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...
Thursday, February 9, 2012
Monday, January 30, 2012
Wednesday, October 26, 2011
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.
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.
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.
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