Sons of Loki

June’s just flown by in a blur of routine. Indeed, there’s nothing like routine to make the days just fly by, is there? I wake up, go to lesson, get back, learn two chapters of Kanji in Context (I’ll hopefully have done all the ones on the official government-mandated “jouyou kanji” list by the time we leave … at least, all the old jouyou kanji), hit the flashcards for a bit, eat, go to the gym and do some weights and some pretty intensive stationary biking (stationary bikes are ace! You can exercise and read/do flashcards/listen to music/watch TV at the same time! Thinking of buying one next year), get back to my room, watch The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya with jury-rigged Japanese subtitles (excellent combined reading/listening practice), then if I’m feeling good, read a bit of Yotsuba or else switch my brain off and play Fallout 2. Then it’s time for bed.

Did I mention I passed? Yeah, that big ass Leeds exam. Obviously, I didn’t get a great mark – well, not even a good one – but it doesn’t bother me now. I am a changed man! I study most of the time. I’ve started using Khatzumoto’s 10,000 sentences method, wherein you find interesting and useful sentences in films/books/manga/daily life, pop them into an SRS flashcard system, and drill them daily until they are burned into the fabric of your brain. It seems to be starting to pay off, or at least I think it is.

Yesterday I went for a bit of a wander for no particular reason; starting in Ebisu, then walking through the quietly upmarket neighbourhoods of Shibuya towards Roppongi Hills and an iced tea outside Starbucks, overhearing a conversation in Australian next to me about how hot it was (and boy, it’s been 31°C – and humid).

Today, though, I went back to Nakano, a place just west of Shinjuku which I used to visit all the time when I lived here two years ago (shit, two and a half years ago. Nearly three years ago). I used to visit the Working Holiday Office there in hopes of finding teaching work (of course, when I arrived in 2007 it was literally mere days after the gigantic NOVA English school imploded, throwing thousands of desperate, highly-qualified, and suddenly unemployed English teachers out on to the streets of Japan, so work was practically non-existent). I’d also hit the Nakano Broadway nearby, because it had a handful of hobby shops and PC stores. And I honestly couldn’t remember why I used to trek halfway across the city when I had Akihabara practically on my doorstep, but wandering around the Broadway mall today, I was suffused with nostalgia, revisiting shops I hadn’t been to in two and a half years. I found the PC store where I bought a keyboard for some reason – and in ultimate proof that everything comes full circle, I bought almost exactly the same model of no-name Chinese-made 500 yen keyboard (the W and S and backspace on my laptop keyboard have stopped working and I stripped the fucking screw! so I can’t replace it until I get home and maybe try some specialist equipment).

There’s all these nice little indie stores – the main store of manga and doujin specialists Mandarake; a store full of weird old books (including Philip K Dick in translation, which I was tempted to buy until I realised that reading VALIS in Japanese would actually give me a brain haemorrhage); a shop selling model railway carriages and model railway carriages only, clearly a labour of love for the glasses-wearing owner (I like to think he worked as a salaryman for decades before deciding to throw it all away and pursue his dream of starting a shop selling sixty-two types of rolling stock); low ceilings, narrow corridors, and a sense of comfort.

It is a beautiful Saturday afternoon and the sports teams are on the sports pitch doing whatever the hell they do (they never seem to play sport, they stand in huddles shouting at each other) and I still have 94 days in Japan and the Leeds exam is increasingly in the past and I think I did alright and yet I can’t shake this strange desire to keep going. I want to learn it all. I doubt this’ll last, but I might as well go along with this feeling as long as it persists.

So many things to do, but nothing that I really need to do… Might go into town, later. I was watching the video for m’flo’s “Been So Long” (I can’t tell if it’s self-consciously ironic or not) and realised I miss the big empty streets of places like Minato-ku, so I was thinking of doing some arty night black-and-white photography down there, like every single photograph of New York ever taken.

I want to finish off Yoshida, at least the #gowife portion. Gotta pay my bills. Play 龍が如く, the Kabukicho-based GTA clone, which I picked up from (the hilariously named) Book Off the other day. Find an arcade and get good at DrumMania (seeing as the actual PS2 drum controller is nowhere to be found).

Cycled to Hachioji the other week – took about two hours each way, and I reached the edge of Tokyo, which is quite a feat. Here’s some pretty pictures.

Right at the limits of my camera's capability. Observe the Bay of Rainbows, the tiny line of light at the top left.

Dunno what this joker was playing at, but he was doing some neat stunts.

Yes, fateful days indeed! Apologies for not updating in a while (although most people I know update their blogs every year or two, so count yourself lucky). Only, it’s quite a turning point this week for me and the country.

Tomorrow is the big Leeds exam, and – you know what, it’s not cool to say it, but I’m not worried. I think I’m gonna pass. Most people are bricking it, but it’s only 40% to pass.

Which may come as a surprise, because literally less than two weeks ago I’d given up all hope. I was pretty sure I’d end up emailing to say I was dropping Japanese and taking up single honours English. And then a tiny, life-changing thing happened. Dan told me I could do it.

We were told you had to start studying for the exam at the start of the year — in October — when you were on the plane. And there I was, with less than two weeks to go on a Monday evening – there was no way I could do it. That’s what conventional wisdom said. 653 kanji and 58 chapters in two weeks? No chance.

But Dan explained how over the past month, he’d gone through Kanji in Context (our workbook) with the help of Heisig’s mindblowingly-awesome Remembering the Kanji. He’d gone through Kanji in Context in order, looked up each kanji in Heisig’s book, and built a mnemonic story with the reading of the kanji built in.

This is not how you’re supposed to use either of these books. Kanji in Context is based around the old-school method of “stare at the kanji until it goes in, then write it a hundred times”. Its deficiency are obvious; it takes forever, the kanji are in a stupid order, and you can forget it in an instant.

Heisig (technically “Remembering the Kanji”, but everyone calls it Heisig after its glorious author James Heisig) is much more sensible; you don’t learn a complex kanji until you’ve learned the components that make it up (KiC has ridiculous things like teaching you 驚 a dozen chapters before you learn 句, and who the hell can wrap their head around that?) and the mnemonic system makes revising kanji actually scarily enjoyable. But it has its failings, too; you don’t learn how the kanji are pronounced, you can sometimes get confused with the mnemonic stories (you learn about fifty kanji in a row with the 人 radical and it all tends to merge together into a baffling mess) and you don’t learn any words, so you’ve got no grounding in the actual language. (It’s entirely possible to read Heisig cover-to-cover and know nothing about the Japanese language.)

But look at it this way; Heisig is a locomotive and Kanji in Context is the track. Neither are any use without the other, but put them together and shit, you can achieve so much.

So I look at something ridiculously complicated like 驚 and I break it down into awe and horse and I see myself in awe as a rock (which reminds me of the reading, odoroku) smashes through the window and a beautiful horse bursts in, causing me shock and wonder, which is what the kanji means. Do that 652 more times, and you are in a very good place to pass the exam.

It is election day.

I am voting for the Liberal Democrats.

The Tories (保守党: “Protect and Guard Party”) were out of the question. Even before reading Johann Hari’s article on the rotten borough of Hammersmith and Fulham:

A young woman – let’s called her Jane Phillips, because she wants to remain anonymous – turned up at the council’s emergency housing office one night, sobbing and shaking. She was eight months pregnant. She explained she was being beaten up by her boyfriend and had finally fled because she was frightened for her unborn child. The council said they would “investigate” her situation to find “proof of homelessness” – but she told them she had nowhere to go while they carried it out. By law, they were required to provide her with emergency shelter. They refused. They suggested she try to find a flat on the private market.

For four nights, she slept in the local park, on the floor.

They are the party of the few and the privileged; the party who will earnestly lie through Murdoch to get the vote of the people they will do the least for (the Sun’s front cover reminds me of the way Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia, not Eurasia). So, in general terms, fuck that.

Labour – oh, I’m supposed to vote for Labour (労働党: Labour and Working Party), the party of the left and the impoverished and the working man, except they really aren’t the party of the left any more. They’ve done so much to advance Britain in terms of civic rights, with the minimum wage and civil partnerships, but I can’t vote for a party of the past – I have to vote on what they are now, and I just don’t agree with Labour’s tired, centrist policies any more.

So we have the Liberal Democrats (自由民主党: “Self-Action People-Rule Party”, which is ironically the name of the recently-ousted Liberal Democratic Party of Japan). Unless the pollsters have got it all wrong and dramatically underestimated the youth vote (which I doubt, because the polls are incredibly accurate these days) there’s very little chance of getting in, but the thing about the Lib Dems is that they’re tenacious – once they’re in, they’re hard to get out, so even a small surge here will build and build, and we have a generation growing up disheartened with Labour but not willing to vote Tory. Clegg seems a decent guy who really cares. Their policies – from the little stuff like protecting post offices, protecting the internet and sorting out unfair council taxes to the big changes like proportional representation, ditching Trident, and a fully-elected House of Lords (something Labour have failed to do in 13 years) are all things that make me excited.

So me, I agree with Nick.

Not a lot been happening here, though I’ve staved off holiday insanity for the last couple of days.

Friday saw a trip to the Tachikawa immigration office, which in punctual style I reached ten minutes before it closed. The staff were friendly for a change, although they started laughing at my file disconcertingly before putting a tiny sticker in my passport which entitles me to work 14 hours a week.
I got the train back from Tachikawa station to Musashi-koganei on the Chuo line (technically the Chuo Line (Rapid), the same thing and entirely different to the Chuo-Sobu Line, which is also identical to and nothing to do with the Chuo Main Line). I’d cycled to Musashi-koganei station to save the extortionate 150 yen fare on the Seibu Tamagawa line, which is the line we have to get from where we live to connect to the Chuo. It’s actually pretty quick to cycle to from TUFS (well, 20-30 minutes), and given that the Seibu Tamagawa line is such a ridiculous money-sink it makes a big difference.
Anyway, I studied in McDonalds for a while and then, not wanting to stay in on a Friday evening, met up with Miles and Ella for dinner and karaoke in Kichijoji. This was enjoyable. Saturday, I was going to go to this music bar in Shinjuku with Ella, Fran and our Korean friend Hime, but ultimately that was cancelled due to Expensiveness and we went to happy hour at Hub, the Japanese pub. Craftily, the pub had conspired to include some kind of chemical in our drinks which lowered our inhibitions and made us more likely to stay and purchase more drinks, even at post-happy hour prices, which we did. Nevertheless, a merry time was had.
Japan really doesn’t do the British pub culture thing very well, at least not in my experience. It’s all izakayas, where you sit in uncomfortable booths and have to eat stuff and then get cheated out on a service charge you didn’t know about. Hub’s nice, though. It’s a place to just relax and drink and watch the curling (where Japan beat GBR, although our team did look like they’d just wandered out of Asda).

Sunday, I found out that j-rocksters the pillows were playing the final gig of their current tour at Tokyo Dome or JCB Hall (or whatever it’s called) and nearly went. I cycled around to find a Lawson convenience store and struggled with their ticket-booking machine for five minutes, trying to find the gig before giving up. Plus I didn’t really have enough money. Plus there’ll be other opportunities to see those guys.

I’ve decided to start shopping at the Lawson 100, the logical successor to Shop 99 of my old 2007 days (though they’re owned by the same company, stock all the same products, and there’s a Shop 99 about five minutes away from my nearest Lawson 100). The eggs are tiny and the coffee disgusting, but the price is right.

And I’m trying to learn 20 kanji a day from Heisig. I tried 50 a day before and burned myself out completely. It’s pointless to do that many – you forget them as soon as you learn them. I should hopefully finish a few weeks before the Leeds exam in May, which I am plus unconfident about given that everyone else is worried.

Yeah, I still don’t know. I got it together briefly enough to barely pass the TUFS exam, but the Leeds one is an entirely different, more difficult thing altogether. I know my parents will be telling me to just get my head down and study, but it’s not that simple. It’s a language. It’s a wild, uncontrollable beast. You track it for a year and you’re no closer to catching it. You study it for hours and forget it all in a heartbeat. I don’t even know how to study it. And yet study I must.

Anyway, this is what I want my contacts to do in a couple of years.

Augmented (hyper)Reality: Domestic Robocop from Keiichi Matsuda on Vimeo.