Sons of Loki

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.

For a change, I did my weekly shop yesterday in Musashi-sakai, one of the endless identical urban centres dotted along the Chuo line in West Tokyo. Did a little Christmas shopping, too, just a few things for the folks back home.

(On Gizmondo recently I saw a post about the amusing “please do it at home” signs fostering good behaviour on the Tokyo Metro, and it occurred to me the things in Japan I now take for granted are genuinely novel and “Japanese” and worthy of note for Western audiences. For example, today the woman on the till at the supermarket put my frozen veg in a paper bag with a plastic bag of ice to keep it cool. Makes perfect sense, doesn’t it? And yet these little things are so commonplace that I barely notice them, and struggle to come up with other examples. Yesterday I noted down just a few: the marks on station platforms indicating where the doors will be when a train stops; the way everyone forms a line on either side of the train door to let passengers get off first; underground bike parks; in restaurants, a bag for your coat so it doesn’t end up smelling of smoke; free water by default; moist towelettes before you eat. And this is just stuff I noted in one evening.)

So as I popped into the bakery on the way back to the station, and as I popped a three-cheese pastry and a chocolate muffin on my tray, I was struck by a sense of … adult community. Like I fit in, like a real person, like this is my city, Fuchu-shi (although I was technically in neighbouring Koganei but it’s still West Tokyo). It’s all part of the fun of growing up and being a crusty old twenty-one years. Like, hey, I’ll do my shopping, and then run some errands like a real person! Obviously I had that independent living thing going on last year, but I never entirely felt like a Leeds resident; I was in halls, still on training wheels, always a train ride away from home. Now I have my own air conditioner and I shop in supermarkets and stop off at bakeries and they are all small things but they all add up to something like independent living, which is very exciting.

Rob tricked me on a night out last night with him and Zo (visiting from Leeds) wherein we visited some people from Hosei University (who were at Leeds last year) for okonomiyaki which was scrumptious, and then for larks did karaoke for the third time in a week and all-night karaoke for the second time in a week which was a bad idea but fun and I wound up joining the tired dregs of Shibuya in their hundreds streaming back to the station for home and bed and sleep.

I’ll leave you with this fascinating report on chimpanzee spirituality:

Gombe. At death of adult male Rix from fall from a tree, group members showed intense excitement, called, paused to stare at his corpse, then performed charging displays away from the corpse, and threw rocks in all directions, while other chimps embraced, touched and mounted one another. Later, some “spent considerable time staring at the body. One male leaned down from a limb, watched the corpse, then whimpered. Others touched or sniffed Rix’s remains. An adolescent female uninterruptedly gazed at the body for more than an hour, during which she sat motionless and in complete silence. After three hours of activity around the corpse, one of the older males finally left the clearing, walking downstream along the valley bottom. Others followed one by one, glancing over their shoulder toward Rix as they departed. One male approached the remains, leaned over for a final inspection, then hurried after the others” (de Waal 1996:56; Goodall 1986:330).