Sons of Loki

It’s weird to think that my room’s still there.

Still the notches I cut in the fridge when slicing carrots. Still the ugly smudge on the window. Still the indentations in the lino from the fridge, right now, as I write these words.

It’s 8:39am in Tokyo right now, so the sun will very firmly be up and the light of dawn will be coming through the left-open curtains.

Packing seemed impossible, but somehow we halved the amount of crap left in the room, then halved it again, then halved it again until it was all either in the bin or in our bags. At some point it went from “stuff everywhere” to “a few things on the desk”. I moved the furniture back to where it had begun, then we scrubbed the floors.

We went to Musashi-sakai to cancel my phone. To my surprise, it was all very simple: three seconds on the computer, my credit card charged with my remaining bill, and I even got to keep my phone, no questions asked. We hunted for lunch and wound up at the nice little gyoza and ramen place. Seems strange that Chinese food has been my consistent favourite throughout the year, but Japanese food is sometimes just too fiddly when all you want is to fill up.

The last thing I packed was my speakers. I wonder if they’re still in the box where I left them downstairs? After a greatest hits package when we were packing, the final song I played – before bundling the speakers into their box and wheeling out the cases – was “Black Out Fall Out”, as hoped. I turned it up. I opened the windows and let the heady beats of youth flood the sports field where a few people were playing baseball. It sounded amazing.

音がない
なきやまない
ずっともうCRY OUT!
I know I know la la la la
もう止まらない!

And for some stupid reason we went the cheap way to Narita, which entailed lugging bags and bags and bags on a Chuo Line train, then a Sobu Line train, then a Keisei Line Local Train, then a Keisei Line Express, then another Express… Hot and sweaty it was, but luckily, it was a quiet Sunday night so the trains were pretty clear. I saw the beautiful towers of Shinjuku under a purple sky for the last time. We crossed the solemn river and left Tokyo for Chiba Prefecture; and the train kept going, and going, and – man, it took forever. I can’t believe how long it seemed to take to get to Narita Airport, but finally we got there … left the terminal and went to the bus stop for the hotel bus. I briefly panicked that we’d missed the last bus, but then it turned out I was reading the chart wrong. We waited as the big coaches for the Hyatt and Toyoko left … and then our titchy little Narita Skycourt Hotel minibus arrived. We squeezed on board and took the ten minute trip to our hotel.

The hotel was pretty cool. It was nothing special, but they had cup noodles and a funny shower and a machine that sold ready meals that you heated up by pulling a drawstring to activate a chemical reaction. We were thinking about staying up all night so that we’d sleep on the plane better, but after a few hours of snapping my Evangelion kit together (oh what a nerd am I) I was getting pretty sleepy, so in the end I got about six hours of sleep.

We had breakfast in the morning. I struggled with the Asahi newspaper. With little to no fanfare, we got the bus to the airport, entered Terminal 2, and checked our bags – despite all the anguish over weight limits and how many bags I could bring on no one, it seemed, gave a damn. (My checked luggage was 32kg, a full 12kg over the JAL limits.)

The others disappeared – Jade and I wandered around for a bit and then found Rob, who had brought his entourage along. Together we checked his bags and paid the date change fee (that’s 15,000 yen I’ll never see again). Jade had to go return her rental phone.


Our group sat around for a bit, not wanting to say our goodbyes quite yet. Rob led people individually away for a final chat – well, that’s Rob for you. I think it was easier for us going home than the others staying – well, as Michael Stipe sang, it’s easier to leave than to be left behind. I played mandolin. We chatted.

Security wasn’t too hard. I got my liquids through, which I was glad about. Our friends waited for us as we queued, and as we went through, and as we reassembled ourselves afterwards, and as long as it took for us to be out of sight entirely, and then that was the end.

Jade and I loaded up on souvenirs, coming back with a huge bag of matcha Kit Kats and assorted booze. They called our rows. We lined up, presented our passports, and with a “Hello” and a “Thank you” we were suddenly on the jetway and in the Triple-Seven and sticking our bags in the overhead storage compartments. I was next to Rob and our friend James (Jade had, somehow, been bumped up to Premium Economy) with a pretty decent window seat.

It occurred to me how my fear of flying was pretty much completely gone now, after fourteen-odd flights. No longer did I quiver when presenting my passport or going through customs. I laughed in the face of turbulence. I sensibly had brought some eye drops and nasal spray on, so desiccating wasn’t a problem even in the dry cabin air. I watched the Wire (aargh like crack it is), Darling wa Gaikokujin (the film adaptation of the popular manga series about a woman whose boyfriend is – shock horror! – a foreigner (is there any country in the world where this is still an issue, except for Japan?) which was sort of funny and sweet and had some nice views of gaijin culture, but was entirely predictable – Jonathan Sherr was great, though – actually let me just take offence at the English character who says how Japanese girls are all easy, and who thinks manga is just for kids, and is really rude to Saori – obviously those people exist in Japan (I’ve been unfortunate enough to meet them) but the character in the film is made out to be an ex-pat, fluent in Japanese, and let me tell you, no real Japan ex-pat could have such disdain and such a rude attitude towards Japan and still be tolerated by his fellows) and kept up the eyedrops and oh shit

It’s Monday. I’m flying back to England, so I get in at 4pm on Monday. Not the next day.

Booked my tickets back from London for Tuesday, didn’t I.

Ah well. Nothing I could do on the plane but catch a little sleep, watch Green Zone (dull, stopped watching it) and Toy Story 2 in Japanese. And take photos.

Brrckkk! We land! We disembark! And fuck, are Brits grumpy. All the Japanese JAL staff smiling and waving and thanking us, and then some grumpy-faced fuck in a florescent jacket looking like he wants to die and like he wants us to die too. No “hello” or “welcome to England” or even a smile, mate. God, I hate London.

You know, only if it had been raining could our reintroduction to Britain have been worse. No one came to pick me and Jade up from the airport, so we haul our baggage through dirty British corridors onto cramped, dirty British trains built in 1976 (christ, JR have been through about six different train classes since then). There’s a train stuck at Piccadilly Circus, please just stick with us for a few minutes. Oh, now there’s another train stuck, seems like someone pulled the emergency brake, we shouldn’t be here long. It’s weird not to hear a Japanese voice with an English translation. It’s weird that it’s just English on all the signs, no Japanese. I am worried about the train tickets and if I can change the date. Well, it shouldn’t be too hard, should it?

“Um, I booked the wrong date and is it possible to maybe change them?” (I know this is my fault, but maybe you could help me out?)
“How much did you pay for your tickets?”
“Um… about eight quid?” (Something like that.)
“Eight quid?”
“Yeah.”
“How much did you pay for your tickets?” (You stupid customer, you no-good pointless waste of my time, give me a straight answer!)
“About eight quid.”
“Well, there’s no point then. I’d have to charge you the cost of today’s tickets minus the price you paid plus a ten pounds admin fee.” (What a fool you are, not knowing this!)
“Oh. Thanks.” (Thanks for nothing, you miserable fuck.)

I walk outside and tell Jade and curse this motherfucking country and its stupid fucking monopoly train lines and tight-assed customer services and I know that if this was Japan the problem would be fucking sorted with a smile and an apology. But what can you fucking do? It’s London. Shit piles up so fast you need wings to stay above it. I go to the ticket machine and deposit sixty quid in National Express East Anglia’s coffers and buy two off-peak singles to Norwich.

Fuck you, National Express East Anglia.

What an awful country, I tap on my iPod. What a load of shit.

Well, we go for burger and chips in Burger King and finally escape awful London. The Gherkin recedes in the window. It’s eight-o-clock and it’s still so bright outside! I listen to music and can’t quite shake the feeling that I’ve finished the novel and now I’m just flipping through the blank pages at the end.

What do I feel? Nothing much. My rage recedes; the oddness of England dampens. Do I miss Japan? I don’t think so. I’ve already forgotten everything I learned there. I have so much to do. Just loads of things to do.

And money. I have no money. I owe a lot of money.

So on Monday, I had my final exam, the one that I got a crappy mark on last time and led me to retake the module. I’d done a bit of revision, and I was feeling pretty confident after we finished the paper. As we went to take the oral test on the PCs there seemed to be a technical problem; after a few minutes our teacher just decided to dismiss us all, and with a cheer and a round of applause Integrated Japanese 300 was over.

To the beach! Jade really wanted to hit the beach in Japan, and I sort of did too, what with the beautiful weather we’d been having. No one else was around to come along, unfortunately, so it was just the two of us getting on the Yokosuka line down to Kamakura. We got there about 3:30pm, so I assumed the beach would be full, but thankfully it wasn’t too bad; a smattering of youths and worryingly tattooed fellows, plus surfers. Lots of surfers.

The tourists come to Kamakura for the temples and giant Buddha, as what I have previously writ, but the surfers come for the waves generated by the cove. So it’s not really a beach to go paddle in.

So we bought loads of food and found a spot and got sand everywhere and in our valuable electronics (hence the lack of photos, not willing to get my camera covered in sand – luckily I wasn’t stupid enough to bring my laptop), then rented an inflatable alligator and hit the waves. Big, big waves. Bobbed around, had a swim, dodged surfers, tried forward rolls as the waves rushed towards us. Great fun. We bought watermelons (which the big ass ravens devoured happily when we were in the water). A guy got buried and a dog sniffed at him. A group of young people played that game where you blindfold someone and hit a watermelon (something like that, it’s a Japanese tradition). As the sun went down, I dug a trench and stared up at the sky. Bliss.

The next day, we got our results. I passed with 80/90 or something, having made some silly mistakes, and my grade for the year came to a B, which …
I’ll be honest, I didn’t really care. I realised very soon during my year abroad that I wouldn’t be learning anything of value from classroom work, so I don’t know what that mark means. It was my second time round, so I probably should have done better. But I feel like for the amount of work I put in, it was a pretty good mark. In the end, all I really care about is actual language ability, not marks.

So, that was the end. We went out in the afternoon to Nakano Broadway, where I picked up a few souvenirs and presents, then went out that night to Shinjuku with Rob and a few friends for monjayaki, where I astonished all with my amazing monjayaki skills (having done it, um, once before).

That night we would be taking a night bus to Osaka, so we had an hour to kill. I fancied a bit of final karaoke (it did turn out to be the last karaoke I went to in Japan) so we went to the cool-looking Karaoke-Kan on the corner near the Shinjuku Center Building and sang a bit of Kimura Kaela and Utada Hikaru, before stocking up for the journey and catching the Willer Travel coach.

The journey was a little hellish. I’d gone for the Standard coach, whereas before I think I’d splashed out on the slightly nicer one with better seats, so sleeping was pretty much impossible. I tried listening to Brian Eno’s Apollo and remember thinking something about how ambient music soaks up the mood and feeling of whatever situation you’ve listened to it in. Something like that.

Jade was a little worse for wear from the trip, and when we arrived in Osaka at oh-dark-hundred I wasn’t feeling fantastic either. Luckily, shortly before either of us crumbled and died we found the one damn cafe open at 8:30am and got some coffee, and after that we felt more up to tackling the day.

For some reason or other we decided to go hit Kobe, so off we went to get the Hankyu line, which comes in ornate varnished mahogany.

Kobe was nice. The last time I went it was pissing it down, so it was nice to explore the old foreigners’ district of Kitano in the sunshine.



Then we took a wander down to the port. I really wanted to visit the Maritime Museum one more time, but time was not on our side, alas.

For lunch, what else but…

Kobe beef?
We found a little restaurant above a butchers that did sukiyaki and something else (a kind of shabu shabu?) for 1,500 yen, which is well cheap for Kobe beef. Suspiciously cheap, actually, but it looked like a classy place.

After that we got back to Osaka and visited the lovely castle and environs. At the nearby stadium crowds of fans waited for some talentless boy band, waving those damn fans. Man, I’d hate to be a girl in Japan.

I fancied heading back to the Osaka Aquarium I’d been to in 2007. I was slightly worried about how long we’d have, but seeing as it was summer it was open until 8pm, and we also lucked out with the After 5 Pair Ticket which meant it was only 1,700 yen each, not 2,000.

It’s a really good aquarium, with some fascinating creatures and habitats there.



They had interactive audio guides supplied in the form of downloadable DS software, which meant just switching on your DS and connecting to the aquarium’s wi-fi. Neat.

As the aquarium closed we were politely chased out. Consequently, we headed down to Dotonbori, the big canal that runs through downtown Osaka (and gives the place a very different feel to Tokyo). I wanted to get some photos for my visual novel Yoshida, it being set partly in the section of the canal where the infamous events of one night in 1985 took place.

After getting photos of the amazing Glico man (and being tutted at by some snotty-nosed local!) we found some little eatery for curry rice and wound up back at the Capsule Hotel Asahiplaza for a well-deserved sleep. I had a nice soak in the baths, struggled through a few pages of Kacho Shima Kosaku, then retired to my capsule for the night.

The next day, we hit Kyoto! Ah, Kyoto … First time I visited, in 2007 I spent several hours straight off the shinkansen lugging all my worldly goods around for the best part of an evening, searching for a hotel and eventually winding up in a capsule somewhere. The key lesson being, of course, book your accommodation in advance. Anyway, while I love Tokyo, and sort of like Osaka, Kyoto’s always been a bit more complicated.

My main goal was to visit the famous Kinkakuji, the Temple of the Golden Pavilion, but first we went to Daitokuji. Well, I think we did. It was pouring down with rain that cold morning, and I was about to turn back in wet misery when we found the tiny entrance to a group of five Zen gardens. The woman on the door was very kind, bringing us towels to dry our wet feet. Well, kind, or just not interested in having wet foreigners drip over everything, which is certainly understandable.

So, Zen.

I like Zen. As a school of philosophy, it really seems to hit the nail on the head.

It occurred to me that with these rock gardens, the monks had captured the uncapturable, from a ripple in a pond to a rolling landscape – all frozen in moss and rock and gravel.

I was really looking forward to Kinkakuji. Since I read The Temple of the Golden Pavilion (and seen part of Mishima) I wanted to see the beauty that obsessed Mishima and drove one young monk to burn the place down in 1950 because true art, as everyone knows, should burn down at least once.

I dunno, it was sort of a letdown.

It’s just a gold box. A tacky gold box. Surrounded by tourists.

We went for matcha and cake, though, which was nice. I’ve never had proper matcha before, and it was delicious. Hot and bittersweet and frothy.

Then Fushima Inari, again, and the beautiful little outlook over Kyoto, again… No cat this time, though.

Back to downtown Kyoto, and we stop for a coffee. I get a phone call asking me to pay 70,800 yen by tomorrow. It appears that TUFS have failed to take my rent out of my account for the past four months. Or I’ve failed to pay them for four months but they haven’t told me. Either way, I have a day to pay. This is ridiculous. This is straight-up bullshit. They’ve been nothing but helpful for ten months and then they totally screw me over.

I swallow my rage and we go in search of old Gion.

I don’t know if we found it or not, but we had a fun wander around Kyoto, hitting Book Off and dodging past the dodgier places. Rain fell, occasionally. No geisha, but we did find some of the old timey wooden houses, which was nice. And so once again I left Kyoto, sort of forgiving it for screwing us over in the morning. We went to the train station, found the one cafe left open for a quick coffee (feeling like an inconvenience on the staff the entire time), drank lots of water and sat waiting for the bus with all the young peeps and backpackers. It made me smile to realise that while the rich and the old ride the shinkansen, the young and the poor get the nightbus. Solidarity of the youth, innit.

Some asshole was sleeping in our reserved seats. The old me would have sat somewhere else, but the new me was very angry with TUFS, and slightly angry at this man. I talked to the driver. The driver talked to the 邪魔. He moved. We sat down, and I swear he glared at me for ten minutes, but I was probably imagining it. The trip back to Shinjuku was a lot more comfortable, that time.

The weekend before last – christ, the weekend before last! – Jade and I took a trip out to Hakone, one of my favourite little destinations easily reached from Tokyo.

I’d been ill most of the week before, and I prayed it wouldn’t spread into the next week, my final week in Japan. For some reason we went out on Friday night and slept outside the Nomura building and then, when a guard moved us on, outside Shinjuku Keio station waiting for the last train (always a fun experience), so we only got to Hakone at 4pm-ish, leaving no time for sightseeing. Still, we had a wander about Hakone in the beautiful late afternoon/early evening.

Down by the river we joined a few other sightseeings in dipping our feet in the water and watching fish flutter past. It was a very peaceful scene.

Back to the ever-excellent Fuji-Hakone Guesthouse where I met up with Yuuka, one of the staff who I knew from last time. I guess I’m sort of getting to be a regular there now, this being my fourth time back there.

Down to the Susuki Fields, just up the road, where they filmed a few scenes of Neon Genesis Evangelion. (I kid, but this particular field was the inspiration for the place where Kensuke and Shinji camp out in an early episode.)

Then ramen and gyoza at China House, this reasonably-priced restaurant just down the road, and back to the guesthouse for those unsurpassable Hakone hot spring onsen. The heat! The calm! The aroma of the volcanic waters! I realised it would be the last time I visited an onsen for a long time.

After a great night’s sleep on the guesthouse’s futons, Jade and I had breakfast, said our goodbyes to Yuuka and the staff (promising to come back when we were able), and set off for a day in beautiful Hakone.

I wanted to find the point in that episode of Evangelion where Misato and Shinji look out from the heights of Mt Kintoki, but the closest the bus got us was a golf course, and in the heat of the day I didn’t really feel like going for a hike.


So we got the bus back to Togendai, boat across the lake to Moto-Hakone. All very familiar, but still fun. Seeing as it was summer and I wasn’t on my own, it seemed like I finally had the chance to do something I always enjoy doing: get a boat.

“There is nothing – absolutely nothing – half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats.”


It was fun, though a pedalo can’t exactly hit a great speed, and there were a few hairy moments where we got caught up in the wake of one of the big tourist boats and wobbled precariously with several hundred pounds worth of camera equipment around our necks. Nevertheless, somehow we survived and got back to dry land, heading up to the lakeside torii and the nearby shrine.



Then the boat back across Ashinoko up to Togendai, at the north end of the lake.

君が代は
千代に八千代に
さざれ石の
いわおとなりて
こけの生すまで

At Owakudani, we bought the famous black eggs that add five years to your life, and I scoffled a few down, having eaten enough there to give me a few hundred years of extra living (if the cholesterol doesn’t get me first). Fuji was invisible, regrettably.

I bought a folding screen of the cover of Pinkerton Hiroshige’s Night Snow at Kambara. As we went to get the ropeway back down to Gora, the tannoy thanked us for our continued patronage. And that’s when I realised: four times, I’ve been there. Hakone’s not the prettiest place in the world, but somehow it just feels right. It’s far enough from Tokyo to be out of the smog and the bustle, but close enough to be convenient; there’s always something different each time you go, whether it’s ice and rain or sun and clear skies. I really like it there. I hope to head back there soon enough.

The day after USJ, Tuesday 23rd March, we went to Nara.

I think that morning, my free gift at the capsule hotel was a capsule hotel voucher. I rather like the idea that you could check in at the capsule hotel on Monday a penniless man and slowly rebuild your life through the loyalty points system. A pair of socks. A free beer. 500 yen off your next stay. Then, shoes. A hat. A pass for the subway.

On the train to Nara, from Osaka, I was reading Paul Theroux’s The Great Railway Bazaar, which my mum had given to my sister to give to me but oh thanks sis why don’t you go ahead and read it first and give me it when you’re done, that’s fine, just like that time you bought me Obama’s autobiography and then decided you’d hang on to it for a while, oh when was that two Christmases ago you say? oh well it must be a pretty engrossing book I’m sure

and it was a good read, because he was writing about the Japanese train system (in 1975), and there I was on a Japanese train.

As a tourist, Theroux had a role in society, and he could play it out as he liked. It occurred to me that they say Japan is all about the role you play, and in Japan foreigners can have two roles; gaijin-san the Tourist

観光目当ての外人さん
カメラ片手に登る富士山
At tourist spots, the gaijin man
Climbs Mt Fuji, a camera in hand
– Teriyaki Boyz, “5th Element”

who goes to temples and wears backpacks and fumbles with the language and forgets to take her shoes off, and gaijin-san the Businessman, who is a teacher or businessman, invariably American and in his 30s or 40s, who is fluent and confident and married to a Japanese woman.

If you fit into those roles it’s fine – people excuse you for being a tourist, or they accept you for being a businessperson and leave you be. But as a young aimless student, I never can quite do either of those. I speak too much Japanese to let myself stoop to fumbling along in English and gestures like a tourist would, but I’m not at the level of proper ex-pats so I can’t really get anything done. I can’t wear a suit, but I can’t strap on a backpack, either. So I’m a kind of outlier, I guess.

Anyway, Nara was cool. They were celebrating their 1,300th anniversary. There were all these deer. We took a look in these old antique bricabrac shops, which I realised I an becoming enamoured with; it’s all old crap, but it’s interesting old crap. It was raining. I saw some temples. We visited a little tourist information place funded by the Okamura corporation, where I tried out their earthquake simulation and protection device. The old man was nice.

The day after, I went to see James and Eri in Kobe. It was a real shame, that it was raining; still, we got to see some of the old Western-style town, and there was a nice view from a small shrine.

Down by the port, the weather wasn’t any better. Katie and Chris peeled off for some shopping, so James, Eri and I went for karaoke and, later, an izakaya with Jayson and Simon. It was very pleasant to get a few drinks and just shoot the shit for a while with the guys.

That night, I wasn’t coming back to the capsule hotel. After inevitable panic, I got the right train back to Osaka, and found the night bus home. Contrary to what I’d heard, it wasn’t so bad; you’re not going to get an uninterrupted night’s sleep, but the dude next to me didn’t snore, and there was a little privacy cover to pull over your head. At one point I got out at one of the rest stops, just so I could have the experience of walking around a Japanese truck stop at 4am in the drizzling rain in the middle of nowhere, trucks as far as the eye could see.

Back in Shinjuku, at 8am, everybody was being miserable in the rain, but I was home.

So, Friday, Katie and Chris returned to Tokyo, and we met up for drinks at the hyper-prestigious New York Bar, which still boggles my mind whenever I visit. (I’ve been, what, four times now? Christ.)

The guy ahead of us, who could have almost been Hugh Grant, said he was with the Cameron Diaz group. (I swear that’s what he said, but she didn’t turn up.) We went in and sat down and I had a martini, the New York Bar special with Bombay Sapphire.

We were surrounded by foreigners in suits and expensive-looking couples and people who looked far more important than me. The thing is, I’d like to be those people. City bankers, top managers, assistants to movie stars; the people who come to the New York Bar and order something with no regards for cost and sit with a sense of calm detachment and not slack-jawed astonishment that they’re even allowed in.

And at the same time, I’d hate to be those people. And I’d hate to be around those people. I wanted to be enjoying a drink with the high-cheekboned blond-haired businessman at the bar, and simultaneously knew that talking to him would be deeply unpalatable.

One day I will be a fifty-something English professor in Tokyo, with hordes of cash and a long list of bestsellers and oodles of fans, and I will come to the New York Bar for a drink and still feel like a little man let into the big boy’s club for an hour or two.

I kind of got a similar feeling at the Roppongi Art Night, held at the incredible Roppongi Hills complex.

I shop til I drop in Roppongi Hills
But don’t follow shit, ain’t none free – chill
Pharrell, Teriyaki Boyz, “超 LARGE”

Roppongi Hills couldn’t be more different to sleazy old regular Roppongi; it’s a massive complex of boutiques and shops and cafes and restaurants, centered around the huge Mori Tower, where a 1BR apartment starts at 370,000 a month. (There’s also some kind of hackerspace called the Academy which I should check out.) This Art Night was a big art expo thingy. They had various acts and displays going on, though to tell the truth we were more just wandering around marvelling at the ultra-modern decor of the place. At an outdoor plaza, Verbal was doing a DJ set for a tiny crowd (though it was only 7:30pm), and I saw that RIP SLYME’s DJ Fumiya and Ryo-Z would be turning up later. So kind of a big deal.

Everything looked so cool. We sat in Starbucks and thumbed through interior design magazines, while I thought about how I wanted my room to be next year. In a nearby Tsutaya, I flicked through some fashion magazines and checked out the graphic design books. I kind of want to do graphic design. And work in magazines. And be a writer. What do I do? Who do I talk to? Is it too late? Is it too early? What do I want to be?

Anyway, I said my goodbyes to Kate and Chris near the Hibiya line station. They would be flying back in the morning. I bid them farewell, and went off to get my train back home.

People call me a misanthropist pretty much all the time, but be honest: most people are feckless idiots who should never be allowed to do anything. I mean, hypothetically, just hypothetically for a second, imagine you’re queuing to buy a ticket for a busy theme park. There are hundreds of people queuing for a small number of ticket gates. Finally, the gate is in sight. You see the cashier. You see the price. What do you do now?

1. Get the exact cash out of your wallet in advance (or the closest, most convenient amount possible), step up to the counter, boldly ask for one ticket and hand the cash over; grab your ticket and change and proceed smartly into the park. [15 seconds]
2. Get to the counter, stare at the prices, remember you’re at a theme park and want to go in, fumble for your wallet or purse, get the money out, look up at the board again, ask the cashier if you can use these coupons – no, these coupons – forget where you are again, try to calculate the price for your six kids, go through your wallet or purse, get confused, ask if you can pay by card, ask if you can use the coupons with your card, finally pay by card, take the tickets and carefully distribute them to your kids at the ticket window, put everything back in your bag, forget where you are again, stand motionless for ten seconds, remember you’re at a theme park and proceed as slowly as possible to the park while a hundred people behind you wait patiently. [for-fucking-ever]

I mean, that’s what I assume was going on as we waited for the best part of an hour to enter Universal Studios Japan, in Osaka. I have no idea what anybody could be doing at the ticket counter to stay there for a full minute. (I know, I was bored enough to time it.) I thought, maybe there’s a lot of questions to answer, or perhaps you have to show ID, or the cashier’s really slow or the printer broke. But when I got there, it was as efficient as can be. Which leads me to blame people, mainly. I don’t claim to be some kind of superhuman ticket purchaser, blessed with ability to queue and buy tickets better than most, but … Anyway, no sense in bitching.

The park? Was cool. Stepping in, it’s an almost unbelievable simulacrum of Manhattan rolled into LA and continuing down the street to San Francisco; hyper-real, in a sense, far too clean and bright and accurate to be like the real thing. 1950s-style store fronts line big, empty boulevards, giant-old fashioned cinemas show posters for the latest Universal flicks, and there’s even a Japanese-style San Francisco-style Japanese-style restaurant – with long queues of Japanese visitors. In fact, I only saw a handful of gaijin in the entire park while we were there.

We made a beeline for the Back to the Future ride, which took two long hours to queue for and was – well, pretty cool, but not worth two hours. (You could watch the first film and make a start on the second in that time!) I almost feared a long, dull day of queuing, but the funny thing about theme parks is that your brain kind of forces you to ignore the queues in pursuit of a fun time. Next up was T2:3D, which I vaguely remembered reading as being very well received as a theme park ride. And it’s a real spectacle; after a not-too-long queue, we were ushed into an entrance hall where a suitably over-excited Cyberdyne representative excitedly asked everybody where they were from and squealed and engaged in a little banter with the audience and generally did a very amusing job of acting. Then it’s into the main auditorium – a huge, huge cinema – where we slip on our “safety visors” (3D glasses) and marvel at some cool Terminator animatronics before Arnold Schwarznegger! (or a slightly-too-short Japanese guy in sunglasses) appears, bursting through the screen as John Connor rappels down from the ceiling and together, on a motorbike, they ride into the screen and straight into a well-made ten-minute action sequence (directed by Jim Cameron himself, I hear) with Arnie and the kid (whatever happened to him?) fighting off Skynet in the future in 3D. I mean, after the spectacle of Avatar anything else in 3D seems a little flat, but there’s a very impressive boss fight in the end where the live actors come back on stage in a huge chamber that makes good use of the 3D effect.

After pizza, Backdraft – which I didn’t even realise was a film, but which is apparently a little-remembered early 90s film with Kurt Russell and Robert de Niro as firefighters, or arsonists, or something. The queue wasn’t too long, so we went for it. After watching Ron Howard speak fluent Japanese about his job as director, and then Scott Glenn talking about fire or something, you get to see the main spectacle – a big-ass pyrotechnic display in a warehouse mock-up, with explosions and fire and barrels crashing off gantries and all in all, quite an impressive scene.

It was getting quite late – and cold – by the time we got to Jurassic Park, which is a log flume/animatronics spectacle through the titular park (wait, wasn’t Jurassic Park the place where those dinosaurs escaped and ate everybody a few years back? And come to think of it, wasn’t there some bizarre thing in the 80s where a Cyberdyne robot came back in time and killed a bunch of people? I swear I saw a documentary about that. I think Universal Studios need some better ride sponsors.) It was a good lark, with a genuinely scary final T. rex and huuuuge drop.

Then the final ride, USJ’s big coaster, Hollywood Dream (presumably themed as a metaphor for the ups and downs of life in LA). Nothing too special – a couple of good drops, a upwards helix, no inversions sadly – but for the (unique?) feature of letting you pick your own music with a keypad in front of every seat. There was Bon Jovi, Eminem’s “Lose Yourself”, The Beatles’ “Get Back”, and two j-pop songs I’d never heard of. I went with old Shady, and I don’t know if it’s deliberately synced up but the chorus seemed to be timed with the drops, so it’d be all “but the beat goes on” at the crest and then “you better LOSE YOURSELF!” just as you hit terminal velocity. A nice addition. As we rolled into the station at the end, the staff stand around the train, applauding as you dismount and grab your possessions.

Afterwards, there was a parade of light with Snoopy and shiny things, which was pretty and visually impressive. Then we ate some shrimp at Bubba Gump’s Shrimp.

So that was Universal.

I’ve never been a huge fan of hostels if I’m alone. Never been a huge fan of being alone, either, but the thing with hostels is that everyone else is having fun in big groups and you tend to feel like Johnny Nomates and paranoid that the loud Yanks are laughing at you! and having more fun than you! Plus this capsule hotel is in the party district, so outside it’s all gorgeous-looking young people standing around and being cool and having more fun than me! and it’s a little depressing.

Luckily, the capsule hotel is full of single losers like me, both Japanese and gaijin, whiling away their lonely lives watching Pirates of the Caribbean or reading manga or writing blog entries on laptops. Today we went back to Kyoto, a city I didn’t quite enjoy the first time. Way back in November 2007, I’d just got the shinkansen in from Tokyo and was confident that the hostel listed in the Lonely Planet would have beds free. Obviously, it didn’t, which meant me traipsing about for four or five hours until finally checking in at a (admittedly decent) capsule hotel that wasn’t really a capsule hotel, and having been surrounded by concrete and traffic lights for most of that first evening I was feeling far removed from “historic Kyoto”. (Still, I grew to like it, and when I finally got a bed I very much enjoyed the hostel, K’s House Kyoto, so I recommend it.

This time it went a little more smoothly. We went out the south exit, which is remarkably a world away from the massive, urban, airy north exit; suburban homes and small businesses until we reached Touji temple, which is where this big Sunday flea market is held. Immediately I was transported back to the car boot sales of my youth; the sheer boredom of antiques and clothes until you reach one store with a fascinating array of old, cheap crap. This time, I was enraptured by stalls selling old Showa-era stuff, like antique postcards and photo albums and Japanese jazz albums and clunky SLRs and even vintage porn mags from the 70s. Ever since visiting Hanbey, I’ve felt a sudden affinity with Showa-era stuff; sepia postcards with LAKE ASHINOKO, HAKONE. written in that old-timey copperplate for 1930s tourists sending postcards across Asia; wartime and post-war austerity and poverty; the first faltering forays of Westernisation; jazzy tunes before enka and j-pop; and the bright and cheery advertising hoardings. One store had all these old photo albums, which were heartbreaking; two soldiers grinning over lunch, smiling children, nameless men in Imperial Army uniforms ready for war. “Grandmother.” “The tour leader on the bus from the school trip.” And all those carefully collected moments, arranged in albums by mothers and daughters and fathers and sons, taken in wartime and in peace, had ended up sitting on a table in a Kyoto flea market.

Of Kyoto’s many temples, there was only one I really wanted to see again. Fushima-Imari, dedicated to kitsune fox spirits and the kami of rice and sake (good bloke) is famous for its long lines of orange torii gates, and if I had my camera down here I’d upload the photos, but perhaps at a later date. We found the spot I loved last time, a little clearing nobody bothers to go to where there’s the most wonderful view of Kyoto through the trees.

On 29 November 2007, two (getting on for three!) years ago, I wrote:

Something compelled me to sit down there, sit and meditate. So I sat down on the dusty ground and just stared at Kyoto, soaking it all in. I considered starting a religion, called Kyotoism, which would basically be a rip-off of Buddhism except you had to make a pilgrimage at least once in your life, by bicycle, to Fushima temple, come up to this spot on the mountainside, and sit and contemplate Kyoto. I imagined that in a century the spot where I sat and founded Kyotoism would possibly because a historical site. I was alone, but then someone else came up and just stood there, looking at Kyoto, for almost as long as I did. I didn’t know her name, or who she was, but we were both Kyotoists. Suddenly, out of nowhere, a white cat appeared and said “miaow”. “A sign!” I thought, though I didn’t know what of, so I decided that in Kyotoism white cats are sacred for arbitrary reasons. In years to come, people will talk of the white cat that appeared to me at Fushima Shrine. Possibly.

I almost wished I’d left some graffiti to come back to, but I am obviously too public-spirited. So I scratched on a stick: “2010-03-21 Matt Durrant. 東京外大　おいてください！ (TUFS Please leave!)” and hid it carefully and it will probably have disappeared next time I go, but at least I tried.

On the way down we ran into a white cat climbing the long, long staircase to the top, carefully putting one foot before the other as he ascended. I reached down to stroke him but he just kept on going. “Maybe he was a forest spirit, a kami” I said, and then in an epiphany remembered the cat from last time … He had returned! The cat spirit nekonokami, deity of Kyotoism. It was beautiful.

After that we visited Gion, home of geisha. I was sceptical that we’d see any. We saw some beautiful sakura along a series of bridges and some genuinely beautiful streets with old buildings. Gion – or at least parts of it – really has the spirit of classically traditional Japanese streets.

But there are a few girl bars dotted about, remnants of the centuries-old water trade. We ate ramen in a decent little ramen joint (seriously, is there such a thing as a “bad ramen shop”? I think not) and then wandered about the streets at dusk, when Gion achieves a new kind of twilit beauty. And, clopping past as I shot a photo of the moon above a old-fashioned wooden inn, in a kimono and white makeup … that rare thing, a geisha.

On the train back I bumped into Juni, my friend from Leeds, currently in Kansai. I mean, it just happened that we were in the same city, at the same station, on the same line, queuing for the same train, at the same carriage, outside the same door, on this given day at 5pm. Coincidences like this happen all the time in Japan.

Anyway, tomorrow UNIVERSAL STUDIOS! Which will be my first theme park in Japan. Hopefully it won’t be too crowded… but it will, inevitably.

Well, I’ll say this for capsule hotel beds; when you wake up, you don’t want to go back to sleep. Either this means that they do a great job of refreshing and rejuvenating you with a good night’s sleep, or that they’re not exactly the height of luxury. The truth’s probably somewhere in between. Anyway, it’s a clever design. When you have to wake up for that 9am meeting, you don’t want to be distracted by a big, comfortable bed.

Yesterday we toured Hakone properly. It was still a little chilly, and a thick, thick fog descended on Owakudani and made the ropeway ride up to the top of the mountain an extraordinarily surreal experience of floating without motion inside a cable car surrounded by a perfectly white sphere thirty metres across:

like that episode of Evangelion where Shinji winds up in the empty void inside the Dirac sea and has a mental breakdown where he encounters the spirit of his dead mother which now inhabits the freakish artificial human fighting machine Evangelion (and who unbeknownst to him was cloned as his fellow Evangelion pilot Rei in a bid to accelerate the final evolution of manki- oh I’m getting carried away with myself).

Speaking of Evangelion, I got the coolest, nerdiest thing ever. I saw they had this map up in the guesthouse, and I asked the receptionist Yuuka if they were available, and after filling out a little form I got my hands on one. (She said they were pretty limited edition; only four places in Japan distributed them.) It’s a map of Hakone collated with the various events of Evangelion, from when Misato meets Shinji at Hakone-Yumoto station to the place where they shoot the big angry diamond thingy in episode three(?). And the pampas grass field I wandered through on my first visit to Hakone and thought “hey, this is just like the field Kensuke plays in in episode four!” turns out to be the actual filming location! Or, er, inspiration for the animators.

So we saw Hakone, went to get our luggage back from the hotel, said our final farewells and caught the bus to Odawara before getting a HIKARI shinkansen to Osaka. Oh, man, the shinkansen. When the first Nozomi superexpress shinkansen burst past with a roar, I nearly shed a tear from sheer … train awesomeness.

And then we got to ride it! Scenery flashed past in the night. I bought a beer. A small child looked at me and I smiled and he smiled. We were both thinking “THIS TRAIN IS SO COOL”. (I have a new admiration for Japanese youngsters after reading Yotsuba&. I want to ruffle their hair and call them ojouchan or obocchan and buy them an ice cream.)

The first thing you notice in Osaka – and it’s seriously jarring for a while – is that people stand on the right on escalators! Also, they’re just so much more happier. They stand in groups on the subway, chatting and laughing and looking happy to be alive, whereas in Tokyo everybody just looks like they want to die. Osaka does indeed have a different feel about it; more leisurely, a little grubbier, but a little happier. The girls aren’t prettier, but they’re more attractive, if you get me.

We found a little izakaya and my gosh, it was the best I’ve ever been to. Lush yakisoba, delicious omerice, and gigantic tankards of Asahi.

Katie and Chris are staying in a proper nice hotel called the Brighton, which is all dark woods and glossy floors and polite staff. I’m in the Capsule Hotel Asahiplaza, which is all 70s carpets and PVC mouldings.

Now I’ve never been to a proper capsule hotel before. I stayed in one in Kyoto in 2007 (last option) but it wasn’t really a proper capsule hotel; more a regular hotel with capsules instead of beds. (For example, I had an entire sizable hotel room, which just happened to have two capsules instead of a proper bed.) Consequently, I kind of screwed up when I got here, the Capsule Hotel Asahiplaza. It wasn’t too hard to find, a 10 minute walk from Shinsaibashi (think I’ve got the hang of Osaka’s subway system which is, in the end, just the same as any other subway system) and I seem to be living in Osaka’s party district, which is exciting. I checked in (I was a little worried about being late but hey, it’s a capsule hotel) and went straight up to my “room”, which was my first mistake. The capsule is entirely for eating, sleeping, and maybe watching a little TV. A proper straight-up capsule, too; the second floor is laid out like the cryogenic freezing hold in some futuristic SF starliner, the walls painted with things like “SECTION C 200-220″ in massive letters, each chamber arranged with two double-decker rows of capsules. You go in. You switch the light on. You sleep.

But I brought all my stuff up there, and then realised that capsules don’t lock, so I went downstairs and found the locker room, which should have been my first port of call. Anyway, I dumped my stuff in the locker and changed into the brown pyjamas which give this place wonderfully cultish overtones, and then headed for a walk around. (I never feel comfortable in a place, especially not a hotel, unless I’ve explored every nook and cranny for interesting things.)

It’s kind of like a miniature version of my beloved Dragon Hill Spa jjimjilbang in Seoul, or perhaps an alternative version of a manga café for more sensible people. There’s lounge chairs, and TVs, and arcade games, and mah-jong; vending machines and a tiny canteen; and a sizable sentou bath area with a hot and cold pool, a jacuzzi, and a 92C sauna (phew!). I don’t think there’s internet (must investigate further) but you can charge your phone and stuff downstairs, for 100 yen. The place is populated by a) salarymans, who can be found in the locker room putting on white shirts and meticulously applying hair tonic and b) a couple of noisy foreigners like myself.

So I got a decent night’s sleep and checked out (I don’t think you can leave your bags there or anything) and went back to the Brighton to start our first proper day exploring Osaka.

We visited the castle, the most popular tourist attraction in Japan (possibly because there’s nothing else to see in Osaka, as the guidebook jests). It was pretty cool, set in a big park with lots of tourists, Osaka’s famous takoyaki, and some pretty sakura. I met a Korean couple and the man, after I impressed him with an “anyeong haseyo!”, turned out to have gone to Chung-Ang University, my summer school alumni! Small world. Also, a bunch of people looking remarkably like the Fleet Foxes walked past.

After that I was thinking about buying a new backpack, so I tried to find a branch of Don Kihote, which led us to the Umeda Sky Building. (On the way one of Osaka’s 1.6 million traffic policemen guided us with a “kocchi! kocchi!” and I replied with a stumbled “kocchi? hai, hai” which warranted a “nihongo jozu!“. People are definitely friendlier.

The Don Kihote turned out to be a cafe of the same name, so we went back to the station area and I got a very nice rucksack for 1,600 and then a plate of curry from a nearby curry house. And the owner was so friendly! People are nice here. Later, we wandered about south of the station, and I had a round of Guitar Freaks at an arcade, steadfastedly ignoring the bemania gods on Beatmania IIDX and the newest DrumMania. (ughh I really want to get DrumMania. I should have snapped it up when I saw it in that weird charity shop in Kichijoji that I will never ever find again)


After that, there wasn’t much left to do, so we headed back to the Brighton so I could use the internet and charge my various mobile devices. Now I have a 30 minute walk back to my coffin in the Asahiplaza, which I wouldn’t be looking forward to if not for the hot bath. Ahh, keep your dark woods and marble floors, I’ve got a jacuzzi.

…which is the only Beatles track to feature Yoko Ono on vocals, incidentally.

I’m a completionist at heart. Or something like that. I never like to leave anything out, and I always fear I’m gonna forget interesting stuff, and I have to blog obsessionally lest a part of my life go unrecorded. So here’s basically what’s happened the last couple days:

• Visited scenic Meiji Shrine in Yoyogi Park for the first time and had a look at all the prayers written on the wooden tablets. Most of them wished for providence in family health, for fame(!), and for success in job hunting (and there’s a good rundown of the basic Japanese ambitions), except for one nasty one in English which spoke glowingly of Jesus’s coming wrath and destruction of the unbelievers. (Ugh.)



• And Meiji Shrine provides easy access to weird and wonderful Harajuku, which continues to be unpredictable. We stumbled across a massive St Patrick’s Day parade, which was a confusing moment of green and Guinness in the midst of downtown Tokyo, but probably the closest we’ll ever get to a Gaikokujin Festival.



• On the road to Shibuya we stopped off in Design Tshirts Store graniph, which makes the kind of t-shirts I find irresistible (except for the price tag); plain colours, Helvetica font, bold slogans, very po-mo. (Or plain modernist. I don’t know.) And the documentary Helvetica on DVD.

And rather wonderfully (in a post-modern modernist in-joke) a t-shirt with just the word ‘Helvetica’ rendered in Helvetica.
We also saw a cat cafe, a particular kind of drinking establishment unique to Japan where one drinks coffee and pets cats. I was missing cats, seeing as all the cats in Japan run away when you approach them.


• After that we went for delicious MEAT at a BBQ joint in Shibuya and had horse sashima (mmm, taboo meats). After chatting to a drunk guy about my weird-ass 魔手・蛇乱道 hoodie and eating old-timey cabbage in awesome Showa-period theme bar Hanbey
  we returned to our abodes.
  
• The next day we went down to Kamakura, a nice little beach resort/temple place I’ve written about previously. We visited the pigeon temple (fulla pigeons, dontcha know) and stumbled across a beautiful little coffee shop, Thomnecogo, in the middle of a residential area with high-class jazz and freshly ground coffee (that I might give a write-up, me being such an internationally renowned journo now).
  
  
  
  
• Next, Odaiba on the Yurikamome monorail (cool as ever) and back on the plain old JR line to Shinjuku.
  
  
• Yesterday we went to Takao, the mountain that marks the end of the massive 35 million people Chiba-Tokyo-Yokohama (千東横?) sprawl. It’s a nice little day trip from Tokyo, a bit of a hike in the autumn air.
  
  
  
  
  
• And today we have come to Hakone, which is my third time here. No coin lockers at the station, so we came straight to the Fuji-Hakone Guesthouse where I chatted in Japanese to the staff about having come in January and name-dropping my famous friend, Ella May Blake, who’d just stayed a week or two ago. Then a bus to Gora, where we ate in an out of the way restaurant; this guy started chatting to us in that way old Japanese guys do, but he was a real laugh, a true ojiisan, and it was great to practice my Japanese with him. He made me promise to come back before I leave, and I really will.I’m getting so much practice guiding these guys around! If only to show off, I seem to be getting in more conversations and the fact is I’m fine in most any conversation. And it’s so much fun, such a good feeling to successfully have a chat with a complete stranger and understand and be understood. If there’s anything I want to keep studying for, it’s stuff like this.

  Anyway, by the time we’d finished it was raining. The obaachan gave us some little tea cups as a present (so kind!) and an umbrella, and we hurried out of that little wonderful den of hospitality into the rain and got the cable car and ropeway up to Owakudani, which today was a pretty close approximation to hell: rain, ice, gales, smoke, and sulphur. I’d never come the reverse route on the ropeway from Gora before, and so it’s quite a surprise when you crest a hill and come out over … absolutely nothing, just a distant quarry below you, the cablecar swaying violently in the wind and rain pelting the windows. These photos do not do it justice.
  
  
  Anyway, there was no point freezing our asses off there, so we went inside and I failed terribly at the gruelling Kagekiyo

(truly the “Through the Fire and Flames” of Taiko no Tatsujin and drank some milk tea (fun fact: first time I ever drank milk tea was Owakudani, 2007) and then we sensibly went back down to Togendai and arrived back at the hotel after shopping at Lawson (which had a poster up detailing all the appearances of Hakone in Neon Genesis Evangelion, from the ropeway to gorgeous Tokyo-3 (compared to a image of the real-life area as it is) and even Hakone-Yumoto station (where Misato comes to find Shinji in episode four(?) – I think if you told my 14-year old self as he watched his prized Evangelion VHS second volume (ordered from MCV, back in the day) with that scene that one day he would pass through that very station, he wouldn’t have believed you) It’s weird how Evangelion has ballooned over the last couple of years from a landmark/slightly niche/incredibly deep and philosophical/deeply twisted and dark anime series made by a crazed auteur coming off four years of clinical depression into a catch-all media franchise, from pachinko to sexy pin-ups to tourist marketing boards, but that’s commericalism for you.).

• Anyway, that was a long digression. Tomorrow, Osaka beckons on the shinkansen. Ah, my beloved New Trunk Line. Exciting times.

Free ice cream aside, my enthusiasm for the manga-kissa faded somewhat when trying to sleep on a sofa covered by a tiny blanket under the hot glare of halogen lamps and the dry suck of the air con. After one or two hours of not quite satisfying sleep it was time to get up; time to leave my enclave, pay the bill, and head out into the world.

Homeless people were sleeping in the station at 5am; perhaps I should have joined them. Instead I followed my nose to one of the ever-present McDonalds and bought a coffee from a girl with the biggest eyes I ever saw, sat down to drink it and lament the sorry fatigue of the traveller. It’s lonely stuff, travelling, and doubly so in a foreign country when you don’t have the benefit of any roots to anchor you down. I thought about turning back, perhaps; Ueno and a warm proper bed were only a couple of hours away. But no. Onwards I must struggle.

Takasaki seemed oddly busy for 5am. Obviously compared to Tokyo it was utterly dead; still, the McDonalds was pretty full with people sleeping or waiting for the first train. Perhaps some of them were on the Seishun 18 like me. I looked at my cluttered schedule on Outlook with a mixture of admiration and fear; it is a clear roadmap for visiting dozens of towns and cities in four days and reaching Hokkaido, the city of Hakodate, where I have promised myself a proper hotel and a proper bed.

I wonder why I’m doing this. To prove it can be done, I guess. The train journeys are taking up most of my time, so it’s not like I’m doing it for the sightseeing … it’s more because I want to hit the road, roam about. Wanderlust. Fernweh. I kind of like the idea of having everything I need in one bag, always accessible, even just seeing myself in the mirror as a proper backpacker (though with a satchel bag), with no real plans and no reservations.

The train from Takasaki takes me to Minakami, where there’s snow on the ground, and there I change to continue on to Nagaoka, after passing through a colossal 13.5km tunnel through the mountains, complete with several spooky underground stations with cavernous entrances and exits where no one gets off and no one gets on. The trains at Nagaoka have this old time feeling, evoking images of travelling through post-war Europe on the train networks in the good old days.

This is the north alright; a fuckton of snow, and when it snows here it really knows. Like, more than a metre deep. Enough to bury me, perhaps.

I found out later that this is the setting for a classic of Japanese literature, Snow Country. The first line famously reads “The train came out of the long tunnel into the snow country.” The tunnel Yasunari Kawabata was writing about was the 13.5 km one I’d just come out of, the Shimizu tunnel. A little bit of literary history there.

After the train came out of the mountains the thick snow abated. Nagaoka is a few fashion stores and a branch of Muji. I get to Niigata, where I have about four hours to kill before catching the succession of trains to Akita tonight. When I walk out of the station, I’m a little bit taken aback; the station area is identical to Takasaki, although as I get deeper into the town it feels different. I catch hints of Seoul, Chicago; funny how cities can all be similar and different at the same time.

Thought about getting a haircut, but 5,500 yen? No thanks. So I walk to the north coast, the Sea of Japan, past concrete uniformity and pointless towers everywhere. I take a few half-hearted photos but Niigata is difficult to get excited about, especially on a grey foggy afternoon. The Sea of Japan is the same as it ever was. I sit down for a minute, trying to make the most of it, and then realise I have.

Maybe I’ve got the wrong idea about “travelling”. Like, I’ve heard that exciting and interesting people spent their youths travelling, so I try to do it too, but I take it a bit too literally and just spend my time travelling from place to place. The key to exciting travels is probably meeting interesting people and visiting novel locations. Need to brush up on that.            

I wound up in a Starbucks underneath Niigata’s shiny NEXT 21 skyscraper drinking their new Sakura frappuchino (delish). They were playing “Slippery People” by Talking Heads, which is a rather obscure choice. Oh, and “Hand in Glove”. I must say that Starbucks’ music is infinitely superior to that McDonalds yesterday. And they played Squeeze. And The Cure. It was like they were streaming it straight off my iPod.

I take the long walk back to the station and I realise I can’t push on. Yeah, I could have got to Akita after another five or six hours and catch two hours sleep in a manga-kissa and start the journey to Hakodate and have an evening there before I have to start back again … but I’m travelling for the sake of it. It’s still barely possible, I calculate using the train thing on my phone, to trace my route back across the spine of Japan to Ueno and end up on my doorstep the same night.

And so I find myself on that lovely, rare object: the homebound train. There’s only a dozen passengers; the warmth and light of our carriages contracts with the frozen wastes outside the window. Now I find myself past Akabane, rolling into Ikebukuro, the beautiful city outside the window as I listen to Kevin Shields’ “City Girl”. It’s insane. Every time I leave this city I come back more in love with it than ever. I can’t explain why.

So I’m back home, but the best bit is I still have three days of the Seishun 18 to use over the next month. Watch this space, dear friends.

I swear man, this is the only way to travel. Working my way back from Yokohama to Tokyo station, where I stopped off at the Travel Centre for a quick chat entirely in Japanese regarding the status of any Moonlight night trains (conclusion: nai) and then on to Ueno where I took my last remaining option; getting any train heading in a sort of northerly direction.

It was fantastic. I got to the platform and saw that I had a choice between somewhere called Koganei (same kanji as the one near where I live, but about two hours away from Tokyo) and a town called Takasaki, both of which I’d never even heard of. I pulled out my trusty map (which served me so well back in 2007). Where shall I go? I found Takasaki on the map and it looked to be in a good place (on the way to Niigata, Akita, and ultimately Sapporo) and the train was leaving in 15 minutes, so I hopped on and grabbed a seat.

Part of the fun of this ticket is the whole Hoffman transfer orbit system of getting around; bumping from station to station, it requires an intricate understanding of the train networks, and you really get a sense of how the railroads spread out throughout the country, interconnected and interchanging. I do find something so wonderfully romantic about trains, and though this ticket is very inconvenient for getting anywhere in a hurry you see a lot more of the country than you would otherwise.

The night is coming on. I’m listening to my recent purchase, Ali Farka Toure’s beautiful African blues on In The Heart of the Moon. I’m on a train bound for some place I never heard of and I think there’s hotels and stuff (it’s a stop for the Shinkansen at least) but I’m not sure if I’ll find one and man it’s all so terribly exciting!<

I’ve got a set of four seats to myself now, which is a welcome change from being cramped in with three others earlier. I’m reasonably confident I’ll have a room for the night. I don’t want to pay too much, but I’m looking at perhaps 4,000 and up. Tomorrow I should be able to make a good start on getting up to Sapporo, or if not at least Akita. Ah, the night scenery flashing past outside is so romantic…

Rolled into Takasaki and into a light drizzle, the traffic lights reflecting off the mostly empty boulevard. Takasaki is one of those nondescript Japanese towns, all grey featureless hotels and cars sluicing through the night. There were a few hotels dotted around, including one for 4,000, but I hoped that there might be a capsule hotel somewhere, so I asked in at a Lawson. There wasn’t one, but the guy at the desk asked the junior assistant and he recommended a little manga/internet café just down the street, next to a cinema. (I was going to go properly Holden Caulfield and catch a late flick, but the last showings had already started).

So, hopefully I should be able to get some sleep and internet there. In the meantime I’ve stopped in at a Gasuto diner, where I got things off to a great start by repeating “Irasshaimase!/Welcome!” to the waitress as I came in. Argh. Oh well, at least they’ll never see me in this town again. They are playing a orchestrated version of “Michelle” that took me a while to recognise.

It’s a little bit scary, though. I’m only two hours from Tokyo if anything goes wrong, but the further I get out, the longer it takes to get back … and if I really balls things up, it might take a shinkansen to get me home. But then in another way of looking at it, I’m already a continent away from my other home…

I’m at the place now, and it’s just far too awesome. Massive screened PC, big telly, PS2, every manga you could possibly want to read, a few DVDs and games, a big comfy sofa, and free drinks and ice cream for 1,500 yen. Although it’s hardly a proper hotel, it’s decent enough for me. I spent an hour or two trying to work out how, exactly, I am to get to Sapporo … and I don`t think I can, but I might be able to reach Hakodate. We will see.