Sons of Loki

You know, after just 136 days here, I’m really starting to settle in. This is my new set up – surrounded by grammar, highlighters, Scarlett Johansson, and motivational quotes. I quite like it like this.

I also worked out how to network my PC to my PS3 to show movies on the television and how to wire my PS3′s AV cables to my PC to play sound from the PS3 through the PC and out the speakers, which is a stupidly roundabout thing to do (it would make a lot more sense to just output my PC to the TV with a cheap cable) but it works, and it cost me not a penny extra. And that’s why I love being able to screw around with stuff until it does something new.

Final exam next Tuesday, and I’m sort of confident that last-minute cramming will be sufficient to pass. I mean, if I get a C, that means doing 300 again, but … actually that would be shit, but I’d be happy to pass.
Everything’s still up in the air, and I’m really bipolar about how I feel about this course. Right now, I really want to do my best (hence the Eminem quote: “Success is the only motherfuckin’ option // Failure’s not”). Tomorrow, I might stub my toe (linguistically speaking) and hate this stupid language and want to give up. But ultimately, I think that I’m bending towards sticking to this, to seeing it through to the end. Ultimately I feel like if I failed, I’d be letting my friends down more than anything. And I don’t want to do that.

Tonight I went back to Mickey House, my old haunt from when I lived in Tokyo in 2007 (good lord, did that really happen?). I went with my mate Kazuya, who was an exchange student at Leeds last year (it was only after he’d gone back to Japan that we realised we were both Mickey House regulars because I realised he’d joined the same Facebook group).

It hadn’t changed a bit, of course. Same nondescript entrance, a lift off the main street in Takadanobaba. Same old Kazu, who didn’t remember me, of course. Same delicious Kirin Ichiban. A few potentially familiar faces – I wasn’t sure. The place was more popular than ever before, heaving with not just English but Spanish, French, and German conversations. Kazu wandered about in the same way he always did, back in the day. The place hadn’t changed a bit. I hadn’t changed a bit.

I spent a few hours there, chatting in a mix of English and Japanese to whoever wandered in and sat at our table. Same old mix of ordinary-looking people who were all quite extraordinary in their own little way – he’s just come back from living in the US for five years, she climbed Fuji and joined a British car firm, her dad was a political prisoner in the last century.

I was speaking to this Chinese woman – well, I was listening to this Chinese woman who was – well. Mainlander Chinese are always a little weird to talk to; despite the opening up of the PRC in the last few decades, there’s still a weird sense of Orwellian doublethink going on. They are, generally speaking, still a world apart from the Western freedoms we take for granted; happy to accept the hand-waving of their government, and turn a blind eye to everything that they must know is going on in their country.
Refreshingly, this woman seemed to be very angry about something, though I wasn’t sure exactly what. I think she was actually unhappy with the government, which is obviously the norm for Westerners but rare from the Chinese people I’ve met. (To be fair, I’ve met very few Chinese people.) At the same time, she had that streak of Chinese nationalism which is so quintessentially Chinese, but even when ranting about those Yankee pigs and their Japanese lapdogs (okay it wasn’t quite that bad) she seemed quite bothered that China’s industrial development and marathon race towards global superpower was coming at the expense of so much in her country. It was, as I said, refreshing.

Back during the Beijing Olympics, I said that 2008 would be the year that China’s dominance of the world began, and I stand by that. It is, as the Chinese say, interesting times right now. Particularly for the West.

Leaving was bittersweet, a little weird. It had been nice to go back, and the Japanese practice was like sweet water for a parched throat, but the problem I always have with those kinds of places is that I rarely have anything in common with anybody. It’s a shame, really. I wandered down the main street, past bars and restaurants and groups of people, taking in the neon beauty of the ukiyo, the floating world.

Ah, the night, friend of Tom Waits, Edward Hopper, Richard Hawley. I popped into an all-night bookstore and bought the first volumes of Crows and Yotsuba-to. (All-night bookstore. Somehow, everything is cooler, more romantic at night.)

It’s getting near midnight, which means the dorm network is slowing to a halt thanks to relentless torrenters downloading the latest episodes of Miracle Train and cutting us off from the internet like it’s Apollo and we’re passing over the Pacific Ocean.

Reader, I bought it. A PlayStation 3, plus a Japanese copy of Metal Gear Solid 4. I was just going to get a PS2 and grab anything that took my fancy, but Sofmap had a secondhand PS3 for 20,000, and I looked at my budget, and my budget said “well I guess this will work”, and I got it in the end. It is for learning Japanese, you see.

No, seriously, hear me out. I have plonked serious money (a month’s worth of food shopping) on this and I don’t intend to have wasted it. Metal Gear Solid 4 is possibly the most complex game I could have purchased, and I am determined to understand it. Which means I am determined to improve my Japanese to the level where I understand it. A game of this magnitude deserves it. (In the first two minutes it did one of those classic MGS fourth-wall breaking mindfuck things with the TV channels (you’ll know if you’ve play it). I have to respect a game that can do that to me.)

Anyway, new year, new term, new start. And not one of those phony new year resolution starts where I put up post-it notes and spend an hour designing an elaborate timetable in Excel and then fall into the same old habits. No, this is a radical restructuring of my entire life. I have quite simply decided to drop all the stuff in my life I don’t need to do. Writing, for one. There will definitely be a place in my life in a few years where I will dedicate myself to writing, but right now it is not where I need to be. Working for magazines, too. It’s good for a future career, but it’s stuff I shouldn’t be worrying about now. Doing stuff that doesn’t really connect itself to learning Japanese. All these must stop.

This is the year where I learn Japanese.

And now for some late-night, soothing video; the Yurikamome monorail, only … mirrored. It took me a while to work out what was going on in this, but doesn’t it just sum up the Gibsonean neo-noir coolness of Tokyo?