Sons of Loki

…which is the only Beatles track to feature Yoko Ono on vocals, incidentally.

I’m a completionist at heart. Or something like that. I never like to leave anything out, and I always fear I’m gonna forget interesting stuff, and I have to blog obsessionally lest a part of my life go unrecorded. So here’s basically what’s happened the last couple days:

• Visited scenic Meiji Shrine in Yoyogi Park for the first time and had a look at all the prayers written on the wooden tablets. Most of them wished for providence in family health, for fame(!), and for success in job hunting (and there’s a good rundown of the basic Japanese ambitions), except for one nasty one in English which spoke glowingly of Jesus’s coming wrath and destruction of the unbelievers. (Ugh.)



• And Meiji Shrine provides easy access to weird and wonderful Harajuku, which continues to be unpredictable. We stumbled across a massive St Patrick’s Day parade, which was a confusing moment of green and Guinness in the midst of downtown Tokyo, but probably the closest we’ll ever get to a Gaikokujin Festival.



• On the road to Shibuya we stopped off in Design Tshirts Store graniph, which makes the kind of t-shirts I find irresistible (except for the price tag); plain colours, Helvetica font, bold slogans, very po-mo. (Or plain modernist. I don’t know.) And the documentary Helvetica on DVD.

And rather wonderfully (in a post-modern modernist in-joke) a t-shirt with just the word ‘Helvetica’ rendered in Helvetica.
We also saw a cat cafe, a particular kind of drinking establishment unique to Japan where one drinks coffee and pets cats. I was missing cats, seeing as all the cats in Japan run away when you approach them.


• After that we went for delicious MEAT at a BBQ joint in Shibuya and had horse sashima (mmm, taboo meats). After chatting to a drunk guy about my weird-ass 魔手・蛇乱道 hoodie and eating old-timey cabbage in awesome Showa-period theme bar Hanbey
  we returned to our abodes.
  
• The next day we went down to Kamakura, a nice little beach resort/temple place I’ve written about previously. We visited the pigeon temple (fulla pigeons, dontcha know) and stumbled across a beautiful little coffee shop, Thomnecogo, in the middle of a residential area with high-class jazz and freshly ground coffee (that I might give a write-up, me being such an internationally renowned journo now).
  
  
  
  
• Next, Odaiba on the Yurikamome monorail (cool as ever) and back on the plain old JR line to Shinjuku.
  
  
• Yesterday we went to Takao, the mountain that marks the end of the massive 35 million people Chiba-Tokyo-Yokohama (千東横?) sprawl. It’s a nice little day trip from Tokyo, a bit of a hike in the autumn air.
  
  
  
  
  
• And today we have come to Hakone, which is my third time here. No coin lockers at the station, so we came straight to the Fuji-Hakone Guesthouse where I chatted in Japanese to the staff about having come in January and name-dropping my famous friend, Ella May Blake, who’d just stayed a week or two ago. Then a bus to Gora, where we ate in an out of the way restaurant; this guy started chatting to us in that way old Japanese guys do, but he was a real laugh, a true ojiisan, and it was great to practice my Japanese with him. He made me promise to come back before I leave, and I really will.I’m getting so much practice guiding these guys around! If only to show off, I seem to be getting in more conversations and the fact is I’m fine in most any conversation. And it’s so much fun, such a good feeling to successfully have a chat with a complete stranger and understand and be understood. If there’s anything I want to keep studying for, it’s stuff like this.

  Anyway, by the time we’d finished it was raining. The obaachan gave us some little tea cups as a present (so kind!) and an umbrella, and we hurried out of that little wonderful den of hospitality into the rain and got the cable car and ropeway up to Owakudani, which today was a pretty close approximation to hell: rain, ice, gales, smoke, and sulphur. I’d never come the reverse route on the ropeway from Gora before, and so it’s quite a surprise when you crest a hill and come out over … absolutely nothing, just a distant quarry below you, the cablecar swaying violently in the wind and rain pelting the windows. These photos do not do it justice.
  
  
  Anyway, there was no point freezing our asses off there, so we went inside and I failed terribly at the gruelling Kagekiyo

(truly the “Through the Fire and Flames” of Taiko no Tatsujin and drank some milk tea (fun fact: first time I ever drank milk tea was Owakudani, 2007) and then we sensibly went back down to Togendai and arrived back at the hotel after shopping at Lawson (which had a poster up detailing all the appearances of Hakone in Neon Genesis Evangelion, from the ropeway to gorgeous Tokyo-3 (compared to a image of the real-life area as it is) and even Hakone-Yumoto station (where Misato comes to find Shinji in episode four(?) – I think if you told my 14-year old self as he watched his prized Evangelion VHS second volume (ordered from MCV, back in the day) with that scene that one day he would pass through that very station, he wouldn’t have believed you) It’s weird how Evangelion has ballooned over the last couple of years from a landmark/slightly niche/incredibly deep and philosophical/deeply twisted and dark anime series made by a crazed auteur coming off four years of clinical depression into a catch-all media franchise, from pachinko to sexy pin-ups to tourist marketing boards, but that’s commericalism for you.).

• Anyway, that was a long digression. Tomorrow, Osaka beckons on the shinkansen. Ah, my beloved New Trunk Line. Exciting times.

A few links I’ve picked up over the last week:

The Death of the Blog Post I’ve always liked bold graphic design, to the point where I sometimes get strange urges to run away from uni and become a graphic designer. Anyway, it’s interesting to see some of the new original magazine-inspired designs you can find on blog articles these days, and that article itself is a prime example. I’d stitch together such a thing for my own blog posts, but I lack the time and the knack and I really have nothing quite so interesting to say. It does make me want to re-jig this theme a little, though.

The remnants of Biosphere 2 When I was a kid I was fascinated by Biosphere 2, a great socio-biological experiment in the Arizona desert that aimed to create a sealed ecosystem. Now, like many things from the mid-90s, including East 17, it’s all a bit depressing and abandoned. Photographer Noah Sheldon documents the remains, which are ironically being taken over by the very nature the experiment sort to duplicate.

The largest sealed environment ever created, constructed at a cost of $200 million, and now falling somewhere between David Gissen’s idea of subnature—wherein the slow power of vegetative life is unleashed “as a transgressive animated force against buildings”—and a bioclimatically inspired Dubai.

What happened to the hominids who may have been smarter than us? It’s a little over-enthusiastic in its extrapolations, but this article presents a fascinating Scratch that. The idea of a super-intelligent hominid has been thoroughly debunked.

Watched The Big Lebowski the other day, and was thoroughly amused. I’ve been meaning to watch it for years, but the final impetus was the sublime Shakespeare version recently released, which does more than a straight “olde english” parody and hits the Shakespearean style right on the head with delicious puns and wordplay and oh-so-perfect writing.

BLANCHE
Let us soak him in the commode, so as to turn his head.

WOO
Aye, and see what vapourises; then he will see what is foul.

[They insert his head into the commode]

BLANCHE
What dreadful noise of waters in thine ears! Thou hast cooled thine head; think now upon drier matters.

WOO
Speak now on ducats else again we’ll thee duckest; whither the money, Lebowski?

THE KNAVE
Faith, it awaits down there someplace; prithee let me glimpse again.

WOO
What, thou rash egg! Thus will we drown thine exclamations.

Yah, been a quiet couple of days. Well, actually no. Went out on Saturday night with the guys/girls for a cheap (1000 yen) night at Atom, a club somewhere in the backstreets of Shibuya (I’ll never find these places again). It was an alright place, especially for that sort of price.

I am freshly committed to finishing my novel, because I’ve realised that if I leave it a couple of years it will begin to look outdated, given that it touches on contemporary events. Almost without realising it, I’ve discovered that this third section is all about social media and social networking and the differences it will make to our lives. But I don’t want to go all technologically evangelistic, because despite the posturings of the Twitterati most of the web is about unintelligible #hashtags and braindead YouTube comments and bad spelling. I’m hoping that will work well as a thematic conflict of ideologies. Maybe. We shall see.

On Christmas Day I unwrapped my presents – ah, precious books! in English! – and caught a train to Shibuya for a bit of a wander and a hunt for lunch. A good roast was out of the question, so I decided to settle for a big old katsu kare – only to find that there were no kare joints to be found. Eventually I settled for katsu rice with a big old bowl of noodles, which is hardly traditional Christmas fare, but filled me up good.
I kept seeing other gaijin in the streets: wondering why they were alone in Tokyo today, wondering if they were thinking the same about me. (Ah, the loneliness of the long distance Tokyo ex-pat.)
Luckily I curtailed this aimless wo/andering with a trip to Akiba to meet up with my dear buddy James, up from Kobe Konan for a few days. We hit one of the multi-floor games stores, where I debated for a looong time whether to buy a “junk” second-hand PS2 for ¥2000 (£13) before ultimately deciding I should save my money, because it probably wouldn’t work.
Having shown James what the inside of a games store looks like, he asked me if there wasn’t anywhere more interesting to go in Tokyo, and so I finally settled on Odaiba for want of anything else.
Oh, crazy Odaiba. We went to Venus Fort, which is a recently-refurbished shopping mall and destination for a squillion couples who were enjoying a Christmas Day date (the traditional yuletide activity in Japan). Oh, and me and James. We’re totally not a couple. Ahahaha.


After a wander about and gunning down a few zombies on the Silent Hill arcade shooter (is it zombies in Silent Hill? I confess to never playing the games) we headed along to the excitingly named TOKYO TELEPORT, which in my mind very strongly reminds me of some Halo level. It looks like arcs of blue plasma should be pulsing from the top, don’t you think?


We got the train from TOKYO TELEPORT! back to the Shinj, where we met Satomi and went to the Tokyo Metropolitan Building’s free observatory deck (the perfect place for skint people like myself to bring visitors!). And so Christmas Day wound up in an izakaya with Jay and Si (my Leeds coursemates, also at Kobe), a plate of chips and some dirt-cheap gintoniks. Heavenly.

Yesterday James, Miles and I made a long overdue visit to an Akihabara maid cafe.
Okay. Maid cafes. You go there, pay a 500 yen cover charge. The staff are all cute young girls dressed as maids. They speak to you in squeaky voices and very polite Japanese and call you “master” and bring you drinks and stir your coffee (“stir your coffee” – I believe this calls for a Pythonesque nudge nudge) and make pretty ketchup designs on your omerice. You can have your picture taken with them.
All this will ring alarm bells for most people – Westerners at least – and I have to say I was really put off by what I thought was the sleaziness of these places. Until, that is, I read up a little more on them, and finally felt slightly more comfortable about visiting one. You know what? They aren’t really that sleazy at all.
Yes, a lot of the customers are otaku, but there were more than a few girls there. One guy had brought his girlfriend (or had she brought him?). The overriding aesthetic (at least at the place we went to) is cute, not sexy. Everything is so sugary sweet that the impressions of some kind of weird hostess bar couldn’t be further from your mind. It is moe, more a pure appreciation of cute kawaii femininity than a leery, pervy lust. At least that’s how I saw it.
I got a cake with a bunny rabbit drawn in chocolate and strawberry sauce. When we ordered pizza, we had to do this ancient Japanese purification ritual (possibly) of making the heart shape with our hands and waving them about while chanting in Japanese. Someone ordered a cocktail, and the poor guy got dragged up on stage while the maid sang a mixing song, waving a cocktail shaker around.
(I had this awesome idea for this Densha Otoko-style romance called Daidokoro Onna – Kitchen Girl about a plain-looking girl who works in the kitchen of a maid cafe and falls in love in one of the patrons, an unusually hunky otaku, but because she’s too ugly to work as a maid she never gets to talk to him until Episode 6 when she has a makeover and in ancient anime tradition merely has to take off her glasses and immediately becomes gorgeous and the rest of the series is about them falling in love and then there’d be a second series but it would be crap.)

With our wallets considerably lightened we met back up with the guys and girls and headed back to Odaiba along the lovely Rainbow Bridge.


We ate at a weird restaurant in Venus Fort, apparently themed in a vague 1930s Hong Kong style with crumbling brickwork and flyers pasted over the walls outside and a kind of Orientalist red-and-black interior. Food was alright, though my portion of chicken and cashew nuts was tiny. Later, ice cream, and then Miles and I said our farewells and got the train back to Shinjuku. I can’t wait to head to Kobe to see those guys in their native environment.

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).

CHECK IT OUT.

There I was, about to host the first inaugural (what does that word even mean) Movie Night Tokyo (The Last Samurai (2003), snacks: Doritos, cookies), bringing Rob and Miles from Tama station when I passed the freecycling area on my way upstairs.

“Oh, man, a water boiling thingy!” (I don’t know what the real name is, but in Japan these electric kettles are popular where you have a nozzle like in a coffee machine and you press a button for hot water.) I was about to appropriate it when my eyes went past it to the RETRO-STYLE SHARP 20C-M4 20″ phat TV. She was a beauty.

And she works. The remote is from an entirely different model, so it doesn’t work, and there’s bugger all worth watching, and the buttons don’t work, but I can see television, which is probably a boon to my Japanese comprehension or something if I spend all day watching the endless programmes about food (there is nothing on Japanese TV except game shows, ridiculous variety shows and twenty-seven separate programmes about restaurants).

So what’s been going down? On Tuesday, as part of the Japan Music Week thing (for which we got special wristbands but only ended up going to one event but it was worth it anyway) Dan, Fran, Ella and I moseyed on down to the Shib to a little cafe called the Pink Cow, where the Singer-Songwriter night was going on. The artists were all foreigners, mostly American, and most of the audience were other artists, mostly American, but the place had a delightful ambience.

Aren’t Yanks funny? In a good way. Just so much more brash and loud than us limeys. It can be annoying, but it’s also quite endearing.

So we had the usual line-up of people – on piano, guitar, other weird instruments.

And then our very own Ella May Blake got the chance to go up after everyone else, and did her own set.

I’m not convinced anything else happened this week. I certainly can’t think of anything. There was a minor earthquake – I woke up briefly to a mild swaying and the sound of several tons of concrete groaning above my head – and we started a band.

Yes, Fran picked up a neat electric violin (together with all the accessories, as seems to be the norm in Japan) and Untitled Band (working name possibly Ichigo?), consisting of Ella May Blake (vocals, guitar), Francesca Wilks (electric violin), Matt Durrant (mandolin) and special guest Harriet South (plastic strawberry-shaped percussion) got together for a short jam, except we didn’t really know any songs. Nevertheless, it was fantastic, and with Ella’s newfound connections in the music business we might end up becoming underground superstars in Shibuya. Maybe.

Anyway, today I spent some time with Fran in Shinjuku meeting up with the local group of Nanowrimoers for the first time, typing away in a Shinjuku Starbucks. Ended up with 3,415 words, which means I’m only 6,292 words off today’s target!

As of press time, still writing.

I feel like a real-life version of Searle’s Chinese room sometimes. (here comes the philosophy lesson)

Imagine a native English speaker who knows no Chinese locked in a room full of boxes of Chinese symbols (a data base) together with a book of instructions for manipulating the symbols (the program). Imagine that people outside the room send in other Chinese symbols which, unknown to the person in the room, are questions in Chinese (the input). And imagine that by following the instructions in the program the man in the room is able to pass out Chinese symbols which are correct answers to the questions (the output). The program enables the person in the room to pass the Turing Test for understanding Chinese but he does not understand a word of Chinese.

We read an entire page of Japanese in class the other day, and at the end I couldn’t tell you the meaning of any of it. Sure, I can read individual words, I know the sounds and maybe even the meanings, but then I get to the end of a sentence or passage and realise I haven’t grokked any of it. It’s like tunnel vision: I can see a tiny part of the sentence at a time, and it makes sense, but when I look at the whole thing it’s just a mass of characters.

This week has been up and down. I’ve had all these things to do, and I haven’t really taken the Getting Things Done philosophy to heart, because I’ve been struggling to get them done.
At any one time I have my three major tasks: a) study kanji b) do the homework c) write (either novel or Nano), which I can deal with, but add two or three tasks on to that and I freeze up like a computer with no free RAM and I can’t accomplish anything. It’s bizarre. The tasks themselves are small, wouldn’t take more than an hour to accomplish, and yet I find myself sitting in a haze for hours not doing anything.
The only way to solve it is to force myself to complete a few tasks and get back to a manageable level. So simply sending a postcard and getting a haircut on Tuesday made me feel a lot better. Then finishing a magazine article last night helped too. (I always panic a little when I get new assignments, but by the end I really enjoy writing these articles.)

This week has been musical. On Sunday I went to Shibuya for no real reason, but I found a smattering of musical happenings in the streets, including a brass band from Tokyo University (quite possibly the best university in the world).

Then a wander around the back streets, which are oddly Bohemian, oddly European. (This city never ceases to surprise me.)

I finally reached Yoyogi Park, which was absolutely lovely. I love parks. No one is ever miserable in a park. A man played the YMCA to himself on a trumpet in a secluded corner. Lovers loved. Salarymen stared at ducks. Performers performed. A blonde gentleman from the BBC was making a programme about something (didn’t recognise him at all, but he looked strangely familiar at the same time, like a walking parody of a certain type of blonde, frowny, uptight BBC person)