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!

Day 60 (30.ix.10)

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.

Having passed my room inspection by the Sakura House auditor with flying colours, I battled my way to Toritsudaigaku station, rucksack on my back, monstrously heavy suitcase pounding along beside me, and a plastic bag of food and drink for tonight and tomorrow pre-flight in my other hand. Because the auditor was a full hour late, I managed to miss the timescale I’d set myself to meet up with a school/uni friend for lunch in Shibuya, so I took the Hibiya line direct to Ueno, and switched to the Keisei line up towards Narita Airport. The journey took over two hours in total – so I’m very glad I did it today rather than tomorrow, when I’ll be stressing before the flight – and it gave me a chance to think about what the 3 things are that I will miss most about Japan.

  1. 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.
  2. The safety. I have not have a single moment in the last two months where I felt remotely in danger of injury, robbery or other infringements of my rights and liberty – it is quite literally possible to leave your belongings at a table where you are sitting in a pub or restaurant and go to the toilet for a significant period of time, and come back to find everything exactly where you left it. Even better, this non-criminal mentality doesn’t appear to stem from any more significant police presence around the city than in other developed countries – the police here, while dogmatically earnest in the execution of their tasks, are more static than elsewhere (i.e. they stay in their koban rather than go ‘on the beat’), but their visible numbers are comparable to the UK or France, though perhaps not to Russia or the USA. In other words, the Japanese are just more honest and honourable than other cultures, and they don’t need a large scaremongering state to achieve this artificially.
  3. 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.

For those of you who might be surprised at the absence of Japanese food in this list, I should point out that, while it may be possible to find a shop somewhere in the UK that sells imported sushi or bento of not embarrassingly inferior quality to the variants found here, the above 3 things are sadly ones that are too alien to the English way of life ever to be imported along with the foodstuffs. Similarly, and in the interests of balanced coverage, there are a further 3 things that I will not miss about Japan:

  1. 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.
  2. The weather. Boiling, boiling, boiling, boiling, boiling, tolerable, monsoon, monsoon, monsoon, monsoon… you get the point. Japan just does extreme weather – it sits at the junction of no less than four tectonic plates, which explains why Okinawa and Hokkaido seem to be wobbling like jelly pretty much constantly, and it gets the dubious benefit of an entire ocean’s worth of meteorological bumf as well. I know and (sort of) appreciate that this may well have been a freak year – but like many Oriental countries, Japan has a strong tendency towards two seasons, hot and cold, both of which are characterised by the presence of far too much water in the atmosphere, whether as humidity or precipitation. I am just not built for weather conditions like these – it is not surprising that the days I enjoyed the most were the ones on which the weather most nearly resembled early spring in Europe…
  3. 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…

It’s time for the final sign-off: as Pushkin says, Пора, мой друг, пора! покоя сердце просит, “’Tis time, my dear, ‘tis time. The heart demands repose.” I’ve deeply and thoroughly enjoyed my time in Japan, even if the daily grind may have occasionally become a little much to bear – I’m already looking forward to the next time I come over to this part of the world, when I will hopefully get to explore both more of this country (Osaka, Kyoto, Sapporo…) and of selected neighbours (South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, China…). For now, however, it has to be sayonara, 左様なら, from me – and matte kudasai, 舞って下さい, “please wait” for the next travel journal. Where will it be? Who knows…

Day 59 (29.ix.10)

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.

Day 58 (28.ix.10)

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 ikebana, 生け花, いけばな, “flower-arranging” school, run by the son of one of the most prestigious flower-arrangers in Japanese history (whose name they mentioned but I didn’t catch). You may wonder why exactly something treated in the UK as a hobby for slightly loopy rural couch potatoes gets a school all to itself in Japan – but if you saw some of the specimens of the school’s work that decorated the restaurant, you would quickly realise quite how much more professional the Japanese variant is. We’re not dealing with wicker baskets stuffed with mildly desperate-looking begonias, we’re talking large-scale sculptures incorporating steel frames, stone blocks and lots of ribbons – it’s more indoor landscape gardening mixed with green-fingered interior design than mere flower arranging.

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 glyptodon named Julius. The Totoro I have is one of the middle-sized manically-grinning ones – not the dark-grey tightly-stuffed un-cuddly one, but the lighter-grey squishy and in every conceivable way superior variant. It (or he – or she, for that matter…) is currently sitting on my suitcase looking about as cheerful as is physically possible, watching the game-show running on the TV behind me and generally being the epitome of awesomeness. I only wish that I had had the chance to pay a visit to the Studio Ghibli museum way off to the west of Tokyo on a weekend – but the extortionate prices for tickets, the surprisingly long travel time, the awkwardness of getting tickets (only via certain konbini, it seems) and especially the long wait for visiting-slots (often as long as several months) made it something of a logistical nightmare. Oh well, reason enough to come back to Japan at some point in future I guess!

Day 57 (27.ix.10)

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.

Shibuya, 渋谷: Garden of Earthly Delights. Shibuya – and by extension Harajuku,  – is not a place for the agoraphobic, the timid, or the conservative. The colours are loud, the hair is outrageous, the skirts are short, and the stockings are frilly. Being a ‘Shibuyette’ (or the male equivalent, ‘Shibuyob’ or something perhaps) is the mainstream Japanese equivalent of being a ‘Valley girl’, a goth or a punk – you create your own identity according to your own norms, and you stand out on your own terms, which you so happen to have adopted from the latest fashion craze rippling through the trendsetters in A-list Tokyo society. Experimental materialism rules OK. It’s two fingers stuck up to society, but with carefully applied nail varnish and a fair amount of jewellery and litres of fake tan. Money talks, bling talks louder. And the shops lap it up.

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.

Ikebukuro, 池袋: The Great Alternative. Everything here belongs into the category of things that could complete the sentence “or, if you like, you could also go to…” – the whole area is like a collective Plan B, a microcosmic bazaar of everything else Tokyo has to offer. The cosplayers from Akihabara also come to Ikebukuro, the shoppers from Ginza and Shibuya also come here, the museum-goers and animal-lovers and nerds and numismatists and people-watchers also come here after their respective first ports of call. And all of this is underscored by the main industry of Ikebukuro: gaming saloons. The rows and rows of iconic pachinkos, パチンコ, with totally focused gamers of every possible background glued to them – salarymen and low-lifes, schoolchildren and pensioners. Everyone can find something to do in Ikebukuro.

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.

Ginza, 銀座: Knightsbridge. The Old Style of shopping centres – food at the bottom, women’s clothes on all the floors above ground except for a solitary men’s section up at the very top – all of which are completely interchangeable in my view. The prices are universally extortionate, the fashions are unanimously generic, and the salespeople are all equally aggressive smiling assassins of your bank balance. The big names are here – Prada, Swarovski, Christian Dior, Chanel, Hugo Boss, Tiffany’s – waiting patiently for the celebrities to appear and clean out their latest collections. Life here is unhurried – the reputation for quality is assured, and the willingness to pay will materialise eventually as well.

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.

So what’s my conclusion? Each of the stops on this hexagon is its own hive of frantic activity. All of it is just as crucial or pointless as its alternatives. Tokyo just doesn’t have a single centre, a single source of its shimmering glare of sophistication, a single motor of its intricate identity. People go where they feel most comfortable – but even if their view of comfort changes, Tokyo will always be able to provide them with an outlet for their desires. All they have to do is look…

Day 56 (26.ix.10)

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 Ed to David Miliband, if you like… I’ve also pretty much run out of places I especially want to see or revisit, and I’ve arranged my expenditure so that I should be able to get through to the end of my stay with virtually no further purchases – and about time too, the sterling-yen exchange rate is going completely haywire, and the shoeleather costs of commission fees are starting to grate fairly substantially. I’ve discovered a very useful kanji dictionary by name of JISHOP, which has enlightened me as to the exact meaning of a couple of symbols I’ve seen around Tokyo, so I guess it’s time for another round of Key Kanji.

方面: ほうめん, homen, meaning “direction”. I’ve seen this particular one all over the metro network (unsurprisingly), and although it was relatively obvious from the context what it meant, I wasn’t able to work out how it was supposed to be pronounced until today. For some reason, I used to think it was pronounced “banzai”, as in the Japanese WW2 slogan, possibly in the context of “onwards/forwards”, but apparently that phrase means “10 000 years”. So absolutely nothing to do with metro networks.

名刺: めいし, meishi, the famed Japanese business cards. There is a whole elaborate ritual associated with the exchange of meishi, including keeping them in a special leather case, proffering and accepting them by holding them in a particular way and at specific corners, introducing oneself as a member of one’s most immediate organisation of affiliation (company, university &c), and concluding this form of introduction with the phrase choudai itashimasu, ちょうだいいたします, or choudai shimasu, ちょうだいします. The relative rank to the person with whom one exchanges meishi affects the angle and level at which one presents the card and what one does with it after receiving it (e.g. storing it on the case, leaving it out on the table for the remainder of the conversation). Thankfully I haven’t had any meishi to distribute myself, but I’ve tried to respect the custom as far as possible (i.e. in the absence of a leather case) when receiving them. Complicated stuff…

開: かい, kai, meaning “open”. Generally found in the context of the verb 開ける, あける, akeru, meaning “to open”. The antonym is閉: へい, hei, meaning (obviously) “closed”, which turns into the verb 閉める, しめる, shimeru, meaning “to close”.

布団: フトン, which is “futon”, in other words, what I don’t want to sleep on. Comfy Western mattress with duvet, pillow and coverlet all the way…

仕事: しごと, shigoto, meaning “work”. Comes from 仕, し, shi, meaning “serve, work for”, and 事, こと, koto, meaning “thing, matter”. What I’ve been doing in Tokyo other than tourism.

気: き, ki, meaning “spirit, life force”. Perhaps the most frequent use for this kanji is in天気: てんき, tenki, meaning “weather”.

Now for some basic directions: 左: ひだり, hidari, meaning “left”. 右: みぎ, migi, meaning “right”. 下: した, shita, meaning “down”. 上: うえ, ue, meaning “up”. The latter two are used with annoyingly different pronunciations in the directional rather than locational sense of the words, so that下り, くだり, kudari, means “down” in the sense of an escalator or lift, while 上り, のぼり, nobori, means “up” in the same sense. These two are unsurprisingly found a lot in metro stations, where different staircases are designated as ‘up’ or ‘down’ in order to keep down confusion and congestion among commuters. Interestingly, the word 下さい, ください, kudasai, which is used after the –te form of verbs to indicate a polite request, uses the same kanji, but in the conjugational context of a verb meaning “to receive an instruction”.

Times of day: 朝: あさ, asa, “morning”. 午: ご, go, “noon”. This has the derived terms 午前, ごぜん, gozen, meaning “forenoon, AM”, and 午後, ごご, gogo, meaning “afternoon, PM”. And finally 夕: ゆう, yu, “evening”. Each of the three main terms can be added in front of the word 御飯, ごはん, gohan, meaning “[rice] meal”, to indicate breakfast, lunch and dinner.

Since I mentioned sumo earlier, here are the other well-known Japanese sports and martial arts. 剣道: けんどう, kendo, which means something along the lines of “way of the sword”. 柔術: じゅうじゅつ, jujutsu, which is translated as “flexible technique”. Also, 合気道: あいきどう, aikido, which is “way of harmonious spirit”, and uses two of the kanji that I’ve already featured here and in previous entries. And of course 空手: からて, karate, which means “empty hand” and comes from what was previously the independent Ryukyu Kingdom in the Okinawa island group.

Finally, an observation instead of my usual ‘wildcard’ kanji: the symbol 社,しゃ, sha, is used to mean both “shrine” and “company”, depending on the context in which it occurs, although the terms are usually clarified into 神社, じんじゃ, jinja, for shrines, and 会社, かいしゃ, kaisha, for companies.

Day 55 (25.ix.10)

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 Summer Heights High (an Australian comedy show to which she introduced me yesterday), dwelt understandably for a long time on reminiscences of university, and ended up contemplating the attitudes that Japanese children have to learning, and learning foreign languages in particular. This proved mildly ironic and deeply coincidental, as after we’d walked from Ueno to Asakusa so that I could show her the Senso-ji temple complex and (importantly) the key shops on Nakamise-dori, we were ambushed no less than four times by groups of English students who wanted to use our gaijin-ness to practise their language skills. If you remember the schoolgirls who did the same to me the first time I as in Asakusa, who prefaced the conversation with a hesitant “do you supeaku Engrishi?” [sic], these students kind of had that question answered for them – unlike my usual solitary tourism, during which I observe strict stony silence, when Alice and I walked into the Kaminarimon plaza, we were chortling away in the unmistakeable middle-class Oxonian blend of London and Midlands accents. Well, OK, Alice was – my accent has become noticeably posher during my time in Japan, and I don’t really understand why. If I’m not careful, I’ll start sounding like the guy from Gap Yah – and since we spent most of our time in the complex commenting repeatedly on how “awaaah” we were of the “spiritual-cultural-political” nature of our visit there, I suspect the transformation may be partway complete…

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 tongue-twister about Tokyo, which went something like “Tokyo, Tokkyo, kyoka kyoku kucho”, and which they filmed me making a complete hash of. Or at least, that’s as far as I got with it – the actual phrase appears to be Tokyo tokkyo kyoka-kyoku kyou kyuukyo kyoka kyakka, which makes my head nearly explode just reading it. The final group was in fact the first group with some further friends attached, who asked Alice and me to help them spell out the letters “ESS” (for “English Students’ Society”) using our bodies.

To be honest, though we obliged graciously every time we were asked for our time, we were getting pretty bored of the increasingly bizarre requests the students came up with – but it highlighted the stark divergence between the relatively rural context in which Alice is teaching English and the ambitious drive of the urban Japanese. As I’ve mentioned before, the current urban Japanese youth as a whole are perceived as being insular, conceited, vacuous and decidedly disinterested in the world outside of their network of friends – so it was gratifying to see some who bucked the trend. More rurally, pupils have no reason to learn foreign languages – they are destined for farming or manufacturing jobs as it is, so even being at school starts to have questionable value for them. I guess this is what comes of trying to browbeat young people into becoming multicultural against their will – without any internal desire to spread their linguistic wings, no amount of commanding at the point of a board-marker will make them better world citizens artificially. This is, I guess, the main downside of the ‘sit down and shut up’ style of teaching Japan (and many other countries) still broadly adhere to – in the absence of either pupils’ realisation of why particular subjects are useful and of any sort of justification for the make-up of the strict one-size-fits-all school syllabus, forcing pupils to learn will make them do it, but they will not enjoy it, will not do it well, and will only be further from understanding the personal benefits of education than they were when they started. The only tangible result is a rising antipathy towards schools, education and teachers – which makes the social conditions for the next generation of pupils all the harder. It’s a self-reinforcing perpetuum mobile of anti-erudition bias. And sadly Japan is starting to succumb to it as well.

Day 54 (24.ix.10)

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 kimchi (beyond knowing it as a nickname for a mutual friend at university), we opted for a portion of tomato kimchi on the basis that, however bad it might turn out to be, it would still be a small enough dish to be edible and not set us back too much. What actually turned up was a small bowl with sliced tomatoes in some sauce that tasted more than anything else of Tabasco – and since I’d always seen kimchi as vaguely akin to Sauerkraut on the basis of the high importance of fermentation in its preparation, I was fairly sure we’d been given something else. The menu also contained tomato carpaccio right below the kimchi, so the computer system may well accidentally-on-purpose have given us that instead – though on the basis of a brief Google image search for both terms, I’m honestly not sure that what we got was even on the menu at all… Oh well, you pay 299-yen, you get 299-yen…

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!

Day 53 (23.ix.10)

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.

Day 52 (22.ix.10)

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…

Day 51 (21.ix.10)

Just gotten back to my room after a lovely meet-up with Eddy K, a fellow pupil and student, and since I spent most of today regretting not having slept more last night, I will make this another Key Kanji, and a hasty one at that.

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 China UnionPay – and I’d rather flush the contents of my bank account down the toilet than entrust them to anything approved of by the central bank of a communist state…

動物園: どうぶつえん, dobutsuen, meaning “zoo”. 動物, どうぶつ, dobutsu, means “animal”, while 園, えん, is a kanji that should already be familiar from a previous edition, and amounts to “parkspace”. To me, this has rather lovely implications of animals roaming happily at will through a large and imaginatively-designed habitat – and indeed, the tourists that visit Ueno Zoo do seem quite content with their environs. Not so sure about the exhibit specimens cooped up behind bars though…

博物館: はくぶつかん, hakubutsukan, meaning “museum”. Tokyo has fewer than many other capitals I can think of, but the ones that it does have are well worth a look. Top pick: still the Edo-Tokyo Museum in Ryogoku.

美術館: びじゅつかん, bijutsukan, meaning “art gallery”. According to my travel guide, this is all Tokyo apparently consists of – which makes me wonder whether the guide to Paris by the same firm just has a page of exclamation marks in place of sober description for the Louvre and the other galleries there…

消防署: しょうぼうしょ, shobosho, meaning “fire station”, where 消防, しょうぼう, shobo, is the fire service.

警察署: けいさつしょ, keisatsusho, meaning “police station”, where (similarly) 警察, けいさつ, keisatsu, is the police force itself. Might just be me, but the kanji for ‘police force’ is possibly the most complicated and illegible ones I’ve seen so far!

~の調子が悪いです: ~のちょうしがわるいです, … no choshi ga warui desu, meaning “XYZ is not working”. A phrase I have struggled to remember so often over the last 2 months, usually when my loyal PASMO card occasionally forgets to beep at an entry gate and I then have to persuade the staff at the other end that I haven’t just been free-riding. So far, they’ve always been nice about it – maybe the expression of anguish and mouth opening and closing like a stressed goldfish are what’s doing the trick.

高い: たかい, takai, meaning “expensive”. Can be used to describe pretty much everything in Japan.

安い: やすい, yasui, meaning “cheap”. Included here only for completeness’ sake – it is highly unlikely you will ever need to use this. Pity really – it’s quite a pretty kanji character in my opinion…

厚い: あつい, atsui, meaning “hot”. What the weather has been far too much during my stay.

寒い: さむい, samui, meaning “cold”. What the weather in the UK has been far too much during my stay.

天気: てんき, tenki, meaning “weather”. Oh come on, you know what weather is… it’s what boring people wish interesting people would talk to them about, since they don’t have the wherewithal to engage the interesting people on their own terms.

Now, here are the compass directions.

北: きた, kita, “North”. 東: ひがし, higashi, “East”. 南: みなみ, minami, “South”. 西: にし, nishi, “West”.

And now my wild-card no. 4:

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…

Day 50 (20.ix.10)

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 Louis Vuitton and Tod’s buildings, took a quick look into Omotesando Hills, and ended up looking round Spiral and various other buildings around Omote-sando station. We wandered down vaguely towards Roppongi and observed the Prada building, which is essentially made of slightly bulbous glass rhombuses piled on top of each other, and then parted ways to our respective dinners.

The reason we had a day off work today was because of what Wikipedia calls “Respect for the Aged Day”, which in Japanese is 敬老の日, keiro no hi. From what I’ve gleaned from Japanese co-workers and the indomitable power of Google, the day is intended to shift the limelight to what in many developed societies has become a disadvantaged social group, which goes hand-in-hand with the considerably greater value placed on the family unit and respect for ‘elders and betters’ in Japan relative to Western countries. Without wishing to comment on the moral stature of these last two values, it certainly makes a change to see the elderly taken seriously by anyone other than ‘grey’ parties and pensioner protest groups – and though the celebration of centenarian citizens has taken something of a bashing recently, with apparent models of longevity being discovered to be long-dead and merely not registered as such, it’s only common sense for the Japanese to indicate some level of awareness of one of the most significantly growing voter groups. Japan doesn’t really have a uniform retirement age, but the most recent legislation on the subject (in the 1980s) changed the industry consensus on 55 as the age at which employers could essentially boot out workers to 60, with scope and incentives for firms to hang on to good employees beyond that point, usually at reduced wages. The usual cut-off point beyond that is 65, but with 21% of the notoriously long-lived Japanese population lying above that age-mark, reform of the pension system is an even bigger problem here than in comparably economically developed countries.

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 monstrous sovereign debt. 189.3% of GDP, second only to Zimbabwe in the entire world (282.6%), and miles above even the profligates in Italy (115.2%) and Greece (113.4%). The public sector is only part of the problem – Japanese citizens are just used to high levels of government spending in all areas, and the two recessions since the start of the 1990s have seen the government here under whatever stripe borrow insane amounts of money to try and kick-start the economy with a multitude of dubiously-effective initiatives over the last 20 years. Vouchers, subsidies, handouts, central bank interest rates of 0%… all pretty much useless – the economy has yet to really pick up again, with stasis and deflation much more pressing worries than in the West. The only definite result has been spiralling debt and massive loss of confidence in the Japanese economy – not helped by the fact that Japanese firms have been remarkably slow to adopt their own countries’ major technological innovations, with a lot of administration being done in parallel by multiple employees, one for paperwork, the other to input the paperwork into the computers from which everything is ultimately run. Unfortunately for the elderly, ramming up pension ages is just so much easier than more involved root-and-branch public-sector reform – even though both will inevitably meet with protests from unions, the latter concerns more vocal current workers, while the former concerns a smaller group of de facto less energetic citizens, and the unions can generally be bought off with some good old pork-barrel politics so that the administratively simpler reforms at least can be pushed through. But at least in Japan such attempts would be far less likely to be snuck through unnoticed…

Day 49 (19.ix.10)

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 Hakone, part of the Fuji-Hakone-Izu National Park, with some of the people I’ve met during my stay in Tokyo – Lena H, Laura H and Laura L – of which by far the most significant event was the climb over Mt Kami up to a maximum height of 1483m above sea-level. And yes, it was most definitely a climb – not really hiking in my book, more mountaineering. But I will get to that later… First, we’d arranged to meet at Yoyogi-Uehara station, which was actually pretty awkward for me to get to from Shibuya, at the unholy hour of 08:30. So I set my alarm for 06:30, and actually managed to wake up then as well. Only problem was that I then dropped off back to sleep until 07:10, by which point I was already pushed for time. I dived around my room showering, eating and getting dressed in a general mélange of preparation, but still only left the apartment at 08:00. Then, of course, it was just my luck that the Sunday timetable produced interminable waits for each of the 3 connections I had to take (home to Shibuya, Shibuya to Meiji-jingumae on the Fukutoshin line, then from there to Yoyogi-Uehara on the Chiyoda line), as well as more inexplicable long waits while the trains just stood uselessly at their platforms. The end result was that I hared out of the Chiyoda line train at Yoyogi-Uehara at 08:39, convinced the others had already left without me. They hadn’t, and I was relieved to discover that the train we were supposed to take wasn’t set to leave till 08:46. The rest of the journey to Odawara was then pathetically uneventful by comparison, and the switch to the local service to Hakone-Yumoto was crowded but generally fine – a 2-hour trip all told, getting us into Hakone proper at about 11:00.

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 Lake Ashi, on which there were several pirate-ship replicas (and more normal boats) that did tours of the lake and its stunning surrounding scenery. As with all the best-laid plans of mice and men, a lot of things ganged a-glae. The Tozan mountain railroad that we had to take from Hakone-Yumoto to Gora was packed full and completely devoid of air conditioning – though thankfully the weather never hit more than 30°C, and since we were at ever-increasing altitude, there was a pleasant cool breeze to take the edge off the discomfort. My main complaint stemmed from a young couple who barged their way onto the train in Odawara literally seconds before the doors closed, who proceeded to take up what little personal space I’d had left before they got on, and then physically forced me back and away from my 3 friends so that they could spend the next few stops’ worth of travel schmoozing in a very un-Japanese way. I treated them to several of my wide range of cold stares, until they realised from a few words I managed to exchange over their heads with my friends that we were one group, and resentfully allowed me back into my original place. Hardly had they done so than Problem no. 2 materialised, in the form of a pair of young children who clearly didn’t appreciate the oppressively thick air and heat, and struck up a preces et responses of bawling that encompassed every note of the human hearing range, and several more besides. Their harassed-looking parents were utterly incapable of getting them to shut up, and drew some frustrated glances from even the most chilled-out Japanese fellow-passengers – my friends got into a major rant about the quality of Japanese parenting, to which I decided not to contribute my male two-cents. What I did notice was that both children were wearing clothes that were far too thick for the weather conditions, but more significantly that both children’s faces alternated between expressions of extreme discomfort and bafflement at regular intervals. The smaller of the two even got to the stage where it was staring in blank disinterest at the surrounding carriage and still emitting regular bawls as though vaguely aware that there was a good reason for doing so, which had temporarily slipped its mind, but should be upheld on a matter of principle. Needless to say, I was very glad when the family finally got off…

From Gora we took the stylishly-designed Hakone Tozan Cable-Car up to Sounzan, and from there the Hakone Ropeway up to Owakudani, which means “Great Boiling Valley”. As we reached the terminus, the unmistakeable rotten-egg stench of sulphur began to pervade the air. Owakudani is a volcanic valley, which emits dull subterranean thuds every so often, and plays host to one of the largest collections of sulphur vents and hot springs in Japan. If I were of a more Doctor-Who/Tolkienesque disposition, I would say that I “looked on the sulphur springs of Owakudani” – more accurately, I covered my mouth and nose with my handkerchief, eyed the springs of hot sulphuric acid with a mixture of concern and scepticism, and treated myself to two of the Kuro-tamago, eggs hard-boiled in the hot acid, which smell slightly of sulphur and have shells burned black, and which are claimed to increase longevity by seven years per egg up to and including two-and-a-half eggs, giving a maximum increased life expectancy of 17-and-a-half years. Fair enough, I thought, it’s only eggs, it’s not like they’re asking me to swim in the acid or anything…

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 Khumbu Icefall. Now, I’ve generally avoided doing any kind of energetic climbing in the past for the sole reason that I don’t want to imagine what might happen if I accidentally slipped and broke something important, and for the entire ascent there was a significant portion of my brain that was screaming at me to stop and go back, regardless of what anyone else might say. On the other hand, there was a larger portion of my brain that was angry at how unexpectedly difficult the course had turned out to be, and was therefore determined to see the whole thing through from top to bottom effectively just to prove I could. That part won out, and even though I spent most of the trek drenched in sweat, with my heart going at about twice its normal rate, my thighs in constant danger of giving out, my glasses steaming up, my balance starting to suffer from the loss of energy and gain in altitude, and the sulphurous fumes giving me a major headache for the first 100 or so vertical metres of the climb, I made it all the way from 1040m at Owakudani to the 1483m point at the summit of Mt Kami. And you know what? I actually really enjoyed the descent. I had no idea I’d be any good at this kind of hiking, but I unearthed something of a knack for using a slightly chimpanzee-like approach to getting down. Trees, roots, branches, big rocks – everything got used as a prop to help me get down (and up, as we approached Mt Komagatake). I probably looked very weird, since my arms performed all manner of unconscious tai-chi balancing movements that weren’t really all that necessary, while I frequently stopped to analyse my route down in a slightly twitchy meerkat-like way, and occasionally congratulated particularly helpful branches as I passed them on the way down. All the same, I was pathetically grateful when I got to the Ropeway station and could gaze out over Lake Ashi with the mountain air whipping around me – nothing like a bit of human civilisation to mitigate the extremes of Mother Nature. Still, in the unlikely event that I ever have to do something like that again in the near future, I now know what to do.

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’ Lonely Planet guides to traverse the hiking trail, we didn’t get to the shores of Lake Ashi before 17:00. Everything, as we soon realised, was shut. There was almost no-one to be seen about, and our repeated enquiries from information centre staff elicited the alarming conclusion that the buses and boats from where we were had already stopped well before we even got down from Komagatake. This was particularly annoying, since it ruled out our being able to travel in one of the pirate ships, and put in question our ability to even get back to Tokyo any time soon – but even worse, the expensive pass we’d bought proved to be totally useless for several of the forms of transport we could have taken. As I’d quietly suspected all day, the cost of the few journeys (cable car, Ropeway) that didn’t take PASMO almost certainly didn’t add up to more than whatever 5000 minus the cost of the trains from Tokyo to Gora would have been. Leergeld, “empty money”, as I call it. The atmosphere in the group was pretty tense, since all of us felt we’d been short-changed by the tail-end of our trip, but eventually we unwound as we found a PASMO-compatible bus to take us back to Sounzan, from where we essentially retraced our steps of the morning, and got into Tokyo around 22:30, completely exhausted. Tomorrow I’m being treated to an architectural tour of Tokyo, courtesy of Lena and Laura L (both architects / interior design students) – if there’s so much as a single stair during the route today, I’m taking the elevator or demanding to be carried…

Day 48 (18.ix.10)

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…

Day 47 (17.ix.10)

My brain feels like mush after an intense all-day event, so I’m going to keep this one short again. In the form of 5 More Things that are Different in Japan:

  1. 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…
  2. The numbering of blocks of houses in all Tokyo cities and areas is based on the radial distance of the block from the Imperial Palace up in Chiyoda. So, for instance, the German embassy is at 4-5-10 Minami-Azabu, which means that it’s in the Minami-Azabu area/town (which is in Minato ward), 4th district, chome, 5th block, ban, 10th building, go, all calculated relative to the central marker of the palace. As good as any marker, I suppose, but I still don’t like the face that, in the 21st century, the influence of an antiquated system of government can still affect something as aesthetically trivial but administratively crucial as an addressing system. NB: unlike the UK system, where one works one’s way up from the house number to the county, it’s prefecture downwards here in Japan.
  3. 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 Noel Edmonds’ shirt-maker, the laughter/applause track is on full blast practically all of the time, and there is a constant undercurrent of sound effects like bouncing springs, whistles and squelches to illustrate pretty much anything on screen. It may be that I’ve tuned into a disproportionate number of late-night talk-/game-shows, but I’m developing the distinct impression that Japanese TV can and does make Shooting Stars look like University Challenge and Never Mind the Buzzcocks sound like Question Time.
  4. The Japanese have a surprising penchant for playing tinny muzak in unexpected bits of the public transport system. This extends to the use of painfully repetitive tunes at pedestrian traffic lights to accompany the whole time that they turn green, and in the metro for the same purpose while the carriage doors are open and commuters are getting on/off. Helpful I guess, but slightly disconcerting for the first few times (due to the shock value) and fairly tedious not long after that.
  5. 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.

Day 46 (16.ix.10)

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 fist-bump, dap, hand-clasp-with-shoulder-bump (the bromantic “pound hug”) or some other baroque Masonic theatrics, or so distinguished that you bow, curtsey or hand-kiss. Only in group contexts, especially when one’s hands are already heavily taken up with drinks and canapés, is it really acceptable to just nod and smile. That, of course, is very different in Oriental countries, where physical contact is (as I’ve said before) just not the ‘done thing’ – even young couples who are obviously infatuated with each other steer well clear of the sort of extrovert salivating drapery that has been developed into an art-form by the Mediterraneans. Japan is perhaps at the extreme end of this scale, and has become renowned for the bowing habit – but (unsurprisingly) the more cosmopolitan Japanese have also, albeit tentatively, started to adopt the brief hand-squeeze as an acceptable alternative.

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 chance find on Wikipedia to correct me. It may not be the commonly done thing, but giving and receiving money with both hands is certainly the metaphorical ‘done thing’ – and since my respect for Japanese culture has only grown during my stay here, it is the thing I will do from now on. Not metaphorically, but quite literally.

Day 45 (15.ix.10)

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

公園: こうえん, koen, meaning “park”. There are surprisingly few examples of these around Tokyo – I pretty much went round all the ones that are accessible to the public on the weekend before work started, with the exception of Meiji-jingu-koen, which I was too grumpy to see then and which I may try and squeeze in next week at some point. The Japanese seem to prefer tree-lined streets (a godsend in sunny weather) and mini-gardens on their balconies to massive creations like Hyde Park, the Tiergarten or Central Park – or perhaps more accurately, they don’t trust the wider populace with using the ones they do have (reserved for the Imperial family, grumble grumble) in a sensible way…

交番: こうばん, koban, meaning “police box”. These are to be found in almost every locality, often near big features like public buildings, government offices and train stations. While their primary function is as a deterrent and first line of defence against criminality, in reality they double up more frequently as information desks, with confused locals and tourists alike trotting in to ask inane directions from the very patient policemen. It’s the Japanese alternative to ‘going on the beat’.

店: みせ, mise, meaning “shop”. Of which there are millions here, all selling goods so popular that the yen is going through the roof. What is it with me going abroad and worsening exchange rates?!

学校: がっこう, gakko, meaning “school”. Related in a kanji way to大学, だいがく, daigaku, which essentially means “big school” – “university”. Students are called学生, がくせい, gakusei; and teachers are called 先生, せんせい, sensei, regardless of the number of qualifications they have, how old they are, how many marriages they’ve been through or what they teach.

切符: きっぷ, kippu, meaning “ticket”. Used in the sense of the cinema or theatre as well as of transport, although the Anglicism チケット is starting to replace it (sadly).

郵便: often written 〒, always pronounced ゆうびん, yubin, meaning “post, mail”. Much as with the curvy M used to denote Tokyo Metro stations, the T symbol crops up everywhere where there is a 郵便局, ゆうびんきょく, yubinkyoku, “post office”. Local branches can be exceptionally local, with barely enough room in them for an employee, a desk, and a queue of 2 people. Yet even the big central ones in Shibuya or Aoyama don’t have machines to dispense postal goods – if you want to buy切手, きって, kitte, “stamps”, you will have to subject yourself to the very Argos-like numbered-receipt-based waiting system before being interrogated at the counter by a surly and resolutely monolingual employee. Otherwise, there will be no sending of 手紙, てがみ, tegami, “letter”, or 葉書, はがき/ポストカード, hagaki/posutukaado, “postcard” for you… You can tell I’ve been through this experience recently…

病院: びょういん, byoin, meaning “hospital”. Somewhere you want to avoid going – judging by the number of untreated basic defects like wonky teeth, different-length legs, and humped backs among especially the middle-aged, Japanese healthcare has only recently really caught up with what we would expect as standard in the West. Nonetheless, if you need to see a 医者, いしゃ, isha, “doctor”, for whatever reason, you now know where to go.

And finally, my random kanji for this edition:

図書館, としょかん, toshokan, meaning “library”. Because books, like everything else, are too expensive to buy for yourself – so you either read them off the shelf in the shop, or wander down to the library. At least, that’s how it seems…

Day 44 (14.ix.10)

In light of the failed attempt today by “shadow shogun” Ichiro Ozawa to unseat Naoto Kan as Democratic Party of Japan leader and thus Prime Minister of Japan, I think it’s about time I gave the uninitiated a little glimpse into the politics of this constructed democracy. Japan is something of an island of liberal democracy in a region otherwise fairly devoid of alternatives to suffocating authoritarianism, with India, Thailand and Mongolia the only systems in the south-east Asian region that offer comparative levels of representation and popular sovereignty. Australia, New Zealand and Papua New Guinea are just that little bit too far away to count as south-east Asia in my book… and South Korea and Taiwan are still recovering from decades of unambiguously authoritarian rule… Without going too far into the nitty-gritty of the world of academic literature on democratisation (although I for one love doing so), Japan has traditionally been viewed as something of an oddity on the spectrum of international democratic systems – this was due to the near-complete domination of the political scene (until 2009) in the so-called “55-year system” by the Liberal Democratic Party, which was only temporarily ousted from office by an 8-party opposing coalition in 1993-96, during which time the LDP retained the relative greatest popularity of any party in the Diet. So, technically, until the DPJ under Yukio Hatoyama categorically defeated the LDP in the 2009 election, Japan had only one party of government, and had not had the two smooth alternations of power between stable governing parties/coalitions that are often seen as a requirement of successful liberal democracies. Not that the LDP ever really threatened to turn Japan into a one-party state – it was more that they were the “natural party of government” along the lines of the French Gaullists, and that they became complacent in power and corrupt in a similar way to the Christian Democrats in the Italian 1st Republic (pre-1994).

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 New Komeito Party (and its predecessors) to form a united front in both government and opposition, is broadly liberal-conservative in hue, encompassing strands of Japanese nationalism, libertarianism and social conservatism – with the Komeito group providing Buddhism-inspired centrism and other minor partners lying more to the social conservative right of the LDP. The DPJ, a fairly young party built in 1998 out of the ashes of failed experiments with overt socialism, is essentially the result of the merger of several independent parties which, like the 8-party coalition in the mid-90s, were united only in the most tenuous way by a shared opposition to the LDP. That, effectively, is still true of the DPJ now – it is a shifting quagmire of competing factions still coming to terms with the trappings of power invested in them by the (predictable but nonetheless novel) electoral collapse of the LDP in 2009. The recent leadership challenge by Ozawa, himself a former LDP leader and resolute social conservative, against Kan, a fairly unambiguous social-liberal centrist, illustrates the problem that the new party has yet to solve – in the short term, the DPJ are likely to be electorally punished, as they already were at the House of Councillors election this June, for failing to improve on the LDP’s recent poor record at stifling the “revolving door” phenomenon of the constantly-changing Prime Ministership (with the notable exception of the legendary Junichiro Koizumi). The LDP, on the other hand, know through long experience how to deal with internal strife – a chunk of the party splits off, generally in the form of a charismatic figurehead and some ideological lackeys, maybe survives in opposition for a few elections, then declines into irrelevance before merging with other parties in an attempt to stay in parliament.

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 mixed electoral system of parallel voting, biased towards constituency pluralities (single-member for the Representatives, multi-member for the Councillors) and ‘topped up’ with D’Hondt-method PR, hugely favours big, locally-entrenched well-organised  catch-all parties – and only the LDP really lives up to anything close to such a label at the moment. Unless the DPJ rapidly resolves its internal squabbling either through a strong whipping system or formal party policy committees (or both), it will soon be dumped out of government, back to the opposition benches along with the lunatics (Japanese Communist Party, Sunrise Party) and the flashes-in-the-pan (Your Party, Happiness Realisation Party). And unless a credible alternative emerges to the tired lottizzazione of LDP rule in the same way as Berlusconi’s Forza Italia initially promised a new type of politics in the Italian 2nd Republic, Japan will continue to be dominated by unimaginative LDP politics occasionally punctuated by brief respites of other-party rule, and popular apathy towards the status quo will continue to be the order of the day.

Day 43 (13.ix.10)

In light of the recent nine-year anniversary of 9/11, for which I can’t really think of any better lay analysis than this article by Robert Fisk, I thought I might devote today’s entry to a brief look at the nature and role of the Japanese military since the wholesale demilitarisation of Japan during the Allied Occupation. In contrast to West Germany, where the military was reconstructed relatively quickly and along fairly familiar lines to counter the then-serious threat of invasion by the USSR, Japan remained completely devoid of armed units of any kind until the sudden threat of war on the Korean Peninsula (and the consequent transfer of almost all the occupying forces to Korea under the UN banner) left it alarmingly defenceless. And it is defence that has remained the key principle behind the operations of the Japan Self-Defence Forces, 自衛隊, jieitai, which emerged from the National Police Reserve (essentially an organised militia) of 1950 and the National Safety Forces (more military police) of 1952. Key to the unique purpose of the JSDF is Article 9 of the post-war Japanese constitution, which reads: “The Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes” and later that “land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained”. That’s strange, you might say, I was sure the Japanese had an army, navy and air force – and you would be almost right. Indeed, Japan does have (relatively small) forces that could recognisably fulfil all these functions: the Ground, Maritime and Air Self-Defence Forces, to be exact. But they don’t have provisions for a lot of “normal” military functions: surface-to-surface missiles, marines or amphibious units.

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 behaviour of Imperial Japan in the 1930s and 40s. This is given considerable weight (in the same way as the similar, if unspoken, policy in Germany) by Japan’s point-blank refusal to countenance either the development or the harbouring of nuclear weapons on Japanese soil, and its de facto passing of the military buck to the USA, courtesy of the Mutual Security Assistance Pact. The message is fairly clear: walk softly, and hang around someone with a big stick. Even the brief but controversial Japanese military expedition to the Reconstruction of Iraq in 2004-6 was done under stringent peacekeeping guidelines, with Japanese personnel generally accompanied by the less restricted Australian armed forces. The real innovation, however, lies in the treatment of the JSDF as just another branch of the Japanese Civil Service – the Chiefs of Staff are junior to the Ministry of Defence, with the ultimate authority lying with the Prime Minister. Members of any of the Defence Forces are officially civilians, known as “special civil servants”, and are subject to exactly the same treatment and adjudication as ordinary Japanese citizens in civilian courts. There is simply nothing special about the military, no extraordinary perception or behaviour, no exceptions of conduct or discretion for military personnel in the name of national security, and certainly no special regulations or laws – it is a job like any other, a public-sector job at that, with the only difference the (dubious) perk of vaguely military training. Not quite the Swiss militia system, if anything almost an inverse – not civilians being potential soldiers, more soldiers being potent civilians.

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 military junta in Burma, Greece under the Colonels’ regime, or (in a different sense) North Korea. Military logic is used to justify and code civilian legislation, government and civil service positions are staffed with military loyalists, the police is incorporated into a gendarme branch of the military, and aggressive gun-toting becomes the driving goal of all activity within the nation-state (political, social and economic). The standard response in most democratic countries is to aim for a clear separation between state and military: this ensures some degree of apolitical professionalism and clear discrimination of purpose, but often leads to lack of accountability on the part of the military, as well as conflicts of strategy in the case of common purpose (i.e. a war). What Japan has done is clear up the problems of the ‘normal’ system without (as yet) sacrificing the benefits – the military is more obviously accountable (inasmuch as any branch of the civil service can be held accountable) through its integration into government administration, while the priority of the civil government is made clear through the simple hierarchy the constitution imposes. Add to that the further measures of the budget cap and Article 9 – and the watchdog of a deeply pacifist population, bar the fringes of the far-right – to reduce the likelihood of military concerns dominating the government agenda, and what comes out is a national security policy that I can only describe as ‘eminently sensible’. For the Japanese, militarism is just so last century…

Day 42 (12.ix.10)

Always a special day, the 42nd of any trip, I find – lot of symbolism and meaning, if only thanks to Douglas Adams. Also in my (growing) experience, since it marks the end of the sixth week of being wherever I am, I’m starting to find that it coincides fairly closely with the point of my stay at which I can begin to say that I’m getting the hang of whichever country I’m in. I had just that feeling today – though if I’m honest I’d been planning to head up to Nikko or down to Hakone, and only changed my plans when I realised I hadn’t gotten up early enough to actually end up spending any meaningful amount of time in either location, once the 2-hours-each-way train journeys had been taken into account as well. So instead I decided to use today to complete my shopping tour, in the form of a very large round-trip around the Outer Sights of Tokyo. I started off by walking from Shibuya to Harajuku along Meiji-dori in order to look into Oriental Bazaar just opposite Omotesando Hills – initially a relatively painless trek in the morning shade, but fairly soon the heat and humidity (which have returned again, now the rainy weather has disappeared) started to take their toll again. However, the trip to Oriental Bazaar was more than worth it – in one fell swoop I found all the things I wanted to get (for myself and others) still outstanding from last week’s expedition. As Simon’s cat might put it, “praouw!” I just wish I’d gone there for some things beforehand – might have saved the odd yen here and there, and would certainly have saved a lot of fruitless errand-running on previous occasions. Oh well. As it was, I earmarked a number of items for purchase nisi aliquid melius inveniatur, then set off on Stage 2 of my trek.

This was to Sunshine City at Ikebukuro, which for the second time running managed to disappoint me in my quest. There seems all of a sudden to be a major deficit of decent Totoro cuddly toys in Tokyo toy-shops – Moé Garden had barely half the range I remember it having from last time, instead shelf-space has been commandeered (somewhat incongruously) by a whole new Чебурашка, Cheburashka, collection that gave me serious déjà vu from Moscow ’07. Toys’R’Us only (bizarrely) had one variant of Medium-Totoro (a definite 2nd-best option), and nothing else – which occasioned a lot of incredulous spluttering from me and several worried looks from passing families – and Tokyu Hands in Ikebukuro didn’t even have a toys section. Add to this the fact that Kiddyland in Harajuku is closed for refurbishing and that the only other relevant shopping area is way off down in Odaiba, and prospects for the acquisition of a physical grinning Totoro are beginning to look rather grim. If the small lifeline of the opening of a temporary Kiddyland store on 17.ix. near the old Harajuku site doesn’t pay dividends, it looks like I’m going to be restricted to whatever I can get in the Tokyu Hands in Shibuya. But I’m not giving up quite yet. Where there’s a Totoro there’s hope – that at least was the moral lesson I got when I first watched Tonari no Totoro, “My neighbour Totoro”, back in Easter last year. The clip at the bottom should give you an idea of why he’s such a great character – even if you don’t understand Japanese, how can you not fall in love with that grin?!

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 Strictly Come Dancing 2010 that hit screens in the UK yesterday evening. Not sure who to back yet, but I’m already slightly resenting the way the judges have decided ex ante that Ann Widdecombe is going to be the John Sergeant of this series. All right, she’s not going to be the most mobile dancer ever, but I’d like to see Craig or Bruno have a go when they hit 62…

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.