Sons of Loki

‘Juku! (Not Shinjuku, the Harajuku.) How I love thee, your very un-Japan backstreets, your curious kids, your ridiculously expensive boutiques standing next to 700 yen vintage clothing stores; your Nigerian hawkers, your hipster photographers, your utterly bemused and bored and offended middle-aged tourists.

I found out where the cool men’s fashion shops are (hint: hidden next to the women’s ones) and had a bit of a splurge, but oh-my-god these clothes are so FAB-U-LOUS!!! I probably would have turned gay were it not for the fact that they’re so awesomely masculine.

(I would love to know more about fashion, but I’m just not in the right crowd. This reminds me of last week when I offhandedly remarked that I’d like to try my hand at fashion journalism. To a fashion director. Who asked the obvious question of “Oh, so what designers do you like?” and I blagged a lame “Uhh well it’s so hard to choose I like the ones in Korea”.)

So I was mainly shopping for a winter coat, thinking something stylish and Uniqloish, but then I ended up with one of those fur-hooded ones that puts me in mind of Squall from Final Fantasy VIII only even more awesome, with superfluous clips and pockets. With that, a strange … combination shirt hoodie which I’m not sure if it will fit but hey, it caught my eye. And a scarf, for winter metrosexualism. And a set of Hello Kitty bathroom scales.

Then I unwound with a bit of photography. I wonder where you sign up for the job of just wandering around Harajuku taking photos? Because I’d be happy to do that forever.

This is, uh, for reasons known only to the designer, a lightbox hanging from a pole.

Man, what a crazy week!

Actually, nothing has really happened. I ran out of food and money. I felt guilty for not attending the school festival. I met Rob in Shinjuku and he bought some speakers and I shopped around for a PS2 and a copy of Beatmania but decided spending overdraft on games consoles would be something I would regret when I wanted to buy food to eat. And I returned to Nikko, probably two years to the day if I could be bothered to look up dates.

Fran and I traversed Tokyo to reach Asakusa to catch the 0900 train to Nikko. Obviously we got there on time to discover that we couldn’t get the Spacia limited express with our ticket and had to get the regular Rapid, which meant we got there an hour after we were supposed to meet Katy and Rob. Luckily for us, they were late too. Anyway, Nikko hadn’t changed a bit. It persisted in being very cold, with a kind of ski town feel according to Fran. I found myself with fond memories of the train station where I once sat reading Alain de Botton’s Consolations of Philosophy. (I cannot think of a way to word that sentence that does not make me sound like a pretentious arse.)

We caught a crowded bus up to the shrines, where we joined the crowds of tourists to walk around and go “ooh” at things.

So after seeing Rob and Katy for all of an hour, they had to rush off for a free buffet thingy, while Fran and I walked back to Nikko (we were going to take the bus, but the driver apparently forgot to open the doors to let us on and drove off, so we walked, but it was pleasant anyway). The plan was to meet Katy and Rob at Edomura Wonderland, a theme park (with ninjas! the promotional pamphlet was eager to explain) but we’d missed the last bus there, or the last train, or there wasn’t a bus, delete as appropriate depending on which official you spoke to. So we had some ramen, and it was extremely pleasant to slurp noodles in a warm restaurant while gazing out at the cold beauty of Nikko outside the window.




On the way back we got the wrong train, of course, and spent twenty minutes shuttling back and forth on the subway before we could even think about beginning the hour-long journey home, but c’est la Tokio.

It’s getting better, sort of. After about a month too long and a few chats with teachers I have got the hang of the Japanese lessons, to an extent, just in time for our week-long break (school festival, which if it means no lessons is something I’m all for). And I’ve settled in, sort of. I still make the same kind of stupid mistakes I did at the beginning (I accidentally bought a second duvet cover instead of a bedsheet the other day, so I just hacked (literally) the duvet cover into a bedsheet and it’s worked so far) but they no longer bother me.

I love TV. Yesterday I watched a Korean language-learning programme on NHK Educational, and it’s in Japanese of course, and it’s a strange experience to learn a language in a language you do not yet know entirely. But it makes perfect sense in a strange way, seeing as Korean is far more like Japanese than English.

NHK is the equivalent to the BBC, and NHK Educational is what BBC Two started off as – the more highbrow intellectual counterpart to the entertainment-based NHK General. It’s touching (and telling) that even at prime-time, when BBC 2 is showing How Clean is Your MP? and Mastermindchef Extreme, NHK Educational is teaching people how to make a quilt and while ITV is sticking Simon Cowell’s fat mug on screen to gurn at hapless children, NHK is showing the sign-language news on at 8:45pm.

Yeah. So yesterday I decided to get out, fix up something highbrow like.

Had a wander around Shinjuku for lunch (been here six weeks and I still don’t think I will ever get tired of that place) and got the train to Rikugien, a lovely little garden tucked away by Komagome station on the north side. Birds tweeted. Couples walked around in kimonos. Salarymen entertained their compensated dates. It warmed the cockles of my cold, cold heart, to see the pretty trees and the swimming turtles. The light was doing lovely things.

Got an email the other day from my editor saying about how there was a new capsule hotel starting up in Kyoto and that I could go along to the opening and do a piece about it if I wanted, and I was like hell yeah. One is never truly a journalist until one starts getting freebies.

Read Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity recently, and it made me laugh, and I identified with portions of it quite a lot, and what more can you ask from a book, really?

Yesterday after class I headed down to Shinny-Shin Shinjuku (as it will hereby be known) and walked down to Kinokuniya’s South store, the one I tried to get to the other day and missed by about a minute’s walk, in hindsight. (I took the train to Yoyogi that time, which is actually about five minutes walk from Shinjuku anyway, but a totally different neighbourhood.)

I picked up my reserved copy of J301, and then browsed the English-language fiction, and got William Gibson’s All Tomorrow’s Parties, which – hey! – is set in Tokyo, and is the sequel to Idoru, which I read last time I was here and tragically, just after finishing it, I left it next to an ATM in Kobe and never saw it again.

God, William Gibson. The writer I want to be. Everything I want to write about is pretty much summed up in his works, and he keeps saying things which make me nod my head and make me angry that I didn’t think of it before. Doubtless, in ten years’ time I will look back and laugh at my angry adolescent love of cyberpunk and post-cyberpunk and nascent post-modernist evolutionary self-facilitating technological underground networking media nodes, but right now it still fascinates me.

I thought I’d do a bit of photography around Shinjuku, but it was cloudy and the light was bad and nothing quite worked.

shades of SimCity

So I went to Starbucks (where all those chairs are in the above photo) to buy hot chai and catch up on NaNoWriMo, as I was a couple days behind. I wrote and wrote. Then I went to the cafe next door, which sold me disgusting coffee but it was only 200 yen and I wrote some more. In total, 3,800 words, almost bringing me back on track.

I realised about fiveish or sixish that I was going to hit the rush hour of a million Tokyoites passing through Shinjuku on their way home via the westward arteries of the Chuo- and Keio-sen, so I left, straight into a glorious illuminated wonderland. Oh, Tokyo, how I love thee.

I believe that this may be the karaoke place in Lost in Translation, though I'm not sure.

HDR was presumably intended to make photography more realistic, more akin to the human eye, but it’s far better for doing hyperrealistic, almost-CG scenes. Here’s the view from my balcony. Clicken zu embiggen.

Today is 文化の日, which means Culture Day, which means another day off school for our lazy asses.

I went to Yoyogi to try to find the Kinokuniya bookstore to get an English copy of this Japanese textbook, J301, but I wound up in a dead neighbourhood with no bookstore in sight (although I did find the curiously quiet site of the NTT DoCoMo Yoyogi Building). So instead of wandering around there (it was cold and windy and I stupidly hadn’t brought a jacket) I made yet another trip to damn Akihabara to buy a camera.

It is a Sony A300 with a 18-70mm zoom lens. It is lovely.

(There was a fun exchange in the shop. There I was, actually using practical Japanese in my conversation with the clerk, and I heard a tourist behind me ask a flummoxed shop assistant, in English, if there was a toilet. The assistant seemed bamboozled, so I stepped in and, cool as a cucumber, translated. “There’s no toilet, I’m afraid,” I said, before going back to my purchase. Oh yeah.)

So what better place to try out my fancy new camera than the Tokyo Jidai Matsuri, a uniquely Japanese parade of history from Asakusa to nearby Tawaramachi? I met up with Fran and Ella, and after a quick Mos Burger we staked out a spot. Oh, the things what we saw!

So after that we caught the metro to Asakusa (pointlessly, as we found out – would have been easier to walk) and headed to Sensoji temple to meet our (now mutual) friend Satomi. Sensoji has a special place in my heart, being one of the final places I went to before leaving Tokyo forever last time. Fulla tourists, but that’s pretty much the course.

The temple gate. (The temple itself was covered up for refurbishment or something, probably.)

It was pretty dark inside, but the A300 was up to the task.

And then a wander through the little shopping alleys and into Asakusa proper, Tokyo’s 下町 – literally “downtown”, but more “Altstadt”.

Asakusa's famed "golden turd", atop the Asahi beer building.