Hello again. Life goes on.
The local little bar round the corner from my flat is always good value. A couple of weeks ago i got talking to a middle aged man who was in the bar for the first time. He was divorced with two kids and worked a few metro stations away. He asked me if i was single and i confirmed that i was. He nodded, smiled and said, “What kind of girls do you like? Fat, chubby, normal or thin?” Not a question you expect from someone you've just met. And it’s a bit difficult to reply without saying, “Erm, well, er, i guess, not fat?” And then shrug.
A more normal and slightly understandable question that people have asked is if England has earthquakes. I tell them that we don’t and that we are also free of tsunamis, volcanoes and typhoons to which the reply is something like, “Ah, England is very safe.” The thing is people in England would probably disagree. The ground might be safe but for some reason i can’t really imagine a single Japanese immigrant sitting in small bar in suburban England and not only be warmly welcomed and plied with alcohol and food at every available opportunity but also be forgiven for his inability to speak the local language and asked of his preference in female waistlines.
My Japanese is very slowly getting the point where i know when students are insulting me. There was also one three year old kid i had for one lesson who refused to say anything other than the word “pasta”. What’s your name? “Pasta!” What's this colour? “Pasta!” At least he was enthusiastic. I had another student who called the Statue of Liberty “Freedom Girl” which is just a much better way of describing it. Makes it sound like a superhero, doesn’t it?
It’s been a long winter here. A few weeks ago it felt like spring was in the post and would be here any moment. I think the postman got lost. It’s still Janurayish some mornings. Weird. The onset of spring in Japan is defined by cherry blossom. The traditional way of celebrating spring is to get drunk in the park on an evening after work surrounded by pink leaves and this is such a popular thing that it becomes quite competitive to get a decent spot amongst the trees. April is also the hiring season for recent university graduates and the combination of a new face in the office and the pretty leaves in the park means that a graduates first task in their new career is to get down to the park at around lunch time, find a decent spot and then sit there until five o’clock when everybody from the office joins the poor bastard, eats and gets drunk.
But right now i think everybody in Japan could do with sitting in the sunshine in the park and getting a bit tipsy in the late afternoon. It’s been a mad month. Roll on spring.
Wednesday, April 6, 2011
Thursday, March 24, 2011
Kyoto and Powercuts
Last week all my classes were canceled as a result of the earthquake, tsunami and fears about people being irradiated. I thought about what i could do to help and realised that i could do nothing apart from use less electric at home. So i went to Kyoto instead.
As Kyoto was the capital of Japan before Tokyo it’s a pretty historical place, half-filled with buildings and temples built and used hundreds of years ago and still standing proudly around the city. Kyoto is a bit of a battle ground. Old and new buildings compete with the skyline and tourist attention. Traditional kimonos trade blows with modern fashion and occasionally win. Old cosy bars and restaurants gently invite you down small alleys while neon blares out of shopping centres. When i was there, even winter and spring were locked in combat with the winter showers easily beating the occasional March sunshine. It was freezing.
I saw the understated Imperial Palace and the opulent Nijo-jo complex that was once home to Shoguns and the ruling elite. There was a breathtaking temple called Sanjusangen-jo which contained 1001 near life-sized Buddhist statues. There was the wonderful Kiyomizu Temple that sits on an impossibly massive wooden veranda overlooking the city with a thatched roof. It was busy when i was there so i imagine it’s a bit mental when spring finally wins the fight against winter and tourists invade the place.
I spent most of the time in Kyoto walking around trying to keep warm and was randomly stopped on the street buy a small camera crew who asked if i could speak Japanese. I lied and said “Yes, a little.” OK, can you be on a cable TV show? Two men, who i’m assuming were comedians but only because of the clothes they were wearing, started to ask me lots of questions and i stood there shivering looking like an utter idiot trying to respond to them. I can only hope i’ve been edited out unless the title of the show is Look, Foreigners Are Stupid in which case i might be top billing.
I stayed just one night and slept in a capsule hotel that was so minimalist and stylish it would make Steve Jobs blush. It was an advert in brushed steal, white plastic and being overpriced. Still, it was a place to crash after getting drunk in a little counter bar where i seemed to make instant friends for being able to use chopsticks and drink hot sake. The middle aged woman sat next to me seemed to want to always try and show me her cleavage, the barman giggled every time i said anything, a business man chatted to me about work and a nice woman with an medical eye patch kept winking at me (although, come to think of it, she could have been blinking but it’s nice to be optimistic).
I also managed to find another random museum - the International Manga Museum. Manga is massive in Japan. The cartoon book magazines are serialised with new editions and volumes being released at regular intervals. It’s a printed version of a soap opera with different manga written for and consumed by every inch of Japanese society. There’s sci-fi manga, comedy manga, political manga, school girl manga, crime manga, housewife manga, businessman manga. If you’re a person, then there’s probably a manga for you and as a result there’s manga everywhere in Japan. It doesn’t seem to matter where you go you always see somebody reading manga. The museum itself was an old school that had been converted into a manga library with walls filled with the magazines and displays in English and Japanese telling you about the history of genre and plenty of seats occupied by people with their heads buried in another edition. As it was international they also had manga that had been translated into different languages and so i sat and read the first three instalments of Ikigami which is a kind of dystopian story about people who know that they only have 24 hours to live. Unfortunately i only had a few hours before the train to Tokyo left and so i had to put down the little book magazine and promise myself that i’d return to Kyoto when the weather was warmer to sample more of its temples and nightlife.
I’m back at work now in Chiba and Tokyo which means that half my lessons begin by wasting at least fifteen minutes swapping earthquake stories and being politely asked why i haven’t left Japan. Greater Tokyo and the north east of the country is still being wobbled by occasional aftershocks and everybody is wondering when the power stations will be back online (Fukushima wasn’t the only plant to get knocked out by the tsunami, just the only one to leak tiny amounts of radioactive material) which means that the power saving and rolling powercuts could continue for a few more months and spring and summer could be a bit smelly and sweaty without air-con. Air-freshener, deodorant and icy ice-cold beer at the ready.
As Kyoto was the capital of Japan before Tokyo it’s a pretty historical place, half-filled with buildings and temples built and used hundreds of years ago and still standing proudly around the city. Kyoto is a bit of a battle ground. Old and new buildings compete with the skyline and tourist attention. Traditional kimonos trade blows with modern fashion and occasionally win. Old cosy bars and restaurants gently invite you down small alleys while neon blares out of shopping centres. When i was there, even winter and spring were locked in combat with the winter showers easily beating the occasional March sunshine. It was freezing.
I saw the understated Imperial Palace and the opulent Nijo-jo complex that was once home to Shoguns and the ruling elite. There was a breathtaking temple called Sanjusangen-jo which contained 1001 near life-sized Buddhist statues. There was the wonderful Kiyomizu Temple that sits on an impossibly massive wooden veranda overlooking the city with a thatched roof. It was busy when i was there so i imagine it’s a bit mental when spring finally wins the fight against winter and tourists invade the place.
I spent most of the time in Kyoto walking around trying to keep warm and was randomly stopped on the street buy a small camera crew who asked if i could speak Japanese. I lied and said “Yes, a little.” OK, can you be on a cable TV show? Two men, who i’m assuming were comedians but only because of the clothes they were wearing, started to ask me lots of questions and i stood there shivering looking like an utter idiot trying to respond to them. I can only hope i’ve been edited out unless the title of the show is Look, Foreigners Are Stupid in which case i might be top billing.
I stayed just one night and slept in a capsule hotel that was so minimalist and stylish it would make Steve Jobs blush. It was an advert in brushed steal, white plastic and being overpriced. Still, it was a place to crash after getting drunk in a little counter bar where i seemed to make instant friends for being able to use chopsticks and drink hot sake. The middle aged woman sat next to me seemed to want to always try and show me her cleavage, the barman giggled every time i said anything, a business man chatted to me about work and a nice woman with an medical eye patch kept winking at me (although, come to think of it, she could have been blinking but it’s nice to be optimistic).
I also managed to find another random museum - the International Manga Museum. Manga is massive in Japan. The cartoon book magazines are serialised with new editions and volumes being released at regular intervals. It’s a printed version of a soap opera with different manga written for and consumed by every inch of Japanese society. There’s sci-fi manga, comedy manga, political manga, school girl manga, crime manga, housewife manga, businessman manga. If you’re a person, then there’s probably a manga for you and as a result there’s manga everywhere in Japan. It doesn’t seem to matter where you go you always see somebody reading manga. The museum itself was an old school that had been converted into a manga library with walls filled with the magazines and displays in English and Japanese telling you about the history of genre and plenty of seats occupied by people with their heads buried in another edition. As it was international they also had manga that had been translated into different languages and so i sat and read the first three instalments of Ikigami which is a kind of dystopian story about people who know that they only have 24 hours to live. Unfortunately i only had a few hours before the train to Tokyo left and so i had to put down the little book magazine and promise myself that i’d return to Kyoto when the weather was warmer to sample more of its temples and nightlife.
I’m back at work now in Chiba and Tokyo which means that half my lessons begin by wasting at least fifteen minutes swapping earthquake stories and being politely asked why i haven’t left Japan. Greater Tokyo and the north east of the country is still being wobbled by occasional aftershocks and everybody is wondering when the power stations will be back online (Fukushima wasn’t the only plant to get knocked out by the tsunami, just the only one to leak tiny amounts of radioactive material) which means that the power saving and rolling powercuts could continue for a few more months and spring and summer could be a bit smelly and sweaty without air-con. Air-freshener, deodorant and icy ice-cold beer at the ready.
Friday, March 18, 2011
Myoden and Porridge
The dust has settled, the debris searched, the missing are still missed, the power plant is still thirsty and i learnt another Japanese word. Ji-shin.
I was crossing a busy-ish street last Friday afternoon just outside Tokyo surrounded by buildings that are about eight floors high. The ground started shaking and twitching and those buildings started to dance. I was stood outside a pharmacy watching stuff rattle off the shelves and fall on the floor. I was listening to people’s slightly scared voices. I was holding onto a post box steadying myself. I was watching the panic on an old lady’s face. “Shit,” i thought as the trees shook and the lampposts swayed and my feet moved beneath me. “If the old lady is worried, it must be a big one.”
I have since experienced earthquakes of varying magnitude whilst cooking, showering, sleeping, walking and drinking. It has changed the way i think about the ground i live on. I appreciate now that it isn’t solid. It’s just the thin crust on the surface of the hot liquid. A bit like cold porridge only not as tasty.
And life goes on. Tokyo and the cities around it are now trying to get back to something close to normal as the electric supply has been disrupted to the point where everybody is rationing electricity usage to avoid power cuts. Supermarkets, shops and businesses are using half their lights. Quieter Metro stations have stopped the escalators and lifts. Unfortunately a lot of food was bought in the unnecessary panic that followed and there’s been delays getting everything back to where it was before last Friday. But it’s not an apocalypse for anybody living in or around Tokyo. It’s just an inconvenience. The biggest danger right now is everybody’s imagination getting carried away with itself.
The nice man in my local bar last night had a vivid imagination. Either that or he was trying to wind me up. “You go England. London. Japan dangerous. Radiation. Nuclear. X-ray. No good.” Or maybe he’s tired of speaking English and listening to my shit Japanese and just sees this as an opportunity to get rid of me. He told me that he had to walk home last Friday from central Tokyo as the trains were stopped. It took five hours. “Very fun!” he said, smiling. “Many people. Like slow marathon!” Or perhaps he’s an aspiring comedian. We all told our little stories. One guy ran home (not screaming and panicking with his arms in the air, i mean, you know, jogging) which took him an hour and a half which he seemed pretty please with. One other guy was totally bemused by the fact that the English word for tsunami is tsunami. I told them my crap story about the pharmacy. Then the drinks bottles started clinking together on the shaking shelf, the stools shook slightly and for a minute the porridge beneath us lost its balance and stammered a little. Phones flipped open. Buttons pressed. Updates gathered. No problem. Just a three, inland. No tsunami threat. Just another little ji-shin.
I was crossing a busy-ish street last Friday afternoon just outside Tokyo surrounded by buildings that are about eight floors high. The ground started shaking and twitching and those buildings started to dance. I was stood outside a pharmacy watching stuff rattle off the shelves and fall on the floor. I was listening to people’s slightly scared voices. I was holding onto a post box steadying myself. I was watching the panic on an old lady’s face. “Shit,” i thought as the trees shook and the lampposts swayed and my feet moved beneath me. “If the old lady is worried, it must be a big one.”
I have since experienced earthquakes of varying magnitude whilst cooking, showering, sleeping, walking and drinking. It has changed the way i think about the ground i live on. I appreciate now that it isn’t solid. It’s just the thin crust on the surface of the hot liquid. A bit like cold porridge only not as tasty.
And life goes on. Tokyo and the cities around it are now trying to get back to something close to normal as the electric supply has been disrupted to the point where everybody is rationing electricity usage to avoid power cuts. Supermarkets, shops and businesses are using half their lights. Quieter Metro stations have stopped the escalators and lifts. Unfortunately a lot of food was bought in the unnecessary panic that followed and there’s been delays getting everything back to where it was before last Friday. But it’s not an apocalypse for anybody living in or around Tokyo. It’s just an inconvenience. The biggest danger right now is everybody’s imagination getting carried away with itself.
The nice man in my local bar last night had a vivid imagination. Either that or he was trying to wind me up. “You go England. London. Japan dangerous. Radiation. Nuclear. X-ray. No good.” Or maybe he’s tired of speaking English and listening to my shit Japanese and just sees this as an opportunity to get rid of me. He told me that he had to walk home last Friday from central Tokyo as the trains were stopped. It took five hours. “Very fun!” he said, smiling. “Many people. Like slow marathon!” Or perhaps he’s an aspiring comedian. We all told our little stories. One guy ran home (not screaming and panicking with his arms in the air, i mean, you know, jogging) which took him an hour and a half which he seemed pretty please with. One other guy was totally bemused by the fact that the English word for tsunami is tsunami. I told them my crap story about the pharmacy. Then the drinks bottles started clinking together on the shaking shelf, the stools shook slightly and for a minute the porridge beneath us lost its balance and stammered a little. Phones flipped open. Buttons pressed. Updates gathered. No problem. Just a three, inland. No tsunami threat. Just another little ji-shin.
Thursday, March 10, 2011
Myoden and Museums
After Yokohama and onsens i was trying to think of some kind of travelling to do in Tokyo itself and that’s when i remembered the Meguro Parasitological Museum. A few years ago i was travelling in Japan and managed to visit it and as a result i started an ill thought-out mission to visit other random little museums in Seoul and Beijing, without much luck, as i travelled through Asia. With the help of some friendly hints and a bit of research it turns out that the parasite museum isn’t alone in Tokyo in housing a small corner of quirky and different.
The Tokyo Kite Museum isn’t really a museum. It’s a cramped room on the upper floors of an old office block in central Tokyo dripping with kites and dust and colour. I stepped straight out of the old lift into a dark, dank room and was welcomed by a nice old lady reading a newspaper behind a reception desk who was trying not to fall asleep while a sign overhead on the wall asked me, “Have you tugged today?” My Japanese language skills were, thankfully, not sufficient for me to inform the lady of an answer. The large room was empty of people (although i did visit on a windy day so maybe the kite enthusiasts of Japan were already preoccupied) but it was utterly and completely crammed with kites. The only space that wasn’t used up to display some kind of flying contraption was the floor and two windows. All other space was kite-filled and bursting with colour in the dim light. There were kites from other countries, pictures of people flying kites, kites the size of stamps and kites the size of sofas, kites shaped like animals and people and dragons and i never even new or cared that such creations existed. It was amazing and crap all at once.
The Tobacco and Salt Museum was a bit different. For a start it was popular and was quite busy with old people and school kids on afternoon trips. It had also been cleaned recently and there were no signs questioning if i’d done anything that morning. There were maps and diagrams showing the history of tobacco and smoking but as all the signs and explanations were in Japanese i was spared the boredom of reading about it and instead just looked at old packets of cigarettes and pipes of various shapes and sizes before buying a postcard of a safety match advertisement and making haste for the Button Museum.
I wasn’t sure what to expect from the Button Museum (other than its contents, that’s quite self explanatory). Would it be covered in dust like the Kite Museum or old people like the Tobacco place? I figured it would be both. I’ll never know. I found the museum in a small building in the east of Tokyo but was informed that you need to call ahead to make a reservation for a guided tour and so i scrapped that one off the list. I’m all for finding stupid museums but i figured i should draw a line with guided tours of buttons. In a foreign language. On my day off.
However, that didn’t stop me visiting the Metro Museum, dedicated to the Tokyo Metro, which was a bit like a crèche with trains. In fact, i think there were more pushchairs than rolling stock but it did have some fancy looking models that showed you how they make the tunnels so it might not have been a total waste of 210 yen.
Next on the list was the Criminology Museum which was at Meigi University and had its home in a dark basement. It had some pretty grim looking contraptions that were once used for torturing people or slowly killing them and paintings of people being murdered in a variety of different and imaginative ways.
I also managed to find a Laundry Museum. All i had was a piece of paper with an address on it and a vague idea of which metro station i needed. After walking from the station the address turned out to be the headquarters for Hakuyosha Dry Cleaners but there was no hint of where the museum was – just a car park and few buildings. A woman in a lab jacket and a small group of grandmothers walked out of the building i was stood in front of and the women in the lab jacket approached me and asked if i needed help. I was stood in the car park of laundry company headquarters looking for a museum about washing machines after i’d spent a couple days seeing kites, pipes, salt, torture devices and trains in small crap museums in suburban Tokyo. I assured the kind women that i did indeed need help. She told me that the museum was on the third floor. On display in the brightly lit room was an old shirt press, a glass cabinet filled with old irons, some wooden tumble dryers, a couple of washboards and some paintings of women slapping clothes on a rock next to a river. I’m glad it was free.
Apparently, Tokyo is also home to a beer museum, a noodle museum, an electrical energy museum and a museum designed by famous animation director Hayao Miyazaki. I guess they can wait a few months as i’ve had my little fix of random crap for now.
The Tokyo Kite Museum isn’t really a museum. It’s a cramped room on the upper floors of an old office block in central Tokyo dripping with kites and dust and colour. I stepped straight out of the old lift into a dark, dank room and was welcomed by a nice old lady reading a newspaper behind a reception desk who was trying not to fall asleep while a sign overhead on the wall asked me, “Have you tugged today?” My Japanese language skills were, thankfully, not sufficient for me to inform the lady of an answer. The large room was empty of people (although i did visit on a windy day so maybe the kite enthusiasts of Japan were already preoccupied) but it was utterly and completely crammed with kites. The only space that wasn’t used up to display some kind of flying contraption was the floor and two windows. All other space was kite-filled and bursting with colour in the dim light. There were kites from other countries, pictures of people flying kites, kites the size of stamps and kites the size of sofas, kites shaped like animals and people and dragons and i never even new or cared that such creations existed. It was amazing and crap all at once.
The Tobacco and Salt Museum was a bit different. For a start it was popular and was quite busy with old people and school kids on afternoon trips. It had also been cleaned recently and there were no signs questioning if i’d done anything that morning. There were maps and diagrams showing the history of tobacco and smoking but as all the signs and explanations were in Japanese i was spared the boredom of reading about it and instead just looked at old packets of cigarettes and pipes of various shapes and sizes before buying a postcard of a safety match advertisement and making haste for the Button Museum.
I wasn’t sure what to expect from the Button Museum (other than its contents, that’s quite self explanatory). Would it be covered in dust like the Kite Museum or old people like the Tobacco place? I figured it would be both. I’ll never know. I found the museum in a small building in the east of Tokyo but was informed that you need to call ahead to make a reservation for a guided tour and so i scrapped that one off the list. I’m all for finding stupid museums but i figured i should draw a line with guided tours of buttons. In a foreign language. On my day off.
However, that didn’t stop me visiting the Metro Museum, dedicated to the Tokyo Metro, which was a bit like a crèche with trains. In fact, i think there were more pushchairs than rolling stock but it did have some fancy looking models that showed you how they make the tunnels so it might not have been a total waste of 210 yen.
Next on the list was the Criminology Museum which was at Meigi University and had its home in a dark basement. It had some pretty grim looking contraptions that were once used for torturing people or slowly killing them and paintings of people being murdered in a variety of different and imaginative ways.
I also managed to find a Laundry Museum. All i had was a piece of paper with an address on it and a vague idea of which metro station i needed. After walking from the station the address turned out to be the headquarters for Hakuyosha Dry Cleaners but there was no hint of where the museum was – just a car park and few buildings. A woman in a lab jacket and a small group of grandmothers walked out of the building i was stood in front of and the women in the lab jacket approached me and asked if i needed help. I was stood in the car park of laundry company headquarters looking for a museum about washing machines after i’d spent a couple days seeing kites, pipes, salt, torture devices and trains in small crap museums in suburban Tokyo. I assured the kind women that i did indeed need help. She told me that the museum was on the third floor. On display in the brightly lit room was an old shirt press, a glass cabinet filled with old irons, some wooden tumble dryers, a couple of washboards and some paintings of women slapping clothes on a rock next to a river. I’m glad it was free.
Apparently, Tokyo is also home to a beer museum, a noodle museum, an electrical energy museum and a museum designed by famous animation director Hayao Miyazaki. I guess they can wait a few months as i’ve had my little fix of random crap for now.
Friday, February 25, 2011
Myoden and Yokohama
In the last couple of weeks i’ve done two important things. I shut up and just travelled.
Yokohama is less than an hour west of Tokyo by train and as a result there isn’t an obvious boundary between the two. The buildings just get smaller and then bigger again as you leave one megacity and enter a smaller one. Tokyo does that. It merges and blurs all the boundaries around it so you can never really tell just how big it is. Yokohama is probably most famous for its China Town which should be more accurately named Chinese Restaurant Town. Most of the China Towns that i’ve been to in major cities just seems to a be a load of Chinese restaurants and a couple of oriental supermarkets crammed into a few small streets with an old gnarly gateway hemming in busloads of tourists and Yokohama fits that idea very well. Still, it was a great place to get lost in, it smelt and sounded exactly like China and the food was oily and tasty.
Yokohama has a history of foreigners coming and going and the China Town plays its part in that along with a huge foreigner’s cemetery shrouded in green and trees which overlooks the city centre. Just next to the cemetery is a suburb called Motomachi that wouldn’t look out of place somewhere in Europe with chic storefronts and bakeries serving expats and Japanese with equal measure on small pedestrian streets. There’s an obvious mix of past and present, Japanese and foreign in Yokohama. Some of the grand old buildings look like they’ve been lifted out of Europe in the 1920s and dropped into Japan in the functional 1980s and then been made to sit all day next to glass fronted modern equivalents.
I also went to an onsen (hot spring) two hours north of Tokyo last weekend in a place called Kinugawa. It was a small town hemmed in by mountains and cut in two by a river. The town is famous for the volcanic water that flows up and into the onsens that have grown into hotels that now line the river and give the town its well known name. My friend booked a night in one of the hotels which was an interesting place. It was like being in a Japan in 1975. Everything seemed faded with time and creaked with age. Things looked well worn but also look as if they hadn’t been used in years and it echoed of time that was much busier. But it was still pulling in small crowds of people – most of them, like the building itself, seemed faded with time and creaked with age. Actually, it was like being in an old people’s home in Japan in 1975. The Japanese onsen is a communal experience so i shared a few relaxing hours immersed in piping hot mineral rich water with a load of naked elderly Japanese men which was much more relaxing than i’ve just made it sound. The price of the hotel also included a huge traditional dinner, a fridge full of beer and other assorted alcoholic drinks and a breakfast. So, it was like a large all you can eat and drink restaurant in a Japanese old people’s home in 1975. With a volcanic bath. Breakfast was a bit disconcerting as i looked across what was once a ball room at the buffet breakfast and saw an elderly man try to fit some more cooked fish in a bowl and thought to myself, “I’ve seen him naked.” Which is not thought I often want at breakfast. Or at any other meal time really. Onsens are funny places.
Life rolls on in Myoden but hopefully i’ll see some more random crap soon. Thanks for reading.
Yokohama is less than an hour west of Tokyo by train and as a result there isn’t an obvious boundary between the two. The buildings just get smaller and then bigger again as you leave one megacity and enter a smaller one. Tokyo does that. It merges and blurs all the boundaries around it so you can never really tell just how big it is. Yokohama is probably most famous for its China Town which should be more accurately named Chinese Restaurant Town. Most of the China Towns that i’ve been to in major cities just seems to a be a load of Chinese restaurants and a couple of oriental supermarkets crammed into a few small streets with an old gnarly gateway hemming in busloads of tourists and Yokohama fits that idea very well. Still, it was a great place to get lost in, it smelt and sounded exactly like China and the food was oily and tasty.
Yokohama has a history of foreigners coming and going and the China Town plays its part in that along with a huge foreigner’s cemetery shrouded in green and trees which overlooks the city centre. Just next to the cemetery is a suburb called Motomachi that wouldn’t look out of place somewhere in Europe with chic storefronts and bakeries serving expats and Japanese with equal measure on small pedestrian streets. There’s an obvious mix of past and present, Japanese and foreign in Yokohama. Some of the grand old buildings look like they’ve been lifted out of Europe in the 1920s and dropped into Japan in the functional 1980s and then been made to sit all day next to glass fronted modern equivalents.
I also went to an onsen (hot spring) two hours north of Tokyo last weekend in a place called Kinugawa. It was a small town hemmed in by mountains and cut in two by a river. The town is famous for the volcanic water that flows up and into the onsens that have grown into hotels that now line the river and give the town its well known name. My friend booked a night in one of the hotels which was an interesting place. It was like being in a Japan in 1975. Everything seemed faded with time and creaked with age. Things looked well worn but also look as if they hadn’t been used in years and it echoed of time that was much busier. But it was still pulling in small crowds of people – most of them, like the building itself, seemed faded with time and creaked with age. Actually, it was like being in an old people’s home in Japan in 1975. The Japanese onsen is a communal experience so i shared a few relaxing hours immersed in piping hot mineral rich water with a load of naked elderly Japanese men which was much more relaxing than i’ve just made it sound. The price of the hotel also included a huge traditional dinner, a fridge full of beer and other assorted alcoholic drinks and a breakfast. So, it was like a large all you can eat and drink restaurant in a Japanese old people’s home in 1975. With a volcanic bath. Breakfast was a bit disconcerting as i looked across what was once a ball room at the buffet breakfast and saw an elderly man try to fit some more cooked fish in a bowl and thought to myself, “I’ve seen him naked.” Which is not thought I often want at breakfast. Or at any other meal time really. Onsens are funny places.
Life rolls on in Myoden but hopefully i’ll see some more random crap soon. Thanks for reading.
Friday, February 11, 2011
Myoden and Shibuya
I promised myself that i’d do something interesting and then i’d have something better to write about than trains and washing machines. Unfortunately that’s not happened yet.
I haven’t really ventured any further than work and a little bar just around the corner from my dinky flat. The owner of the bar is a friendly little bald man who loves The Beatles. Every time i’ve been in there and sat at the small bar cobbling utterances together in Japanese while other assorted drunks try and cobble together a sentence in English, The Beatles always play along in background. It’s a nice place to have a quiet beer and too much sake before falling into my shoebox sized flat.
It’s also more convenient than getting drunk in central Tokyo, missing the last train home and having to walk for about two hours in the cold and eventually sleep in a 24 hour internet cafe until about 5am when the metro starts running again. Only a complete fool would do such a thing. Or you could get drunk in central Tokyo after eating Korean-style pork bbq followed by watching Japan beat Australia in the final of the Asian Football Championships and then celebrate at the famous Shibuya crossing in the early hours of the morning by joining hundreds of Japanese fans by repeatedly running into the middle of the crossing when the traffic stops and cheering and jumping up and down like a lunatic surrounded by skyscrapers, neon and pedestrian-traffic marshals and then scampering back to the pavement when the lights turn back to green. After which, you could get the first train home. That night out was less convenient but definitely a lot more fun.
A few of my lessons are also quite fun. One of my students was trying to describe having hay fever and struggled to think of the word for “snot”. Instead she said “nosewater”. I love this word. I’m now always going to refer to “snot” as “nosewater”. Please join me in getting this fantastical new word into general usage and everyday language where it rightly belongs. One day it will be in the Oxford English Dictionary and we will laugh at times past when we called nosewater “snot”. Do it.
A small but significant portion of my other students are crazy children who bounce of the walls (and that’s not a figure of speech, it’s just a genuine observation) or educated adults who want to travel, learn a new language and have fun. It’s a bit of a mix but then that’s what life seems to have become recently. All or nothing. I teach toddlers or grandparents. I drink in a little bar in suburbia playing The Beatles or in packed bars in Tokyo watching football. I eat grilled meat or raw fish. I get the last train home at eleven o’clock or the first train at 5am. I drink beer or sake, teach English or study Japanese. And worse of all? I write a blog called shutupjusttravel but don’t actually go anywhere.
But i’m going to Yokohama on Sunday and hopefully to an onsen in the mountains next weekend so i promise (really promise) that next time i will write about something new, somewhere different and something vaguely more interesting than me disappearing up my own arse. Thanks for reading.
I haven’t really ventured any further than work and a little bar just around the corner from my dinky flat. The owner of the bar is a friendly little bald man who loves The Beatles. Every time i’ve been in there and sat at the small bar cobbling utterances together in Japanese while other assorted drunks try and cobble together a sentence in English, The Beatles always play along in background. It’s a nice place to have a quiet beer and too much sake before falling into my shoebox sized flat.
It’s also more convenient than getting drunk in central Tokyo, missing the last train home and having to walk for about two hours in the cold and eventually sleep in a 24 hour internet cafe until about 5am when the metro starts running again. Only a complete fool would do such a thing. Or you could get drunk in central Tokyo after eating Korean-style pork bbq followed by watching Japan beat Australia in the final of the Asian Football Championships and then celebrate at the famous Shibuya crossing in the early hours of the morning by joining hundreds of Japanese fans by repeatedly running into the middle of the crossing when the traffic stops and cheering and jumping up and down like a lunatic surrounded by skyscrapers, neon and pedestrian-traffic marshals and then scampering back to the pavement when the lights turn back to green. After which, you could get the first train home. That night out was less convenient but definitely a lot more fun.
A few of my lessons are also quite fun. One of my students was trying to describe having hay fever and struggled to think of the word for “snot”. Instead she said “nosewater”. I love this word. I’m now always going to refer to “snot” as “nosewater”. Please join me in getting this fantastical new word into general usage and everyday language where it rightly belongs. One day it will be in the Oxford English Dictionary and we will laugh at times past when we called nosewater “snot”. Do it.
A small but significant portion of my other students are crazy children who bounce of the walls (and that’s not a figure of speech, it’s just a genuine observation) or educated adults who want to travel, learn a new language and have fun. It’s a bit of a mix but then that’s what life seems to have become recently. All or nothing. I teach toddlers or grandparents. I drink in a little bar in suburbia playing The Beatles or in packed bars in Tokyo watching football. I eat grilled meat or raw fish. I get the last train home at eleven o’clock or the first train at 5am. I drink beer or sake, teach English or study Japanese. And worse of all? I write a blog called shutupjusttravel but don’t actually go anywhere.
But i’m going to Yokohama on Sunday and hopefully to an onsen in the mountains next weekend so i promise (really promise) that next time i will write about something new, somewhere different and something vaguely more interesting than me disappearing up my own arse. Thanks for reading.
Thursday, January 20, 2011
Tokyo and Myoden
After sleeping in airports and aeroplanes i arrived in Tokyo and had to sleep in a hostel. Actually, i had to live in a hostel for a week as my new company was organising an apartment for me. I wasted a couple of days watching cricket on the internet and ambling around cold, sunny, central Tokyo and past rows of shops and restaurants that had shut for the New Year holiday.
My new job is busy. I’m teaching at three different places around Tokyo all for a company which provides English lessons all over the greater Tokyo area at little language schools. It involves quite a lot of commuting and i’ve got all sorts of different classes. My youngest student is three and my oldest is seventy but as long as i don’t get the lessons plans mixed up things should go well. Although, if i get bored i guess i could always break into a rendition of The Wheels On The Bus with one of the business men.
I’m not complaining that the new people i’m working for organised an apartment for me (it would have been a hell of a language barrier to climb over for me to do it myself) but i think i might have been better off in the hostel. I would use the word “apartment” very loosely here as well. “Apartment” makes me think of a spacious open plan living space in Manhattan. I’m living in a flimsy shoebox on the outskirts of Tokyo in a bland commuter suburb called Myoden. Also, when i moved in the other week i discovered that the stove didn’t work properly so i couldn’t cook any food, some of the furniture was falling apart, there was no internet connection so i couldn’t email anybody and my washing machine is a twin-tub cold water contraption that’s older than me so i have to go to the laundrette around the corner. And the carpet smells. And the bathroom is the size of a phone box. And when i wake up every morning i open the curtains to be greeted by rivers of condensation dripping down the windows. The last place i had felt like the halls of residence at a university. Now i feel like i’m squatting. Still, on the plus side i’ve got a phone that works properly this time.
Apparently there’s a recession going on. We’re in a period of sluggish growth or a downturn or a stagnating economic situation or some other combination of words that are getting overused. I think it means that it’s now difficult to get and keep a job and banks aren’t lending money to people who can’t pay it back so less people are buying shit they don’t need. Japan is in the same boat as everybody else but you wouldn’t know it if you went to Akihabara. Akihabara is a part of Tokyo that’s home to a bizarre mix of electronics, manga porn and maid cafes. Everything electronic is sold in department store sized gadget stockpiles while dozens of shops selling cartoon porn DVDs and comics nestle in between along with discreet upstairs cafes where, apparently, cute girls dressed up in a variety of different outfits will serve you drinks and flirt with you, if that kind of things floats your boat and flicks your switch. Last month, when i went to buy a mobile phone that actually works as a phone should, the place was stacked full of people hurriedly buying something electronic, something pornographic or some drinks from a Japanese girl dressed as a French maid. I guess you’ve got to have some fun, even in a recession.
There’s another thing in Japan that’s recession proof. The trains. I’m not sure i’ve been to a country that uses, needs and breathes trains as much as this one. Everybody uses them. All the time. Everyday. There’s 27,190km of train track in Japan. That’s enough to go around the equator. There are 20,000 daily train services. The annual ridership is 400 billion. No wonder Honda and the rest of them export so much. They have no choice. In Japan the train is king.
I'll be here for twelve months so i’m planning on seeing yet more of Tokyo and snatches of the rest of the country as well in the coming months so hopefully i’ll have something more interesting to write about than washing machines and trains. Hopefully.
My new job is busy. I’m teaching at three different places around Tokyo all for a company which provides English lessons all over the greater Tokyo area at little language schools. It involves quite a lot of commuting and i’ve got all sorts of different classes. My youngest student is three and my oldest is seventy but as long as i don’t get the lessons plans mixed up things should go well. Although, if i get bored i guess i could always break into a rendition of The Wheels On The Bus with one of the business men.
I’m not complaining that the new people i’m working for organised an apartment for me (it would have been a hell of a language barrier to climb over for me to do it myself) but i think i might have been better off in the hostel. I would use the word “apartment” very loosely here as well. “Apartment” makes me think of a spacious open plan living space in Manhattan. I’m living in a flimsy shoebox on the outskirts of Tokyo in a bland commuter suburb called Myoden. Also, when i moved in the other week i discovered that the stove didn’t work properly so i couldn’t cook any food, some of the furniture was falling apart, there was no internet connection so i couldn’t email anybody and my washing machine is a twin-tub cold water contraption that’s older than me so i have to go to the laundrette around the corner. And the carpet smells. And the bathroom is the size of a phone box. And when i wake up every morning i open the curtains to be greeted by rivers of condensation dripping down the windows. The last place i had felt like the halls of residence at a university. Now i feel like i’m squatting. Still, on the plus side i’ve got a phone that works properly this time.
Apparently there’s a recession going on. We’re in a period of sluggish growth or a downturn or a stagnating economic situation or some other combination of words that are getting overused. I think it means that it’s now difficult to get and keep a job and banks aren’t lending money to people who can’t pay it back so less people are buying shit they don’t need. Japan is in the same boat as everybody else but you wouldn’t know it if you went to Akihabara. Akihabara is a part of Tokyo that’s home to a bizarre mix of electronics, manga porn and maid cafes. Everything electronic is sold in department store sized gadget stockpiles while dozens of shops selling cartoon porn DVDs and comics nestle in between along with discreet upstairs cafes where, apparently, cute girls dressed up in a variety of different outfits will serve you drinks and flirt with you, if that kind of things floats your boat and flicks your switch. Last month, when i went to buy a mobile phone that actually works as a phone should, the place was stacked full of people hurriedly buying something electronic, something pornographic or some drinks from a Japanese girl dressed as a French maid. I guess you’ve got to have some fun, even in a recession.
There’s another thing in Japan that’s recession proof. The trains. I’m not sure i’ve been to a country that uses, needs and breathes trains as much as this one. Everybody uses them. All the time. Everyday. There’s 27,190km of train track in Japan. That’s enough to go around the equator. There are 20,000 daily train services. The annual ridership is 400 billion. No wonder Honda and the rest of them export so much. They have no choice. In Japan the train is king.
I'll be here for twelve months so i’m planning on seeing yet more of Tokyo and snatches of the rest of the country as well in the coming months so hopefully i’ll have something more interesting to write about than washing machines and trains. Hopefully.
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