Sons of Loki

What’s wrong with this car?

Look a little closer:

Ouch. Spotted by the eagle-eyed (groan) Ed just outside our house.

Mount Fuji (富士山) is a 3,776m stratovolcano, the highest point in Japan. On Thursday, we climbed it.
Download my Fuji .kmz for Google Earth

Jade and I awoke at 3:45am, after hardly any sleep, and cycled to Rob’s house bright and early to meet him and Kanako. Jade had borrowed Ella’s bike, and halfway there I was struck by the terrifying thought of being stopped by a cop and having to explain ourselves and missing the train and not getting to climb Fuji and everything going horribly wrong. Luckily, it didn’t happen. One of the TUFS security guards greeted us with a “good morning! It’s pretty early.”
“Yup,” I said. “We’re climbing Fuji today.”
“Ah. Take care.”


At Musashi-Koganei station, we met Tatsuya on a Takao-bound Chuo-line train. At Tachikawa we met Rei and Risako, and the Fellowship was duly assembled.

From left to right: Rob, Kanako, Risako, Tatsuya, Rei, Jade.

As the almost-empty train sped through the countryside to Otsuki, beautiful sunlight streamed through the windows. At Otsuki we changed to the Fujikyu express line, which was charmingly old-fashioned: you had to buy a ticket from an actual conductor on board the train! No IC cards out here.

Everyone else slept, but I found I couldn’t. The train drifted higher, until the land hit the sky and clouds started to stream around the mountains. I felt the anticipation when I spotted the summit of Fuji appear from a veil of clouds.

At Kawaguchiko, we changed to a bus headed for Kawaguchiko 5th Station, the trailhead for the Yoshida Trail and the beginning of our ascent…
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Roppongi Hills (六本木ヒルズ) is a multipurpose entertainment, residential and commercial development located in the neighbourhood of Roppongi in Minato Ward, Tokyo. Designed by property tycoon Minoru Mori, construction started in 2000 and finished in 2003. Over a 27 acre lot, the complex incorporates offices, apartments, shops, restaurants, cafes, the Grand Hyatt Tokyo, an art gallery and observation deck, the headquarters of TV Asahi, and several parks.

Frustratingly, Roppongi Hills lacks an obvious street entrance approaching from the Oedo Line station. Visitors may be drawn towards the landmark 238m Mori Tower, but the cheesily-named Hollywood Beauty Salon building blocks the entrance and the entrance to Roppongi Hills’ central plaza is not obvious.

Rather, the grandest entrance is from the Hibiya Line station, with a enormous three-story escalator inside a central atrium.

The centrepiece of Roppongi Hills is Mori Tower (森タワー), a 54 story, 238m skyscraper that incorporates cafes and restaurants at the base, offices in the middle, and an art museum and observation deck at the top.

Before Mori Tower lies Roku-Roku Plaza (66プラザ, a reference to Roppongi Hills’ address in the sixth district of Roppongi (literally ‘six trees’)). Designed in modernist steel and glass, this side of the complex has a feel of some futuristic metropolis.

Tempering the glass facade of Mori Tower is the stonework incorporated in the more post-modernly designed surrounding buildings.

The layout allows vistas of nearby Tokyo Tower, which pops into view as you move about the complex.

Throughout, a fusion of various building styles creates an almost theme-park like ambience. Roppongi Hills is designed as a destination as much as a shopping mall, a place that in itself provides an enjoyable experience. Exploring the different zones helps to create a sense that this place is more than the sum of its parts.

The roads that cut through the complex are themselves part of the whole assembly, with a boulevard feel that is worlds away from Tokyo’s more dense, cramped areas.

Compared to the rest of Roppongi, the Hills area has a distinctly more upmarket feel. Beyond Roku-Roku Plaza are areas which feel like the backstreets of some quaint French town, lined with boutiques and restaurants.

One of the hearts of the complex is the Arena, where today a Sony 3D presentation was being held.

Trees and greenery can be found throughout.

Multiple levels provide expansive views and break up the structure of the outdoor areas.

Even the most remote corners have been designed with attention to detail.

The residential towers feature commercial spaces on the ground floor, with everything from upscale restaurants to dog-washing salons. Apartments range from 450,000 yen (£3,462) to 1,720,000 yen (£13,326) per month. (For comparison, most one bedroom apartments in Tokyo start at around 80,000 yen (£615).)

There’s even a Lutherian church on site.

The shopping side of the complex is expansive and sprawling, but easy to get lost in.

Each floor has a different layout to the others; escalators are separated, making it hard to ascend or descend several floors at a time.

However, the mixture of expansive and narrow spaces helps to give Roppongi Hills a different feel to most malls, and makes browsing with no particular intention a delight. Most of the stores sell fashion and accessories, including a shop dedicated to umbrellas.

Reflecting Roppongi’s large foreigner population and as a popular tourist attraction, all signage is in Japanese and well-translated English.

Art installations can be found across the streets, including a giant LED counter by the Gate Tower. In the Gate Tower itself, a branch of Tsutaya and Starbucks attracts browsers for its selection of arty magazines and books on design, including glossy coffee table books on Roppongi Hills itself.

Most shopping malls are rarely anything to get excited about. However, Roppongi Hills succeeds where others fall to mediocrity by imposing its own identity on the paradigm of recreational complexes, rather than simply being a venue for shops. Areas of natural beauty integrate with 21st century architecture; visitors congregate in beautifully-realised public spaces. Roppongi Hills is less like a mall and more like a self-contained city: a kind of arcology dropped into a Tokyo neighbourhood.

It is a beautiful Saturday afternoon and the sports teams are on the sports pitch doing whatever the hell they do (they never seem to play sport, they stand in huddles shouting at each other) and I still have 94 days in Japan and the Leeds exam is increasingly in the past and I think I did alright and yet I can’t shake this strange desire to keep going. I want to learn it all. I doubt this’ll last, but I might as well go along with this feeling as long as it persists.

So many things to do, but nothing that I really need to do… Might go into town, later. I was watching the video for m’flo’s “Been So Long” (I can’t tell if it’s self-consciously ironic or not) and realised I miss the big empty streets of places like Minato-ku, so I was thinking of doing some arty night black-and-white photography down there, like every single photograph of New York ever taken.

I want to finish off Yoshida, at least the #gowife portion. Gotta pay my bills. Play 龍が如く, the Kabukicho-based GTA clone, which I picked up from (the hilariously named) Book Off the other day. Find an arcade and get good at DrumMania (seeing as the actual PS2 drum controller is nowhere to be found).

Cycled to Hachioji the other week – took about two hours each way, and I reached the edge of Tokyo, which is quite a feat. Here’s some pretty pictures.

Right at the limits of my camera's capability. Observe the Bay of Rainbows, the tiny line of light at the top left.

Dunno what this joker was playing at, but he was doing some neat stunts.

I decided to head back to Asakusabashi, for a stroll along the Sumida River. The trip out was weird; first time I’ve been out in daylight for a while, first time I’ve seen Tokyo in the morning for a long time.

I went to Asakusa, to Shitamachi (lit. ‘down-town’, meaning ‘old town’), way back in 2007 to find a department store that apparently specialised in fancy paper. While there I ended up down strange ancient alleys that seemed the antithesis of the Tokyo I knew, and wandering along the Sumida River, so desolate and empty compared to the Thames or the Seine or whatever municipal rivers you care to name.

It was a stroll that inspired a short story for my Writing Fiction class last year, and that little short story grew into a novel that’s 60k and counting. Head down the right passage off the Sumida embankment, you see, and you stumble across the secret artist commune that’s at the heart of my novel. Which sets most of my novel in old town, in Shitamachi. Which meant I wanted to head along and do a little research. (It’s not every day one’s in Tokyo, after all.)

After lunch at Maccy D’s, I walk.

I always feel some strange connection to rivers. I’d love to own a boat one day, go chugging along, watch the scenery go by…

The titantic bulk of the (Shuto?) Expressway.

I bother a few pigeons for cool shots.

Strange little buildings, as far from the towers of Shinjuku as can be imagined.

Could this be the secret entrance, I wonder? (Naught but a concrete wall and bags of rubbish could I peek behind it.)

The riverside walk stretches on for an awfully long way, but is desolate except for old people, the homeless, and a couple salarymen on a smoke break.

How many live here?

Fabulously wealthy Tokyo has a shanty town too. It's just that this shanty town is thousands of elaborate cardboard hovels stretched in every nook and cranny across the city.

I end up walking quite a ways along the river, all the way down to Tsukishima and its Hong Kong-esque apartment towers at the tip of Tokyo Bay. Here I stop for a sit-down at the top of a steep embankment and catch a quick nap in the less-than-blazing January sunshine.

Walking back inland towards Tokyo Station, I pop into a Starbucks populated mainly by businesspeople rather than the usual student crowd (and a woman in a kimono chatting to a Yank for reasons I couldn’t discern) and get a café latte while putting a few ideas down. Writing in cafes. It’s practically the entire point of being a writer.

I can’t believe I’ve gone 21 years without staying up to watch a sunrise. Today I went out at about 6:50am and wandered out of the dorm and down the street, past the old man flexing his fingers for his morning exercises. The air was ice cold, and so refreshing.
There’s this little park near us which I knew about but never visited before. I’m glad I did. It’s so strange how we can go months living in a place and barely scratch the surface of what’s around us, isn’t it?
But the park was simply beautiful. I happened across it, catching the first rays of the rising sun as I heard “Hazey Jane I” on my iPod:

Do you feel like a remnant
Of something that’s past
Do you find things are moving
Just a little too fast?

and the sunlight blazed between pillars and between trees and it was really too beautiful, the pale green of the park before me, covered in icy dew. I wandered across the common, feet crunching on frozen grass, overwhelmed by it all. I told myself I wouldn’t bring my camera, but I wished I had. (I will tomorrow, maybe.) The sun shining over Chofu airfield, the distant towers, the ducks on the glimmering pond; the last glow of the moon above, in the west.

I got back and grabbed my camera and took a few photos from the top floor of the dorm.