Sons of Loki

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.

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.

On the road, he became anonymous, a nobody. Just another gaijin tourist; no more worthy of note than that the sky was blue or that birds sang. He didn’t so much blend in as simply not be present; he was discovered as a suitcase in a luggage rack, or seen as wallpaper plastered against walls, or spotted as a railing affixed to the pavement.

In Kyoto he saw the temples and the forests and the geisha. In a town called Yamaguchi, he brushed his teeth with the complimentary toothbrush, and ordered a cup noodle from the vending machine.
Down in the far south, from a city called Kagoshima, he took a train ride down the coast to the end of the world. The sea thrashed and boiled in a desperate frenzy as it poured over the rim. From the edge of the Earth, hanging out over eternity, a peninsula ran out into a thick grey fog; there he found himself as far from Tokyo as possible, surrounded by mountains and empty highways, vending machines and deserted high schools. There was a TV shop here, too: big-screened Sonys and Toshiba plasmas. A man was carrying wet cardboard boxes from a pile and tossing them over a railing off the edge of the world, where they tumbled down into infinity.
A little further down the coast there was a white-painted metal stairway leading down to an observation platform, proudly proclaiming itself as the most remote point on Earth, a kilometre out from the rim and into space. An elderly couple – the man in a grey coat and flat cap, the woman wearing a purple headscarf – were leading on the rail, staring out at God’s creation, enormous lilac nebulae and supernovae erupting across unimaginable distances.
“It’s cold,” the man said, in Japanese he could just about understand.
“It is, isn’t it?” his partner replied.