Division of labour
By way of what the blogger formerly known as Iain Dale would call a ‘parish notice’, this is just a quick heads-up of some changes in my blogging habits. I’ve decided to outsource my political blogging onto a different site, which you can now find at Radical Discourse. This blog won’t exactly be retiring, but it will spring in and out of existence as a travel journal for when I’m wandering around some far-flung corner of the world and don’t have time for a handwritten equivalent.
Thanks to all my readers for your positive comments in the past–they’re what keeps bloggers like me going!
Well well, doesn’t time fly when you’re having fun?! Already I’m sitting in my hotel room in Narita, wearing an amusing branded dressing-gown-yukata-thing after a luxurious bath, preparing to enjoy one final night of trashy Japanese TV – and I barely booked the place half a month ago! OK when I say ‘booked’, I mean ‘went through all the normal rigmarole online, including payment, and therefore expect my reservation to have at the very least been communicated to the hotel relatively soon afterwards’. This, apparently, was too much to ask of whoever processed my reservation, since the brief Anglo-Japanese conversation I had with the staff member at reception here when I arrived strongly implied that they’d never heard of me, didn’t know it was possible to book without going through their own website, and generally were totally unprepared for my arrival. A couple of phonecalls later (by them, not me), it transpired that I do in fact exist, that I had submitted a perfectly legitimate reservation, and that there was a room available. And again, when I say ‘room’, I mean ‘space no wider than the door you enter from the corridor by, at the end of which is a bed several square miles too big for the room, and next to which is a bathroom evidently designed for hobbits’. I’m fairly sure I have the smallest room in the hotel by a significant margin, but then that appears to be something of a holiday tradition as well, thinking back to the Portland Square Hotel I stayed in during New York ’08, where my room was so cramped it was physically impossible for me to fit both myself and my suitcase through the door at the same time… This one at least has some room to move, and since I’m only staying for a night and planning on leaving early tomorrow morning, I could have done a good deal worse.
The metro. It puts every other underground transport system in the world to shame – not even its minimalist Toronto or grandiose Moscow rivals can hope to compete, and London Underground can frankly crawl into a corner and hide for shame. The best part of it, I’ve decided, are the information screens: they show you the destination, next station, name of current and alternative lines, the bit of the metro network you’re on, a diagram of the train with your coach shaded, the direction of travel, a bird’s-eye-view of the upcoming platform complete with exit directions, lifts and escalators – and all in hiragana/katakana, kanji and romaji. Simply genius – a lot better than the vague LED signs Europe is still dealing in.
The politeness. Probably linked to the safety point, but the difference in the quality of social interaction between Japan and Western countries is almost absurd. For whatever cocktail of cultural reasons, the Japanese just treat each other with so much more respect than the people in countries closer to home – this is not to say that the Japanese enjoy a stronger sense of community than other national groups, since I’m pretty sure individualism and heterogeneity (if they could be quantified) would be on comparable levels here and there, but more that Japanese people are less inclined to aggressively challenge the boundaries of the self-defined private spheres of action of the people with whom they passively or actively interact in the name of any definition of liberty.
The prices. I thought London was expensive – but then I came to Tokyo. I have honestly never seen cash evaporate from my wallet so quickly in shops as I have here – even though ATMs only give out cash in multiples of 10 000 yen (£75), which in any other economy could be anything up to 2 or 3 weeks of average expenditure but here melts away in a week at most. I ranted about this in a previous post, so I won’t regurgitate everything again – but suffice it to say that I’m very glad food and transport prices back home are not at the cripplingly insane levels they are here.
The insects. Yes, that’s right, there’s no way I’m leaving this country without a final broadside at the 6-legged pests that make everyone’s life a misery here. Though the cicadas have all disappeared now the weather’s dropped below their ideal temperature, there are still more than enough mosquitoes to go around – I’ve luckily managed to avoid the worst of the bites (I’ve generally been surrounded either by people with better-tasting blood or mosquito nets on the windows), but the ones I have received have been all the more annoying because of that. The worst we get in Europe is irritating flies, slightly mental wasps or pathetically inept daddy-long-legs – but none of these seem to exist here, and what Japan has replaced them with are effectively angry ninja versions of these creatures with serious inferiority complexes. Sting, bite, buzz, flap, splat, squish, machine-gun. An odd motto, I agree, but one that seems to have kept most of the slavering hordes at bay…
My trip to Yokohama today was something of a mixture of work and entertainment. As far as I can see, Yokohama is a city built mostly for the purpose of generating money from international trade – a lot of high-rise buildings, lots of swish hotels, and a very large number of mooring-stations, artificial harbours and piers. Of the latter, one of the most important is Osanbashi Pier, which used to be the point of arrival for the big trade vessels from the Netherlands, Portugal and especially the USA after the 19th century – now, it is still used as a point of embarking and unloading, but by far the most significant alternative role that the place has developed is that of an exhibition and display venue, and it was for the latter purpose that it was of interest to me, and to all the other important people gathered there today. The summit was hosted in a German cruise ship, the Hanseatic, and I got to feel very smug and official rubbing shoulders with the great and good for a couple of hours, being inundated in meishi and making small-talk in a range of languages. Thankfully I wasn’t actually meant to be doing anything directly myself – that was up to my boss, the preparation for whose Big Moment had been the final project I had undertaken at work. So I sat back, chatted and observed – and was then driven back to work once all the (generous) canapés on the ship had been gobbled up. The rest of the afternoon and evening was spent tying up loose ends, being generally fussed over by my co-workers, and then scoffing a lot of sake and more canapés after crashing the opening ceremony for a renovated floor in the building where I work – which featured (among other things) a Very Important German wearing a happi coat and using an oversized mallet to break open a wooden keg of sake. And no, before you ask, that Very Important German wasn’t me…
The final part of the evening consisted of Laura H, Laura L (whose real name is apparently Laura B), Christian H and a girl named Sara who we met at the ceremony heading to Shinjuku in order to take a lift up to the top of the City Government Building in order to get a proper view out over Tokyo by night. The first thing I noticed when we got to the top was that this particular activity seems to be exceptionally high on the list of ‘romantic things to do for young couples’ in Tokyo – apart from us, pretty much all the other visitors were young pairs of lovers, who were all so entwined and engrossed with each other that I suspect they paid very little attention to what one could actually see out of the various windows. I probably saw more young people snogging intently this evening than I have throughout the rest of my stay – as I pointed out in a previous post, Public Displays of Affection are just not the done thing in Japanese society. I expect that the 45th floor of a skyscraper at 22:30 is about as close as they’ll be able to get in Tokyo to a secluded spot without actually withdrawing to their private sphere, so I imagine they were pretty determined to make use of the opportunity. But this certainly didn’t mean that I was going to judge them any less for doing so – I’ve been on the receiving end of more than enough judgement of my own for the same reason in England, after all… Unfortunately, this excursion marked the end of my time together with the 299-yen-pub crew, so as we all started to go our separate ways once we’d come down from the observation floor, the sweet sorrow of parting manifested itself over and over again – I’ve had some great times with the people I’ve met here, and the memories will stay with me wherever we all go from here. Eventually, I found myself striding down Meiji-dori from Kita-sando to Shibuya, plugged into Metallica and revelling in the welcoming crispness of a proper autumn night – not even the thought of having to spend the next few hours wrestling my belongings back into my suitcase could dampen my mood.
Well, I had a day with a couple of real highlights – and since I have to go to bed fairly soon in order to get up early for a foray down the coast to Yokohama, I will keep today’s entry short and sweet. The first was that I managed to get from home to work at a brisk pace without breaking sweat for the first time ever – only a pity that I had to wait till the final commute for this to happen to me. The second pleasant surprise was that I was taken out for lunch at a restaurant by some of my fellow interns and co-workers, where I had what is still my favourite Japanese dish – chicken katsu curry, garnished with all manner of delicacies, including mini-onions and vegetables caramelised in soya sauce and sugar. The restaurant was at the top of a very swish modern-looking building that my co-workers informed me is an 
The third and final Good Part of today arose from my detour into Harajuku en route back to Shibuya, which I took in order to (finally) pay a visit to Kiddyland. The flagship store on Omotesando-dori itself, which has been there seemingly since time began, possibly even longer than that, has closed for refurbishment, so that the whole caboodle has moved into an abandoned site down a side-street. To be honest, the building the store is in at the moment is a good deal more accessible, more open and just better laid-out than the old site – so unless the management are planning to knock down the old building entirely and replace it with a Skyscraper of Toys, I think they’re missing a trick with the shop’s temporary accommodation. You can probably guess what I was doing in Kiddyland – I have, at long last, gotten myself a cuddly Totoro, thereby continuing a holiday tradition whose previous most recent alumnus is a cuddly 
Since my time in Tokyo is drawing slowly but surely to a close, the moment of the final look-back and analysis of my stay is coming ever nearer. I will leave my overall impressions and vaguer musings for the very last entry, but I think that the unique nature of Tokyo as a city and metropolis probably justifies sifting out my treatment of it as a subject of acerbic scrutiny into a separate blog-post. Tokyo is noticeably different from what I’ve seen of the rest of Japan – which admittedly doesn’t include the other major cities of Kyoto, Osaka and arguably Sapporo, so the impressions of Tokyo may ring true of the other large cities to a certain extent as well – in the sense that it provides a view of the country through the Westernised kaleidoscope of globalisation and cosmopolitanism. In other words, I’m going to rattle through what I think of the various candidates for ‘city-centres’ in the inner urban area now, and then let them off the hook for the next couple of days. In true modern bite-size brevity-is-the-soul-of-wit style, I’m also going to try and burden each of the areas I will look at with a short epithet by way of a convenient summary.
Shinjuku, 新宿: The Hub. Grey people doing grey jobs in grey buildings, with the squat spider of Shinjuku stations throwing the strands of its web in all directions. This is where people earn the money they spend in Shibuya – the only form of entertainment here is the red-light district to the east, and even that consists in some making money at the expense of others. Money talks here as well, but it uses the stern tones of power and administration instead of the shrill cackle of hedonism and consumerism. Shinjuku means “new highway station”, and in many senses it really is the centre of modern Japan. The government buildings may be in Chiyoda, but the on-switch of the metropolis is here.
Ueno, 上野: Green Zone. From the tower-blocks of academia to the swan-boats on the lake, this is one of the more peaceful, saner areas of Tokyo – and believe me, they are few and far between. Museums, the concert hall, the zoo, the indisputably civilised station shopping mall, and the proximity to the religious nexus at Asakusa make this a haven for the more inquisitive, discerning tourists who have things to do other than throw money at the Japanese economy. It is also the only place that provides everything one might possibly require for a casual stroll in the whole of Tokyo – even on weekends the sights do not become overcrowded, and there are areas of serene seclusion (like the Tokugawa family graveyard) that allow more introspective visitors to zone out of the frenetic chatter of the outside world, and lose themselves in contemplation.
Roppongi, 六本木: The Big Easy. The Cradle of Cool, with untouchable dominance of Tokyo nightlife. The place where anything goes, no matter how foreign or sweaty or balding or pervy – anyone can slot into Roppongi life. Where Shibuya is brash and Ikebukuro is wide-eyed, Roppongi exudes the seedy charm of the vaudeville performer down on his luck – a region with two faces, each a mask of inscrutable unpredictability. The aspiration and class of Roppongi Hills, next to the carnal aggressiveness of its alleys and backstreets – Roppongi will swallow up unsuspecting visitors and take them for the ride of their lives. All they have to do is hang on – because there’s no knowing where they might end up if they lose control.
Having another domestic day today – I’ve got a fairly hectic week ahead of me, so I think I’m going to take all the rest I can get. Plus there’s sumo, 相撲, すもう, on TV – and since I didn’t get a chance to go to the National Sumo Stadium in person, this will have to be the 2nd-best thing. Like 
Today was the final day of Alice’s visit – she has 5 lessons on Monday to prepare for, and going straight from night bus to the classroom wouldn’t exactly be the best idea, so she’s taking a late one tonight so she’s not pressed for time tomorrow. I had a lazy morning while she was off in Akihabara helping out with the free food distribution of some Japanese harvest festival, ostensibly aimed at the homeless of Tokyo but in reality based (from her description) more on the motto of ‘meet, do admin, and network’ with the JET organisers. We met up in Ueno at 12:30 and (after briefly contemplating getting a bento for lunch) defaulted to the appeals of the burgers in the Hard Rock Café. Our conversation drifted languidly from David Mitchell to 
At any rate, the students wanted much the same as the schoolgirls had wanted all those weeks ago – to ask questions. Or at least the first lot did – 2 boys (Keisuke and Jun) and a girl (didn’t catch the name) – who went through the usual rigmarole of asking where we came from, what we were doing in Tokyo, how long we’d been there, which place we liked the most, where in England we would recommend to go, all the usual. The second group didn’t bother introducing themselves, and merely presented us with 2 sheets of photos, asking which out of a line-up of 10 boys Alice thought was the most attractive, and the same for me out of a group of 10 girls. This was after we’d managed to make it through Nakamise-dori up to the pagoda and main temple, had gazed in awe upon the paintings on the ceiling inside, and had commented on the relatively relaxed approach that Buddhism has to religious worship compared with the rigours of dogmatic Christianity, Islam or Judaism. The third group decided that I needed to learn a 
Today was another working day – and like the 2nd-inversion dominant chord of build-up that prefaces the cadenza of inventiveness before the coda of completion, it was spent fine-tuning the last major project I am dealing with during my time here in Tokyo. It meant that I had to leave Alice to her own devices for the whole day – which I consider pretty poor hosting on my part, even if I didn’t exactly have any say in the matter – but we met up again in the evening to revisit the 299-yen pub for the chief purpose of trying some of the more outlandish things on the menu. Since a lot of these samplings produced some very positive results, I think I might mention a few of them here. Since the two main discoveries from yesterday’s pub trip had been the plum brandy and takoyaki, we carefully steered clear of these in order to branch out properly into new territory – something that, anecdotally, Alice is very good at, while (creature of habit and custom that I am) I am rather bad at. The sampling was complicated slightly by the fact that the electronic ordering-screens seem to encourage a version of fat-finger-syndrome, which added something of a quantum randomness element to our order. For instance, since neither of us had ever tried 
The other choices were a little more promising. I went for 2 skewers of ox-heart in some form of plum/barbecue sauce, which were fiddly to eat with chopsticks but otherwise very tasty – perhaps unsurprisingly, heart seems to taste fairly similar to liver, although perhaps slightly meatier. It was a choice between that and (on the ox front) tongue, cheek and some other internal organ, while the chicken offerings included skin and gizzard, and the pork featured skewers of cartilage. I appreciate that a fair amount of those things probably end up in any number of the sausages I usually eat in the West, but there was something remarkably sobering about seeing the items laid out individually on a menu, complete with the ultimate in no-frills names. Alice, meanwhile, had chosen a “tuna ship” on the basis of the name only, which turned out (rather disappointingly) not to have anything nautical about it at all – what she got was a plate of tuna sashimi wrapped tightly in seaweed, which (another quantum moment coming up) tasted sufficiently suspiciously of salmon for us to suspect another order gone awry. The final two meals we tried were a plate of potatoes “like snowy cheese” (according to the menu), which were essentially potato mash with rice flour compressed into cubes, covered in a light drizzle of parmesan, and something called “rod-shaped pork”, which had us giggling immaturely into our cocktails for several minutes. The pieces of rod-shaped pork turned out to be rather shorter and fatter than we’d anticipated, which prompted another round of childish mirth and a stream of innuendos, timed scrupulously so as to make actually eating the pork about as challenging for Alice as was physically possible under the circumstances.
It was during the potato meal that the young guy in the couple at the table next to us, having evidently noticed that we were talking loudly in English, decided to strike up a conversation with us – and through a combination of bits of our respective patchy knowledge of conversational Japanese, Alice and I explained what we were doing in Japan. The highlight of the chat by a long shot was when the guy, noticing the enthusiasm with which I’d tucked into the potatoes, commented that I was “quite big for a vegetarian” – I was so stunned that I didn’t know how to respond at all at first, before eventually choosing guffawing with laughter as the best option. I observed to Alice that I’ve only rarely been talked to by total strangers while I’ve been in Tokyo, which she expressed some surprise at – apparently, she has had a significant number of such chance conversations, as have a number of the people she’s working with. I expect that it may have been the fact that we were speaking a recognisable foreign language (i.e. not the German I usually speak in that pub), coupled with the fact that I was looking as unthreatening as I could ever manage, that meant that the Japanese guy plucked up the courage to start the chat in the first place. I gather that Western women are fairly often engaged in conversation in this way if they’re on their own, but almost never if there’s a forbidding male presence there with them – which makes me wonder whether it was that I didn’t look sufficiently forbidding or that I wasn’t providing enough of a male presence that created the exception to that rule. I’ll choose the former, I think, and take it as something of a compliment!
Well, today was the autumnal equinox, which occasioned another public holiday – certainly not going to complain. I got up at the usual time and generally faffed around in my room until a loud ping from Facebook informed me that a friend from Magdalen, Alice B, had arrived outside my apartment and was waiting to be let in. The day then turned into a rapid edition of ‘Marius’s Slightly Frenetic Guide to Everything He’s Vaguely Aware Of in Tokyo’ – which was massively not helped by the weather, which reverted to torrential monsoon behaviour after yesterday’s heatwave. A brief exodus to Shibuya and an attempt to explore the shopping areas was rapidly defeated, so we beat a hasty retreat to Harajuku – though unfortunately Oriental Bazaar, which I was hoping to present as a Good Place to Buy Things, was closed, so we headed into Omotesando Hills instead before trekking down to Omote-sando station. Since the weather was being so unhelpful, I suggested the Edo-Tokyo Museum as a viable indoor plan – and we headed to Ryogoku to view it, taking a guided tour through most of the museum from 12:30. Hunger set in at this point in quite a major way, and we dipped into Finn’s Restaurant in the Edo-Tokyo complex, where I introduced Alice to tonkatsu curry while I sampled a sort of lasagne-rice-egg-thing that came with a totally unnecessary bottle of Tabasco sauce. The next stop was Ikebukuro, since Sunshine City (for all its past faults) is still one of the best shopping areas in Tokyo, and after traipsing round the more promising clothes shops – the sudden cold meant that Alice at least needed a jumper or added layer of sorts, while I was happily thriving in the temperatures I’ve tried to sustain artificially using my air conditioning all summer – we each devoured an absurdly filling crêpe that made us both feel sleepy and over-indulgent, and at 17:30ish began to head back towards the Shibuya end of town.
Never one to miss the opportunity for a visit to the 299-yen pub in Omote-sando, I made that the last stop of the Ostrowski Guide to Tokyo. On recommendation, I tried some plum brandy (heavily diluted in soda and lime juice) for the first time – not too bad actually, highly reminiscent of Archer’s and lemonade, though lacking the associated student memories – and a measure of the ‘Shandy Gaff’ beer-ginger-ale fusion, as well as the deeply non-alcoholic Cassis Orange cocktail. Alice ordered us a plate of takoyaki, which are breaded balls of octopus meat served with the most Western of garnishes and sauces – I regarded them with the critical cynicism with which I approach most things in life, but grudgingly tried some and absolutely loved them. There are some foods in the world to the taste of which only the word ‘nom’ can really do adequate justice, and both the crêpe and the takoyaki fall well within this category. As so often happens when I’m around, the conversation drifted inexorably towards politics and current affairs, and fairly soon Alice and I were in pretty intense debate about the issue of national identity and its evolution in light of globalisation and other modern developments, she from an anthropological standpoint, and I from the political angle. The conclusions we reached were not wholly new – there is now a whole long list of authors I need to delve into, including Banks, Anderson and Dunbar – but fairly radical, and helped me crystallise a number of thoughts I’d been having into a more coherent argument. It’s not a conversation I was particularly expecting to have in Tokyo, but it has Given me some Ideas – always a momentous event, and one that usually signals that I have Work to Do. As I observed at the end, it’s been brought home to me recently quite how much politics and anthropology do actually have in common – in another life, that might have been an alternative degree to PPE – and I suspect it’s a realisation that I may see more of in future time and time again. In the meantime, however, we watched the opening show of Strictly Come Dancing when we got back, and now it’s time to shut up shop, since I have a pretty intense day at work heading for me tomorrow.
Another brief observation today – it’s to do with the trend in what I can only describe as utterly nonsensical expressions plastered all over the clothes of the (probably self-defined) ‘trendy’ Japanese people I’ve come across in the ‘cooler’ areas of Tokyo, most notably Ikebukuro and Shibuya. I’m not really referring to the weak innuendos and borderline cataclysmic humour that pervades Western equivalents – the sort of vomit-inducing Primark slogans like “Tackle me” or “Learner”, or the faux-cute “Little Princess” or “Daddy’s Girl” found increasingly on the bibs and t-shirts of children who haven’t even made it to the age of 1, worn fairly often by women devoid of any sense of public decency who are also nearing the age of retirement. I’m talking more about a cross between the ‘lost in translation’ effect seen famously on Chinese attempts at English translations of various traffic signs, which have generally found their way onto, and are now plastered all over, the internet forums and chatrooms of a mocking Anglophone public, and the sort of vacuous phrases found in more sober clothing ranges of the main high-street chains of continental Europe. I’ll give you an example: I own a bunch of t-shirts with some pretty incongruous but ultimately bland phrases on them – “LRS Production Inc. – MIS Polar B LRN 2054 NT rctic [sic] Operations” or even “Western Sails 33 Yacht Hire Port Authority Est. 1964” (the second one is actually an M&S creation). I am neither a member of a conglomerate engaged in exploration around the North Pole, nor do I have even the remotest interest in boats or sailing – yet I own the t-shirts because they fit, they are comfortable, they look half-decent, they were affordable and they fulfil all the basic functions I expect from an item of clothing. Am I making a statement about my job or interests? No. Do people use writing and symbols on clothes for just such a purpose? Yes. Is there therefore a discrepancy here that I can blog about? Yes.
By extension, I assume that plenty of the wearers of the more outlandishly-decorated clothing here gave as little thought to the content of the writing on their clothes as I did, and merely chose on the overall impression (colour, shape, fit &c). If anything, I reckon I can safely say that they probably gave even less thought than I did, since while the Roman alphabet is familiar to me from my mother tongue, Japanese people are understandably reticent about learning romaji. So they might not even be able to read, let alone understand or interpret, what the statements on their clothes are essentially implying about them. Let me illustrate with some of the better examples. One of the most elaborate I’ve seen was the phrase “My body is a temple but it sometimes needs a little paint”, displayed on the back of a black t-shirt worn by a Japanese ex-metalhead with hair dyed blonde, a leather beret, a lot of rock-bling, tight leather trousers, a huge belt, and a vacuous but vaguely pretty girl half his age on his arm. Since I was stood behind them on one of the longest escalators in Shibuya station, I had plenty of time to observe and muse over the phrase. Is it a sexual innuendo? Is it talking about plastic surgery? Or maybe tattoos? Is it just supposed to be a play on the Confucian equivalent of mens sana in corpore sano? No idea, if I’m honest. At least it was a grammatical sentence though… the next one to stick in the mind was “Crazy Slowly Walking”, on the front of a demure-looking Japanese woman, possibly in her mid-20s, who had indeed apparently never learnt the meaning of speed. But why “crazy”? What, in a linguistics sense, is it supposed to be modifying? Ostensibly, “walking” – but with the presence of “slowly”, “walking” is no longer a noun but a participle, which should make “crazy” an ‘advective’ (a word that works as both adverb and adjective, e.g. ‘fast’, or ‘good’ and ‘real’ in non-standard English), and ‘crazy’ is not a word that really fits into that category very well…
Even less grammatical was “Run You Run”, which I saw on the t-shirt of a woman who for reasons of physionomy would have had serious trouble following this advice – the absence of punctuation, specifically of at least one comma (which might imply an explanation) or even two (which would result in a double-imperative) caused me so much grief that I spent a fair distance between train station and apartment spluttering irascibly to myself, to the obvious surprise of numerous passers-by. The oddities aren’t restricted to English either – at the start of my stay here, I saw a man wearing a t-shirt that proclaimed “Je m’appelle Théodore”, who, judging by his ethnicity, is about as likely to be called Théodore as I am Kazuhiro or Shuichi. But the prize for weirdest phrase by far has to go to the single word I saw on the t-shirt of a short middle-aged man with a rucksack and large glasses: “Lubricants”. Nothing else, just “Lubricants”. As far as I could see, it wasn’t an advert or some kind of brand-name – though I was in the vicinity of the Harajuku branch of Condomania (no, I haven’t been inside yet, don’t really intend to go there either), which added enough irony to the chance encounter that I shrieked with laughter (often a traumatic experience for the unprepared) as soon as I saw it. Needless to say, the object of my mirth didn’t have the faintest clue what I was laughing about – unless, of course, it was part of a rather elaborate double-bluff…
銀行: ぎんこう, ginko, meaning “bank”. There are certainly more than enough of them in Japan – not quite on the extreme level of Moscow, which literally seemed to have a branch of some company bank every 25 metres, but a healthy amount, at least. I will go into the bigger names in a future Key Kanji, but suffice it to say that Citibank and 7/11 Bank are definitely the newbie tourist’s friends here in Japan – they are, so far, the only branches which have consistently accepted my very English debit card. The others often refuse anything foreign other than 
信号: しんごう, shingo, meaning “traffic light”. Very well-made here in my view: not just because of the tinny muzak and X-crossings, but because a lot of them have a ‘decreasing-bar’ timer on them to indicate how much of green or red is left for pedestrians. Oh, and another thing: here in Japan, the 3 lights are horizontal (in either order) – somehow exotic yet more aesthetically pleasing than the Western vertical variety…
The architecture tour today was briefer than I imagined, and focused mainly on Harajuku and Omote-sando. I met up with the others at 14:00 at Meiji-jingumae station – despite a brief communication breakdown at the beginning where I waited for them at the metro exit, while they had all congregated at the JR station exit – and proceeded down the main Omote-sando street, occasionally dipping into side-streets and narrow alleys to look at some interesting buildings. One particularly wild creation was a house covered in lurid graffiti and murals, as well as a vaguely spider’s-web-shaped metal structure, which housed an art gallery and café – not sure most of the art on display particularly agreed with me, but there was a stairway imaginatively covered in henna-tattoo-like patterns and a quirky cartoon-artist which certainly caught my eye. We headed on past the 
The reason we had a day off work today was because of what Wikipedia calls “
Quite how far Respect for the Aged Day translates into social awareness where this (fiscally long-overdue) reform is concerned I can’t tell – but I expect that Japanese citizens might be even more resistant than the French and Greeks to the sort of austerity measures that would be needed to bring down Japan’s 
Well, I’ve expended more effort and energy today than I have in several years – possibly since my heroic walks around Toronto two years ago… I had a very enjoyable but utterly exhausting day out in 
The plan for the day was to travel part of the way up the mountain by train, cable-car and the Hakone Ropeway, then go wandering around and across Mt Kami and the surrounding lower peaks before taking the Komagatake Ropeway down on the other side to 
From Gora we took the stylishly-designed 
From Owakudani, a rickety little path led into the dense undergrowth that covers Mt Kami, and after a short debate over the meaning of some kanji on a signpost – which essentially involved one of my friends contradicting what I knew to be the correct reading and refusing to accept I was right even when it was demonstrably proved quite how right I was – we headed up. At first, by which I mean ‘for the first 10 metres’, the climb was fairly gentle, but then suddenly the angle of the slope reared up in front of us, and we were confronted with the rock equivalent of what looked like the 
It was 16:50 by this point, and here things started really going wrong. First, Lena lost her Hakone Free Pass, which at 5000 yen, about £40 now, was a fairly heavy dent to take. Then, since we’d taken longer than the 2 hours claimed by the others’ 
Next Monday is a public holiday of some description – which I will blog about when I’ve read a bit more about it – so since I will be spending both tomorrow and the day after in perpetual motion, I thought I’d be domestic again today. I finally caved in and decided to risk washing some of my shirts and towel in the washing machine, while doing all the whites and my exceptionally red handkerchief by hand – a time-saving device, rather than evidence of any sudden change of mind where the domestic facilities here are concerned. I also needed to take drastic action with regard to my towel. I happen to have used the same one for slightly longer than half of my stay here, though I’ve now switched to the spares I brought along, and the awful weather during August – hot and wet – basically meant that there was nowhere in my room that I could hang anything to dry. This meant that, until about a fortnight ago, the best my towel could manage was to progress from sopping wet to fairly damp every 24 hours, which over the course of a month had been slowly converting it from a passive piece of cloth to (I imagine) a teeming ecosystem. Washing it by hand had only made things worse – so I took to hanging it in outside my door in the hope that it might actually dry properly. Slight improvement, but a bit of the eau de old P.E. kit remained. So today it got slung into both washing-machine and tumble-dryer along with the shirts – and while everything emerged from the dryer still faintly damp in places, the towel already looks more, well, uninhabited. A couple of days out in the sun and some regular disinfectant spray should probably do the trick – and maybe another wash next weekend to finish the job.
In general, however, the effect on my shirts was no more impressive than the manual washes I’ve done up to now – and the tumble-dryer didn’t really achieve much more than a good wringing and hanging on the curtain-rail has so far either. All it did was save me a bit of time – so I was able to take a more leisurely approach to the ironing than I usually do, once I’d emerged briefly into the local area in order to stock up on drinks and muesli at the supermarket. I’ve started to mix and match goods between the two local ones – an Isetan and a Tokyu Store – since the prices of some key ingredients in my daily culinary routine vary significantly, depending on which one I use. For example, the Isetan rules on cheese and muesli, while the Tokyu Store wins on drinks (thanks mostly to the fact that it has one entire side of its inner surface area dedicated to drinks) and bentos. My most pressing worry was cereal – nowadays exclusively the Japanese-Kellogg’s versions of Bran Flakes and Coco Pops, since conventional Alpen-style muesli isn’t really sold here – so I hit the Isetan, then returned to guzzle lunch and watch bits of Would I Lie to You?, The Rob Brydon Show and the recent Labour leadership debate on Question Time while finishing off my ironing.
Before I switch on the TV – which yesterday treated me to a late-night King’s Singers concert – to see what I can amuse myself with for the rest of the evening, I feel compelled to mention the one facility in my apartment with which I am significantly dissatisfied: the toilet. Not really operation-wise but, shall we say, in the comfortableness-of-use criterion. To put it simply, there isn’t really enough room in the cubicle to accommodate the toilet-bowl and a person at the same time – which is a slight issue, since the former tends to play the part of the immovable object in any such relationship. The main problem is that the architect seems to have built all the toilet-cubicles in the building for people who don’t have any legs – when the door (which mercifully opens outwards) closes, the distance between the front of the ‘throne’ and the inside of the door is perhaps 25-30cm. The only way to successfully become ‘enthroned’ requires some fairly elaborate feats of acrobatics and serious splaying of one’s various limbs, hampered by the fact that the toilet-roll dispenser is unnecessarily huge (it can accommodate three rolls at once) and takes up valuable leg-room on the left side. Getting into the toilet either involves walking in backwards or, once inside and with the door bolted behind you (about 5cm from your nearest buttock), some pretty agile clambering and careful positioning of one’s centre of gravity in order to turn around without plunging headfirst into the toilet or ending up wrapped inextricably around the cistern. The worst part by far has to be getting out, however, since any forward movement whatsoever while standing up puts one into exceptionally sudden and intimate contact with the toilet-door – a lot of strategic propping and leaning is required to emerge safely, which I am glad to say I managed to master fairly swiftly. For those still struggling to get their heads round what exactly I’m whinging about: just imagine trying to go to the toilet in your average economy class seat on an aeroplane – obviously without the expressions of shock on your fellow passengers’ faces…
Blowing one’s nose in public is considered the height of rudeness. Blowing one’s nose into a handkerchief and then studying the contents intently as if trying to divine the future from their appearance is so far beyond the pale that it’s transcended reality to move into a whole new dimension of disgustingness. The acceptable alternative is apparently – and I’m seriously not making this up – to snort back the phlegm vigorously with a sharp intake of breath through the nose, which is precisely the sort of sickening activity that blowing one’s nose was invented to prevent… I haven’t checked it, but my suspicion is that snorting rather than blowing is analogous to not being unnecessarily extrovert in public: when one snorts, one is containing the nasty fluids and germs inside one’s own body, instead of spraying everything everywhere by blowing it out. Alternatively, it could be because the tissues here are so flimsy – one solid blow, and they’d promptly disintegrate…
Japanese entertainment TV is infinitely more colourful and high-octane than anything I’ve ever seen in Europe. Almost every programme appears to incorporate a reaction-camera insert, bits of dialogue keep popping onto the screen as absurdly colourful subtitles in dozens of different quivering fonts, the presenters all seem to be shouting and guffawing permanently, the contestants squeal and gasp with more melodrama than a village panto, the sets look like they’ve been designed by 
Japanese women use parasols in sunny weather. I don’t really mean the frilly floral monstrosities the Edwardians had – the ones here can be anything from quirky asymmetric minimalist IKEA-ish creations to standard fragile pagoda-shaped variants that look less stable than the average cocktail umbrella. It seems it’s part of the deeply Oriental drive to preserve as pale a skin hue as possible, which is why the same women also wear elbow-length gloves and stockings, just in case the odd ray of light manages to break past their parasol. Utterly alien to the tanning-obsession of Western culture, but equally irrational.
Having now been in a fair number of situations where two groups of people were meeting each other for the first time – conference here, lunch there, you know the sort of thing – I think it might be worth my highlighting one of the remarkable idiosyncrasies of how Japanese people greet new acquaintances. With us in the West, it’s fairly likely that some form of hand-contact will be used in such contexts – generally somewhere on the spectrum between bone-crusher and limp fish – unless you’re in company so street that you go for the 
There are a couple of stock phrases associated with new acquaintance, in the same style as the English “pleased/lovely to meet you”, the French enchanté(e), the German sehr angenehm / freut mich, or the Russian очень прятно, ochen’ pryatno. One is はじめまして, hajimemashite, which references the start of the new acquaintance – sort of “we have begun”. The other, more all-purpose phrase is 宜しくお願いします, よろしくおねがいします, yoroshiku onegaishimasu, which can be used to mean a whole smorgasbord of different things, including “thank you for looking after this”, “yours sincerely” and in this case also “pleased to meet you”. Each is accompanied with a separate bow (coupled with a handshake, depending on the person), which can be extended as long as you are physically able to sustain the last syllable of whatever you’ve just said, and then suffixed with a lot of quicker nods and smiling. An optional extra seems in my case also to be a subsequent 5-minute conversation about why I “know so much Japanese”, even though in my book 3 words and a vague awareness of etiquette doesn’t really constitute much in the way of ‘knowledge’. Through frequent repetition of this situation, I’ve managed to work out how to conduct at least the first few sentence of said conversation in Japanese, generally involving the phrases “evening classes”, “1 year”, “university” and “I only understand a bit of kanji”, illustrated with lots of nodding, frequent interspersal of the filler あのおおお…, anooooo…, which is roughly equivalent to the odd euh-drone that French people use to fill in the blanks between anything they say, and lots of time for the other party to say そうですか?, so desuka?, “is that so?” several times.
Though I’ve found it grimly disheartening that even my fairly patchy grasp of Japanese is perceived as an unusually impressive level of effort for gaijin to go to when they come to Japan, I’ve realised I still have a fair amount to learn before I can claim a decent amount of ‘cultural savoir-faire’. For instance, further to a long-ago post about how the customer-salesperson relationship is exaggerated here in Japan, to the extent that お客様は神様です, okyaku-sama wa kami-sama desu, “the customer is a god”, I’ve realised that I’ve been going slightly wrong in how I’ve dealt with the finer points of giving and receiving payment and change in note and coin form. I noticed fairly quickly the (to me) unusual habit of salespeople to take and return money from and to me with both hands, rather than the Western multi-tasking approach of exchanging payment with one hand while doing something in parallel (holding bag, tapping in numbers, opening till &c) with the other. I mentally filed it under ‘excessively submissive salesperson behaviour’ and gave it no more thought, until I realised pretty much today that I’m supposed to be doing the same thing! If I’d seen other Japanese people be as polite about money as the salespeople, I’m sure I’d have cottoned on rather sooner – but as it stands, it was down to a 
I spent a surprisingly long time today bouncing enthusiastically around my office and room in celebration of the fact that it is now officially cold outside – no-one else seems to be particularly pleased about this, but I’m hugely enjoying the prospect of not having to go to sleep with my air conditioning on full blast at 16°C any more. The plaudits should probably go to the high quantity of heavy rainfall we’ve had here over the last few days – nothing like the Perfect Storm last time, more a discreet-butler kind of affair, just a bit of a torrent here and there when nobody’s awake and watching, a little bit of gentle inundation to keep the lid on the temperature. This makes me rather pleased that I didn’t go a-touristing last weekend, since there is (as I’ve discovered on at least 2 occasions so far) absolutely nothing enjoyable about wandering round places you don’t know between crowds of infuriatingly slow-moving and aimless people while drenched from head to foot in sweat. Given the more favourable weather, which I am reliably informed should actually start becoming a permanent feature fairly soon, I will devote this edition of Key Kanji to some more bits of out-and-about terminology and their logical extensions. Et voilà…
In light of the 
In a similar way to post-war Germany, the political spectrum in Japan is largely built in such a way as to avoid any form of electable extremism. The LDP, which generally relies on at least the support if not the outright alliance of the 
There are some very good reasons why the election of the DPJ in 2009, while a nominal novelty and seeming ‘breath of fresh air’ into an otherwise fairly dull and apathy-promoting political system, is unlikely to be of great benefit to Japanese politics in the short run – including ideology, the electoral system, and the irrelevance of alternative parties. At the risk of turning this into a politics essay, if I were writing at A-level standard, I would say that everything plays a partial role; if I were in a Finals exam, I would say that it’s blatantly one of the factors and that the importance of the others is being exaggerated by the examiner; and if I were researching this, I would deny that Japan has a political system at all, argue that the Japanese are subject to a Schumpeterian entrapment through rent-seeking by powerful vested interests, and hint strongly that my recent book on the topic holds the real answer. Less facetiously, it’s fairly clear that the blurred boundaries between the LDP and DPJ blocs – one economic liberal with a pork-barrel tendency, the other social liberal with a chronic desire to appear as un-LDP-like as possible (which is currently failing spectacularly) – aren’t doing the credibility of Japanese politicians any favours at all, so that alternation of power between parties will be as meaningless as it is ineffectual. The 
In light of the recent nine-year anniversary of 9/11, for which I can’t really think of any better lay analysis than 
Much more interesting than the capabilities of the JSDF, however, are the abilities in a constitutionally-sanctioned rights sense that Japanese armed units have to act like a ‘normal’ military. Japan’s defence policy explicitly rules out offensive military action, specifically to avoid becoming a ‘major threat’ to other powers – an obvious reference to the 
And all this under a defence budget cap of 3% of total government spending – which is, I think, the crucial part of why Japan’s approach to national defence is so unique. Japan is about as far away as it is currently (i.e. under the status quo in international relations) possible to be from military autocracy, or to make the point more bluntly, from excessive predominance of military concerns in the domestic and foreign policy spheres. At the distant end of the scale, we have the martial law exercised by (for instance) the 
Always a special day, the 42nd of any trip, I find – lot of symbolism and meaning, if only thanks to 
Before returning to Omote-sando to buy the earmarked items in Oriental Bazaar, I treated myself to a delicious chocolate-fondant pastry and chocolate-tapioca milkshake at the Sunflower Café in Sunshine City (highly recommended), then trekked over to Ueno by way of a metro to Hongo-sanchome and a massive and unexpected detour via Akihabara. I circumnavigated the park and lake, taking a few photos that reminded me strongly of the trees-in-front-of-high-rise-buildings effect I first encountered at the Jackie Kennedy Onassis Reservoir in Central Park in 2008 (just much smaller in scale), then plopped into the Ginza line all the way back to Omote-sando, bought the stuff I wanted and walked back to Shibuya to catch my train home. I still have a couple of admin-y things to sort out this evening before I can catch some proper shut-eye, but I think I will unwind first by watching the rest of the preview episode of 
