Sons of Loki

(Allegedly she’s singing “smoking cigars”, but you can never be too sure with Bjork)

Last night was my planned birthday celebrations, and I was genuinely heartened by just how many people turned up: old friends, new friends, friends who were sort of in between. A group of us set out from Shinjuku station to the Shinjuku Park Tower and the Hotel Park Hyatt. Oh, the sumptuous wood panelling, the carpets, the soft lighting and the overwhelming sense of sheer class! It’s another world in there, of luxury and considerable wealth, and it’s exciting just to spend an hour there.

So, up to the 54th floor, home to the New York Bar: I had cocked up slightly, telling people we’d dodge the cover charge if we got there before 8pm, but (probably to combat people like me) it turns out that it’s only if you leave before 8pm. But there was a general consensus of “hey, when will we next be here”, and so we settled in at our table and I ordered a bourbon and soda and after coordinating plans with the people who would be coming later/were already there/were lost basked in the general atmosphere. A jazz band came on. The lights of Shinjuku twinkled. Bar staff hurried to and fro. People drank. The bar was being all marbley and mahogany-y and muted and sombre and classy and I wished I could have just bottled up the ambience because it was so ridiculously cool.

Entry, service charge and one drink? 5,000 yen – £33. Yeah. Obscene luxury comes at a price.

So we ditched the Hyatt and met up with the others at Shinjuku, and then got to Shibuya to meet yet more people, so that in total we had me, Ella, Fran, Dan, Hattie, Satomi, Rob, Miles, Katy, Chris, Jan, Yuta, Tom, Kat, and Ruben, and it was so awesome to have all my friends there and to have everyone turn up, and that was what made it such a good night.

We split up: half of us went to get some drinks in, the other half went to get some food, and I hadn’t eaten so I went with them. Round about 11:30pm it was last trains, so most people headed home, leaving the Mancunians (Tom/Ruben/Kat), Jan, Rob, Dan, Satomi and Verity to PARTY HARD UNTIL DAWN. In theory. We couldn’t quite work out where we wanted to go, and Shinichi Osawa was playing in Roppongi but that was kinda expensive and then we missed the last train, and we could have gone to WOMB, but then I thought hey, Club Air is only 3,500 yen and I’d like to see what that’s like, so we marched through the backstreets of Shibuya and eventually stumbled across Air, a house/techno club hidden underneath a bohemian restaurant in a residential area. They were IDing, which meant Satomi and Verity couldn’t get in, unfortunately, so they went their separate ways with Rob while the six of us left headed down the flights of stairs into Air. And it was pretty good. Drinks weren’t too pricey (although anything isn’t too pricey after the Hyatt), and after a year at Leeds of Halo and Oceana I’d forgotten how much I enjoy house music. Some bald British chaps called Shapeshifters were DJing, which Tom was excited about. And so we partied into the wee hours, some Japanese girls we’d just met spontaneously erupted into singing “Happy Birthday” for me, Dan had his smuggled-in bottle of scotch plucked from his hand by one of the staff, some Spirytus was downed (96% – I was not touching that stuff), we exited merrily at 4:30am or so and got back to the station largely without incident (he says, glossing).

Funny thing on the way back: a trio of homebound musicians (judging by their instruments) on the train were talking in Japanese about De La Soul and Marvin Gaye, and I caught Tom’s eye, and he was like “Are you hearing this?” and suddenly the musicians went silent and the girl said “聞いた?” (“They heard?”) and an awkward moment was avoided when quick as a flash Tom launches into a conversation with them about Marvin Gaye, which lasts a merry serendipitous ten seconds before it’s our stop and we have to get off. Ah, those little connections you make with complete strangers, sometimes. It’s really rather wonderful.

Japan isn’t as straightlaced as you might think. (Also, on a random whim I looked up that “BNE” sticker, and it has a surprising history and no one quite knows what it means. Fascinating.)

I was gearing up for a tortuous day of three straight periods today, but I was surprised to find that only the first lesson was mandatory, and everyone else was heading off to do other stuff, so I went to Shinjuku for to pick up these kanji books we need for the Leeds kanji test.

Kinokuniya is practically the biggest book store in Tokyo, but it took me ages to find it. I was ready to give up when I finally stumbled across it, and I melted a little when I discovered the small-yet-well-stocked English-language section.

“It consoles me in my retreat; it relieves me of the weight of distressing idleness and, at any time, can rid me of boring company. It blunts the stabs of pain whenever pain is not too overpowering and extreme. To distract me from morose thoughts, I simply need to have recourse to books.” The Complete Essays III.3.932, Michel de Montaigne

Since finishing The Tipping Point I’ve hungered for new non-fiction books, but all I’ve had to read is manga, which is barely readable for someone of my level after much effort, but it’s still more like hard work than something to lose yourself in on the train or on the bog. So it was great joy that I picked up an interesting tome by recent science hero Simon Singh (currently fighting the good fight against chiropractors and UK libel laws) all about the Big Bang. Oh, the kanji books. I’m not entirely sure if I even really need them, given that it just seems like a kanji dictionary and I’ve already got a good one of those (the Kodansha Kanji Learner’s Dictionary), but I did also get Heisig’s Remembering the Kanji 1. For years we have been told that kanji are all but impossible to learn, that we should give up, that the only way to do it is slog through them with the utmost misery. Heisig just says “Why not use a system?” And it sounds like a very good system indeed – mnemonic pictorial cues, similar to what I’ve been using before, but codified and refined. And best of all, he concentrates on meaning, not the particular reading/pronunciation (which is something that comes naturally anyway).

So, being all geeked up, I decided to head to Harajuku to see if you really could get cheap clothes there, as I’d been told. Harajuku is a place, like the rest of Tokyo, which is hard to pin down. It’s not quite as achingly, effortlessly hip as Gwen Stefani might think it is (that’d be Shibuya) – it’s a little rough around the edges, a little too self-conscious. Of course, you’ve got the truly cool and fashionable gliding through the crowds like they’re too hot to touch. Then you’ve got the freaks in bizarre costumes, gothic lolita, or a dozen piecings and pink hair. And finally you’ve got everyone else, the normals, the Japanese public and the kids hanging out with their friends and the permamently bemused tourists and the coolhunters.
Coolhunting. It’s such a postmodern concept, the idea that cool is a natural resource that flows out of the ground in Harajuku and Shibuya and can be tracked and collected and distilled and sold to the public at large. So you’ll see these Japanese kids with SLRs stalking the streets, hunting down the latest fashion to be transmitted down the line to the boutiques of New York and London in a few months’ time. Or so I like to think; they were probably just photographers like me.

In the end, cheap clothes were nowhere to be found except in the vintage and used clothing shops, which smelled funny and didn’t really have anything I liked (nor which would fit), although I did pick up a ironically retro Swissair manbag for 700yen.

I’m not quite sure what I want to be. A house DJ? (Been screwing around with this DJing app I downloaded, and mixing is hard, but when you get two songs that really work together it’s nowt but pure joy.) A geologist? (For some reason, I found myself trawling through geology articles on Wikipedia recently. It’s fascinating!) An author? A photographer? (It’s so fantastic to just go into Tokyo and take photos of stuff, which is one of the reasons I want to splash out on an SLR for my birthday hint hint ma and pa). Ah, what a time to be alive, when it’s so easy to dabble in various fields (even if it’s a case of jack of all trades, master of none.)

Coffee and Oreos and rain outside. Is there anything more to life? Well, lots, evidentally, but it’s a start.

On Sunday I rolled into Shibuya, capital of kakkoii cool (I don’t know if the kids say kakkoii any more) with the famous crosswalk:

and stood by ye old statue of Hachiko with all the other girls and boys of Tokyo waiting for people as they have done for decades, and the salesmen blared and the screens flickered and a girl who looked about ten in gothic lolita fashion puffed on a cigarette and hey, this is Tokyo.

Katy turned up (or rather we noticed each other, both of us having waited for each other for about twenty minutes without realising it) and we took a tour through all the weird and wonderful things of Shibuya. Found a Uniqlo and I bought two “Heattech”-enabled (keeps you warmer or something? I’m not sure) t-shirts, which in Uniqlo style came packed square into zip-loc bags with tear-off tops like a packet of salami, two casual shirts, black slacks, a bandana and – in an uncertain moment – a flat cap.

Today we were all hoping to get bank accounts, but apparently due to the volume of applications that will have to wait. 仕方がない – oh well, it can’t be helped.

So instead Ella and Fran and I went down to Kichijouji, another of west Tokyo’s indistinct city centres, so Ella could purchase a guitar, for which she has been suffering withdrawal symptoms (and I can sympathise). With the help of a passer-by we found the shop and Ella picked up a cheap-yet-decent one – complete with an awesome free starter pack including capo, plectrums, peg winder thingy, and other goodies. Only in Japan. So now all we need is Fran on violin for our ultimate Tokyo bluegrass band.

We had a wander around Kichijouji in the intermittant rain and I bought a pot plant and some tonic water. Oh, and stopped off at a Japanese McDonalds, where we had our first encounter with Mr James.

Mr James is McDonald’s house gaijin mascot. He speaks in broken Japanese about how wonderful Japan is and how much he loves McDonalds. He wears funny clothes and silly glasses and is obviously a complete nerd. Crazy Mr James! He doesn’t even have a surname!
Now, Mr James has kicked off a bit of debate in the non-Japanese community, with Arudou Debito obviously a tad miffed, with a thorough dissection in the Japan Times.
Thing is, it’s quite hard to see how disarmingly offensive Mr James is without being down in the street in Japan. This business kicked off while I was still in the UK, and I watched the adverts on YouTube and chuckled a little and thought “Well, it’s hardly that bad.”
But when you’re out in the street and you pass one of Mr James’ ubiqutous standees, it’s like … It’s like a big company got someone to dress up like you, with that silly jumper you’re always wearing, and made them walk around saying the sorts of things you say in a moron voice and acting like a doofus and everyone laughed at that parody of you, because that’s what you’re really like, you clown!
Gaijin/non-Japanese turn up in ads here all the time as – well, token gaijin, or for a sense of international style, or simply because the product is targeted towards us. And that’s fine. I passed an advert in a shoe store today with a black model, and it wasn’t being offensive in the slightest. But Mr James is like a comedy mascot, like a big joke on every street corner aimed squarely at you, you weirdo. It’s not something that really bothers me more than a quick moan in a blog post, but still…
Anyway, headed back, popped in at campus store and got a few useful bits and pieces, including flashcards. The big placement test is on Wednesday, so I better revise.