Sons of Loki

The day after USJ, Tuesday 23rd March, we went to Nara.

I think that morning, my free gift at the capsule hotel was a capsule hotel voucher. I rather like the idea that you could check in at the capsule hotel on Monday a penniless man and slowly rebuild your life through the loyalty points system. A pair of socks. A free beer. 500 yen off your next stay. Then, shoes. A hat. A pass for the subway.

On the train to Nara, from Osaka, I was reading Paul Theroux’s The Great Railway Bazaar, which my mum had given to my sister to give to me but oh thanks sis why don’t you go ahead and read it first and give me it when you’re done, that’s fine, just like that time you bought me Obama’s autobiography and then decided you’d hang on to it for a while, oh when was that two Christmases ago you say? oh well it must be a pretty engrossing book I’m sure

and it was a good read, because he was writing about the Japanese train system (in 1975), and there I was on a Japanese train.

As a tourist, Theroux had a role in society, and he could play it out as he liked. It occurred to me that they say Japan is all about the role you play, and in Japan foreigners can have two roles; gaijin-san the Tourist

観光目当ての外人さん
カメラ片手に登る富士山
At tourist spots, the gaijin man
Climbs Mt Fuji, a camera in hand
– Teriyaki Boyz, “5th Element”

who goes to temples and wears backpacks and fumbles with the language and forgets to take her shoes off, and gaijin-san the Businessman, who is a teacher or businessman, invariably American and in his 30s or 40s, who is fluent and confident and married to a Japanese woman.

If you fit into those roles it’s fine – people excuse you for being a tourist, or they accept you for being a businessperson and leave you be. But as a young aimless student, I never can quite do either of those. I speak too much Japanese to let myself stoop to fumbling along in English and gestures like a tourist would, but I’m not at the level of proper ex-pats so I can’t really get anything done. I can’t wear a suit, but I can’t strap on a backpack, either. So I’m a kind of outlier, I guess.

Anyway, Nara was cool. They were celebrating their 1,300th anniversary. There were all these deer. We took a look in these old antique bricabrac shops, which I realised I an becoming enamoured with; it’s all old crap, but it’s interesting old crap. It was raining. I saw some temples. We visited a little tourist information place funded by the Okamura corporation, where I tried out their earthquake simulation and protection device. The old man was nice.

The day after, I went to see James and Eri in Kobe. It was a real shame, that it was raining; still, we got to see some of the old Western-style town, and there was a nice view from a small shrine.

Down by the port, the weather wasn’t any better. Katie and Chris peeled off for some shopping, so James, Eri and I went for karaoke and, later, an izakaya with Jayson and Simon. It was very pleasant to get a few drinks and just shoot the shit for a while with the guys.

That night, I wasn’t coming back to the capsule hotel. After inevitable panic, I got the right train back to Osaka, and found the night bus home. Contrary to what I’d heard, it wasn’t so bad; you’re not going to get an uninterrupted night’s sleep, but the dude next to me didn’t snore, and there was a little privacy cover to pull over your head. At one point I got out at one of the rest stops, just so I could have the experience of walking around a Japanese truck stop at 4am in the drizzling rain in the middle of nowhere, trucks as far as the eye could see.

Back in Shinjuku, at 8am, everybody was being miserable in the rain, but I was home.

So, Friday, Katie and Chris returned to Tokyo, and we met up for drinks at the hyper-prestigious New York Bar, which still boggles my mind whenever I visit. (I’ve been, what, four times now? Christ.)

The guy ahead of us, who could have almost been Hugh Grant, said he was with the Cameron Diaz group. (I swear that’s what he said, but she didn’t turn up.) We went in and sat down and I had a martini, the New York Bar special with Bombay Sapphire.

We were surrounded by foreigners in suits and expensive-looking couples and people who looked far more important than me. The thing is, I’d like to be those people. City bankers, top managers, assistants to movie stars; the people who come to the New York Bar and order something with no regards for cost and sit with a sense of calm detachment and not slack-jawed astonishment that they’re even allowed in.

And at the same time, I’d hate to be those people. And I’d hate to be around those people. I wanted to be enjoying a drink with the high-cheekboned blond-haired businessman at the bar, and simultaneously knew that talking to him would be deeply unpalatable.

One day I will be a fifty-something English professor in Tokyo, with hordes of cash and a long list of bestsellers and oodles of fans, and I will come to the New York Bar for a drink and still feel like a little man let into the big boy’s club for an hour or two.

I kind of got a similar feeling at the Roppongi Art Night, held at the incredible Roppongi Hills complex.

I shop til I drop in Roppongi Hills
But don’t follow shit, ain’t none free – chill
Pharrell, Teriyaki Boyz, “超 LARGE”

Roppongi Hills couldn’t be more different to sleazy old regular Roppongi; it’s a massive complex of boutiques and shops and cafes and restaurants, centered around the huge Mori Tower, where a 1BR apartment starts at 370,000 a month. (There’s also some kind of hackerspace called the Academy which I should check out.) This Art Night was a big art expo thingy. They had various acts and displays going on, though to tell the truth we were more just wandering around marvelling at the ultra-modern decor of the place. At an outdoor plaza, Verbal was doing a DJ set for a tiny crowd (though it was only 7:30pm), and I saw that RIP SLYME‘s DJ Fumiya and Ryo-Z would be turning up later. So kind of a big deal.

Everything looked so cool. We sat in Starbucks and thumbed through interior design magazines, while I thought about how I wanted my room to be next year. In a nearby Tsutaya, I flicked through some fashion magazines and checked out the graphic design books. I kind of want to do graphic design. And work in magazines. And be a writer. What do I do? Who do I talk to? Is it too late? Is it too early? What do I want to be?

Anyway, I said my goodbyes to Kate and Chris near the Hibiya line station. They would be flying back in the morning. I bid them farewell, and went off to get my train back home.

I got into the Teriyaki Boyz recently, this Japanese rap supergroup comprised of Nigo (founder of A Bathing Ape), a dude called Wise, Verbal from M-Flo, and Ilmari and Ryo-Z from j-rap superstars RIP SLYME. I thought I’d expand my burgeoning interest in J-hip-hop by checking out Rip Slyme, who I was vaguely aware of before. So, first of all, listen to this. Listen to that synth bassline when it kicks in at 0:30. Isn’t that just the best thing you ever heard? Don’t you want it injected into your blood to harness the supreme sunny glory of that synth? Don’t you want it to be played from all the rooftops of all the houses across the land?

Saturday I was thinking about heading down to Shibuya to check out the BAPE store (as a child of 00s hip-hop rather than 90s rap I have been subtly brainwashed to buy designer clothes rather than shoot cops) but I ended up doing the complete opposite and shopping Akiba for DVI cables and cheap monitors (you can pick up a second-hand TFT one for 2.5k (£15), which is nuts). After that I met up with the guys in Shinjuku for nomikai, literally “drink-meet”. We found a izakaya which we thought was deliciously cheap. However, we had been burned. The izakaya was not offering cheap nomihoudai, as represented. It was some kind of gypsy grifter establishment … sorry, I’m channelling Philip K Dick here. Anyway, we ended up with a lot of food we didn’t want and a bill for 3,500 yen each and some dangerously watered-down cocktails. I wanted to use my gaijin smash to escape, but in the end decided to save it for another day.

Luckily, the club we went to was free.

We decided – well, the girls decided – to take Miles to his first ever gay club. And the place for gay clubs in Tokyo is Nichome in Shinjuku, so that’s where we went.

Man, it was gay. Nary a woman in sight. Bars with hilarious names. Men holding hands. Sunkus (truly the gayest combini chain). It was kind of exciting, in a gay way, like I imagine San Francisco to be. We met a Australian girl with her male friend (gay, no doubt) who was trying to find the same gay club as us (“Arty Farty”, which sounds pretty gay). Eventually we found it, went inside, and bought our mandatory gay drink (mine was a gay Vanilla Mule). Unsurprisingly, the place was packed with men. From what I hear, Arty Farty is the only place to attract a sizable gaijin (or should I say “gay-jin”? no, perhaps not) crowd, so there were quite a few foreigners about. And so we drank our drinks and entered the gay dancefloor, fittingly as “I Will Survive” came on.

And you know what? It wasn’t bad. No, actually, I had a really good time. There was just a different vibe to other clubs; everyone was there to have a good time, not to get pissed or start a fight or hook up with girls. (Uh, you know what I mean.) The music wasn’t too bad, and it was a whole lot cheaper than other places in Tokyo – and you got access to their other branch for free, which means basically two clubs for the price of none.

Today I went to the Tachikawa immigration bureau to get a student work permit. It was my first interaction with the machine of Japanese government bureaucracy by myself, so I’m surprised it went as smoothly as it did. I brought my documents and the form from TUFS authorising me to work, waited patiently for my number to come up, went up, was told by a scary man to fill out a form, filled out the form, waited for my next number to come up, went back up and – yes! – hadn’t done anything wrong. Japanese efficiency applying to everything but government, I should receive my permit in three weeks.

It was quite interesting, the ethnic mix in the waiting room. I know it’s not so, but always I tend to assume that the majority of gaijin in Japan are Americans, followed by Europeans, but that’s a colossal mistake. Of the zainichi (from zainichi gaikokujin, lit. “living in Japan foreigners”) the vast majority are ethnic Koreans and Chinese, who have quite an interesting place in Japanese society – they were born in Japan, have lived in Japan their entire lives, speak only Japanese and are to all intents and purposes Japanese, and yet just … aren’t. It’s an interesting subject.