Sons of Loki

On Christmas Day I unwrapped my presents – ah, precious books! in English! – and caught a train to Shibuya for a bit of a wander and a hunt for lunch. A good roast was out of the question, so I decided to settle for a big old katsu kare – only to find that there were no kare joints to be found. Eventually I settled for katsu rice with a big old bowl of noodles, which is hardly traditional Christmas fare, but filled me up good.
I kept seeing other gaijin in the streets: wondering why they were alone in Tokyo today, wondering if they were thinking the same about me. (Ah, the loneliness of the long distance Tokyo ex-pat.)
Luckily I curtailed this aimless wo/andering with a trip to Akiba to meet up with my dear buddy James, up from Kobe Konan for a few days. We hit one of the multi-floor games stores, where I debated for a looong time whether to buy a “junk” second-hand PS2 for ¥2000 (£13) before ultimately deciding I should save my money, because it probably wouldn’t work.
Having shown James what the inside of a games store looks like, he asked me if there wasn’t anywhere more interesting to go in Tokyo, and so I finally settled on Odaiba for want of anything else.
Oh, crazy Odaiba. We went to Venus Fort, which is a recently-refurbished shopping mall and destination for a squillion couples who were enjoying a Christmas Day date (the traditional yuletide activity in Japan). Oh, and me and James. We’re totally not a couple. Ahahaha.


After a wander about and gunning down a few zombies on the Silent Hill arcade shooter (is it zombies in Silent Hill? I confess to never playing the games) we headed along to the excitingly named TOKYO TELEPORT, which in my mind very strongly reminds me of some Halo level. It looks like arcs of blue plasma should be pulsing from the top, don’t you think?


We got the train from TOKYO TELEPORT! back to the Shinj, where we met Satomi and went to the Tokyo Metropolitan Building’s free observatory deck (the perfect place for skint people like myself to bring visitors!). And so Christmas Day wound up in an izakaya with Jay and Si (my Leeds coursemates, also at Kobe), a plate of chips and some dirt-cheap gintoniks. Heavenly.

Yesterday James, Miles and I made a long overdue visit to an Akihabara maid cafe.
Okay. Maid cafes. You go there, pay a 500 yen cover charge. The staff are all cute young girls dressed as maids. They speak to you in squeaky voices and very polite Japanese and call you “master” and bring you drinks and stir your coffee (“stir your coffee” – I believe this calls for a Pythonesque nudge nudge) and make pretty ketchup designs on your omerice. You can have your picture taken with them.
All this will ring alarm bells for most people – Westerners at least – and I have to say I was really put off by what I thought was the sleaziness of these places. Until, that is, I read up a little more on them, and finally felt slightly more comfortable about visiting one. You know what? They aren’t really that sleazy at all.
Yes, a lot of the customers are otaku, but there were more than a few girls there. One guy had brought his girlfriend (or had she brought him?). The overriding aesthetic (at least at the place we went to) is cute, not sexy. Everything is so sugary sweet that the impressions of some kind of weird hostess bar couldn’t be further from your mind. It is moe, more a pure appreciation of cute kawaii femininity than a leery, pervy lust. At least that’s how I saw it.
I got a cake with a bunny rabbit drawn in chocolate and strawberry sauce. When we ordered pizza, we had to do this ancient Japanese purification ritual (possibly) of making the heart shape with our hands and waving them about while chanting in Japanese. Someone ordered a cocktail, and the poor guy got dragged up on stage while the maid sang a mixing song, waving a cocktail shaker around.
(I had this awesome idea for this Densha Otoko-style romance called Daidokoro Onna – Kitchen Girl about a plain-looking girl who works in the kitchen of a maid cafe and falls in love in one of the patrons, an unusually hunky otaku, but because she’s too ugly to work as a maid she never gets to talk to him until Episode 6 when she has a makeover and in ancient anime tradition merely has to take off her glasses and immediately becomes gorgeous and the rest of the series is about them falling in love and then there’d be a second series but it would be crap.)

With our wallets considerably lightened we met back up with the guys and girls and headed back to Odaiba along the lovely Rainbow Bridge.


We ate at a weird restaurant in Venus Fort, apparently themed in a vague 1930s Hong Kong style with crumbling brickwork and flyers pasted over the walls outside and a kind of Orientalist red-and-black interior. Food was alright, though my portion of chicken and cashew nuts was tiny. Later, ice cream, and then Miles and I said our farewells and got the train back to Shinjuku. I can’t wait to head to Kobe to see those guys in their native environment.

Playing a stolen guitar along to an old Brian Eno track, and it is Christmas! Tokyo has gone in for it in a mildly big way: there are lights everywhere, and Christmas cheer, and Mariah Carey bellows forth from every shop. The day itself here is more of a thing for couples to get together and go down to Odaiba or Shibuya or wherever, which is kind of sweet, even for hopeless singles like myself.

So while my stomach has been grumbling for roast pig and potatoes and stuffing and gravy and carrots and maybe peas and trying to cram ourselves round a tiny table in a room that is slightly too cold with 60s Christmas hits playing and everyone’s wearing hats and reading out lame jokes before the customary slouch in the living room watching whatever crap’s on and gorging on more food – ah, Christmas! – my friend Zo’s been visiting from Leeds and sleeping on my floor and other people have come in from other parts of the country and it’s been an exciting and very expensive week.

Saturday saw a trip to Shinjuku with Rob and Zo, where we dined on fine okonomiyaki (Japanese omelette-y fried noodles … like a pancake … or maybe pizza but not really anything like pizza) in a fine-enough department-store food-court establishment. My coursemates Hugo and James had made the trip up from Nagoya, and our friend Emily was in from England staying with her relatives, and then Kaz turned up, and it was like old times.

You wouldn't like Rob when he's angry.

Then up to 5F in a nondescript tower to a branch of Hub to meet up with Zo again, who was with a few of his friends – Hosei graduates who came to Leeds a few years back. Zo’s been at Leeds for six or seven years now on various degrees, so he’s like a constant Methuselah of the Japanese Society, familiar with many years of graduates.
I couldn’t help but be amused by an incident in the lift as we left, when it stopped on 3F and we were confronted by a Hooters-style semi-girlie-bar, with scantily-clad waitresses and two Japanese men waiting for the lift. There were a few comedic seconds of silence at we stared at each other, each bamboozled by the scene before our eyes – the apparent respectability of the two men, the half-naked waitress, the lift packed with gaijin sardines – before both sides of the divide erupted into astonished conversation and the doors mercifully closed.

On Monday we all met up again in Akihabara, for some serious geekage. In Yodobashi Camera, I played an electronic guitar with no strings (verdict: the most pointless instrument in the world) and made Bach-aficionado Hugo play the JR station jingles from a book of sheet music we found in the keyboard section. Then a wander round the hobby section, where the rows and rows of Gundam models stirred some long-forgotten otakuness in me, but ultimately failed to cause a relapse of my condition, thankfully.

We then headed to Odaiba, the Tokyo waterfront area, which I must admit is growing on me. We had a wander around the shops, a gaze at the skyscrapers of Minato Ward glittering across the Bay, and then (in bitterly cold windswept conditions) watched the waterfront lightshow, which was pretty cool (even if it is essentially a sprinkler on a pier with a projector pointed at it).

Tuesday saw a trip with Zo to the famous Starbucks over Shibuya Crossing for a eclair latte thing(?).

After I bought a polarising filter for my camera, Zo split off to elsewhere and I met Emily and the guys to watch the new One Piece film with the guys in Shibuya (coincidentally at the very same cinema I saw Evangelion 1.0 at two years ago). Knowing absolutely nothing about One Piece, and knowing not so much Japanese either, I wasn’t sure how much I’d get but it was an enjoyable romp, for sure. The others didn’t seem to like it so much (being One Piece fans, I imagine they find that the franchise is running a little out of steam) but I’m looking forward to starting on the manga that sits upon my shelf.

After that we met back up with Zo and assaulted a local game centre, where much fighting occurred and I played Taiko no Tatsujin (high score!) and Drummania (sort of getting the hang of it, even if I got a ‘E’ on “Through The Fire and Flames”).


We also bought some cream shoes (I am entirely unsure of the proper name, but that’s the katakana for you) in Shibuya, which are basically incredibly unhealthy cream puffs sold from a place by the station which cost ¥150 and are oh god so delicious, so sugary on the outside and so pastry-y in the middle and then so sweet sweet cream on the inside.

Finally, Zo, Miles and I wound up in Kichijoji to meet Kaz, who has a car, and promised to drive us aimlessly around Tokyo until the wee hours. He sped off on his Triumph to get his car:


while we loitered dangerously in a local Family Mart and laughed at the merchandise.

Kaz came back with his Toyota and we drove into Shinjuku – so cool – and picked up Rob and went barrelling downtown just as “All The Small Things” came on and it was sweet.


Tokyo was being gorgeous as ever, the endless streets, endless stores, endless people on their errands – it occurred to me that there are oh so many stories in the naked city – and I realised that you don’t really get as good a sense of the sheer mindblowing size of the Chiba-Tokyo-Yokohama megacity from a train as you do from a car, where it’s obvious just how it keeps going, and going, and going, and every street you cross over at a junction has its own shops and homes and people just like the one you’re driving down, and then there are a hundred other streets after that one; and you slowly begin to build the resulting grid of streets up in your mind and you realise that this city is the biggest place you’ll ever see and it is beautiful. It made me go all funny inside, to see the salarymen and the taxi drivers and the couples flashing past in an instant, like I wanted to find the words to describe the beauty and the lonely existentialism of the night as we flashed across the Arakawa but just couldn’t. We put on the Akira soundtrack, which was great as the skyscrapers went by, and then the Teriyaki Boyz’ “Tokyo Drift” as we got into Ginza, which was good dumb fun, and then bellowed “LINDA LINDA!!” along with the Blue Hearts as we headed down to Yokohama. Yokohama seemed pretty nice: surprisingly different to neighbouring Tokyo, more open, more modern.

I was looking forward to writing about the newly-spiced up battle for Christmas no. 1 when a few days ago this woman basically said it all for me much better:

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

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

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

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

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

I wake up today to see that Rage won.

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