Sons of Loki

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).

You buy furniture.  You tell yourself, this is the last sofa I will ever need in my life.  Buy the sofa, then for a couple years you’re satisfied that no matter what goes wrong, at least you’ve got your sofa issue handled.  Then the right set of dishes.  Then the perfect bed.  The drapes.  The rug.  Then you’re trapped in your lovely nest, and the things you used to own, now they own you.

Just cycled to the Japanese version of Habitat up somewhere in Fuchu to get  a few vitals. It was raining, and as I crossed the bridge over the Seibu Tamagawa line I saw two lines of stupendously tall electricity pylons, looking utterly incongruous amongst the Fuchu suburbs, stretching north and south into the fog-soaked distance literally as far as the eye could see, and I got a sense of how big Tokyo is. It’s like, most cities make an effort to have the commercial centre, and then maybe a few flats, and some industrial bits, and then residential areas, and in a nod to the environment they might stick in a green belt and a few nice parks and open, low density suburbs. But in Tokyo it’s more like they just decided to cram as many people as possible in, so they just sprawled outwards with apartment blocks and car dealerships and expressways and train tracks and airports and department stores. It’s insane. And awesome.

So I went a bit Ed Norton in Fight Club and bought a stylish clock and a silly doormat and a mirror (finally! I can go out and not have people look at me funny) and a mattress cover, which would be great if not for the fact that I kinda need a pillowcase and sheet as well and I went by the little picture on the packet of a comfortable looking bed and assumed it would all be in there and ignored the katakana for “MATTRESS COVER”. Also I lost my bike lock. Oh well. One step forward, two steps back, right?

Today we had an induction mostly in Japanese, which served to make me feel wonderfully inadequate and terrified of failure. Hooray!

Yesterday continued our breakneck pace of getting stuff done. I was all ready to buy a bike for 7000 yen (£50) when Dan said he was sure that we could rent some, and lo and behold there was a meeting and a handful of us international students got to rent some lightly-rusted-but-working bicycles for the entire year for a bargain 1000 yen (£7). Mine is currently nameless, but I invite suggestions.

Fran and I were going to bike to Tobitakyu station to catch the train into Akihabara to see Katy, but her bike had a puncture, so she walked/ran while I biked. In the rain. Should have brought umbrella. At Tobitakyu station a genial attendent in the underground bike car park (as big as, you know, a car car park … I have just realised I wrote “Bike car park” which is essentially meaningless ignore this) talked to us very quickly in Japanese, leaving me bemused, but luckily Fran understood barely enough for us to ascertain that he was telling us that it was 100 yen for 24 hours, so I paid and parked up.

So we rolled into Akihabara half an hour late and got lost at the exit and couldn’t find Katy and then found her, extremely relieved and wet from the rain and grovelled apologies and then spent an unashamedly geeky couple of hours in Akihabara.

Laox was as overpriced as I remember.

It had changed a lot, and yet it was exactly the same. Geeks, technology, cameras, PCs, manga, anime, games, and every type of perversion lined the streets. It’s a million miles from the ultra-hip Tokyo of Shibuya, or the financial Tokyo of Shinjuku, or the historic Tokyo of Ueno.

Uhh yeah

I eventually ended up buying some Logitech – scratch that, here it’s “Logicool” for some reason – 2.1 speakers, which sound great for a mere 3,500 yen or so. Then we went to karaoke and sung stupid anime songs and accidently keyed in some obscure (to us) Japanese stadium rock from the 70s/80s, which will possibly become an unofficial theme tune, and then wound up with Wuthering Heights. Oh, karaoke, I’ve missed you. Oh, and Katy informed us that JASSO is definitely back on, the freeze being a minor hiccup.

On the train back there was a gaijin fellow who looked suspiciously like an older Lee Tergesen frowning and scribbling in a notebook. I wondered if he was making notes when he flipped a page over, caught my eye, and I saw he’d done a pen sketch of the carriage on the other side. Cool.

Today we went to meet our teacher Mochizuki-sensei at her little English conversation cafe not far from TUFS, and were served up some delicious sushi and dumplings and ice cream. After that Dan and I cycled to the nearest supermarket to finally stock up on provisions. Oh, how delightful it is to cycle through the quiet-yet-busy backstreets of Fuchu-shi at night! I bought far too much stuff, but the basics like noodles and soy sauce and curry blocks should last me a while. No room for beer, sadly. Japanese supermarkets are a bizarre experience, because they’re almost just like English ones but slightly different. There’s bread, but it’s all weird! There’s a fish counter, but it takes up half the store! The fish comes in a billion varieties and it’s all extremely cheap. The vegetables are gigantic, so much so that it’s like you’re suddenly shrunk and walked into a salad. I bought a huge apple. And so, I cycled home.

Yes, this time next week I’ll be wandering through the streets of Tokyo marvelling at the pretty lights and smiling at the light-polluted orange sky, or else tucked up in bed, paralysed by jet lag. I’m increasingly convinced that I won’t actually notice how close it is getting until Tuesday, at which point it’s a bit late. So. See friends, pack. Board train. Transverse underground. Meet chums. Board 777. Land in Japan.

Today I picked up a big fat wad of yen from M&S, bought a few toiletries and some damn pants and socks* and I reckon that’s about all I need. And I’m properly out of debt (well, except student loan and tuition fees, but I don’t have to worry about that until 2012, and that’s years away!).

*“If you wanna look for me I’ll be in charity shops // I ain’t buying my shirts, I’m buying my damn pants and socks.” — David Peter Meads, “Development”