Some of my friends have been drumming up fundraising efforts. Others sifted through news sources to try and get a grip on what was going on. Others worried about loved ones in Japan (I’ve never visited Sendai or Tohoku and I don’t know anyone in the area, but a close friend of mine very sadly lost a dear friend in the disaster, and that really brought the tragedy home to me.) Yet others – thankfully no one I know – have been saying it’s karma or divine retribution, and all I can tell myself is that those deluded folks are just trying to come up with a reason to explain such an incomprehensible tragedy. I didn’t know how to respond. I still don’t.

Like the rest of the world, I’ve been following the events at Fukushima with interest. At first, I was shocked that such an event could occur – how could two backup power systems fail? The Guardian was talking of explosions and fires. The authorities were saying everything was under control. I didn’t know who to believe.

And I still don’t. The Guardian seems to have an agenda to push, with a nice big graphic about the current level of doom and various flimsy opinion pieces decrying nuclear power. But I don’t trust the Japanese government to give just the facts, and I certainly don’t trust a corporation like TEPCO (remember the Chisso Corporation at Minamata, or Showa Denko in Niigata?). And everyone on the internet has an opinion, although the people I trust (i.e. skeptics and scientists) seem to agree that it’s not a worse-case scenario by any means.

I wouldn’t call myself pro-nuclear power. I was very anti- as a teenager, but as I’ve learned more about the subject and the physics I’ve come to think it may be beneficial overall, despite the (very real) risks involved. Ironically, to me at least, Fukushima proves that the safety features put into place for a reason do actually work, even in a worse case scenario. There was an earthquake – then a tsunami – then the power failed twice – then fires – then explosions – then more fires – and still there hasn’t been a catastrophic explosion or expulsion of radiation or apocalyptic deaths. It’s hard to imagine what else could have gone wrong, but Fukushima is still barely hanging together – and this is an old, almost obsolete design. Big mistakes were made – it’s idiotic to have your backup generators positioned where a tsunami can wipe them out, for example – but it is not the end of the world.

It still could go all tits-up, of course. I’m not disputing that this could become a radioactive disaster, and it’s a very scary (and real) prospect. Nuclear power has some terrifying risks (and that’s not even taking the issue of nuclear waste into account). What bothers me is the amount of scaremongering and downright bad science going around. It bothers me that the media keeps speaking of “the next Chernobyl” (which is technically impossible – Chernobyl was basically the worst possible design for a reactor and no one in their right mind would do that again) or “catastrophic failure” (“safety features working as planned in exceptional circumstances” does not equal “catastrophe”).

Tomorrow is the big Leeds exam, and – you know what, it’s not cool to say it, but I’m not worried. I think I’m gonna pass. Most people are bricking it, but it’s only 40% to pass.

Which may come as a surprise, because literally less than two weeks ago I’d given up all hope. I was pretty sure I’d end up emailing to say I was dropping Japanese and taking up single honours English. And then a tiny, life-changing thing happened. Dan told me I could do it.

We were told you had to start studying for the exam at the start of the year — in October — when you were on the plane. And there I was, with less than two weeks to go on a Monday evening – there was no way I could do it. That’s what conventional wisdom said. 653 kanji and 58 chapters in two weeks? No chance.

But Dan explained how over the past month, he’d gone through Kanji in Context (our workbook) with the help of Heisig’s mindblowingly-awesome Remembering the Kanji. He’d gone through Kanji in Context in order, looked up each kanji in Heisig’s book, and built a mnemonic story with the reading of the kanji built in.

This is not how you’re supposed to use either of these books. Kanji in Context is based around the old-school method of “stare at the kanji until it goes in, then write it a hundred times”. Its deficiency are obvious; it takes forever, the kanji are in a stupid order, and you can forget it in an instant.

Heisig (technically “Remembering the Kanji”, but everyone calls it Heisig after its glorious author James Heisig) is much more sensible; you don’t learn a complex kanji until you’ve learned the components that make it up (KiC has ridiculous things like teaching you 驚 a dozen chapters before you learn 句, and who the hell can wrap their head around that?) and the mnemonic system makes revising kanji actually scarily enjoyable. But it has its failings, too; you don’t learn how the kanji are pronounced, you can sometimes get confused with the mnemonic stories (you learn about fifty kanji in a row with the 人 radical and it all tends to merge together into a baffling mess) and you don’t learn any words, so you’ve got no grounding in the actual language. (It’s entirely possible to read Heisig cover-to-cover and know nothing about the Japanese language.)

But look at it this way; Heisig is a locomotive and Kanji in Context is the track. Neither are any use without the other, but put them together and shit, you can achieve so much.

So I look at something ridiculously complicated like 驚 and I break it down into awe and horse and I see myself in awe as a rock (which reminds me of the reading, odoroku) smashes through the window and a beautiful horse bursts in, causing me shock and wonder, which is what the kanji means. Do that 652 more times, and you are in a very good place to pass the exam.

It is election day.

I am voting for the Liberal Democrats.

The Tories (保守党: “Protect and Guard Party”) were out of the question. Even before reading Johann Hari’s article on the rotten borough of Hammersmith and Fulham:

A young woman – let’s called her Jane Phillips, because she wants to remain anonymous – turned up at the council’s emergency housing office one night, sobbing and shaking. She was eight months pregnant. She explained she was being beaten up by her boyfriend and had finally fled because she was frightened for her unborn child. The council said they would “investigate” her situation to find “proof of homelessness” – but she told them she had nowhere to go while they carried it out. By law, they were required to provide her with emergency shelter. They refused. They suggested she try to find a flat on the private market.

For four nights, she slept in the local park, on the floor.

They are the party of the few and the privileged; the party who will earnestly lie through Murdoch to get the vote of the people they will do the least for (the Sun’s front cover reminds me of the way Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia, not Eurasia). So, in general terms, fuck that.

Labour – oh, I’m supposed to vote for Labour (労働党: Labour and Working Party), the party of the left and the impoverished and the working man, except they really aren’t the party of the left any more. They’ve done so much to advance Britain in terms of civic rights, with the minimum wage and civil partnerships, but I can’t vote for a party of the past – I have to vote on what they are now, and I just don’t agree with Labour’s tired, centrist policies any more.

So we have the Liberal Democrats (自由民主党: “Self-Action People-Rule Party”, which is ironically the name of the recently-ousted Liberal Democratic Party of Japan). Unless the pollsters have got it all wrong and dramatically underestimated the youth vote (which I doubt, because the polls are incredibly accurate these days) there’s very little chance of getting in, but the thing about the Lib Dems is that they’re tenacious – once they’re in, they’re hard to get out, so even a small surge here will build and build, and we have a generation growing up disheartened with Labour but not willing to vote Tory. Clegg seems a decent guy who really cares. Their policies – from the little stuff like protecting post offices, protecting the internet and sorting out unfair council taxes to the big changes like proportional representation, ditching Trident, and a fully-elected House of Lords (something Labour have failed to do in 13 years) are all things that make me excited.

So me, I agree with Nick.

Anyway, election debate! I rather got more excited than I expected, staying up until 4:30am for the start. I even had some popcorn. It was a weird experience. Seeing the leaders all in the same room was weird. Actually, seeing them outside of press conferences and the Commons was weird.

It was hard to concentrate on the actual content of the debate when there’s a whole Twitter storm going on. I know it’s a bit naff to go on about social media, but it was a strangely social experience, to be plugged into the thoughts of thousands of other people watching the debate.

It’s more an opportunity to just get a sense of what these people are like. They’re all going to lie, and spin, but you can get a sense of what sort of person they are from how they act up there. Cameron spun out some Daily Mail-style anecdotes about “broken Britain” with an amusingly PC cast of women and blacks and druggies. Brown tried to point out policy successes and statistics, but sounded too much like he was on a script with some painful zingers shoehorned in.

And then Clegg. Clegg! From zero to possible hero, the clear winner of the debate with 43% on ITV. I liked him. He took no bullshit, and called out the other leaders, at one point asking exasperatedly: why do you say you’re for reform and change, and then vote against it?

I’ve always liked the Lib Dems, for the simple fact that I liked the underdog. Now I’m older and wiser, I still think they may well do a better job than the others. And they have policies I agree with. I’m not sure Clegg’s leader material, but he’s my favourite.

And the most exciting thing is that a lot of people around me feel the same way. It’s a biased sample of 20-something students, sure, but I’m sure there’s enough of us to sway the election. It’s damned exciting, the prospect of real change, of a historic upset. It happened with Rage Against The Machine, even though it seemed ridiculously impossible at the outset. Could we be in for the first Liberal Democrat government ever? Probably not. But I’ll be interested to see the polls.

(And I will kick myself if my proxy form’s got lost in the post and I miss my chance to take part in an a historic election.)

Last week I seem to have watched Brother, by Takeshi Kitano (currently appearing in ads for some English teaching school), which was a bit pants, to be honest. It’s like Kitano has no idea how to direct Americans, so he asks them to wave their arms around and speak in expository dialogue at all times (it’s painful to watch the talented Omar Epps (of House fame) churn out such stilted dialogue). Nevertheless, the clash of Yakuza with LA is pretty fun to watch, even if it completely loses the plot in the last act.

Then I recorded a commercial for my speech class, where I played an influenza suffer who is cured by the magic of Japanese natto. I haven’t had natto in two years. It hasn’t got any better. I mean, it’s less of a vomit-inducing unpalatableness than I remember, but it’s just … unpleasant to eat.

I went to Shinjuku, where a chugger asked me for some money for charity. Now, don’t get me wrong, I give to charity and I think it’s the duty of everyone to make at least some kind of regular contribution. It’s just that I don’t give to charities I’ve never heard of. This guy, as most Japanese street collectors are, was collecting for places hit by heavy snow in Japan and while I certainly wouldn’t wish natural disasters on anyone, the fact is that I’d rather give my money to third-world nations rather than a first-world country with the second biggest economy in the world.

They obviously only pick on foreigners, because he called out to me in English. I feigned lack of comprehension, so he asked if I was Portuguese. I waved my hands and then gave up and popped a handful of change into his box.

Speaking of charities; you may wish to consider a donation to whistleblowing site Wikileaks, who have found themselves in a spot of financial bother. These guys are fighting for free speech, and not just in an abstract way; this site has brought about a lot of exposure on everything from Guantanamo Bay doctrine to the recent Carter-Ruck super-injuction.

The weekend was fun. Went for karaoke in Kichijoji with Kanako, Katy, Miles and Rob, sang the usual; bit of 80s Japanese punk, 90s Britpop, 00s rap.


Saturday wandered about Shinjuku with Katy and (eventually) went for ramen. I believe Chris wanted to see what people wear in Tokyo, so here we go:



(and isn’t Flickr so much nicer than FB’s ultra-JPEG?)

In the evening, headed to Musashi-Sakai to meet Rob and Miles where we feasted upon Subway sandwiches and bought dairy products from a local combini and ate them on a bench outside a hairdressers for reasons I can no longer remember.

And now it’s today! It snowed last night, so I went to ICU today and we had a little bit of a snowball fight. Then I got the Specials album off iTunes (it makes it so easy to whittle away all your money in tiny chunks, doesn’t it) and am thoroughly enjoying all the tracks I have sort of picked up from cultural osmosis.

We live our lives amongst popular culture. The Christmas number 1, for the past decade, has nearly always been a novelty record, but the group isn’t protesting at that. What they’re angry about is that nearly everything is now a novelty record, that the charts are now full of talentless jingle singers with sob stories instead of genuinely exciting musicians, and that thanks to all that, children now assume that becoming famous needs no discernible talent or effort.

Now I wasn’t too bothered when the idea of “Killing in the Name” came up as a rock-the-vote candidate for Christmas number one, because there were a few songs floating around and none of them seemed to have any chance of defeating Cowell’s dreary inevitability. But then … something very magical happened. Imagine that, a miracle at Christmas! The Facebook group grew, and grew to the point where it might actually happen. A proper grassroots campaign might achieve it.

Everyone got it wrong, of course. It wasn’t to spite Joe Whatshisface – the truth is I didn’t even know his name until last week, and I have no idea what his song is like, and I’m sure he’s a lovely lad, but he is a celebrity now, and has become a pop singer through a shamelessly commercialised route, and must come to terms with the fact that the public may not like him. It’s not really about Cowell, who is actually a guilty pleasure to watch at times (but mostly a dick). It’s not juvenile rebellion, even if there is an irony in a band of people coming together to say “Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me!” and then sheepishly all buying the same record because one guy told them to. (As Rebecca Winson notes, “Lying down and letting a Miley Cyrus cover, for crying out loud, with all of its connotations – take us into the next decade… well, now that’s sheepish behaviour.”)

It’s about all the people in Britain who are fed up of being pandered to by crappy reality shows and mindless tabloids (who predictably lashed out at the campaign, suggesting that they lived in some bizarre fantasy world where Simon Cowell owned Sony and got a direct cut of RATM’s royalties, which is patently untrue). All the people who didn’t want another bloody cover from another bloody here-today-gone-tomorrow artist with the right voice and the right looks to appeal to a very particular market did indeed cry out, “fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me.” This can only be a good thing, right?

And it’s more than that. You know where I spent my formative years? By the radio, listening to the Sunday chart show with my sister. Every week, like an unrepentant gambler, I would have my own choice for number one, something made with real talent and sweat. Every week I would hope against all odds for Marion or Kenickie or The Bluetones to get to the top spot, and every week it would be the same commercialised, soulless pap. You know what that does to a small child? Disillusionment. I was taught from a very young age that real talent and hard work will get you nowhere thanks to Simon and his cronies.
As I wrote this last night, the results were yet to be in.

I wake up today to see that Rage won.

Good times. It is only a small thing, but I hear my childhood self cheering.

Yet a country where beer costs £6 a pint, as evidenced by our trip last night to joy-of-joys Roppongi, which was fun in the bizarre dumb way that only Roppongi can be.

Last night started off with the TUFS international welcome party, which had free sushi and beer – always a good combination. Unfortunately, with the heady enthusiasm of freshers’ week long, long behind me, I totally failed to meet many new people and forgot all the names, but this Leeds alumni who was at TUFS three years ago turned up and we had a very reassuring chat. It is fine. You can be put in level 200 and wind up in 500. Just study and read manga and you too can wind up graduating with a cushy teaching job, which is what he was doing.

So then I headed on down to Musashi-koganei to meet Miles, Rob and Katy, it being round about where they live, and we proceeded from McDonalds to Hub to the hour-long two-transfer journey to distant Roppongi. It was getting late. The trains would be stopping soon. There was no way back.

We picked up two highly excitable Australians, but managed to lose them by declining a taxi ride, and Rob rediscovered this club he’d been to last year. Typical Roppongi joint – ridiculously small and overpriced, with two or three confused looking tourists and misplaced salarymen – and yet with a heady enthusiasm that was strangely endearing, from the MJ-loving DJ to the gorgeous Michelle Yeoh lookalike behind the bar knocking back bottles of Corona and juggling limes (probably).

And so we partied until the early morn, left, found a Johnsons, ate some breakfast at 4am, got back to the station, and began the loong unpleasant train ride with the rest of the early birds back to the suburbs. A night out in Tokyo. Needed that, but I don’t think I’ll be doing it again any time soon.

Rob and I were so ridiculously sleep-deprived by the end that we spent about ten minutes laughing at a poster with illustrations of the stuff you shouldn’t do on escalators – don’t run, hold the handrail, don’t be an old man who falls over on the escalator and drops his cane and gets kicked in the head oh god it was not funny in the slightest and yet it was the funniest thing I have ever seen.

Oh, and Obama’s been given the Nobel Peace Prize. Good for him, and I do like Obama, but … uh … what has he really achieved so far? I have no doubt that by the end of his term he’ll have brought about some worthy changes but he’s not even been in office a year!