Thanks to all my readers for your positive comments in the past–they’re what keeps bloggers like me going!

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…

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 45^th 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.

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!

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…

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.

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.

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!

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.

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…