Sons of Loki

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)

Today is 文化の日, which means Culture Day, which means another day off school for our lazy asses.

I went to Yoyogi to try to find the Kinokuniya bookstore to get an English copy of this Japanese textbook, J301, but I wound up in a dead neighbourhood with no bookstore in sight (although I did find the curiously quiet site of the NTT DoCoMo Yoyogi Building). So instead of wandering around there (it was cold and windy and I stupidly hadn’t brought a jacket) I made yet another trip to damn Akihabara to buy a camera.

It is a Sony A300 with a 18-70mm zoom lens. It is lovely.

(There was a fun exchange in the shop. There I was, actually using practical Japanese in my conversation with the clerk, and I heard a tourist behind me ask a flummoxed shop assistant, in English, if there was a toilet. The assistant seemed bamboozled, so I stepped in and, cool as a cucumber, translated. “There’s no toilet, I’m afraid,” I said, before going back to my purchase. Oh yeah.)

So what better place to try out my fancy new camera than the Tokyo Jidai Matsuri, a uniquely Japanese parade of history from Asakusa to nearby Tawaramachi? I met up with Fran and Ella, and after a quick Mos Burger we staked out a spot. Oh, the things what we saw!

So after that we caught the metro to Asakusa (pointlessly, as we found out – would have been easier to walk) and headed to Sensoji temple to meet our (now mutual) friend Satomi. Sensoji has a special place in my heart, being one of the final places I went to before leaving Tokyo forever last time. Fulla tourists, but that’s pretty much the course.

The temple gate. (The temple itself was covered up for refurbishment or something, probably.)

It was pretty dark inside, but the A300 was up to the task.

And then a wander through the little shopping alleys and into Asakusa proper, Tokyo’s 下町 – literally “downtown”, but more “Altstadt”.

Asakusa's famed "golden turd", atop the Asahi beer building.