Sons of Loki

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.

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.

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.