Sons of Loki

I’ve been feeling pretty good lately. As if everything’s going alright. Like I’m on top of the world. This sort of thing could come from a number of factors:

#1 Undiagnosed manic depression
#2 Undiagnosed love (see #1)
#3 Springtime (it is unseasonably warm (well, not cold) and sunny for late January)
#4 A dramatic paradigm shift in the study of Japanese

Which is to say: I’m starting to get it. It’s rare that one website could make me turn my entire life around, but I came across All Japanese All The Time a few days ago and it was like everything I read rang many, many bells.

The site’s owner is a guy who taught himself Japanese in the US over about a year or two (and soon after was hired by a Japanese software company as a programmer) without classes or textbooks or drills or any of the stuff I hate, but simply by loving the language and filling his entire life with it. 24/7. Japanese music, Japanese TV, games, books, manga. Even when sleeping he had his earphones in. Like any good diet, he simply replaced anything in English with the Japanese equivalent; so,  if he felt like watching Independence Day, he watched the Japanese dub. If he found himself wasting time on Wikipedia, he wasted it on the Japanese version.

And he kept his brain open, picking up interesting sentences and picking them apart to learn grammar and words, rather than using textbooks or vocab lists. Coupled with an SRS and Heisig, he proceeded to become fluent in a year or two.

Impressive.

And it explains so much. Why I can’t be bothered in class, why I find textbooks so dry. Because they are dry. I always live my life by a tenet from David Byrne:

If your work isn’t what you love
Then something isn’t right

and the key to doing anything is working out what you love about it, and doing it. Why do I do Japanese? Because I enjoy tests, flashcards, and filling in blanks? No! I do it because I want to partake in Japan. People, films, books, games, everything. I’d forgotten that.

So I started again. I complained before about not being good enough to enjoy games or manga in Japanese, but I’d got it the wrong way round. I should use my enjoyment of games and manga as a spur to encourage me to want to study, and as a tool to teach me. I opened my brain and played Metal Gear Solid 4 and sure, I only got 10% of the wordy verbosity, but that 10% was valuable stuff. (反政府勢力 – anti-government forces.) I opened my brain and read One Piece and stuff went in. (海賊 – pirate (lit. sea burglar).) I watched Hatoyama in the Diet on NHK. (政治家 – politician.) I studied the lyrics of those ancient and learned Japanese poets, the Teriyaki Boys – rap is so good for learning because the rhymes make words pop out.

やるだけやってあとは交代
じゃ、そろそろみな集めて乾杯!

I’ll do it only what I can do and after that change
Well, we’ll gradually get everybody together and – cheers!

Just concentrating on what I understand rather than what I don’t is such a boost, too. Last night I watched one of MGS4′s famously lengthy cutscenes and though most of the highly complicated technical speak washed over me, I understood most of the opening scene and the ending one, and to the point where I didn’t even realise I was understanding it, I was just enjoying it. That’s the goal. That’s the reason I study.

Also, I should be hopefully published in an upcoming issue of Metropolis with an article on Rikugien in Tokyo and hopefully another one after that, so keep eyes peeled! (If you’re in Japan. Obviously if you’re in Mexico or Sri Lanka, not much point looking out for it.)

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.