I managed to do some travelling for a change and coupled with a week’s holiday and an Aussie mate, i made my way to the country’s second city, Osaka, and the others that surround it in an area known as Kansai.
After an overnight bus a couple of Saturdays ago we found a cheap hotel in a part of Osaka called Shin Imamiya which was a dishevelled neighbourhood that was wonderfully trapped in a 1980’s time warp complete with an old knackered tourist tower, a closed theme park with a rollercoaster covered in scaffolding and lots of cafes, restaurants and game centres filled with old men in a variety of different shades of grey and beige somehow managing to successfully melt into the neon.
Just to the north of all this was Dotonbori which is the 21st century equivalent of Shin-Imamiya where the endless shops, bars and restaurants are all new and the men are fifty years younger wearing freakish haircuts in a variety of different shades of blonde trying quite successfully to stand out against the neon. We wandered around slightly bewildered, getting a bit lost, getting a bit drunk and finding our way to some tiny unpretentious back alley bars where local businessmen and office workers let one day fall into another before finding a taxi to take them home. We joined them, much to their enthusiasm, as one of them seemed extremely happy that we were staying in the 1980s time warp as this was where some of his favourite brothels were. He spent most of the rest of the night giving us rather too much information about Osaka prostitutes before meeting up with his wife. There was a slightly less drunk guy who told us he worked in “asset management” and was also part of the “camouflage business” and that when the police weren’t watching he’s “making soup”. Oh, and he also somehow, and for reasons i still haven’t fathomed, showed us a picture of his cock on his mobile phone. And this was the first night we were there. Osaka nightlife is a bit daft.
Less than an hour from Osaka is Nara which was once the capital of Japan and is second only to Kyoto in terms of historic temple tourist appeal. We hired a couple of bicycles and saw a five story pagoda, a three story pagoda, an octagonal temple, old shrines, new shrines and very grand Todaiji Temple which is the biggest wooden building in world containing one of the biggest bronze Buddha statues in the world. There are also loads of deer in Nara. I’d heard about the Nara deer and seen pictures of people feeding them. The deer there are a bit like cows in India as they just have right of way and graze around looking of people to feed them deer food which can be bought near all the tourist traps. At first i thought this was quite cute and charming until i got a shoe full of deer shit and then i quickly changed my mind to realise that they were, in fact, cute and charming faeces-filled vermin. Still, Nara is a beautiful city dripping with history and understated serenity. It’s one of the best places i’ve been in Japan.
We also managed to venture to Kobe for a day which is less than one hour west of Osaka. Kobe is probably most famous for an earthquake that ripped the place up in 1995 wiping out large parts of the city and population. Although you wouldn’t know it now as Kobe is an attractive gleaming shiny city tucked neatly between the blue ocean in front and the green mountains that loom behind it. After dodging crap restaurants and school kids in China Town we managed to find a sake museum and brewery that showed us the history of sake brewing and then gave us several samples of the stuff which was a tasty way to start another night back in Osaka amongst the back alley bars and the eclectic mix of drunks again.
The rest of our time there was a haze of alcohol, people and food with Japanese, Filipino, Irish and Australians, eating pizza, okonomiyaki, takoyaki, sushi, and pie and chips whilst drinking soju, sake, beer, Guinness and some weird mango thing. Eating and drinking is what Osaka is most famous for and what the city itself would probably most like to be remembered for. I once heard somebody in a pub in Leeds describe Osaka as “like two Birminghams”. I’ve never really been to Birmingham but i can only hope, for Birmingham’s sake, that it’s like half an Osaka.
Wednesday, October 26, 2011
Thursday, September 22, 2011
Myoden and Typhoons
Living somewhere foreign gives you a bit of twisted perspective of the world. Everything is a first. Every week makes you feel like a child again reading “My First” books. My first sake, my first bullet train, my first sushi, my first sumo, my first washing machine museum. Yesterday was My First Typhoon.
The default reaction of Japanese to the news that a massive storm is approaching their islands is to roll their eyes and start mumbling something about the trains. “It will disrupt the trains,” they grumble while shaking their heads and looking solemn. “They’ll be cancelled for safety reasons. It’s just so inconvenient having these 130km/h winds and a year’s worth of rain in a few days. It just buggers up the time table for at least 24 hours.” That seemed to be the only thing anybody was bothered about yesterday. Personal safety wasn’t much of issue. Getting home on time was what mattered.
My afternoon classes got called off and we all got sent home early as the typhoon made landfall further east of the Tokyo and, apparently, had plans to skewer the country for the rest of the day and night barrelling its way north west. The closest train line to my work was already closed so i hopped on a bus for a few minutes to another train line which was also shut. The late afternoon had already turned into an eerie dark dusk. The wind seemed undecided which direction to blow in so just chose all of them at once. Rain lashed down not in a steady down pour but in intermittent buckets. I walked to another train station (yeah, in know, there are three train lines within walking distance and tiny bus ride from where i work on Wednesdays) and that one was still running. It made it about half the way home and then stopped at a small local station waiting for the storm to pass.
I left work at 4.30. It was now 5.30. The rain battered everything. Cars were lined up outside, only their windscreen wipers moving. The wind buffeted the train which rocked from side to side. There was a typhoon passing overhead. A fucking typhoon. Wasn’t this a bit, you know, dangerous? I looked up and down the train and saw people sighing, their body language saying, “This is rubbish” not “Shit! A Typhoon!” Then i realised, quite stupidly, that just because this was My First Typhoon it didn’t mean that it was for everybody else. Japan gets hit by one of these a few times a year. Some people read books, some people chatted, a lot of people pushed buttons and screens, most people went to sleep being rocked by the wind that was gyrating its way around the train, station, building, city and country beyond. Why was i even worried? I found a seat, read a few chapters and got some sleep.
I woke up to find that it had stopped raining and the wind was lessening. The train wasn’t planning on moving forwards anytime soon though and i swear that none of the people had moved either. They were all in the exact same positions reading, talking, texting and snoozing. The trains wouldn’t be running for a while yet and i figured i’d just start walking as the rain had stopped and i’d been sat on the train for the best part of three hours.
It took another two to walk home. I followed snakes of traffic, road signs and my local train line to find my way back to dinky Myoden. There was a kind of giddy yet exasperated atmosphere on the streets and in the stations. Giddy because something had broken the monotonous routine and everyday ordinariness and everybody now had a story to tell about their day. A bit like when a dog turns up in the playground at school. And exasperated because everybody was an hour or two from getting home. Damn those trains. I marched through the streets noticing all of sudden how much crap was lying about. This seems to happen in most cities when there’s a storm or really windy day. It’s as if the world has had its hair ruffled and disturbed a load of dandruff and crap that you never knew existed. Plastic bags and empty wrappers, an old shoe and bits of wood, a plant pot and an amazing amount of broken umbrellas. There was also the sight of long rows of bicycles that had, until recently, been an ordered parked row outside a train station that had, quite quickly, dominoed into a long mass of wheels and handle bars strewn down the pavement.
I walked past my local station on the way back to my flat to be greeted to the sound of a train rumbling past. They’d started running again just as i got home. I flicked on the TV to see what the latest was. There were the usual cooking shows and shit dramas and the news mentioned something about Fukushima. I didn’t understand much of the report but it didn’t really matter. It may as well have said, “The typhoon is now approaching the Fukushima nuclear power plant. Many people there are very worried...because they might not get home on time.” I am, of course, now converted. The next time i hear of an approaching typhoon i’ll roll my eyes and shake my fist at the impending death and destruction before surreptitiously checking the timetables and planning my evening commute.
The default reaction of Japanese to the news that a massive storm is approaching their islands is to roll their eyes and start mumbling something about the trains. “It will disrupt the trains,” they grumble while shaking their heads and looking solemn. “They’ll be cancelled for safety reasons. It’s just so inconvenient having these 130km/h winds and a year’s worth of rain in a few days. It just buggers up the time table for at least 24 hours.” That seemed to be the only thing anybody was bothered about yesterday. Personal safety wasn’t much of issue. Getting home on time was what mattered.
My afternoon classes got called off and we all got sent home early as the typhoon made landfall further east of the Tokyo and, apparently, had plans to skewer the country for the rest of the day and night barrelling its way north west. The closest train line to my work was already closed so i hopped on a bus for a few minutes to another train line which was also shut. The late afternoon had already turned into an eerie dark dusk. The wind seemed undecided which direction to blow in so just chose all of them at once. Rain lashed down not in a steady down pour but in intermittent buckets. I walked to another train station (yeah, in know, there are three train lines within walking distance and tiny bus ride from where i work on Wednesdays) and that one was still running. It made it about half the way home and then stopped at a small local station waiting for the storm to pass.
I left work at 4.30. It was now 5.30. The rain battered everything. Cars were lined up outside, only their windscreen wipers moving. The wind buffeted the train which rocked from side to side. There was a typhoon passing overhead. A fucking typhoon. Wasn’t this a bit, you know, dangerous? I looked up and down the train and saw people sighing, their body language saying, “This is rubbish” not “Shit! A Typhoon!” Then i realised, quite stupidly, that just because this was My First Typhoon it didn’t mean that it was for everybody else. Japan gets hit by one of these a few times a year. Some people read books, some people chatted, a lot of people pushed buttons and screens, most people went to sleep being rocked by the wind that was gyrating its way around the train, station, building, city and country beyond. Why was i even worried? I found a seat, read a few chapters and got some sleep.
I woke up to find that it had stopped raining and the wind was lessening. The train wasn’t planning on moving forwards anytime soon though and i swear that none of the people had moved either. They were all in the exact same positions reading, talking, texting and snoozing. The trains wouldn’t be running for a while yet and i figured i’d just start walking as the rain had stopped and i’d been sat on the train for the best part of three hours.
It took another two to walk home. I followed snakes of traffic, road signs and my local train line to find my way back to dinky Myoden. There was a kind of giddy yet exasperated atmosphere on the streets and in the stations. Giddy because something had broken the monotonous routine and everyday ordinariness and everybody now had a story to tell about their day. A bit like when a dog turns up in the playground at school. And exasperated because everybody was an hour or two from getting home. Damn those trains. I marched through the streets noticing all of sudden how much crap was lying about. This seems to happen in most cities when there’s a storm or really windy day. It’s as if the world has had its hair ruffled and disturbed a load of dandruff and crap that you never knew existed. Plastic bags and empty wrappers, an old shoe and bits of wood, a plant pot and an amazing amount of broken umbrellas. There was also the sight of long rows of bicycles that had, until recently, been an ordered parked row outside a train station that had, quite quickly, dominoed into a long mass of wheels and handle bars strewn down the pavement.
I walked past my local station on the way back to my flat to be greeted to the sound of a train rumbling past. They’d started running again just as i got home. I flicked on the TV to see what the latest was. There were the usual cooking shows and shit dramas and the news mentioned something about Fukushima. I didn’t understand much of the report but it didn’t really matter. It may as well have said, “The typhoon is now approaching the Fukushima nuclear power plant. Many people there are very worried...because they might not get home on time.” I am, of course, now converted. The next time i hear of an approaching typhoon i’ll roll my eyes and shake my fist at the impending death and destruction before surreptitiously checking the timetables and planning my evening commute.
Sunday, August 21, 2011
Akita and Myoden
I was sat in an internet cafe in Hokkaido when i last wrote but i’m now safely cocooned back near the throbbing mass of Tokyo after travelling back from the north and going back to work.
Hakodate had a load of old colonial buildings, grand old Russian churches and a former British Consulate which has since been converted into an over-priced tea room and a crap gift shop. This seemed quite apt as most old touristy buildings in the UK have an over-priced tea room and a crap gift shop. I’m hoping that’s what most of the Olympic Village will be next summer in London – just lots of cafes hawking tea and scones for five pounds and some William and Kate commemorative coasters and tea towels.
It hosed it down in Hakodate when i was there so i spent quite a bit of time ducking in and out of old buildings and churches trying not to look bored and found refuge in an expensive jazz coffee shop with lots of cats and waited for the sun to come out which it eventually did. The most famous thing in Hakodate is the view of Hakodate from the little mountain which pokes into the sky at the southern end of the city. A quick cable car to the top reveals the sprawl below and all of sudden it looks nothing like an old colonial city but like a luminous modern Japanese hub glowing in the night time.
From Hakodate i headed back south on more local trains and met a couple of students who had the same cheap ticket as me. We chatted for a few hours as best we could and they drew pictures of my face and told me that i “look like Harry Potter”. Later that day i arrived in Akita, found a cheap hotel and paid for two nights. I should probably have stayed for two hours.
Akita is empty. There’s nothing actually there. The streets are dead. There are no shops. There are no offices. There are no restaurants. Just block after block of bland buildings. Then after a while you realise that everything is inside. Akita is actually an indoor city. All the stuff you need is encased in department stores and shopping centres leaving you with the feeling that an entire city is inside out/outside in and as a consequence it had the feel and atmosphere of, well, a bland shopping centre. The only outdoor place that enabled you to feel alive was the park and castle which were empty as everybody was escaping the heat by heading to the air-conditioned bliss of, of course, department stores and shopping centres. Akita is rubbish.
Last Sunday afternoon i got another handful of slow trains back to Tokyo half filled with people gently dozing and falling asleep as if they were spending their Sunday afternoons not sat on a train cutting a track through gentle green landscapes but instead sat on their sofas at home failing to stay awake as a movie plays idly on the TV. It was a nice reminder that it’s very easy to get caught up in the hype and hustle of the capital and the cities that surround it. Everybody is in a rush, on the train, on the phone, at work, at home, with friends, in a bar, nurse a hangover, rinse and repeat every week. But there are large parts of this country that beat to a different rhythm. People here sometimes tell me that it’s a small country (i guess it is when you look at a map and compare it to China right next door) but there’s so much depth to the place. You could spend forever swimming through the history, food, drinks, art, literature, mountains, film, temples, parks, cities, beaches and, of course, shopping centres and department stores and still feel like you’d not seen enough. A week with a cheap train ticket barely scratched the surface.
Hakodate had a load of old colonial buildings, grand old Russian churches and a former British Consulate which has since been converted into an over-priced tea room and a crap gift shop. This seemed quite apt as most old touristy buildings in the UK have an over-priced tea room and a crap gift shop. I’m hoping that’s what most of the Olympic Village will be next summer in London – just lots of cafes hawking tea and scones for five pounds and some William and Kate commemorative coasters and tea towels.
It hosed it down in Hakodate when i was there so i spent quite a bit of time ducking in and out of old buildings and churches trying not to look bored and found refuge in an expensive jazz coffee shop with lots of cats and waited for the sun to come out which it eventually did. The most famous thing in Hakodate is the view of Hakodate from the little mountain which pokes into the sky at the southern end of the city. A quick cable car to the top reveals the sprawl below and all of sudden it looks nothing like an old colonial city but like a luminous modern Japanese hub glowing in the night time.
From Hakodate i headed back south on more local trains and met a couple of students who had the same cheap ticket as me. We chatted for a few hours as best we could and they drew pictures of my face and told me that i “look like Harry Potter”. Later that day i arrived in Akita, found a cheap hotel and paid for two nights. I should probably have stayed for two hours.
Akita is empty. There’s nothing actually there. The streets are dead. There are no shops. There are no offices. There are no restaurants. Just block after block of bland buildings. Then after a while you realise that everything is inside. Akita is actually an indoor city. All the stuff you need is encased in department stores and shopping centres leaving you with the feeling that an entire city is inside out/outside in and as a consequence it had the feel and atmosphere of, well, a bland shopping centre. The only outdoor place that enabled you to feel alive was the park and castle which were empty as everybody was escaping the heat by heading to the air-conditioned bliss of, of course, department stores and shopping centres. Akita is rubbish.
Last Sunday afternoon i got another handful of slow trains back to Tokyo half filled with people gently dozing and falling asleep as if they were spending their Sunday afternoons not sat on a train cutting a track through gentle green landscapes but instead sat on their sofas at home failing to stay awake as a movie plays idly on the TV. It was a nice reminder that it’s very easy to get caught up in the hype and hustle of the capital and the cities that surround it. Everybody is in a rush, on the train, on the phone, at work, at home, with friends, in a bar, nurse a hangover, rinse and repeat every week. But there are large parts of this country that beat to a different rhythm. People here sometimes tell me that it’s a small country (i guess it is when you look at a map and compare it to China right next door) but there’s so much depth to the place. You could spend forever swimming through the history, food, drinks, art, literature, mountains, film, temples, parks, cities, beaches and, of course, shopping centres and department stores and still feel like you’d not seen enough. A week with a cheap train ticket barely scratched the surface.
Wednesday, August 10, 2011
Hakodate
I`m in Hokkaido on holiday. I`ve got ten days off work and a cheap train ticket that allows unlimited travel on trains anywhere in Japan for any five days in summer. The only catch is that you can only get local trains so it takes hours and hours to get anywhere.
I left Tokyo on Sunday morning heading north. I had to change trains a bunch of times which idly wandered through carpets of green rice fields, villages and towns. On one train there was a small old man with a rucksack full of tennis rackets, a greying ponytail and leathery sunbrowned skin. He was doing lunges and stretches and squats in the aisle and chatted with me in English which amused everybody on the train including me. In between hamstring stretches and pull-ups he told me that he was 72 and that he had just become an English teacher after spending the previous few decades gliding, paragliding, windsurfing, speed skating and motor crossing and he was on his way to his first ever tennis competition which was why he was continually moving his body and stretching. I felt like telling him he was a little bit crazy. "Everybody on this train thinks i`m crazy!" he said. Yeah, well, fair enough.
I changed trains at Fukushima station in the middle of a city that shares a name with a now famous nuclear power plant a hundred or so kilometres to the south east. I had a few minutes to waste, wandered to a shop to buy an ice cream and saw a women wearing a t-shirt that said, "Leave Me Alone" which seemed to sum up everybody`s general feelings about Fukushima quite well.
The next train didn`t feature any leathery old exercised obsessed men but a chubby kid with too much energy who jiggled opposite me for an hour wearing a t-shirt that said "I`m Gonna Be King Of The Pirates". This didn`t seem to sum anything up (apart from perhaps an east Asian obsession with wearing t-shirts with random English on them) and while i appreciated his ambition, both i and his already long suffering father appeared to doubt his chances of success.
I arrived in Morioka ten hours and about eight trains after i left Tokyo. Morioka is a compact, cute city with old banks and fire stations that have survived through the years and look like they`ve been stolen from 1900 and placed neatly into a small city. There`s also a large castle fort thing that sits proudly in the centre of town allowing old men to sit in the shade and read newspapers. Then there`s the Morioka Museum of Letters which is a small one room museum housing a collection of old letters written by some famous people to the important folk of Morioka. As my Japanese reading ability stretches to being able to recognise a few stations on the Tokyo metro map this was an utterly useless experience. Still, one for the collection.
Yesterday i got on a couple more one-man-and-his-dog style local trains that zagged through forests and dragged themselves over hills and through green valleys until i got to Aomori at the north of Honshu island. Thanks to the longest undersea tunnel in the world and an express train i was in Hakodate in Hokkaido island about an hour later.
If Morioka looks like it`s stolen a few buildings from 1900 then Hakodate looks like a European city from the same time that has stolen some modern hotels, apartments and transport infrastructure. It was one of the few places in Japan that was a trading port in the 19th century (the others being Yokohama and Nagasaki) and the old warehouses, churches, banks and consulates still remain along with clanking trams and a few houses as well.
I strolled around last night and found myself in a little outdoor food quarter called Daimon Yokocho with stalls selling fish and beer and sake. I ate a load of raw fish in one of the tiny restaurants and got chatting to a middle aged couple on holidday with too much money and not enough time. They kept feeding me raw squid and other assorted food. The friendly husband shoved one of the plates towards me and said "Bacon! Bacon! Here!" So i had some bacon even though it didn`t look lke bacon. And it didn`t taste like bacon. It tasted like fishy-bacon. Or bacony-fish. It tasted good. I asked him what it was. "Bacon!" he confirmed again. "Er...whale...whale bacon." I looked guiltily at my chopsticks. I felt like i`d just eaten a rainforest. A really delicious rainforest.
I`ve got a few more days of train hopping around northern Japan and it`s been a nice break so far. One thing that keeps happening is that people compliment me on my Japanese ability. I know my Japanese is crap and it`s just people being kind so i always tell them that i can only speak a little. Then occasionally i`ll add that if i keep studying it i might be quite good at Japanese next year. This is always followed by a pause and a few nods of heads and semi-positive noises. It`s almost as if they`re saying, "Yeah, well, we appreciate your ambition but, to be honest we doubt your chances of success. Here, have some bacon and shut the fuck up." I miss travelling.
I left Tokyo on Sunday morning heading north. I had to change trains a bunch of times which idly wandered through carpets of green rice fields, villages and towns. On one train there was a small old man with a rucksack full of tennis rackets, a greying ponytail and leathery sunbrowned skin. He was doing lunges and stretches and squats in the aisle and chatted with me in English which amused everybody on the train including me. In between hamstring stretches and pull-ups he told me that he was 72 and that he had just become an English teacher after spending the previous few decades gliding, paragliding, windsurfing, speed skating and motor crossing and he was on his way to his first ever tennis competition which was why he was continually moving his body and stretching. I felt like telling him he was a little bit crazy. "Everybody on this train thinks i`m crazy!" he said. Yeah, well, fair enough.
I changed trains at Fukushima station in the middle of a city that shares a name with a now famous nuclear power plant a hundred or so kilometres to the south east. I had a few minutes to waste, wandered to a shop to buy an ice cream and saw a women wearing a t-shirt that said, "Leave Me Alone" which seemed to sum up everybody`s general feelings about Fukushima quite well.
The next train didn`t feature any leathery old exercised obsessed men but a chubby kid with too much energy who jiggled opposite me for an hour wearing a t-shirt that said "I`m Gonna Be King Of The Pirates". This didn`t seem to sum anything up (apart from perhaps an east Asian obsession with wearing t-shirts with random English on them) and while i appreciated his ambition, both i and his already long suffering father appeared to doubt his chances of success.
I arrived in Morioka ten hours and about eight trains after i left Tokyo. Morioka is a compact, cute city with old banks and fire stations that have survived through the years and look like they`ve been stolen from 1900 and placed neatly into a small city. There`s also a large castle fort thing that sits proudly in the centre of town allowing old men to sit in the shade and read newspapers. Then there`s the Morioka Museum of Letters which is a small one room museum housing a collection of old letters written by some famous people to the important folk of Morioka. As my Japanese reading ability stretches to being able to recognise a few stations on the Tokyo metro map this was an utterly useless experience. Still, one for the collection.
Yesterday i got on a couple more one-man-and-his-dog style local trains that zagged through forests and dragged themselves over hills and through green valleys until i got to Aomori at the north of Honshu island. Thanks to the longest undersea tunnel in the world and an express train i was in Hakodate in Hokkaido island about an hour later.
If Morioka looks like it`s stolen a few buildings from 1900 then Hakodate looks like a European city from the same time that has stolen some modern hotels, apartments and transport infrastructure. It was one of the few places in Japan that was a trading port in the 19th century (the others being Yokohama and Nagasaki) and the old warehouses, churches, banks and consulates still remain along with clanking trams and a few houses as well.
I strolled around last night and found myself in a little outdoor food quarter called Daimon Yokocho with stalls selling fish and beer and sake. I ate a load of raw fish in one of the tiny restaurants and got chatting to a middle aged couple on holidday with too much money and not enough time. They kept feeding me raw squid and other assorted food. The friendly husband shoved one of the plates towards me and said "Bacon! Bacon! Here!" So i had some bacon even though it didn`t look lke bacon. And it didn`t taste like bacon. It tasted like fishy-bacon. Or bacony-fish. It tasted good. I asked him what it was. "Bacon!" he confirmed again. "Er...whale...whale bacon." I looked guiltily at my chopsticks. I felt like i`d just eaten a rainforest. A really delicious rainforest.
I`ve got a few more days of train hopping around northern Japan and it`s been a nice break so far. One thing that keeps happening is that people compliment me on my Japanese ability. I know my Japanese is crap and it`s just people being kind so i always tell them that i can only speak a little. Then occasionally i`ll add that if i keep studying it i might be quite good at Japanese next year. This is always followed by a pause and a few nods of heads and semi-positive noises. It`s almost as if they`re saying, "Yeah, well, we appreciate your ambition but, to be honest we doubt your chances of success. Here, have some bacon and shut the fuck up." I miss travelling.
Friday, July 22, 2011
Myoden and Summer
Summer’s here. It doesn’t seem like that long ago that i was commenting (well, complaining) about how long the Japanese winter was lingering around stubbornly refusing to succumb to the spring. So i guess i should be happy that summer is here, the heat has started, the humidity has cranked itself up and all of a sudden everybody is sweating like a penguin in a sauna. Summer in east Asia is a bit like being steamed or slow roasted in a pressure cooker. It doesn’t hit you like a wall of heat but gently bakes you until all of your bodily fluids have vacated their normal positions and instead relocated to your underwear and, for some reason, your lower back.
This is just the beginning. July is the starter. August and early September are worse. The government has launched the wonderfully titled Japan Meteorological Association Extreme High Temperature Forecast. This is very nearly useless. It’s designed to give different regions morning warnings if it's going to be more than 35 degrees. It's almost always going to be more than 35 degrees. It's a bit like having an Oxygen Warning or The Sky Is Blue Update or Rupert Murdoch Owns Some Dodgy Newspapers Forecast. But it's a fantastic name. One of my mates already wants to start a band called The Japan Meteorological Association Extreme High Temperature Forecast.
Unfortunately The Japan Meteorological Association Extreme High Temperature Forecast doesn’t seem to follow any of my simple/useless advice for aggressively humid summers.
1. Go for swim in the morning.
2. Eat ice cream in the afternoon.
3. Drink ice cold beer in the evening.
4. Stop complaining about the heat. It makes it worse. Much worse. Why do we do it? Why do we always tell each other it’s hot? Sometimes people will just say, “Wah, it’s hot today!” as a greeting. Why? We know it’s hot. We’ve got fully functioning nervous systems and smelly feet. We are aware that it’s hot. Stop telling us it’s hot. It’s Ju-fucking-ly. It’s always hot. Everyday. Saying the word “hot” every five minutes makes it hotter. Shut up.
The only rest bite comes when there’s a typhoon which blows the heavy sticky air around for a few days and floods everything but that seems more like a punishment for eating too much ice cream and drinking too much beer.
All of this is making headline news here more than usual due to the fact that the half the nuclear power plants in the country aren’t back online yet, Fukushima nuclear plant is still the same as it was in March and so everybody is saving electric, using less air-con and drinking more cold beer. Hand fans are now a more common accessory than an iphone on the trains and buses. Everybody carries a little handkerchief/sweat blanket thing to wipe the sweat out of the eyes and off their faces. Shops sell “ice scarves” that have some kind of chemical jelly in them and you stick it in the freezer and then wear it on the way to work hoping to keep off the heat. I think i might get one, stick it down my pants and wait for autumn.
This is just the beginning. July is the starter. August and early September are worse. The government has launched the wonderfully titled Japan Meteorological Association Extreme High Temperature Forecast. This is very nearly useless. It’s designed to give different regions morning warnings if it's going to be more than 35 degrees. It's almost always going to be more than 35 degrees. It's a bit like having an Oxygen Warning or The Sky Is Blue Update or Rupert Murdoch Owns Some Dodgy Newspapers Forecast. But it's a fantastic name. One of my mates already wants to start a band called The Japan Meteorological Association Extreme High Temperature Forecast.
Unfortunately The Japan Meteorological Association Extreme High Temperature Forecast doesn’t seem to follow any of my simple/useless advice for aggressively humid summers.
1. Go for swim in the morning.
2. Eat ice cream in the afternoon.
3. Drink ice cold beer in the evening.
4. Stop complaining about the heat. It makes it worse. Much worse. Why do we do it? Why do we always tell each other it’s hot? Sometimes people will just say, “Wah, it’s hot today!” as a greeting. Why? We know it’s hot. We’ve got fully functioning nervous systems and smelly feet. We are aware that it’s hot. Stop telling us it’s hot. It’s Ju-fucking-ly. It’s always hot. Everyday. Saying the word “hot” every five minutes makes it hotter. Shut up.
The only rest bite comes when there’s a typhoon which blows the heavy sticky air around for a few days and floods everything but that seems more like a punishment for eating too much ice cream and drinking too much beer.
All of this is making headline news here more than usual due to the fact that the half the nuclear power plants in the country aren’t back online yet, Fukushima nuclear plant is still the same as it was in March and so everybody is saving electric, using less air-con and drinking more cold beer. Hand fans are now a more common accessory than an iphone on the trains and buses. Everybody carries a little handkerchief/sweat blanket thing to wipe the sweat out of the eyes and off their faces. Shops sell “ice scarves” that have some kind of chemical jelly in them and you stick it in the freezer and then wear it on the way to work hoping to keep off the heat. I think i might get one, stick it down my pants and wait for autumn.
Monday, July 4, 2011
Busan and Myoden
I’ve just spent the past week in Korea. I had a week off work and i found a cheap ticket to Busan, Korea’s second city, and thought i’d catch up with some old friends and see a country that used to be home but i hadn’t seen for two years.
I arrived at Busan airport and stood at the bus stop waiting to be taken to the train station. I friendly Korean guy started chatting to me about Busan and travelling and Japan and i thought, “This is a decent welcome. Nice happy, friendly, people striking up conversations at bus stops.” Then he said something about “many problems” in the world and the “meaning of life” and he thrust some leaflets in my face about God and Jesus. It’s interesting to see just how fast you can change your opinion about a complete stranger. Thankfully he didn’t follow me onto the bus that zoomed its way through Busan which resembled a high rise city that recently fell out the sky and landed on the side of a load of misty green mountains next to the beach.
I didn’t stay long. I was aiming to meet up with some old friends in Seoul. It wasn’t until i arrived that i realised that Seoul was a bit of an old friend too, having lived there (on and off) for almost two years, and it dawned on me how much of the place i’d completely forgotten about. There are the middle aged men with bright pink polo shirts tucked into shiny black trousers with shiny black shoes and shiny black hair getting drunk on soju and barking at each other into the night. There are the cackling old perma-permed women laughing and joking wearing their purple floral print shirts selling food from street stalls. There are the nightclub salesmen trying to coerce young women into nightclubs and bars. There are the taxi drivers who honk and grumble if the car ahead isn’t breaking the speed limit or the bumper in front. There are the bus drivers who seem to be heavily involved in their own personal Grand Prix to see who can drive the fastest to the next red light. I’d forgotten about Seoul. It seems to live constantly at maximum revs, full speed, foot to the floor. Eat. Drink. Work. Sleep. Play. Fuck. Shop. Chat. Shout. Sing. It’s ferocious. And Korean people also seem to take the same approach with their emotions as they swing from Maximum Happy to Maximum Angry to Maximum Funny within minutes. Shades of grey don’t exist in Seoul. Just endless neon. But i remembered that that’s what i both like and dislike about it at the same time. People wear their hearts of the sleeves (and, quite often, their pockets, and jeans and shoelaces and anywhere there’s a free space) which is both entertaining and affirming and yet i doubt many people in Seoul ever thought, “Understated is underrated” or “Hmm, maybe that’s a bit loud.”
So i met up with old friends and joined in. I ate too much and drank too much and slept too much and watched baseball too much and tried to do everything in excess. The weather joined in and it rained too much (then again, it is the rainy season) so the Han River was bursting its banks as the roads were bursting with cars and the shops and streets bursting with people. I didn’t really see anything that i hadn’t seen before apart from a few new buildings and i didn’t really eat or drink anything i hadn’t had before as Korean bbq is still damn tasty and Korean beer is still the worst in the entire world (seriously, they should be indicted on some kind of Health and Safety or criminal charges, it’s that bad) and that was Seoul. A nice few days doing too much of not much.
I ended where i started back in Busan on a Saturday night ready for my cheap flight back to Japan on the Sunday morning. Busan was covered in an eerie sunset mist that rolled off the sea and clung to the high rise next to the most famous strip of sand in Korea - Haeundae beach. The neon signs blinked in the shrouded darkening distance unsure of what they were advertising and which buildings they were attached to. Beneath them thousands of people went about their Saturday nights eating, drinking, laughing, crying, driving. Whatever it was they were doing, there was probably a surplus of it.
I arrived at Busan airport and stood at the bus stop waiting to be taken to the train station. I friendly Korean guy started chatting to me about Busan and travelling and Japan and i thought, “This is a decent welcome. Nice happy, friendly, people striking up conversations at bus stops.” Then he said something about “many problems” in the world and the “meaning of life” and he thrust some leaflets in my face about God and Jesus. It’s interesting to see just how fast you can change your opinion about a complete stranger. Thankfully he didn’t follow me onto the bus that zoomed its way through Busan which resembled a high rise city that recently fell out the sky and landed on the side of a load of misty green mountains next to the beach.
I didn’t stay long. I was aiming to meet up with some old friends in Seoul. It wasn’t until i arrived that i realised that Seoul was a bit of an old friend too, having lived there (on and off) for almost two years, and it dawned on me how much of the place i’d completely forgotten about. There are the middle aged men with bright pink polo shirts tucked into shiny black trousers with shiny black shoes and shiny black hair getting drunk on soju and barking at each other into the night. There are the cackling old perma-permed women laughing and joking wearing their purple floral print shirts selling food from street stalls. There are the nightclub salesmen trying to coerce young women into nightclubs and bars. There are the taxi drivers who honk and grumble if the car ahead isn’t breaking the speed limit or the bumper in front. There are the bus drivers who seem to be heavily involved in their own personal Grand Prix to see who can drive the fastest to the next red light. I’d forgotten about Seoul. It seems to live constantly at maximum revs, full speed, foot to the floor. Eat. Drink. Work. Sleep. Play. Fuck. Shop. Chat. Shout. Sing. It’s ferocious. And Korean people also seem to take the same approach with their emotions as they swing from Maximum Happy to Maximum Angry to Maximum Funny within minutes. Shades of grey don’t exist in Seoul. Just endless neon. But i remembered that that’s what i both like and dislike about it at the same time. People wear their hearts of the sleeves (and, quite often, their pockets, and jeans and shoelaces and anywhere there’s a free space) which is both entertaining and affirming and yet i doubt many people in Seoul ever thought, “Understated is underrated” or “Hmm, maybe that’s a bit loud.”
So i met up with old friends and joined in. I ate too much and drank too much and slept too much and watched baseball too much and tried to do everything in excess. The weather joined in and it rained too much (then again, it is the rainy season) so the Han River was bursting its banks as the roads were bursting with cars and the shops and streets bursting with people. I didn’t really see anything that i hadn’t seen before apart from a few new buildings and i didn’t really eat or drink anything i hadn’t had before as Korean bbq is still damn tasty and Korean beer is still the worst in the entire world (seriously, they should be indicted on some kind of Health and Safety or criminal charges, it’s that bad) and that was Seoul. A nice few days doing too much of not much.
I ended where i started back in Busan on a Saturday night ready for my cheap flight back to Japan on the Sunday morning. Busan was covered in an eerie sunset mist that rolled off the sea and clung to the high rise next to the most famous strip of sand in Korea - Haeundae beach. The neon signs blinked in the shrouded darkening distance unsure of what they were advertising and which buildings they were attached to. Beneath them thousands of people went about their Saturday nights eating, drinking, laughing, crying, driving. Whatever it was they were doing, there was probably a surplus of it.
Thursday, June 16, 2011
Myoden and Bicycles
As Japan is often viewed, rightly or wrongly, as the most tech savvy country on Earth, it’s great to see the low tech stuff keeping the whole place ticking over. There’s one piece of technology among all the neon, phones, cameras, bullet trains and other mindless gadgets that Japan could not live without. The bicycle.
I’ve never been to a country that embraces the bicycle quite like this one. Even the bike friendly flat-as-a-fart Holland and Denmark could take lessons in bicycles from the Japanese. And the Chinese may have more of the two-wheeled clangers in sheer numbers but you’ll never see a rich housewife or a businessman popping down to the shops on one in Beijing - too much image to keep up and face to save. Everybody in Japan has a bicycle. The prime minister’s probably got one (and not just to try and pass himself off as some kind of eco-friendly tree warrior). The Crown Prince probably passes the occasional morning tootling around the palace on one. I bet the CEO of Honda’s got several. Armies of kids peddle home on them. Old people dither around on them. Drunk men fall off them. Homeless people scavenge for them. The police fight crime on them. The postman delivers the mail on one. Shit, i’ve got two of the things and i’m a foreigner. Maybe it’s contagious.
A strange thing that i noticed as well is that you never see a kid learning to ride a bike. They just can. I’ve never seen a children’s bike with stabilisers strapped to the sides and dumb kid plonked on it trying not to fall off, which is how i spent a surprisingly large amount of my childhood. No, it just seems accepted here that there are certain stages to growing up. Crawl, walk, ride. It’s seen as some kind of natural progression, as if all Japanese have an inbuilt balance gene that allows them to get on a bicycle at the age of three and be on one the things everyday for the rest of their lives.
The geography of the country lends itself this huge bicycle ownership quite well. The landscape has, to my simple foreign eyes, three states – mountain, farm and city. If it’s not a wild natural mountain it’ll be manufactured flat green or flat grey. The commute to work or the station isn’t ever interrupted by a hill. Japanese towns and cities don’t do hills. They barely even do inclines. Steep road is an oxymoron. So, everybody’s got two wheels beneath them.
Well, almost everybody. You haven’t got your bicycle beneath you if it’s been nicked. There’s a surprisingly large amount of bicycle theft here and almost everybody i’ve asked has had a bicycle stolen at some point but i’m pretty sure it isn’t out of spite or for any economic gain. Almost all the bicycles are single gear old knackered lady style bikes anyway. Most bike theft is probably just because the thief is late for work or is a bit pissed and has missed the last train home.
The other side effect of the millions of bikes is trying to find somewhere park them. Basically there are too many bicycles and not enough space. The city authorities collect up illegally parked ones from time to time and force people to pay thousand of yen to get it back. Also, there’re always two old men in uniform (the Bicycle Police, The Bike Fuzz, The Peddling Rozzers) outside a station or a supermarket marshalling the pavement as if an inappropriately parked bicycle will lead to the end of law and order, social welfare and civilisation itself. The poor bastards stand around in all weather watching people with proper jobs go places and do stuff and have fun whilst making sure the two wheeled vehicles of the country are not improperly parked. A thankless job, really.
So, there you go. In a country where the train is king and the cars are sold all over the world, where the seas provide the sushi and the gadgets the entertainment, it’s the humble old bicycle that is the glue that keeps the place together. Until it gets nicked. Or it rains. Or you’ve got lots of shopping. Or you’ve got two kids. Or it snows. Or you live next to a train station. Or you’ve just bought an ironing board. Or, yeah, whatever. Japan. Bicycles. Popular. Thanks.
I’ve never been to a country that embraces the bicycle quite like this one. Even the bike friendly flat-as-a-fart Holland and Denmark could take lessons in bicycles from the Japanese. And the Chinese may have more of the two-wheeled clangers in sheer numbers but you’ll never see a rich housewife or a businessman popping down to the shops on one in Beijing - too much image to keep up and face to save. Everybody in Japan has a bicycle. The prime minister’s probably got one (and not just to try and pass himself off as some kind of eco-friendly tree warrior). The Crown Prince probably passes the occasional morning tootling around the palace on one. I bet the CEO of Honda’s got several. Armies of kids peddle home on them. Old people dither around on them. Drunk men fall off them. Homeless people scavenge for them. The police fight crime on them. The postman delivers the mail on one. Shit, i’ve got two of the things and i’m a foreigner. Maybe it’s contagious.
A strange thing that i noticed as well is that you never see a kid learning to ride a bike. They just can. I’ve never seen a children’s bike with stabilisers strapped to the sides and dumb kid plonked on it trying not to fall off, which is how i spent a surprisingly large amount of my childhood. No, it just seems accepted here that there are certain stages to growing up. Crawl, walk, ride. It’s seen as some kind of natural progression, as if all Japanese have an inbuilt balance gene that allows them to get on a bicycle at the age of three and be on one the things everyday for the rest of their lives.
The geography of the country lends itself this huge bicycle ownership quite well. The landscape has, to my simple foreign eyes, three states – mountain, farm and city. If it’s not a wild natural mountain it’ll be manufactured flat green or flat grey. The commute to work or the station isn’t ever interrupted by a hill. Japanese towns and cities don’t do hills. They barely even do inclines. Steep road is an oxymoron. So, everybody’s got two wheels beneath them.
Well, almost everybody. You haven’t got your bicycle beneath you if it’s been nicked. There’s a surprisingly large amount of bicycle theft here and almost everybody i’ve asked has had a bicycle stolen at some point but i’m pretty sure it isn’t out of spite or for any economic gain. Almost all the bicycles are single gear old knackered lady style bikes anyway. Most bike theft is probably just because the thief is late for work or is a bit pissed and has missed the last train home.
The other side effect of the millions of bikes is trying to find somewhere park them. Basically there are too many bicycles and not enough space. The city authorities collect up illegally parked ones from time to time and force people to pay thousand of yen to get it back. Also, there’re always two old men in uniform (the Bicycle Police, The Bike Fuzz, The Peddling Rozzers) outside a station or a supermarket marshalling the pavement as if an inappropriately parked bicycle will lead to the end of law and order, social welfare and civilisation itself. The poor bastards stand around in all weather watching people with proper jobs go places and do stuff and have fun whilst making sure the two wheeled vehicles of the country are not improperly parked. A thankless job, really.
So, there you go. In a country where the train is king and the cars are sold all over the world, where the seas provide the sushi and the gadgets the entertainment, it’s the humble old bicycle that is the glue that keeps the place together. Until it gets nicked. Or it rains. Or you’ve got lots of shopping. Or you’ve got two kids. Or it snows. Or you live next to a train station. Or you’ve just bought an ironing board. Or, yeah, whatever. Japan. Bicycles. Popular. Thanks.
Sunday, May 29, 2011
Myoden and Pachinko
Before i came to Japan i knew it was famous for a few things (Samurais, bullet trains, kimonos, sake, you can probably make your own little list) but there’s one other thing that seems to be more ubiquitous than all of the above and only becomes obvious after you’ve been here a while. It’s a game that is present near every train station and along almost every road. They’re a visual and audio abscess on the urban landscape of the county. The buildings that house them are almost always gaudy, sometimes angular, boxes that shout out colours, lights and a waterfall of sound to anybody within listening distance all day, every day. It is a game that i’ve only ever seen in Japan. It’s a slot machine arcade game that divides the country and causes the end of relationships, jobs and even lives. It is, of course, Pachinko.
Pachinko is an arcade game that, to my foreign eyes, looks utterly unfathomable. It appears to be some kind of pin ball slot machine hybrid created by somebody who was both hard of hearing and colour blind. The basic premise of the game might be, i think, to fire some pinballs around a circle and see how many fall through some pins and make it to the bottom. It constantly makes lots of noises and lights flash and you win some money and suffer from sensory overload. Perhaps. It wouldn’t be so bad if there was only one of these weird machines sat in the corner of a shit pub but Pachinko has become so popular that they have Pachinko parlours custom built to house row after row of the blinking, flicking, singing, pinball shitting idiot machines. The Pachinko parlours are always painted orange or green or sky blue or a combination of all of them and they have slogans in English such as Entertainment Heaven or Pleasure Land or Enjoy Kingdom. So, a nice, modest, welcoming, understated business then.
I normally treat Pachinko parlours like a disease but i went in one for the first time the other day to see if it was as bad as it seemed. It was worse. There were hundreds of the slot machines in rows with zombie looking people sat in front of them watching pinballs flick around, oblivious to the volume level and cigarette fumes. It was difficult to hear, hard to concentrate through the colours and not that nice to breathe. Still, the zombies seemed to enjoy themselves as the machines vomited sounds, colours and, occasionally, money at them so who am i to judge? One of the Pachinko attendants (who, i assume looks after all the balls) asked me a question that i could only guess was, “Can i help you?” I thought for a second, shrugged and said, “Hmm, sorry, no” and left.
Apparently Pachinko started as a children’s game at fun fairs before World War II and after the war became a game where you could win prizes such as food or gifts and has since morphed into a slot machine that couldn’t be more uniquely Japanese if it was made out of raw fish and was the shape of Mount Fuji. It has spawned professional Pachinko players who know how to spot a machine that has better placed pins and therefore more chance of paying out money and can earn themselves 10,000 yen a day. Or bankruptcy. People queue outside waiting for the doors to open at 10 o’clock to rush in and sit at the best machine that has the biggest chance of a payout. There’s a whole slot machine gambling subculture here that seems to live for Pachinko and nothing else. I’ve been told by more than one person of a story where a woman left her kids in the car and went to play Pachinko. It was a hot summer day and the car windows were shut. She sat playing for hours and when she came back outside the kids had suffocated and died (i think it’s an urban legend or a crazy one off story but i’m told this happens every year).
It seems to divide opinion among Japanese themselves. It’s either a fat waste of time and money or you’re addicted to it. Nobody ever says, “What? Pachinko? Yeah, s’alright i guess. I’ve played it a few times.” It’s abhorrence or addiction. But, then again, why wouldn’t it be popular? Japan loves games. This is the home of Mario and Nintendo. There are arcade centres filled with racing games, shoot ‘em ups, grab-a-cuddly-toy-you-don’t-even-want games and those things where you bet on small plastic horses running a computerised race that appear massively out of place in a Japanese city, as if they’ve been nicked from an English seaside town and dumped here by mistake. If a sizable minority of the population weren’t addicted to Pachinko it would be Tetris or PacMan or Virtua Cop 3. And then it wouldn’t be unique and famous, would it?
Pachinko is an arcade game that, to my foreign eyes, looks utterly unfathomable. It appears to be some kind of pin ball slot machine hybrid created by somebody who was both hard of hearing and colour blind. The basic premise of the game might be, i think, to fire some pinballs around a circle and see how many fall through some pins and make it to the bottom. It constantly makes lots of noises and lights flash and you win some money and suffer from sensory overload. Perhaps. It wouldn’t be so bad if there was only one of these weird machines sat in the corner of a shit pub but Pachinko has become so popular that they have Pachinko parlours custom built to house row after row of the blinking, flicking, singing, pinball shitting idiot machines. The Pachinko parlours are always painted orange or green or sky blue or a combination of all of them and they have slogans in English such as Entertainment Heaven or Pleasure Land or Enjoy Kingdom. So, a nice, modest, welcoming, understated business then.
I normally treat Pachinko parlours like a disease but i went in one for the first time the other day to see if it was as bad as it seemed. It was worse. There were hundreds of the slot machines in rows with zombie looking people sat in front of them watching pinballs flick around, oblivious to the volume level and cigarette fumes. It was difficult to hear, hard to concentrate through the colours and not that nice to breathe. Still, the zombies seemed to enjoy themselves as the machines vomited sounds, colours and, occasionally, money at them so who am i to judge? One of the Pachinko attendants (who, i assume looks after all the balls) asked me a question that i could only guess was, “Can i help you?” I thought for a second, shrugged and said, “Hmm, sorry, no” and left.
Apparently Pachinko started as a children’s game at fun fairs before World War II and after the war became a game where you could win prizes such as food or gifts and has since morphed into a slot machine that couldn’t be more uniquely Japanese if it was made out of raw fish and was the shape of Mount Fuji. It has spawned professional Pachinko players who know how to spot a machine that has better placed pins and therefore more chance of paying out money and can earn themselves 10,000 yen a day. Or bankruptcy. People queue outside waiting for the doors to open at 10 o’clock to rush in and sit at the best machine that has the biggest chance of a payout. There’s a whole slot machine gambling subculture here that seems to live for Pachinko and nothing else. I’ve been told by more than one person of a story where a woman left her kids in the car and went to play Pachinko. It was a hot summer day and the car windows were shut. She sat playing for hours and when she came back outside the kids had suffocated and died (i think it’s an urban legend or a crazy one off story but i’m told this happens every year).
It seems to divide opinion among Japanese themselves. It’s either a fat waste of time and money or you’re addicted to it. Nobody ever says, “What? Pachinko? Yeah, s’alright i guess. I’ve played it a few times.” It’s abhorrence or addiction. But, then again, why wouldn’t it be popular? Japan loves games. This is the home of Mario and Nintendo. There are arcade centres filled with racing games, shoot ‘em ups, grab-a-cuddly-toy-you-don’t-even-want games and those things where you bet on small plastic horses running a computerised race that appear massively out of place in a Japanese city, as if they’ve been nicked from an English seaside town and dumped here by mistake. If a sizable minority of the population weren’t addicted to Pachinko it would be Tetris or PacMan or Virtua Cop 3. And then it wouldn’t be unique and famous, would it?
Sunday, May 8, 2011
Myoden and Yakult
I’ve just had a holiday as the past week has been Golden Week in Japan. I’m not sure why it’s called Golden Week (i haven’t seen any gold in the past seven days) but everybody gets a three day national holiday and if you’re lucky, like me, you can join up the dots, connect the weekends and get nine days off work.
Golden Week is, apparently, pretty mental in a normal year with people travelling here there and everywhere in search of fun, friends and family. This year is a little different though as a lot of people didn’t want to have too much of a good time after March and April and so Japan, at times, is a bit sombre at the moment. I think it may take a while to fully get its mojo back.
I did some hiking for the first time here at a place called Tsukuba and climbed the cute little mountain of the same name on a hazy Monday which was all a train ride and small bus journey north east of Tokyo. It was a nice hike, the mountain peppered with trees, rocks and old people as well as a cable car that slugged the sluggish to the summit. I’ve been hiking a bunch of times in different countries but realised something for the first time on this one. People always say hello to each other and smile and seem friendly when they’re on the mountain but then when everybody gets back to the bus stop and the train station people don’t even make eye contact with the same hikers that they smiled at amongst the trees and the sweat. We all just sit in silence, plug the headphones in, push buttons, re-read text messages and generally avoid everybody as soon as we get back to busy streets, buildings and transport.
I went to Doki Doki Flea Market the next day which was definitely not the kind of place where you can say hello to complete strangers. There were too many of them. Thousands. It was the biggest car boot sale second hand flea market thing i’ve ever seen. I saw more random crap being hawked than ever before. It's only held once a year during Golden Week and it seems some of the traders selling stuff had spent the previous twelve months not throwing anything away but saving it for the first week in May. One man was selling, amongst other things, an inflatable sofa, a surfboard, a sword, some roller skates and a Mickey Mouse alarm clock. I always feel the same at these kinds of places. I never want to buy anything. I just want to stop and ask the owner of the car boot or stall to tell me the back story of how they came to own such a random collection of objects.
I also went with a few mates to my first game of baseball in Japan which quickly made me realise that there’s one thing that Japanese baseball is very good at. Names. No other sport i know of has such amazing names. Take, for example, Hokkaido Nippon Ham Fighters, Fukuoka Softbank Hawks, Hiroshima Toyo Carp or, the team we went to see, Tokyo Yakult Swallows. I like the way they’ve done these names with a quick Place Name-Sponsor Name-Random Animal or Noun combination. You can make your own. It’s easy. Edinburgh Tesco Elephants. Moscow Shell Oil Pirates. Islamabad Del Monte Pineapple Tornadoes. See? Thankfully, i quite like Tokyo, Yakult and Swallows and i also like what the Tokyo Yakult Swallows fans do when their team scores. From nowhere and without any kind of warning thousands of people all open small pink or green umbrellas and dance with them and start singing. I would love to know the back story to that as well but as we were surrounded by people and not trees we didn’t really strike up a conversation and ask anybody. The Swallows lost by the way, heavily beaten by the Dragons from Nagoya sponsored by Chunichi.
I think i’ll go back to watch the Swallows play again. It’s on a list called Stuff To See And Do In Japan that gets ever longer and will probably never be conquered. The more you see, the more you want to see more. When’s the next holiday?
Golden Week is, apparently, pretty mental in a normal year with people travelling here there and everywhere in search of fun, friends and family. This year is a little different though as a lot of people didn’t want to have too much of a good time after March and April and so Japan, at times, is a bit sombre at the moment. I think it may take a while to fully get its mojo back.
I did some hiking for the first time here at a place called Tsukuba and climbed the cute little mountain of the same name on a hazy Monday which was all a train ride and small bus journey north east of Tokyo. It was a nice hike, the mountain peppered with trees, rocks and old people as well as a cable car that slugged the sluggish to the summit. I’ve been hiking a bunch of times in different countries but realised something for the first time on this one. People always say hello to each other and smile and seem friendly when they’re on the mountain but then when everybody gets back to the bus stop and the train station people don’t even make eye contact with the same hikers that they smiled at amongst the trees and the sweat. We all just sit in silence, plug the headphones in, push buttons, re-read text messages and generally avoid everybody as soon as we get back to busy streets, buildings and transport.
I went to Doki Doki Flea Market the next day which was definitely not the kind of place where you can say hello to complete strangers. There were too many of them. Thousands. It was the biggest car boot sale second hand flea market thing i’ve ever seen. I saw more random crap being hawked than ever before. It's only held once a year during Golden Week and it seems some of the traders selling stuff had spent the previous twelve months not throwing anything away but saving it for the first week in May. One man was selling, amongst other things, an inflatable sofa, a surfboard, a sword, some roller skates and a Mickey Mouse alarm clock. I always feel the same at these kinds of places. I never want to buy anything. I just want to stop and ask the owner of the car boot or stall to tell me the back story of how they came to own such a random collection of objects.
I also went with a few mates to my first game of baseball in Japan which quickly made me realise that there’s one thing that Japanese baseball is very good at. Names. No other sport i know of has such amazing names. Take, for example, Hokkaido Nippon Ham Fighters, Fukuoka Softbank Hawks, Hiroshima Toyo Carp or, the team we went to see, Tokyo Yakult Swallows. I like the way they’ve done these names with a quick Place Name-Sponsor Name-Random Animal or Noun combination. You can make your own. It’s easy. Edinburgh Tesco Elephants. Moscow Shell Oil Pirates. Islamabad Del Monte Pineapple Tornadoes. See? Thankfully, i quite like Tokyo, Yakult and Swallows and i also like what the Tokyo Yakult Swallows fans do when their team scores. From nowhere and without any kind of warning thousands of people all open small pink or green umbrellas and dance with them and start singing. I would love to know the back story to that as well but as we were surrounded by people and not trees we didn’t really strike up a conversation and ask anybody. The Swallows lost by the way, heavily beaten by the Dragons from Nagoya sponsored by Chunichi.
I think i’ll go back to watch the Swallows play again. It’s on a list called Stuff To See And Do In Japan that gets ever longer and will probably never be conquered. The more you see, the more you want to see more. When’s the next holiday?
Wednesday, April 6, 2011
Myoden and Pasta
Hello again. Life goes on.
The local little bar round the corner from my flat is always good value. A couple of weeks ago i got talking to a middle aged man who was in the bar for the first time. He was divorced with two kids and worked a few metro stations away. He asked me if i was single and i confirmed that i was. He nodded, smiled and said, “What kind of girls do you like? Fat, chubby, normal or thin?” Not a question you expect from someone you've just met. And it’s a bit difficult to reply without saying, “Erm, well, er, i guess, not fat?” And then shrug.
A more normal and slightly understandable question that people have asked is if England has earthquakes. I tell them that we don’t and that we are also free of tsunamis, volcanoes and typhoons to which the reply is something like, “Ah, England is very safe.” The thing is people in England would probably disagree. The ground might be safe but for some reason i can’t really imagine a single Japanese immigrant sitting in small bar in suburban England and not only be warmly welcomed and plied with alcohol and food at every available opportunity but also be forgiven for his inability to speak the local language and asked of his preference in female waistlines.
My Japanese is very slowly getting the point where i know when students are insulting me. There was also one three year old kid i had for one lesson who refused to say anything other than the word “pasta”. What’s your name? “Pasta!” What's this colour? “Pasta!” At least he was enthusiastic. I had another student who called the Statue of Liberty “Freedom Girl” which is just a much better way of describing it. Makes it sound like a superhero, doesn’t it?
It’s been a long winter here. A few weeks ago it felt like spring was in the post and would be here any moment. I think the postman got lost. It’s still Janurayish some mornings. Weird. The onset of spring in Japan is defined by cherry blossom. The traditional way of celebrating spring is to get drunk in the park on an evening after work surrounded by pink leaves and this is such a popular thing that it becomes quite competitive to get a decent spot amongst the trees. April is also the hiring season for recent university graduates and the combination of a new face in the office and the pretty leaves in the park means that a graduates first task in their new career is to get down to the park at around lunch time, find a decent spot and then sit there until five o’clock when everybody from the office joins the poor bastard, eats and gets drunk.
But right now i think everybody in Japan could do with sitting in the sunshine in the park and getting a bit tipsy in the late afternoon. It’s been a mad month. Roll on spring.
The local little bar round the corner from my flat is always good value. A couple of weeks ago i got talking to a middle aged man who was in the bar for the first time. He was divorced with two kids and worked a few metro stations away. He asked me if i was single and i confirmed that i was. He nodded, smiled and said, “What kind of girls do you like? Fat, chubby, normal or thin?” Not a question you expect from someone you've just met. And it’s a bit difficult to reply without saying, “Erm, well, er, i guess, not fat?” And then shrug.
A more normal and slightly understandable question that people have asked is if England has earthquakes. I tell them that we don’t and that we are also free of tsunamis, volcanoes and typhoons to which the reply is something like, “Ah, England is very safe.” The thing is people in England would probably disagree. The ground might be safe but for some reason i can’t really imagine a single Japanese immigrant sitting in small bar in suburban England and not only be warmly welcomed and plied with alcohol and food at every available opportunity but also be forgiven for his inability to speak the local language and asked of his preference in female waistlines.
My Japanese is very slowly getting the point where i know when students are insulting me. There was also one three year old kid i had for one lesson who refused to say anything other than the word “pasta”. What’s your name? “Pasta!” What's this colour? “Pasta!” At least he was enthusiastic. I had another student who called the Statue of Liberty “Freedom Girl” which is just a much better way of describing it. Makes it sound like a superhero, doesn’t it?
It’s been a long winter here. A few weeks ago it felt like spring was in the post and would be here any moment. I think the postman got lost. It’s still Janurayish some mornings. Weird. The onset of spring in Japan is defined by cherry blossom. The traditional way of celebrating spring is to get drunk in the park on an evening after work surrounded by pink leaves and this is such a popular thing that it becomes quite competitive to get a decent spot amongst the trees. April is also the hiring season for recent university graduates and the combination of a new face in the office and the pretty leaves in the park means that a graduates first task in their new career is to get down to the park at around lunch time, find a decent spot and then sit there until five o’clock when everybody from the office joins the poor bastard, eats and gets drunk.
But right now i think everybody in Japan could do with sitting in the sunshine in the park and getting a bit tipsy in the late afternoon. It’s been a mad month. Roll on spring.
Thursday, March 24, 2011
Kyoto and Powercuts
Last week all my classes were canceled as a result of the earthquake, tsunami and fears about people being irradiated. I thought about what i could do to help and realised that i could do nothing apart from use less electric at home. So i went to Kyoto instead.
As Kyoto was the capital of Japan before Tokyo it’s a pretty historical place, half-filled with buildings and temples built and used hundreds of years ago and still standing proudly around the city. Kyoto is a bit of a battle ground. Old and new buildings compete with the skyline and tourist attention. Traditional kimonos trade blows with modern fashion and occasionally win. Old cosy bars and restaurants gently invite you down small alleys while neon blares out of shopping centres. When i was there, even winter and spring were locked in combat with the winter showers easily beating the occasional March sunshine. It was freezing.
I saw the understated Imperial Palace and the opulent Nijo-jo complex that was once home to Shoguns and the ruling elite. There was a breathtaking temple called Sanjusangen-jo which contained 1001 near life-sized Buddhist statues. There was the wonderful Kiyomizu Temple that sits on an impossibly massive wooden veranda overlooking the city with a thatched roof. It was busy when i was there so i imagine it’s a bit mental when spring finally wins the fight against winter and tourists invade the place.
I spent most of the time in Kyoto walking around trying to keep warm and was randomly stopped on the street buy a small camera crew who asked if i could speak Japanese. I lied and said “Yes, a little.” OK, can you be on a cable TV show? Two men, who i’m assuming were comedians but only because of the clothes they were wearing, started to ask me lots of questions and i stood there shivering looking like an utter idiot trying to respond to them. I can only hope i’ve been edited out unless the title of the show is Look, Foreigners Are Stupid in which case i might be top billing.
I stayed just one night and slept in a capsule hotel that was so minimalist and stylish it would make Steve Jobs blush. It was an advert in brushed steal, white plastic and being overpriced. Still, it was a place to crash after getting drunk in a little counter bar where i seemed to make instant friends for being able to use chopsticks and drink hot sake. The middle aged woman sat next to me seemed to want to always try and show me her cleavage, the barman giggled every time i said anything, a business man chatted to me about work and a nice woman with an medical eye patch kept winking at me (although, come to think of it, she could have been blinking but it’s nice to be optimistic).
I also managed to find another random museum - the International Manga Museum. Manga is massive in Japan. The cartoon book magazines are serialised with new editions and volumes being released at regular intervals. It’s a printed version of a soap opera with different manga written for and consumed by every inch of Japanese society. There’s sci-fi manga, comedy manga, political manga, school girl manga, crime manga, housewife manga, businessman manga. If you’re a person, then there’s probably a manga for you and as a result there’s manga everywhere in Japan. It doesn’t seem to matter where you go you always see somebody reading manga. The museum itself was an old school that had been converted into a manga library with walls filled with the magazines and displays in English and Japanese telling you about the history of genre and plenty of seats occupied by people with their heads buried in another edition. As it was international they also had manga that had been translated into different languages and so i sat and read the first three instalments of Ikigami which is a kind of dystopian story about people who know that they only have 24 hours to live. Unfortunately i only had a few hours before the train to Tokyo left and so i had to put down the little book magazine and promise myself that i’d return to Kyoto when the weather was warmer to sample more of its temples and nightlife.
I’m back at work now in Chiba and Tokyo which means that half my lessons begin by wasting at least fifteen minutes swapping earthquake stories and being politely asked why i haven’t left Japan. Greater Tokyo and the north east of the country is still being wobbled by occasional aftershocks and everybody is wondering when the power stations will be back online (Fukushima wasn’t the only plant to get knocked out by the tsunami, just the only one to leak tiny amounts of radioactive material) which means that the power saving and rolling powercuts could continue for a few more months and spring and summer could be a bit smelly and sweaty without air-con. Air-freshener, deodorant and icy ice-cold beer at the ready.
As Kyoto was the capital of Japan before Tokyo it’s a pretty historical place, half-filled with buildings and temples built and used hundreds of years ago and still standing proudly around the city. Kyoto is a bit of a battle ground. Old and new buildings compete with the skyline and tourist attention. Traditional kimonos trade blows with modern fashion and occasionally win. Old cosy bars and restaurants gently invite you down small alleys while neon blares out of shopping centres. When i was there, even winter and spring were locked in combat with the winter showers easily beating the occasional March sunshine. It was freezing.
I saw the understated Imperial Palace and the opulent Nijo-jo complex that was once home to Shoguns and the ruling elite. There was a breathtaking temple called Sanjusangen-jo which contained 1001 near life-sized Buddhist statues. There was the wonderful Kiyomizu Temple that sits on an impossibly massive wooden veranda overlooking the city with a thatched roof. It was busy when i was there so i imagine it’s a bit mental when spring finally wins the fight against winter and tourists invade the place.
I spent most of the time in Kyoto walking around trying to keep warm and was randomly stopped on the street buy a small camera crew who asked if i could speak Japanese. I lied and said “Yes, a little.” OK, can you be on a cable TV show? Two men, who i’m assuming were comedians but only because of the clothes they were wearing, started to ask me lots of questions and i stood there shivering looking like an utter idiot trying to respond to them. I can only hope i’ve been edited out unless the title of the show is Look, Foreigners Are Stupid in which case i might be top billing.
I stayed just one night and slept in a capsule hotel that was so minimalist and stylish it would make Steve Jobs blush. It was an advert in brushed steal, white plastic and being overpriced. Still, it was a place to crash after getting drunk in a little counter bar where i seemed to make instant friends for being able to use chopsticks and drink hot sake. The middle aged woman sat next to me seemed to want to always try and show me her cleavage, the barman giggled every time i said anything, a business man chatted to me about work and a nice woman with an medical eye patch kept winking at me (although, come to think of it, she could have been blinking but it’s nice to be optimistic).
I also managed to find another random museum - the International Manga Museum. Manga is massive in Japan. The cartoon book magazines are serialised with new editions and volumes being released at regular intervals. It’s a printed version of a soap opera with different manga written for and consumed by every inch of Japanese society. There’s sci-fi manga, comedy manga, political manga, school girl manga, crime manga, housewife manga, businessman manga. If you’re a person, then there’s probably a manga for you and as a result there’s manga everywhere in Japan. It doesn’t seem to matter where you go you always see somebody reading manga. The museum itself was an old school that had been converted into a manga library with walls filled with the magazines and displays in English and Japanese telling you about the history of genre and plenty of seats occupied by people with their heads buried in another edition. As it was international they also had manga that had been translated into different languages and so i sat and read the first three instalments of Ikigami which is a kind of dystopian story about people who know that they only have 24 hours to live. Unfortunately i only had a few hours before the train to Tokyo left and so i had to put down the little book magazine and promise myself that i’d return to Kyoto when the weather was warmer to sample more of its temples and nightlife.
I’m back at work now in Chiba and Tokyo which means that half my lessons begin by wasting at least fifteen minutes swapping earthquake stories and being politely asked why i haven’t left Japan. Greater Tokyo and the north east of the country is still being wobbled by occasional aftershocks and everybody is wondering when the power stations will be back online (Fukushima wasn’t the only plant to get knocked out by the tsunami, just the only one to leak tiny amounts of radioactive material) which means that the power saving and rolling powercuts could continue for a few more months and spring and summer could be a bit smelly and sweaty without air-con. Air-freshener, deodorant and icy ice-cold beer at the ready.
Friday, March 18, 2011
Myoden and Porridge
The dust has settled, the debris searched, the missing are still missed, the power plant is still thirsty and i learnt another Japanese word. Ji-shin.
I was crossing a busy-ish street last Friday afternoon just outside Tokyo surrounded by buildings that are about eight floors high. The ground started shaking and twitching and those buildings started to dance. I was stood outside a pharmacy watching stuff rattle off the shelves and fall on the floor. I was listening to people’s slightly scared voices. I was holding onto a post box steadying myself. I was watching the panic on an old lady’s face. “Shit,” i thought as the trees shook and the lampposts swayed and my feet moved beneath me. “If the old lady is worried, it must be a big one.”
I have since experienced earthquakes of varying magnitude whilst cooking, showering, sleeping, walking and drinking. It has changed the way i think about the ground i live on. I appreciate now that it isn’t solid. It’s just the thin crust on the surface of the hot liquid. A bit like cold porridge only not as tasty.
And life goes on. Tokyo and the cities around it are now trying to get back to something close to normal as the electric supply has been disrupted to the point where everybody is rationing electricity usage to avoid power cuts. Supermarkets, shops and businesses are using half their lights. Quieter Metro stations have stopped the escalators and lifts. Unfortunately a lot of food was bought in the unnecessary panic that followed and there’s been delays getting everything back to where it was before last Friday. But it’s not an apocalypse for anybody living in or around Tokyo. It’s just an inconvenience. The biggest danger right now is everybody’s imagination getting carried away with itself.
The nice man in my local bar last night had a vivid imagination. Either that or he was trying to wind me up. “You go England. London. Japan dangerous. Radiation. Nuclear. X-ray. No good.” Or maybe he’s tired of speaking English and listening to my shit Japanese and just sees this as an opportunity to get rid of me. He told me that he had to walk home last Friday from central Tokyo as the trains were stopped. It took five hours. “Very fun!” he said, smiling. “Many people. Like slow marathon!” Or perhaps he’s an aspiring comedian. We all told our little stories. One guy ran home (not screaming and panicking with his arms in the air, i mean, you know, jogging) which took him an hour and a half which he seemed pretty please with. One other guy was totally bemused by the fact that the English word for tsunami is tsunami. I told them my crap story about the pharmacy. Then the drinks bottles started clinking together on the shaking shelf, the stools shook slightly and for a minute the porridge beneath us lost its balance and stammered a little. Phones flipped open. Buttons pressed. Updates gathered. No problem. Just a three, inland. No tsunami threat. Just another little ji-shin.
I was crossing a busy-ish street last Friday afternoon just outside Tokyo surrounded by buildings that are about eight floors high. The ground started shaking and twitching and those buildings started to dance. I was stood outside a pharmacy watching stuff rattle off the shelves and fall on the floor. I was listening to people’s slightly scared voices. I was holding onto a post box steadying myself. I was watching the panic on an old lady’s face. “Shit,” i thought as the trees shook and the lampposts swayed and my feet moved beneath me. “If the old lady is worried, it must be a big one.”
I have since experienced earthquakes of varying magnitude whilst cooking, showering, sleeping, walking and drinking. It has changed the way i think about the ground i live on. I appreciate now that it isn’t solid. It’s just the thin crust on the surface of the hot liquid. A bit like cold porridge only not as tasty.
And life goes on. Tokyo and the cities around it are now trying to get back to something close to normal as the electric supply has been disrupted to the point where everybody is rationing electricity usage to avoid power cuts. Supermarkets, shops and businesses are using half their lights. Quieter Metro stations have stopped the escalators and lifts. Unfortunately a lot of food was bought in the unnecessary panic that followed and there’s been delays getting everything back to where it was before last Friday. But it’s not an apocalypse for anybody living in or around Tokyo. It’s just an inconvenience. The biggest danger right now is everybody’s imagination getting carried away with itself.
The nice man in my local bar last night had a vivid imagination. Either that or he was trying to wind me up. “You go England. London. Japan dangerous. Radiation. Nuclear. X-ray. No good.” Or maybe he’s tired of speaking English and listening to my shit Japanese and just sees this as an opportunity to get rid of me. He told me that he had to walk home last Friday from central Tokyo as the trains were stopped. It took five hours. “Very fun!” he said, smiling. “Many people. Like slow marathon!” Or perhaps he’s an aspiring comedian. We all told our little stories. One guy ran home (not screaming and panicking with his arms in the air, i mean, you know, jogging) which took him an hour and a half which he seemed pretty please with. One other guy was totally bemused by the fact that the English word for tsunami is tsunami. I told them my crap story about the pharmacy. Then the drinks bottles started clinking together on the shaking shelf, the stools shook slightly and for a minute the porridge beneath us lost its balance and stammered a little. Phones flipped open. Buttons pressed. Updates gathered. No problem. Just a three, inland. No tsunami threat. Just another little ji-shin.
Thursday, March 10, 2011
Myoden and Museums
After Yokohama and onsens i was trying to think of some kind of travelling to do in Tokyo itself and that’s when i remembered the Meguro Parasitological Museum. A few years ago i was travelling in Japan and managed to visit it and as a result i started an ill thought-out mission to visit other random little museums in Seoul and Beijing, without much luck, as i travelled through Asia. With the help of some friendly hints and a bit of research it turns out that the parasite museum isn’t alone in Tokyo in housing a small corner of quirky and different.
The Tokyo Kite Museum isn’t really a museum. It’s a cramped room on the upper floors of an old office block in central Tokyo dripping with kites and dust and colour. I stepped straight out of the old lift into a dark, dank room and was welcomed by a nice old lady reading a newspaper behind a reception desk who was trying not to fall asleep while a sign overhead on the wall asked me, “Have you tugged today?” My Japanese language skills were, thankfully, not sufficient for me to inform the lady of an answer. The large room was empty of people (although i did visit on a windy day so maybe the kite enthusiasts of Japan were already preoccupied) but it was utterly and completely crammed with kites. The only space that wasn’t used up to display some kind of flying contraption was the floor and two windows. All other space was kite-filled and bursting with colour in the dim light. There were kites from other countries, pictures of people flying kites, kites the size of stamps and kites the size of sofas, kites shaped like animals and people and dragons and i never even new or cared that such creations existed. It was amazing and crap all at once.
The Tobacco and Salt Museum was a bit different. For a start it was popular and was quite busy with old people and school kids on afternoon trips. It had also been cleaned recently and there were no signs questioning if i’d done anything that morning. There were maps and diagrams showing the history of tobacco and smoking but as all the signs and explanations were in Japanese i was spared the boredom of reading about it and instead just looked at old packets of cigarettes and pipes of various shapes and sizes before buying a postcard of a safety match advertisement and making haste for the Button Museum.
I wasn’t sure what to expect from the Button Museum (other than its contents, that’s quite self explanatory). Would it be covered in dust like the Kite Museum or old people like the Tobacco place? I figured it would be both. I’ll never know. I found the museum in a small building in the east of Tokyo but was informed that you need to call ahead to make a reservation for a guided tour and so i scrapped that one off the list. I’m all for finding stupid museums but i figured i should draw a line with guided tours of buttons. In a foreign language. On my day off.
However, that didn’t stop me visiting the Metro Museum, dedicated to the Tokyo Metro, which was a bit like a crèche with trains. In fact, i think there were more pushchairs than rolling stock but it did have some fancy looking models that showed you how they make the tunnels so it might not have been a total waste of 210 yen.
Next on the list was the Criminology Museum which was at Meigi University and had its home in a dark basement. It had some pretty grim looking contraptions that were once used for torturing people or slowly killing them and paintings of people being murdered in a variety of different and imaginative ways.
I also managed to find a Laundry Museum. All i had was a piece of paper with an address on it and a vague idea of which metro station i needed. After walking from the station the address turned out to be the headquarters for Hakuyosha Dry Cleaners but there was no hint of where the museum was – just a car park and few buildings. A woman in a lab jacket and a small group of grandmothers walked out of the building i was stood in front of and the women in the lab jacket approached me and asked if i needed help. I was stood in the car park of laundry company headquarters looking for a museum about washing machines after i’d spent a couple days seeing kites, pipes, salt, torture devices and trains in small crap museums in suburban Tokyo. I assured the kind women that i did indeed need help. She told me that the museum was on the third floor. On display in the brightly lit room was an old shirt press, a glass cabinet filled with old irons, some wooden tumble dryers, a couple of washboards and some paintings of women slapping clothes on a rock next to a river. I’m glad it was free.
Apparently, Tokyo is also home to a beer museum, a noodle museum, an electrical energy museum and a museum designed by famous animation director Hayao Miyazaki. I guess they can wait a few months as i’ve had my little fix of random crap for now.
The Tokyo Kite Museum isn’t really a museum. It’s a cramped room on the upper floors of an old office block in central Tokyo dripping with kites and dust and colour. I stepped straight out of the old lift into a dark, dank room and was welcomed by a nice old lady reading a newspaper behind a reception desk who was trying not to fall asleep while a sign overhead on the wall asked me, “Have you tugged today?” My Japanese language skills were, thankfully, not sufficient for me to inform the lady of an answer. The large room was empty of people (although i did visit on a windy day so maybe the kite enthusiasts of Japan were already preoccupied) but it was utterly and completely crammed with kites. The only space that wasn’t used up to display some kind of flying contraption was the floor and two windows. All other space was kite-filled and bursting with colour in the dim light. There were kites from other countries, pictures of people flying kites, kites the size of stamps and kites the size of sofas, kites shaped like animals and people and dragons and i never even new or cared that such creations existed. It was amazing and crap all at once.
The Tobacco and Salt Museum was a bit different. For a start it was popular and was quite busy with old people and school kids on afternoon trips. It had also been cleaned recently and there were no signs questioning if i’d done anything that morning. There were maps and diagrams showing the history of tobacco and smoking but as all the signs and explanations were in Japanese i was spared the boredom of reading about it and instead just looked at old packets of cigarettes and pipes of various shapes and sizes before buying a postcard of a safety match advertisement and making haste for the Button Museum.
I wasn’t sure what to expect from the Button Museum (other than its contents, that’s quite self explanatory). Would it be covered in dust like the Kite Museum or old people like the Tobacco place? I figured it would be both. I’ll never know. I found the museum in a small building in the east of Tokyo but was informed that you need to call ahead to make a reservation for a guided tour and so i scrapped that one off the list. I’m all for finding stupid museums but i figured i should draw a line with guided tours of buttons. In a foreign language. On my day off.
However, that didn’t stop me visiting the Metro Museum, dedicated to the Tokyo Metro, which was a bit like a crèche with trains. In fact, i think there were more pushchairs than rolling stock but it did have some fancy looking models that showed you how they make the tunnels so it might not have been a total waste of 210 yen.
Next on the list was the Criminology Museum which was at Meigi University and had its home in a dark basement. It had some pretty grim looking contraptions that were once used for torturing people or slowly killing them and paintings of people being murdered in a variety of different and imaginative ways.
I also managed to find a Laundry Museum. All i had was a piece of paper with an address on it and a vague idea of which metro station i needed. After walking from the station the address turned out to be the headquarters for Hakuyosha Dry Cleaners but there was no hint of where the museum was – just a car park and few buildings. A woman in a lab jacket and a small group of grandmothers walked out of the building i was stood in front of and the women in the lab jacket approached me and asked if i needed help. I was stood in the car park of laundry company headquarters looking for a museum about washing machines after i’d spent a couple days seeing kites, pipes, salt, torture devices and trains in small crap museums in suburban Tokyo. I assured the kind women that i did indeed need help. She told me that the museum was on the third floor. On display in the brightly lit room was an old shirt press, a glass cabinet filled with old irons, some wooden tumble dryers, a couple of washboards and some paintings of women slapping clothes on a rock next to a river. I’m glad it was free.
Apparently, Tokyo is also home to a beer museum, a noodle museum, an electrical energy museum and a museum designed by famous animation director Hayao Miyazaki. I guess they can wait a few months as i’ve had my little fix of random crap for now.
Friday, February 25, 2011
Myoden and Yokohama
In the last couple of weeks i’ve done two important things. I shut up and just travelled.
Yokohama is less than an hour west of Tokyo by train and as a result there isn’t an obvious boundary between the two. The buildings just get smaller and then bigger again as you leave one megacity and enter a smaller one. Tokyo does that. It merges and blurs all the boundaries around it so you can never really tell just how big it is. Yokohama is probably most famous for its China Town which should be more accurately named Chinese Restaurant Town. Most of the China Towns that i’ve been to in major cities just seems to a be a load of Chinese restaurants and a couple of oriental supermarkets crammed into a few small streets with an old gnarly gateway hemming in busloads of tourists and Yokohama fits that idea very well. Still, it was a great place to get lost in, it smelt and sounded exactly like China and the food was oily and tasty.
Yokohama has a history of foreigners coming and going and the China Town plays its part in that along with a huge foreigner’s cemetery shrouded in green and trees which overlooks the city centre. Just next to the cemetery is a suburb called Motomachi that wouldn’t look out of place somewhere in Europe with chic storefronts and bakeries serving expats and Japanese with equal measure on small pedestrian streets. There’s an obvious mix of past and present, Japanese and foreign in Yokohama. Some of the grand old buildings look like they’ve been lifted out of Europe in the 1920s and dropped into Japan in the functional 1980s and then been made to sit all day next to glass fronted modern equivalents.
I also went to an onsen (hot spring) two hours north of Tokyo last weekend in a place called Kinugawa. It was a small town hemmed in by mountains and cut in two by a river. The town is famous for the volcanic water that flows up and into the onsens that have grown into hotels that now line the river and give the town its well known name. My friend booked a night in one of the hotels which was an interesting place. It was like being in a Japan in 1975. Everything seemed faded with time and creaked with age. Things looked well worn but also look as if they hadn’t been used in years and it echoed of time that was much busier. But it was still pulling in small crowds of people – most of them, like the building itself, seemed faded with time and creaked with age. Actually, it was like being in an old people’s home in Japan in 1975. The Japanese onsen is a communal experience so i shared a few relaxing hours immersed in piping hot mineral rich water with a load of naked elderly Japanese men which was much more relaxing than i’ve just made it sound. The price of the hotel also included a huge traditional dinner, a fridge full of beer and other assorted alcoholic drinks and a breakfast. So, it was like a large all you can eat and drink restaurant in a Japanese old people’s home in 1975. With a volcanic bath. Breakfast was a bit disconcerting as i looked across what was once a ball room at the buffet breakfast and saw an elderly man try to fit some more cooked fish in a bowl and thought to myself, “I’ve seen him naked.” Which is not thought I often want at breakfast. Or at any other meal time really. Onsens are funny places.
Life rolls on in Myoden but hopefully i’ll see some more random crap soon. Thanks for reading.
Yokohama is less than an hour west of Tokyo by train and as a result there isn’t an obvious boundary between the two. The buildings just get smaller and then bigger again as you leave one megacity and enter a smaller one. Tokyo does that. It merges and blurs all the boundaries around it so you can never really tell just how big it is. Yokohama is probably most famous for its China Town which should be more accurately named Chinese Restaurant Town. Most of the China Towns that i’ve been to in major cities just seems to a be a load of Chinese restaurants and a couple of oriental supermarkets crammed into a few small streets with an old gnarly gateway hemming in busloads of tourists and Yokohama fits that idea very well. Still, it was a great place to get lost in, it smelt and sounded exactly like China and the food was oily and tasty.
Yokohama has a history of foreigners coming and going and the China Town plays its part in that along with a huge foreigner’s cemetery shrouded in green and trees which overlooks the city centre. Just next to the cemetery is a suburb called Motomachi that wouldn’t look out of place somewhere in Europe with chic storefronts and bakeries serving expats and Japanese with equal measure on small pedestrian streets. There’s an obvious mix of past and present, Japanese and foreign in Yokohama. Some of the grand old buildings look like they’ve been lifted out of Europe in the 1920s and dropped into Japan in the functional 1980s and then been made to sit all day next to glass fronted modern equivalents.
I also went to an onsen (hot spring) two hours north of Tokyo last weekend in a place called Kinugawa. It was a small town hemmed in by mountains and cut in two by a river. The town is famous for the volcanic water that flows up and into the onsens that have grown into hotels that now line the river and give the town its well known name. My friend booked a night in one of the hotels which was an interesting place. It was like being in a Japan in 1975. Everything seemed faded with time and creaked with age. Things looked well worn but also look as if they hadn’t been used in years and it echoed of time that was much busier. But it was still pulling in small crowds of people – most of them, like the building itself, seemed faded with time and creaked with age. Actually, it was like being in an old people’s home in Japan in 1975. The Japanese onsen is a communal experience so i shared a few relaxing hours immersed in piping hot mineral rich water with a load of naked elderly Japanese men which was much more relaxing than i’ve just made it sound. The price of the hotel also included a huge traditional dinner, a fridge full of beer and other assorted alcoholic drinks and a breakfast. So, it was like a large all you can eat and drink restaurant in a Japanese old people’s home in 1975. With a volcanic bath. Breakfast was a bit disconcerting as i looked across what was once a ball room at the buffet breakfast and saw an elderly man try to fit some more cooked fish in a bowl and thought to myself, “I’ve seen him naked.” Which is not thought I often want at breakfast. Or at any other meal time really. Onsens are funny places.
Life rolls on in Myoden but hopefully i’ll see some more random crap soon. Thanks for reading.
Friday, February 11, 2011
Myoden and Shibuya
I promised myself that i’d do something interesting and then i’d have something better to write about than trains and washing machines. Unfortunately that’s not happened yet.
I haven’t really ventured any further than work and a little bar just around the corner from my dinky flat. The owner of the bar is a friendly little bald man who loves The Beatles. Every time i’ve been in there and sat at the small bar cobbling utterances together in Japanese while other assorted drunks try and cobble together a sentence in English, The Beatles always play along in background. It’s a nice place to have a quiet beer and too much sake before falling into my shoebox sized flat.
It’s also more convenient than getting drunk in central Tokyo, missing the last train home and having to walk for about two hours in the cold and eventually sleep in a 24 hour internet cafe until about 5am when the metro starts running again. Only a complete fool would do such a thing. Or you could get drunk in central Tokyo after eating Korean-style pork bbq followed by watching Japan beat Australia in the final of the Asian Football Championships and then celebrate at the famous Shibuya crossing in the early hours of the morning by joining hundreds of Japanese fans by repeatedly running into the middle of the crossing when the traffic stops and cheering and jumping up and down like a lunatic surrounded by skyscrapers, neon and pedestrian-traffic marshals and then scampering back to the pavement when the lights turn back to green. After which, you could get the first train home. That night out was less convenient but definitely a lot more fun.
A few of my lessons are also quite fun. One of my students was trying to describe having hay fever and struggled to think of the word for “snot”. Instead she said “nosewater”. I love this word. I’m now always going to refer to “snot” as “nosewater”. Please join me in getting this fantastical new word into general usage and everyday language where it rightly belongs. One day it will be in the Oxford English Dictionary and we will laugh at times past when we called nosewater “snot”. Do it.
A small but significant portion of my other students are crazy children who bounce of the walls (and that’s not a figure of speech, it’s just a genuine observation) or educated adults who want to travel, learn a new language and have fun. It’s a bit of a mix but then that’s what life seems to have become recently. All or nothing. I teach toddlers or grandparents. I drink in a little bar in suburbia playing The Beatles or in packed bars in Tokyo watching football. I eat grilled meat or raw fish. I get the last train home at eleven o’clock or the first train at 5am. I drink beer or sake, teach English or study Japanese. And worse of all? I write a blog called shutupjusttravel but don’t actually go anywhere.
But i’m going to Yokohama on Sunday and hopefully to an onsen in the mountains next weekend so i promise (really promise) that next time i will write about something new, somewhere different and something vaguely more interesting than me disappearing up my own arse. Thanks for reading.
I haven’t really ventured any further than work and a little bar just around the corner from my dinky flat. The owner of the bar is a friendly little bald man who loves The Beatles. Every time i’ve been in there and sat at the small bar cobbling utterances together in Japanese while other assorted drunks try and cobble together a sentence in English, The Beatles always play along in background. It’s a nice place to have a quiet beer and too much sake before falling into my shoebox sized flat.
It’s also more convenient than getting drunk in central Tokyo, missing the last train home and having to walk for about two hours in the cold and eventually sleep in a 24 hour internet cafe until about 5am when the metro starts running again. Only a complete fool would do such a thing. Or you could get drunk in central Tokyo after eating Korean-style pork bbq followed by watching Japan beat Australia in the final of the Asian Football Championships and then celebrate at the famous Shibuya crossing in the early hours of the morning by joining hundreds of Japanese fans by repeatedly running into the middle of the crossing when the traffic stops and cheering and jumping up and down like a lunatic surrounded by skyscrapers, neon and pedestrian-traffic marshals and then scampering back to the pavement when the lights turn back to green. After which, you could get the first train home. That night out was less convenient but definitely a lot more fun.
A few of my lessons are also quite fun. One of my students was trying to describe having hay fever and struggled to think of the word for “snot”. Instead she said “nosewater”. I love this word. I’m now always going to refer to “snot” as “nosewater”. Please join me in getting this fantastical new word into general usage and everyday language where it rightly belongs. One day it will be in the Oxford English Dictionary and we will laugh at times past when we called nosewater “snot”. Do it.
A small but significant portion of my other students are crazy children who bounce of the walls (and that’s not a figure of speech, it’s just a genuine observation) or educated adults who want to travel, learn a new language and have fun. It’s a bit of a mix but then that’s what life seems to have become recently. All or nothing. I teach toddlers or grandparents. I drink in a little bar in suburbia playing The Beatles or in packed bars in Tokyo watching football. I eat grilled meat or raw fish. I get the last train home at eleven o’clock or the first train at 5am. I drink beer or sake, teach English or study Japanese. And worse of all? I write a blog called shutupjusttravel but don’t actually go anywhere.
But i’m going to Yokohama on Sunday and hopefully to an onsen in the mountains next weekend so i promise (really promise) that next time i will write about something new, somewhere different and something vaguely more interesting than me disappearing up my own arse. Thanks for reading.
Thursday, January 20, 2011
Tokyo and Myoden
After sleeping in airports and aeroplanes i arrived in Tokyo and had to sleep in a hostel. Actually, i had to live in a hostel for a week as my new company was organising an apartment for me. I wasted a couple of days watching cricket on the internet and ambling around cold, sunny, central Tokyo and past rows of shops and restaurants that had shut for the New Year holiday.
My new job is busy. I’m teaching at three different places around Tokyo all for a company which provides English lessons all over the greater Tokyo area at little language schools. It involves quite a lot of commuting and i’ve got all sorts of different classes. My youngest student is three and my oldest is seventy but as long as i don’t get the lessons plans mixed up things should go well. Although, if i get bored i guess i could always break into a rendition of The Wheels On The Bus with one of the business men.
I’m not complaining that the new people i’m working for organised an apartment for me (it would have been a hell of a language barrier to climb over for me to do it myself) but i think i might have been better off in the hostel. I would use the word “apartment” very loosely here as well. “Apartment” makes me think of a spacious open plan living space in Manhattan. I’m living in a flimsy shoebox on the outskirts of Tokyo in a bland commuter suburb called Myoden. Also, when i moved in the other week i discovered that the stove didn’t work properly so i couldn’t cook any food, some of the furniture was falling apart, there was no internet connection so i couldn’t email anybody and my washing machine is a twin-tub cold water contraption that’s older than me so i have to go to the laundrette around the corner. And the carpet smells. And the bathroom is the size of a phone box. And when i wake up every morning i open the curtains to be greeted by rivers of condensation dripping down the windows. The last place i had felt like the halls of residence at a university. Now i feel like i’m squatting. Still, on the plus side i’ve got a phone that works properly this time.
Apparently there’s a recession going on. We’re in a period of sluggish growth or a downturn or a stagnating economic situation or some other combination of words that are getting overused. I think it means that it’s now difficult to get and keep a job and banks aren’t lending money to people who can’t pay it back so less people are buying shit they don’t need. Japan is in the same boat as everybody else but you wouldn’t know it if you went to Akihabara. Akihabara is a part of Tokyo that’s home to a bizarre mix of electronics, manga porn and maid cafes. Everything electronic is sold in department store sized gadget stockpiles while dozens of shops selling cartoon porn DVDs and comics nestle in between along with discreet upstairs cafes where, apparently, cute girls dressed up in a variety of different outfits will serve you drinks and flirt with you, if that kind of things floats your boat and flicks your switch. Last month, when i went to buy a mobile phone that actually works as a phone should, the place was stacked full of people hurriedly buying something electronic, something pornographic or some drinks from a Japanese girl dressed as a French maid. I guess you’ve got to have some fun, even in a recession.
There’s another thing in Japan that’s recession proof. The trains. I’m not sure i’ve been to a country that uses, needs and breathes trains as much as this one. Everybody uses them. All the time. Everyday. There’s 27,190km of train track in Japan. That’s enough to go around the equator. There are 20,000 daily train services. The annual ridership is 400 billion. No wonder Honda and the rest of them export so much. They have no choice. In Japan the train is king.
I'll be here for twelve months so i’m planning on seeing yet more of Tokyo and snatches of the rest of the country as well in the coming months so hopefully i’ll have something more interesting to write about than washing machines and trains. Hopefully.
My new job is busy. I’m teaching at three different places around Tokyo all for a company which provides English lessons all over the greater Tokyo area at little language schools. It involves quite a lot of commuting and i’ve got all sorts of different classes. My youngest student is three and my oldest is seventy but as long as i don’t get the lessons plans mixed up things should go well. Although, if i get bored i guess i could always break into a rendition of The Wheels On The Bus with one of the business men.
I’m not complaining that the new people i’m working for organised an apartment for me (it would have been a hell of a language barrier to climb over for me to do it myself) but i think i might have been better off in the hostel. I would use the word “apartment” very loosely here as well. “Apartment” makes me think of a spacious open plan living space in Manhattan. I’m living in a flimsy shoebox on the outskirts of Tokyo in a bland commuter suburb called Myoden. Also, when i moved in the other week i discovered that the stove didn’t work properly so i couldn’t cook any food, some of the furniture was falling apart, there was no internet connection so i couldn’t email anybody and my washing machine is a twin-tub cold water contraption that’s older than me so i have to go to the laundrette around the corner. And the carpet smells. And the bathroom is the size of a phone box. And when i wake up every morning i open the curtains to be greeted by rivers of condensation dripping down the windows. The last place i had felt like the halls of residence at a university. Now i feel like i’m squatting. Still, on the plus side i’ve got a phone that works properly this time.
Apparently there’s a recession going on. We’re in a period of sluggish growth or a downturn or a stagnating economic situation or some other combination of words that are getting overused. I think it means that it’s now difficult to get and keep a job and banks aren’t lending money to people who can’t pay it back so less people are buying shit they don’t need. Japan is in the same boat as everybody else but you wouldn’t know it if you went to Akihabara. Akihabara is a part of Tokyo that’s home to a bizarre mix of electronics, manga porn and maid cafes. Everything electronic is sold in department store sized gadget stockpiles while dozens of shops selling cartoon porn DVDs and comics nestle in between along with discreet upstairs cafes where, apparently, cute girls dressed up in a variety of different outfits will serve you drinks and flirt with you, if that kind of things floats your boat and flicks your switch. Last month, when i went to buy a mobile phone that actually works as a phone should, the place was stacked full of people hurriedly buying something electronic, something pornographic or some drinks from a Japanese girl dressed as a French maid. I guess you’ve got to have some fun, even in a recession.
There’s another thing in Japan that’s recession proof. The trains. I’m not sure i’ve been to a country that uses, needs and breathes trains as much as this one. Everybody uses them. All the time. Everyday. There’s 27,190km of train track in Japan. That’s enough to go around the equator. There are 20,000 daily train services. The annual ridership is 400 billion. No wonder Honda and the rest of them export so much. They have no choice. In Japan the train is king.
I'll be here for twelve months so i’m planning on seeing yet more of Tokyo and snatches of the rest of the country as well in the coming months so hopefully i’ll have something more interesting to write about than washing machines and trains. Hopefully.
Sunday, January 2, 2011
Heathrow, Milan and Tokyo
After a week in Leeds for Christmas catching up and catching colds it was time to leave again. I think both me and my close friends and family are now starting to get used to me leaving. The first time i left for an indefinite period of time we had a big party in my parents back garden that lasted almost a day. Now we all seem fairly happy if we get a pint and good luck hug.
As you’re probably aware i’ve done a little bit of travelling here and there over the past few years so you’d think that it was within the realms of possibility for me to able to buy a plane a ticket without a hitch. Think again. I bought a cheap one way ticket from London to Tokyo via Milan. No problems. Until i checked the itinerary and realised that i’d paid for a ticket that, although going via Milan, would actually arrive and leave from different airports. On different days.
I had to get to London first. The bus journey took six hours and the vehicle seemed to contain everything modern England has to offer. For a start it was stuck in traffic, going nowhere and being driven by an Eastern European. The passengers were an eclectic mix of bored teenagers with headphones glued into their ears, old women constantly looking as if somebody had just pissed in their handbags, the ever-friendly jovial chirpy types (you know the ones, only from the UK, always happy, would have sung Row Row Row Your Boat if they’d have been on the Titanic as it hit the iceberg) and a few families of happy immigrants who couldn’t speak a sentence of English. All of this was wrapped up in green fields, thick damp fog and old towns and cities trying to throw off 1960s architecture with 1990s memories and 2010s debt. And then I arrived at Heathrow.
Airports are shit. Most of them should come with some kind of health warning and they all seem to be the same. They’re too hot, there are never enough seats, the food is bland, soggy and expensive, you always see people sleeping no matter what time you arrive or leave, elderly people look utterly lost, small children have only two states - hyperactive or crying, there are lots of designer shops selling expensive jewellery and handbags to absolutely nobody (how do those shops make any money?) and the cleaners are always immigrants. As you can probably tell, i’ve only ever flown economy class.
My ticket landed me in Milan Linate Airport on Wednesday night and flew me out of Milan Melpansa Airport on Thursday afternoon. The plan was to find a cheap hotel somewhere in Milan but my flight from Heathrow left late and so the airport was completely shut when i arrived. There were no buses, no shops open, no hotels and the taxi drivers were asking 80 Euros for a trip to the city centre. I found a bench for the night and copied the homeless people and other stranded travellers and tried unsuccessfully to get some sleep before getting a bus the next morning across the city to the other airport where i flew from that afternoon.
I only spent a very short time in Italy and Milan but here’s what i noticed:
1. The orange juice is red.
2. The chocolate bars are rubbish.
3. It seems that it may be compulsory for all the women to wear tight fitting jeans and knee high leather boots.
4. It seems that it may be compulsory for the men to look completely disinterested with everything but do so with perfect hair.
5. Most people greet each other as if they haven’t seen each other in decades. Even if they’re strangers.
The flight to Tokyo was almost empty which meant that i curled up on three seats and stole fragments of sleep from various different time zones during the night and woke up over a wintery sugar-coated Korea on Friday morning and then landed in Japan. I got on the metro train at Narita Airport to take me into Tokyo. When it pulled into the station, there was a man slumped, fast asleep on one of the seats. Nobody moved him or troubled him. The train doors closed and off we sped into Tokyo where he’d just come from. He’d probably been on the train for a few hours going backwards and forwards from Tokyo to Narita sleeping off the beginnings of a hangover. I looked up and down the train, quietly giggled to myself and almost left like i’d come home.
I’ll be in Japan for a year as i start a new teaching job in the next few days. I’ll try to write more inane observations and useless stories as and when i can. Thanks for reading. Happy New Year and best of luck with 2011.
As you’re probably aware i’ve done a little bit of travelling here and there over the past few years so you’d think that it was within the realms of possibility for me to able to buy a plane a ticket without a hitch. Think again. I bought a cheap one way ticket from London to Tokyo via Milan. No problems. Until i checked the itinerary and realised that i’d paid for a ticket that, although going via Milan, would actually arrive and leave from different airports. On different days.
I had to get to London first. The bus journey took six hours and the vehicle seemed to contain everything modern England has to offer. For a start it was stuck in traffic, going nowhere and being driven by an Eastern European. The passengers were an eclectic mix of bored teenagers with headphones glued into their ears, old women constantly looking as if somebody had just pissed in their handbags, the ever-friendly jovial chirpy types (you know the ones, only from the UK, always happy, would have sung Row Row Row Your Boat if they’d have been on the Titanic as it hit the iceberg) and a few families of happy immigrants who couldn’t speak a sentence of English. All of this was wrapped up in green fields, thick damp fog and old towns and cities trying to throw off 1960s architecture with 1990s memories and 2010s debt. And then I arrived at Heathrow.
Airports are shit. Most of them should come with some kind of health warning and they all seem to be the same. They’re too hot, there are never enough seats, the food is bland, soggy and expensive, you always see people sleeping no matter what time you arrive or leave, elderly people look utterly lost, small children have only two states - hyperactive or crying, there are lots of designer shops selling expensive jewellery and handbags to absolutely nobody (how do those shops make any money?) and the cleaners are always immigrants. As you can probably tell, i’ve only ever flown economy class.
My ticket landed me in Milan Linate Airport on Wednesday night and flew me out of Milan Melpansa Airport on Thursday afternoon. The plan was to find a cheap hotel somewhere in Milan but my flight from Heathrow left late and so the airport was completely shut when i arrived. There were no buses, no shops open, no hotels and the taxi drivers were asking 80 Euros for a trip to the city centre. I found a bench for the night and copied the homeless people and other stranded travellers and tried unsuccessfully to get some sleep before getting a bus the next morning across the city to the other airport where i flew from that afternoon.
I only spent a very short time in Italy and Milan but here’s what i noticed:
1. The orange juice is red.
2. The chocolate bars are rubbish.
3. It seems that it may be compulsory for all the women to wear tight fitting jeans and knee high leather boots.
4. It seems that it may be compulsory for the men to look completely disinterested with everything but do so with perfect hair.
5. Most people greet each other as if they haven’t seen each other in decades. Even if they’re strangers.
The flight to Tokyo was almost empty which meant that i curled up on three seats and stole fragments of sleep from various different time zones during the night and woke up over a wintery sugar-coated Korea on Friday morning and then landed in Japan. I got on the metro train at Narita Airport to take me into Tokyo. When it pulled into the station, there was a man slumped, fast asleep on one of the seats. Nobody moved him or troubled him. The train doors closed and off we sped into Tokyo where he’d just come from. He’d probably been on the train for a few hours going backwards and forwards from Tokyo to Narita sleeping off the beginnings of a hangover. I looked up and down the train, quietly giggled to myself and almost left like i’d come home.
I’ll be in Japan for a year as i start a new teaching job in the next few days. I’ll try to write more inane observations and useless stories as and when i can. Thanks for reading. Happy New Year and best of luck with 2011.
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