Libertarian musings from just inside the M25.

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.