Sons of Loki

culture fest/shooting things with guns and keyboards

October 29th, 2009 Matthew Durrant No comments

On Sunday Chris and I went along, with a few other students, to a small cultural festival at a community centre just down the road from our uni. It wasn’t anything big – just a few performances by the kids from the local schools, an audience of their parents and old people – but it was a fascinating look at the side of Japan we don’t really see as young students, the world of kids and their grandparents and well-groomed old men in suits who happily give you free beer at the end. Ah, beer, the great connector.

We had to give a short self-introduction in front of a small crowd of Japanese grandmothers, which we found out about thirty seconds before we had to do it, but as I’ve done about a million self-introductions in the last month it rolled off the tongue. I even got a tiny bit of applause at my self-deprecating “日本語が上手じゃありませんけど、がんばります” (At Japanese I lack skill but I will persevere).

On Monday our JASSO came in – 160,000 delicious yen. Then, for a long time nothing happened.

At Ochanomizu, I caught this lovely sight of a middle-aged couple stopping to admire the view from a bridge over the Kanda. They remind me of Noguchi and Kazu from After The Banquet, I write, pretentiously.

At Ochanomizu, I caught this lovely sight of a middle-aged couple stopping to admire the view from a bridge over the Kanda. They remind me of Noguchi and Kazu from Mishima’s Utage no Ato, I write, pretentiously.

Yesterday I trawled Yodobashi Camera, giving the cameras a try in my long quest for Durrant’s Next Top Model (of Camera), snapping a few pictures on my SD card for later review. Verdict: Pentax K-m was so horribly bad with and lack of detail and JPEG mush that I wonder if the settings were screwed up. The Sony alpha series were nice, but it is not a camera made for human hands, as several people have pointed out. The Nikon D3000 is fine, but picking up the Canon Kiss X2 and trying it out seriously endeared me to it. It just felt right, and the photos are lovely. (Only problem is the expense. May just plump for the next model down.)

After that I met up with the guys for a meal with Ella’s friend Satomi. Had a wander through Shinjuku – will never get tired of that – and wound up at a very exclusive-seeming restaurant with private rooms, dark lighting, muted dark woods, trickling water features with fish in – the works.

We had shabu-shabu, a Japanese dish very similar to one I had in Korea all the time (and may be the same thing) – a pot of boiling water at the table with stock into which are dropped vegetables and bits of meat which are left to boil, and then plucked out and eaten. It was nice, but a tad unfilling.