Tokyo Marathon

Sunday was a rare day. I ran a marathon. I didn't mean to. I applied on a whim last year knowing that less than 10% of people who apply get selected in the lottery for the Tokyo marathon. I was “lucky”. I bought some running shoes, found a training schedule and started running last year.

I ran 42.195km in 5 hours. I ran down streets that I've staggered down drunk. I ran past buildings I’ve worked in. I ran past the station where I met my girlfriend. I ran on streets that nobody is allowed to run on apart from one day a year. I ran with all different races and nationalities and people. Men. Women. Old. Young. Dreadlocks. Hijabs. Spiderman. A tomato. Mount Fuji. A few Marios. A topless Cowboy. A guy dressed up as that fucker with his pen and his pineapple. I ran with people taking pictures and people taking selfies and people taking pictures of people taking selfies.

I ran past dancing troupes and cheerleaders and orchestras. I ran past sound systems loudly declaring that uptown was going to funk me up. Another sound system was playing the Village People. We all joined in to make a river of runners snaking through Tokyo doing the YMCA dance.

I ran past huge crowds cheering and waving and supporting. Past men dressed as cats meowing whenever any runner high fived them as we went by. Past waving kids and old ladies telling us to go faster. I ran past homemade signs. One read, “If Trump can run and win, so can you,” which is an interesting motivation technique. Another, around the 25km mark, claimed, “Your feet are hurting because you’re kicking so much ass.” Nice idea but my feet strongly disagreed.

Actually, all of me disagreed. Things started hurting with about 10km left. Muscles that I didn’t know I had appeared for the first time and instantly hated me. I was a sweaty mess from that point to the finish. Yes, it was a rare day. So rare that I can say it’ll never happen again. I’m very happy I did it, but I’m not sure I ever want to run again. Anywhere. Not even for a bus or to escape a house fire. I think I’ll go back to using my Sundays for occasionally cycling or hiking or wandering around or reading books. But thank you Tokyo for putting on a show, making me feel a part of something and for making me like you even more.

Things I'd Forgotten About South Korea

Dear South Korea

I used to live and work in Seoul. It was fun but time moved on and so did I. I'm in Japan now (no offence, don't take it personally) and last week I took a trip back to Seoul for a few days. It made me realise that there were things I'd forgotten about you. A few things actually.

I'd forgotten how quickly i get drunk drinking soju.

I'd forgotten about your old men in shiny shirts and shinier shoes standing around sucking on cigarettes and looking uncomfortable.

I'd forgotten about your perma-permed old ladies who have a Jeckyl and Hyde approach to dealing with the world. They sway between kind, smiley, helpful people to manic, cackling aggressive balls of wrinkles and flower print clothing. They don't seem to have a mid point.

I'd forgotten about your food. I don't mean the combinations of meats, vegetables, spices and sauces that is often carefully selected and occasionally perhaps chosen at random but I'd forgotten what your food does to me. Specifically, my digestive system. Your food doesn't seem to stay in me for very long. Essentially, it's always in transit. I'm hopeful that my body takes some nutritious elements from your food but as far as I can make out all it seems to do is repackage it into a much less appetising, slightly more agricultural version of itself. Which brings to my next point.

I'd forgotten that a lot of your bathrooms locate a large mirror above the toilet. I'm not sure when in your history your people deemed it necessary to be able to view themselves wiping their own arsehole but I'd be surprised if the demand for such a thing still exists. Maybe you can ask around.

I'd forgotten about your traffic in Seoul. It's a heinous mess. Have you considered taking it to a UN Court and charging it with Crimes Against Humanity? I'm pretty sure there's no legal precedent but it may be an option worth pursuing, if only for your own sanity.

I'd forgotten about the guys who deliver stuff on motorbikes. I have no idea what they deliver or why there is such a reckless urgency to deliver it. They seem to exist within rules, traffic laws and dress codes known only to themselves. I suspect they may have actually evolved into a different species.

I'd forgotten about the misappropriation of English swear words that adorn your various items of clothing. Last week on the Seoul metro I saw a girl with a flowery baseball cap that said, "F**kin' problems". There was also a man with a t-shirt that invited me to "Come to fuckdom". It was a tempting offer but I think it may be better if your burgeoning English language teaching system sticks a small chapter in the back of a textbook or three titled "Words You Should Avoid Putting on Clothing Unless You Want to Look Like Life-sized Youtube Comments". Also, I'm sure you've already been told this but when naming a business it might be useful to remember that not all English nouns can be used as verbs.

I think that's about it. I apologise if I sound quite negative but that's because it's easy to forget the minor entertaining annoyances and to remember the good things and the fun times.

Anyway, thanks for a nice little trip. Hopefully we'll meet up again soon.

Dave

Tokyo and Mount Oyama

It’s been a while since i wrote anything on here and there’s a pretty good reason for that; i haven’t done any travelling. However, last month i managed to leave Tokyo for the first time since last September when i finished peddling around Hokkaido.

I went hiking in Kanagawa on Mount Oyama, which is only an hour’s train ride from central Tokyo, in the sunshine with hundreds of other people as it was a national holiday. There were cloudy views of Mount Fuji to the west and a hazy Tokyo on the horizon to the east. And hundreds of other people, all scrambling around the mountain trying not to get in each other’s way and failing miserably. This may well be the quintessential way to spend a national holiday in Tokyo. Well, apart from shopping.

I’ve been working too much to travel anyway and after last summer’s excesses on a bicycle plus moving house four times in the space of 12 months i couldn’t really summon the enthusiasm for more bag-packing, bus-taking, train-hopping into places unknown.

I’ve got a few different part time jobs teaching English. One is at an office in central Tokyo where filthy rich people call and email to book tickets and make restaurant reservations for places that have been verified by a tyre manufacturer. It’s a little glimpse back into the world of office work where the low hum of air conditioning, perpetual grey colour schemes and muffled silences take me back to jobs in identical looking places in England, where i used to sit hoping the clock would go faster and the phone wouldn’t ring yet knowing precisely the opposite.

I started another job last month in Saitama, out of Tokyo to the north-west (so, now i leave Tokyo twice a week), at a university where i endeavour to coax words out of students who’ve just spent the last few years of their lives learning English in order to pass an exam and now seem genuinely surprised and scared to find out that actual human beings speak these unfathomable words as form of communication and struggle frantically to locate their imagination and social skills before they have to keep them in check again a few years later when they have to get a job in one of those offices. I hope a few of them will do a bit of travelling in between, speak the English i’m chucking at them and see some silly shit like i did.

I’ve met a variety of people in a different teaching gig which is just one-to-one conversation classes who provide me with excellent research for the other blog i’ve been playing around with (http://conversationswithjapan.wordpress.com/). Some of the people who take these classes work for multi-national companies or have travelled quite a bit in other places too. I met a guy last night who told me he was going to Borneo on Friday. “Wow.” i said, “Borneo. What are you going there for?” i asked, hoping he would say the words “holiday” or “volunteer” or “orang-utans” or “to stop the ecological destruction of one of the world’s oldest and endangered ecosystems” but knowing that his suit and his haircut didn’t offer much hope for this. He smiled and said, “Business, i, er, go for business trip...to...help building of new coal mine.” Deep, wonderful joy.

But it could all be a lot worse, couldn’t it? I’m living in Tokyo and i’m paid to chat with people (or contribute to the end of the natural world and civilisation; it depends how full or empty your glass currently is) which looks a bit like this from my point of view.

I'll be back in England for a week or two over the summer and i'll hopefully have more trips out of Tokyo to try to break the cycle of work, eat, drink, sleep, work, eat, drink, sleep which seems to have quietly replaced the work, eat, drink, sleep, panic, pack-bag, disappear routine that dominated the last ten years. Am i slowing down or is the world speeding up?

Anyway, thanks for reading. Keep moving.

Hokkaido Summer Cycling Slideshow

I made a little video slideshow of the bike trip which looks a bit like this.

Hakodate

Hakodate was the start of this little peddle around Hokkaido and now it`s the end. But last week i was in a different city.

Sapporo was good. It`s laid out on an easy grid of north-south east-west streets that seem to idle through the day waiting for sunset so it can enjoy itself under the neon again. Every other building seemed to house a bar or restaurant. People told me i should go back in winter. "It`s a different city in winter" they`d say. Day and night, cold and warm, four cities in one. It would be very easy to go to Sapporo for a week and still be there a few years later.

But i only managed to stay for a couple of nights before the tyres were rolling again through more headwinds, rain, sunshine and scenery west through Otaru and then south through the beautiful mountains of Niseko which upped the sweat levels to saturation point. The tyres have also rolled past quite a bit of crap on this journey which i would never have seen if i was in a vehicle. I guess i`ve never given it too much thought before (never had to) but the side of the road is where everything gets washed up; litter, furniture, a lonely shoe, crushed cans, mushed newspapers, car crash leftovers and plenty of dead animals from insects to deer with all your regular domestic pets along the way too. You never notice when you glide past in an air conditioned box at murderous speeds but trust me, all the shit that you throw out of the window or squash under your tyres is all there waiting to greet the long distance cyclist, driftwood for the world of wheels.

After Niseko i took stock a little bit and wasn`t too pleased with the results. The tent has a couple of holes in it. The camping mattress has a bulge in the middle of it the size of a rugby ball whenever i inflate it. The lenses of my glasses are scratched so badly that everything looks slightly frosted. My mobile phone battery is dead. My odometer reset itself so that i have no idea how far i actually travelled. The bike is buggered. I`ve met people who`ve cycled around the world for months and years at a time. How do they do it?

And camping itself had got a little tiresome. I`d gone through what i`ve subsequently called the Three Stages of Over-Camping.

Stage One: You think to yourself, "I`d love to sleep in a bed." Thoughts of duvets and pillows and blankets occupy your mind at sunset.

Stage Two: You think to yourself, "I`d love to sleep in a room." Beds are no longer important at this stage. Four walls, a ceiling and a floor would be just lovely, thank you.

Stage Three: You think to yourself, "I`d love to sleep...well, yeah, i`d love to sleep". That`s all. You no longer care where and on what that sleep occurs. On a beach, in a storm, on a bed of nails, in hell, on a wild bear, you don`t care as long as you get multiple hours of it continuously. I didn`t reach a Stage Four. I can only assume that would be a combination of murder and suicide.

Hakodate is a cute little city but i`ll leave tomorrow heading back to Tokyo and work and normality and a bed. It`s been a thoroughly good journey that`s disappeared into the past faster than most, the ending crept up on me even though i could see it clearly on a map getting closer. But there`s something about the rhythm of the peddles and the barely perceptible sound of your own movement that makes you crave more. For all the sweat and rain and sunburn and malfunctions, this morning as i set off into more scenic hills for the last time i thought, "Yeah, i could do another week of this."

Keep moving. See you soon.

Sapporo

It`s been a while. I`ve peddled 2200km around Hokkaido in the last five weeks(ish) and i`m not quite finished. My legs may never forgive me.

I went along the south coast of Hokkaido through more fishing villages and farming towns dodging roadkill (there`s lots of that) and being dodged by trucks and cars (quite a few of them too) until i reached Cape Erimo which sticks out of the coast and into gale force winds. It was probably the windiest place i`ve ever been. Houses slanted. Dogs walked at angles. Birds took off and never came back. It was like riding through sand.

My guide book highlighted beautiful scenic coastal roads that would be perfect for motorbike or cycle touring but it started raining and it didn`t stop for days and so the scenery was submerged in three horizons of wet, damp and fog, ably accompanied by a shit load more wind. Camping isn`t an adventure when everything you own is wet and there isn`t a shower and you`ve just spent the best part of a day peddling downhill into a head wind. Things were in danger of slipping into the negative end of the fun scale but Nemuro came to the rescue.

Nemuro is a town on the far south east corner of Hokkaido that is frozen solid for most parts of the year and as a consequence nobody there really knew what to do with the summer sunshine and t-shirt temperatures. People walked about looking at the sky expecting snow to fall from it and looking at the ground in slight disbelief as it wasn`t covered in a layer of ice or snow. I slept in a bed, washed and dried everything and ate a bucket load of sushi.

Up the east coast there was the Shiretoko Peninsular which is a stunning looking place dripping with mountains and trees. A winding road of only 18km took me two and half hours to climb such was the gradient and temperature but the 13km on the other side only took about 15 minutes. There was a lot of sweat, swearing and photograh taking on Shiretoko.

The most entertaining times have been when things have gone wrong. Heading east instead of west and then finding out your mistake and shrugging and carrying on east anyway until you find a campsite near a beach with a drunk old man who basically lives in a tent near a beach and won`t stop talking to you or waving at you when you walk across the campsite heading to the toilet and makes you wish you`d gone west just like you planned.

Or when the wind and rain become so stong and pain-in-the-arse-ish that you actually physically shake your fist at the sky and shout obsenities at it only to realise that there`s a car full of people behind you trying not to look and laugh as they overtake.

I`ve met plenty of other people on cycling or motorbike tours and as a consequence ended up in a hostel one night with a group of lads thrown together in the middle of nowhere. They all chatted away agreeing with each other and nodding vigourously while i sat on the edges listening in trying to catch any words that seemed recognisble which were mainly difficult, easy, wet, hot, tired, delicious, cheap, expensive (i deduced that they were either all talking about their interetsing journeys or they`d all visited one hell of a brothel) all the while we ate bbq fish as the mosquitos ate us and the crows tried to get to the leftovers in the rubbish bins and the local cat stalked the birds. Not sure who wins that food chain.

Mounatins, beaches, lakes, rivers, dirt tracks, gravel, roads, rain, fog, sun, sun burn, sun tan, sodden feet, sweaty clothes, dirt, baths, cities, running repairs, incomprehensible conversations, laughter, anger (hang on, this sounds like i`ve been to war)and being just on the correct side of lost, Hokkaido and a bicycle have given me too much. Well, almost too much. I`ve got two weeks left yet.

Tomakomai

Apparently there`s some sort of big sporting event currently going on in London and apparently GB are doing pretty well. And, apparently, i`ve chosen this time to be cycling round Hokkaido with a tent. You`re not even reading this are you? You`re watching judo or table tennis or something.

I started in Hakodate last week and met two English guys on the train from Tokyo who had bikes and were spending two weeks cycling around Japan`s northern island as well (see, it`s not just me missing London 2012). We stayed in a guesthouse that i knew from last year and went our different routes the next morning. That day i went 50km through little fishing towns and villages that were drying out seaweed in the sun. After getting my legs sunburnt i arrived at a a campsite near a mountain and met a 70 year old man cycling around Hokkaido for the tenth time. "I`m crazy" he happily told me and then started a conversation with himself about the Royal family of Japan and the UK as if to confirm the point.

Seaweed seems to be a major industry in southern Hokkaido and i guess it must make enough money for the people who live next to the ocean there. There can be no other reason to force that smell upon your local communinty. Still, it wakes you up in the mornings peddling through it. I strayed off the coast and headed to Mount Kamogotake and found cow farms and so the drying seaweed smell was replaced by manure. Southern Hokkaido stinks. I bumped into the 70 year old man again that day around lunch time. "What is the puprose of your trip? he asked. "Is it spiritual enlightenment? Personal fulfilment?" I didn`t really have the heart to say, "Erm, i`m avoiding work, responsibilty and joining the human race for as long as i can get away with it."

Mount Kamogotake is a beautiful twin peaked volcano sat next to a lake. The busy main road that i rode on for most of the next day heading north made it seem more attractive and remote as i spent most of the day being passed by trucks and buses whilst the occasional old restaurant or decaying building would sit lonely at the side of the road with a tree growing out of it and overgrown plants covering it, long deserted and forgotton by a bubble that burst a few decades before. And then i arrived in Oshamambe.

The university that i worked at near Tokyo has a campus in Oshamambe. Some of the students i was teaching had to spend a year in the town and would always complain about how boring it was. "There`s nothing there," they would say, wide eyed. "Nothing!". They weren`t wrong. It wouldn`t be so bad if it was nice to look at but it`s ugly as well. Empty buildings and disued houses. Grey communist style blocks of nothing. It had derelict fish processing factories that smelt like, well, like derelict fish processing facotories and nearby by volcanic springs that smelt of sulphur mixed in the air. A year? I spent a night at the campsite and headed north. Oshamambe is a hole.

The next few days were spent doing more cycling through green valleys and forests and camping by lakes and volcanoes with other holidaying people and families escaping the heat of the the south. The campsite i stayed at last night was on the beach of a lake. I asked the guy at the office if there were showers. "No". Is there an onsen or public bath near? "Six kilometres". Hmmm. "Use the lake," he offered. Fair enough.

I`m　in Tomakomai now. It`s a non-descrpit town in between more beatiful scenery and interesting smells. I`m heading east from here to find more campsites with ensuite lakes and more tourists escaping the south. I`ve met quite a few people here who are cycling around, as well as guys on motorbikes who are touring the island and casually wave as they glide past my peddling sweat. There are surfers who happily declare their ocupation as "NEAT" and hang out of belching vans, grinning as they lurch past more of my peddling sweat. Apart from the summer holiday making familes who take over campsites it would seem, on first glance at least, that Hokkaido is where Japan comes when it`s had enough of being Japanese. Long haired men and tattoed women, drifters and job quitters, bike riders and bums all floating around in the summer wind and being very happy not rushing around in Kanto or Kansai being pushed about and into line with everybody else.

Still, i wonder if they`ve managed to see any of the Olympics?

Mount Fuji

The last few months have involved almost no travelling - just working, eating and drinking and not always in that order. I’ve done a couple of small hikes and bike rides but nothing too strenuous or different. On Saturday i went to Mount Fuji with two friends and climbed it. People always talked about the view from the top and that it’s a fantastic once in a lifetime kind of thing to do. But things don’t always go according to plan though, do they?

The most popular way to climb Fuji is, strangely, at night presumably because everybody wants to watch to a sunrise on the roof of Japan whilst being utterly knackered and completely sleep deprived at 4am. This didn’t seem like much fun (i’ve seen the sunrise before and i quite enjoy sleeping) so me and two friends got a train to a small city called Gotemba near the mountain. We wanted to stay the night there, hike up on Sunday, see the view and be back in Tokyo that night. We arrived in Gotemba at 6.30pm. We went to four hotels. They were all fully booked. A nice man working in the fourth one we tried told us that there was a “formula race” taking place and there wasn’t a free room in the whole city. We had a choice – get the train back to Tokyo or climb at night.

After quickly buying some torches and inhaling some sandwiches we got the bus to the start of the Subashiri trail – one of four that goes up Fuji. The weather was good, spirits were high, the trail was busy. Busy with people who looked like they were prepared for a long war in Antarctica. Headlamps, ski-masks, walking poles, boots, water-proof gaiters, wind-proof hats, bullet-proof gloves. It looked like a North Peak fashion show. We found out why.

The lower parts of the trail were great. We walked through a forest out of the tree line and into a grey lunarish landscape. The sun had set but the horizon was still glowing from greater Tokyo that was busy enjoying Saturday night on the other side of the hills. The further up the mountain we ventured the cloudier, windier, colder, wetter and steeper it became. The wind became a relentless howl; gusts would threaten to throw you off balance and they would always be accompanied with a few handfuls of rain, freezing cold and sandy volcanic ash that would take route in your ears and nostrils and teeth.

After a few hours of this Jessica, one of my friends, had had enough, didn’t fancy going any further and decided to spend the night at one of the stations/hostels that are on the routes up the mountains and are open for the two months of summer when it’s possible to get up Fuji. Me and Dave continued along with thousands of other people wedged onto a single path that zigzagged its way through the volcanic ash and rocks upwards towards the summit. It was so busy that as we got closer to the top, and therefore colder, wetter and more tired, the slower we were able to walk which meant the colder and wetter and more tired we became. Neither of us had weather proof gloves or rain proof socks or, well, any item of clothing suitable for climbing Mount Fuji at night time in a storm. At 3400m we took a rest and tried to get out of the wind at one of the stations/hostels. A foreign guy (it turned out he was from Iceland) walked past in shorts and a woolly jumper with his hands in his pockets as if he was walking in the park. Sat next to me was a woman wearing thousands of dollars worth of clothing breathing in a can of pure Oxygen. It was the last time i smiled until we reached the top.

The next few hundred metres up were hell. It was late night/early morning, the rain invaded every pore i own, cold covered my bones in a layer of frost and the wind was a never ending brutal bitch. I was a soggy tired mess and Dave wasn’t much better as we trudged single file for what seemed like hours until eventually we arrived at the summit of Mount Fuji. We stood on the top of Japan and celebrated by finding the first piece of shelter out of that fucking wind. Immediately at the top there are a couple of little buildings which were huts serving noodles and coffee for ridiculous prices. We grabbed a corner, sat down, ate drank and giggled at ourselves. We were spent. It was 3.30am. We started the hike at about 8.45pm. I was too tired to figure out how long that was.

We didn’t see the sunrise. 4am duly came and went and the cloud, wind, cold and rain slowly turned from black to white. There was a hint of light blue for a few minutes but that was about as once-in-a-lifetime-amazing as my Fuji summit sunrise got. Visibility was about 10m and wasn’t going get better anytime soon. The wind still hadn’t stopped and the cold and rain seemed equally up the fight. Me and Dave weren’t. We got as dry and warm as we could, stayed in the noodle/coffee huts for a few hours and started back down.

Well, we ran back down actually. We were so desperate to get out of the cold gale force rain that we skipped and jogged down most of the trail bypassing the descending North Face catwalk with ease. The landscape was covered in volcanic ash and stones that had been there for centuries. My feet were sliding over crumbled remains of a volcanic explosion that occurred hundreds of years ago, feeding the Earth with more earth in a wonderful geological exercise in recycling. I didn’t give a shit. I didn’t even stop to take a picture. All i wanted to do was get off fucking Fuji.

Me and Dave got split up but i figured it didn’t matter as we’d both be pretty happy to be out of the clouds and rain and approaching acceptable temperature levels considering our clothing. I met Jessica at the start of the trail as she’d gone back down that morning. But, surprisingly, there was no sign of Dave. We waited. And waited. We got something to eat. And waited. After a while we started to worry. Where was he? Did he get lost? Was he injured? He didn’t have a phone so i couldn’t call him. Four hours later we asked a nice woman at the tourist information if she could help us make some phone calls to the station/hostels to ask if they’d seen him. She took us straight to a little police station where two policemen who looked genuinely excited by the prospect of somebody being lost on Mount Fuji started asking questions. They got out maps, asked where i’d last seen him, how he was feeling, what he looked like, what was he wearing, names, addresses, phones numbers, work, mother’s maiden name, fathers inside leg measurement, they made phone calls, got answers and started making plans for a search. But, they asked, was it possible that he took the wrong trail and then just went home from one of the other four start points? No, definitely not, we assured them. Dave, me and a few other teachers all live in the same apartment block. I called another mate and asked if Dave was back there. He said he’d call me back if he was. We waited. They started a search mission. Two guys disappeared in a four wheel drive. We’d been in the police station for an hour sorting stuff out, writing things down and giving information. Jessica looked worried. The nice women from the tourist office told me that this would probably be in the news. They gave us biscuits. They look worried.

My phone rang. “Hey, Dave’s right here. I’m looking at him. You wanna speak to him?”

Erm, yeah, sorry Mr Policeman and Miss Nice Tourist Woman but you were right. Dave just took a wrong turning and went all the way back home by himself...Yeah, just arrived, got the train and everything...I’m so sorry...Really sorry...Erm, i guess those two search and rescue dudes can come back down now...Uh-huh...Yeah, it would appear that our small little journey up Japan’s highest mountain has turned into a complete clusterfuck...Yeah, yeah...Thanks for your help...Bye.

Me and Jessica took the bus back to Gotemba. We wanted to take the express bus from there back to Tokyo but it had been in an accident so we had to take the trains again which took longer and cost extra. More luck. I got off the train at Tokyo Station and stubbed my toe on an escalator which oozed blood all over my flip-flop and the dripped on the platform. It’s a rare thing on a Sunday evening to think to yourself, “I can’t wait for Monday.”

Fortunately, Monday was a national holiday and this week is the end of term and the end of another work contract teaching English. I’m heading to Hokkaido for six weeks at the end of July with a bike, a tent, a map and, hopefully, more luck than last weekend.

Kuala Lumpur again

I'm sat in an internet cafe surrounded by kids playing World of Warcraft wasting time before my flight back to Japan. This is the end of the little trip which has been fun.

I went to Melaka which is the old capital of Malaysia which was filled with Dutch and Portuguese traders and then British colonialists long before KL was even a city. It also has Chinese and Indian influences as well which makes it full of history and culture with grand old European buildings serving package tours to bus loads of tourists. For some reason amongst all the history and grand old architecture somebody, somewhere decided that the best way to experience all of this would be on a trishaw (a bicycle with a side car for two) which are then coloured pink or yellow or red or every colour there is. And decorated with plastic flowers and lights and umbrellas. And music. Dance music. Loud Dance music. So, there you are walking amongst old Churches and colonial villas and independence memorials to be greeted by Boom Shake Shake The Room rattling your ears as three or four of these luminous bicycle taxis roll past with some tourists on them. It's all a bit incongruous. A bit like been shown around Stonehenge by a clown. Fortunately Melaka also has some fantastic night markets, amazing food, friendly people, a very laid back style and an outdoor, open-air, cheap-beer-serving, big screen Saturday night football venue.

I got a bus from Melaka to Singapore. Well, i thought i got a bus from Melaka to Singapore but i guess the driver was in a rush as he just left us at the Singapore side of the border after we'd cleared immigration. With no Singapore dollars and no idea i ventured out into the rain storm. Welcome to Singapore.

I'd heard mixed things about Singapore. Some say it's the best city in Asia. Some say it's dull and bland. It's neither. You can tell it's a planned city from the moment you start walking down the streets. In fact, at times it feels planned to the point to being stage managed. As if the taxis and pedestrians were meant to be in those places at those times, being directed there and following orders. It's not very organic. All shiny and new and engineered. There's the CBD area which could be anywhere in the world with global banks, global shops and global people all working and playing by the river at the quays. And there were lots of fat western people jogging around the quays as well for some reason. Then there's Little India which is a wonderful place to get lost in with its knots of streets and smells, sights and sounds making it almost authentically Indian. All that's missing is some cows ambling down the streets holding up traffic. Chinatown, with it's usual Chinatown shops and restaurants and coughing men and haggling women, seemed to complete the centre of Singapore. The West, China and India all in one city but all separate and engineered for your own personal flavour and preference. Outside of that is the rest of the place which seems to be filled with apartment blocks, shopping malls and people speaking a weird indecipherable language that is a mix of English, Chinese and who knows what else. If Singapore was a person it would probably have some kind of multiple personality disorder or at least be seeking therapy for an identity crisis.

I got back to Malaysia last night content at seeing a brief glimpse of an interesting little country. I've walked down streets here that have Hindu temples, Buddhist temples, Mosques and Churches. All on one street and everybody's fine about it. How do you do that, Malaysia? And why do you insist on outdoor karaoke at sights of extreme natural beauty or historical significance? Who designed the Melaka Independence Memorial and can you get you money back? Which idiot decided to completely privatise your bus network? Turning up at a bus station to be greeted by 10 different bus companies going to 25 different destinations at 4 different prices at various different times isn't better for anybody, is it? What makes your taxi drivers so happy and chatty? And how can we convince the rest of the world to use as much cucumber in their cooking as you do?

I'll be back in Tokyo tonight hopefully finding more unanswerable questions that nobody gives a toss about. Keep moving.

Melaka

I've got a weekish left in Malaysia and then i'm back in Japan.

I was in Khoto Bharu waiting for a Saturday night and a game of football at the city stadium but it turned out that the local team was playing in Borneo that day so i never got to sample the delights of top flight Malaysian professional football. The next day i went to an island just off the east coast called Pulau Perhentian. My guidebook, and almost everybody else i'd met who'd been there, told me that it was a tropical paradise so i hopped on a bus and then a boat and headed out to the island.

The boat was a small speed boat thing with a small roof driven by a large man with a big grin and just two other passengers. Speeding out of the harbour and over the sea we could see the island looming large on the horizon. Unfortunately there was a storm just behind it heading towards us and the horizon turned a dark grey colour, the wind picked up and the rain started lashing down so hard i could actually taste it. It looked like we were sailing into the apocalypse. Waves splattered into the boat and we all got completely sodden. We arrived at the jetty and i wandered down the beach in the rain and found a place to stay.

I set out at finding paradise. It was raining hard. I was wet. The guesthouse didn't have electric during the day. The two main beaches were packed with little guesthouses and restaurants that had bright plastic tables and chairs covering the upper part of the sand. Everybody else seemed to be a fat hairy European, a kid, a loud Chinese man, a JCB digger or a suntanned, long-haired, hippy-looking diving instructor. I sat on the beach between rainstorms drawing looks from complete strangers with my lobsters-for-arms fax-machine-paper-for-a-body t-shirt suntan. Paradise.

The guesthouse was owned by Muslims so they didn't serve beer. I watched Man United get a lucky win. Horrid karaoke drifted down the beach after sun set from one of the resorts as everybody sat on plastic chairs eating burnt bbq fish and getting attacked by mosquitoes. Yeah, paradise. But i did find some nicer parts to the place, went for a swim, read two books, did bugger all and managed sunburn other parts of my body other than my forearms so it could've been worse.

After the beach i went to the jungle. A train from Koto Bharu took me through the dense green of the north east which was occasionally peppered with the odd corrugated iron shack or colourful town. I stayed a couple of nights near Taman Nagara rain forest which is the oldest in the world at 1.3M years. I met a couple of people on their holidays and travels and went on a canopy walkway during the day and a night hike after dark within the jungle itself where we saw more weird insects than you could imagine, deer, a mouse deer (i'm still not sure what that was) and, amazingly, a wild elephant. Good fun.

As hiring a guide and hiking through more of the jungle was about the same price as a second hand car, i got a bus to Melaka yesterday instead. I wondered around this morning to see a China town and Indian restaurants and cheap bars and a market and pollution and beepbeeping taxis and all the other stuff that comes with humid, busy, south east Asian cities. Paradise.

Kota Bharu

I started this week in Kuala Lumpur which is home to quite a few night market hawkers selling fake everything, men sleeping on park benches and alley ways in the middle of the day and, surprisingly, a hell of a lot of trees. I escaped a few monsoon-like rain storms in the air conditioned Islamic Art Museum and the massive National Mosque and also spent a sweaty afternoon at the fantastically named Lake Titiwangsa (it's ok, go on, giggle, i did) where you can get a fine view of the KL skyline through the mist and pollution. Oh, and if you ever get the chance to visit the National Art Gallery don't go there around lunch time as the place is like a fucking creche, half-filled with little snot machines running around the place turning it into some kind of post modern parenting exhibition.

I got an 8 hour bus to the north west corner of the country to Kota Bharu a few days ago. Malaysia's default colour is green. Once you're out of a city all you can see is endless amounts of trees and jungle clambering over every peak and into every valley. Kota Bharu is a nice enough little city not far from the Thai border. It's an Islamic place with mosques scattered around between quiet shops and billboards advertising watches and mobile phones that me and you can't afford, let alone the woman waiting tables in the half empty cafes. The occasional rat scuttles about in the shadows, stalked by the stray cats and at sunset the birds go a bit mental for half an hour as a lightening storm usually rages on the horizon or, if you're really unlucky, over head. Nobody is in a rush and everybody seems perfectly happy and content with the languid pace of life and easy going days. Why wouldn't they be?

Yesterday was Friday so everything was shut apart from the mosques and the 7-11s so i rented a bicycle and headed off to a beach out of town to the north. Along the journey half the people i passed seemed to want to say hello. Kids waved, teenagers on scooters zipped past shouting greetings and giggling at my insufficient speed. As a consequence of being sucked into this happy-go-lucky sunshine atmosphere i neglected to recognise that i was wearing a short sleeved shirt and i'm now the proud owner of bright red forearms and pasty white body. Sexy. I've spent today at the War Musuem (don't ask), hiding my arms from sunlight and generally just killing time before the Kota Bharu football team plays a home game tonight. Apparently they're the champions of Malaysia and according to the guys who work in my hostel the standard of football is "a bit shit". Should be fun. Tomorrow i'm heading to an unpronounceable island with a beach for a few days to try and make the rest of my body the same colour as my arms. Then maybe a train or a jungle. Or both. Or something.

Thanks for reading. I'll try and write some more guff next week.

Kuala Lumpur

I'm in Malaysia. I have a month between jobs in Japan so April is free, the plane ticket was cheap and i'm currently sat in a dank internet cafe avoiding the sweaty afternoon downpour.

Kuala Lumpur is a former British colonial city with Chinese, Indians, Malays, Muslims, tourists and probably everybody else scurrying around it. There's noodles and naan, Chinatown and Little India, headscarves and miniskirts, baseball caps and suits, smelly markets and air conditioned malls, Buddhist monks and mosques. It's a fantastic cultural mess all wrapped up with the usual south east Asian blend of thick pollution, thick traffic and even thicker air.

I wandered around all of this yesterday and somehow ended up at the Petronas Towers, the twin sky scrapers that loom over the city from almost every angle meaning that you keep catching glimpses of them through gaps in buildings or through the monotony of construction sites or between metro tracks over head. It seems a little bit weird (or apt) that that the most photogenic and famous landmark here is a essentially an office block for an oil company. Still, it's worth seeing close up and has a massive shopping centre in it filled with stuff that i couldn't really afford and is mainly home to people walking around escaping the heat trying to figure out how to pronounce BVLGARI and why they charge so much for handbags.

Last night was spent on the rooftop bar of my hostel swigging beer and chatting to people telling stories about traveling around Asia as the smell of sizzling food and wet cement and belching buses and humid fug floated up from the city below, ably accompanied by the sounds of people laughing and scooters beeping and music blaring and kids running. This is, essentially, why i don't have a job and a mortgage in England. I tasted all this a few years ago, drank lots if it in but somehow never really slaked my thirst. I probably never will.

Myoden and 2012

I haven't written on here for ages which is a bit rubbish of me. Then again i haven't really done any travelling and i've been messing about with flags (see below) and conversations (see right).

New Year was a fun ordeal in navigating my way through thousands of people to see a couple temples. Everybody here seems to enjoy queuing for hours to get into a shrine or temple and then spend five minutes in it praying for family health and happiness and then paying for a New Year's fortune that you don't believe in anyway. I guess everybody does stuff at that time of year not because they like doing it but because it's just become a tradition.

Another winter tradition is skiing which, in Japan, is awesome. The snow i've experienced so far is the finest powdery substance i've ever been on. It's like skiing on dandruff. You can hardly hear the skis as they turn through the snow and get tangled together and send you head first into the stuff reminding you of the dandruff comparison quite abruptly. Winter has been unusually cold and it's claimed dozens of lives in the north as houses have collapsed under the weight of the snow and people have been injured or worse clearing tons of the white stuff from their roofs. Last month there was one metre of snow overnight in Niigata prefecture. The trains are still running though.

Hopefully this year i'll have some travelling to write about. I finish my job at the end of March and then i'll be spending April travelling around Malaysia. I'll be working back at a university somewhere from May and then the summer should include a bicycle, a tent and Hokkaido. Autumn and winter will be back teaching again somewhere in Tokyo. It'll be next year soon...

Flag Metro Map

Eng-ger-land

Osaka

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.

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.

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

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.

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.