The Information Super B-Road

Going to the immigration office in Tachikawa yielded an important discovery. We are surrounded by LARGE URBAN CONGLOMERATIONS. In ALL DIRECTIONS. And here I was thinking we lived on the outskirts of the city. No, though this terrain is littered with allotments sprouting unidentified fruit & veg, it seems this is just a resting point before more unbridled urbanity.

And these aren't like small suburban centers in London with a few Tesco Express stores and a grubby pub. Each one has a couple of high-rise department stores, several concrete runways and four billion restaurants. I've been into these high-rise department stores driven by curiosity and other basic human necessities. Often they are divided into sub-buildings arranged according to two or more of the cardinal points, each with their own unattractive elevators and a varying number of floors. Some parts of the building go to the 8th floor, some go to the 6th. How do they do it? Vast expanses filled with merchandise and just a couple of scattered people looking as bewildered as me. How do they stay alive? Along with the billion restaurants, shops, tiny bars... HOW DO THEY DO IT? Many times walking the streets you'll glimpse a small window whose immaculately arranged curtain betrays a tantalizing glimpse into some congenial little parlour with a counter and stools arranged for some kind of mysterious eating purpose... The towers above you bear signs advertising all kinds of restaurants on any floor from 3 below to 7 up, bars with names in kanji, and hiragana characters, the occasional English word thrown in to shed no more light on what they are actually like, on how much time, how much money you need to find them all... What are you missing?



A new friend of a friend and his friend and I went on an outing with a charming group of older but astonishingly active Japanese people on their English conversation group outing, one of whom was the friend of a friend's friend's mother. We travelled out the city to a small town whose main tourist attraction was a museum to Japanese film character Tora san. His films are like a Japanese version of Carry On, i.e. cheesy old comedy films that they squeezed every last drop out of. Amazingly the conversation crew was content with standing outside the museum and chatting for a little while before going off to have tea in an exquisite traditional house. My new friends and I rebelled and entered the museum to find ourselves confronted with fantastically detailed miniature models of Tora san's common film sets. His 48 films all had the same plot and involved him falling for a woman only to wind up a heartbroken vagabond yet again. When the poor actor was riddled with cancer the pushy producers forced him to make one more film in which he spends most of it sitting down. Then he died, and so did the film series. Sad, isn't it?

We crossed the river into Chiba, thereby leaving Tokyo. We inched silently across the water's breadth in a wooden gondola crammed with people. Everyone was sunned into momentary silence. The water was still and thick; the dying summer heat pounded us with a large polystyrene mallet. The craggy boatman turned his stick with ancient patience. We were crossing into oblivion and it was warm. On the other side, we climbed up the dock and found various fields rolling off into the distance. What do people come here for, I wondered? We crossed a field and mounted a hill where an old man sat on a deckchair wearing a hat from the Australian Outback. He got up and so began one of the features of Japanese society. Old people with information.



While the young and not actually that young are plugged into the information superhighway, so the over-60s in Japan (who seem to be less technologically savvy than their Western counterparts) are plugged into a kind of information B-road. Weekends are filled with club activities for the retired. Married couples split up and pursue their personal activities, be it English conversation (in this case), rambling, golf, etc etc. As you amble about you will come across local old people who are lying in wait to ambush you and spurt information in your general direction. It kept happening. At a temple a volunteer tour guide approached us and proceeded to spend the entire day following us around giving lengthy sermons, that were translated to me differently by each person I spoke to. When we crossed the river I thought we'd lost him but sure enough when we returned he was there, wagging his tail and panting in his luminous orange "I'm a volunteer" jacket. The old man in the Crocodile Dundee hat awaiting us on the other side of the river, as if in some unspoken relay with Tail Wagger, spoke interminably about the history of the small patch of ground surrounding us. Some said he was talking about an old horse-riding college. Others said he was talking about rice crops after the war. But whatever it was it was long and slow and when we walked away I took his photo and he was embarrassed.

The Five Starbucks of Kichijōji

Kichijōji is an excellent area, let down only by it's gangrenous proliferation of Starbucks. I have counted five up to now, though I'm always ready to spot another tucked around a corner like the malignant boil behind a giant's ear. Time for a lancing.

- There's that one on the path down to the park by the famous yakitori place that billows with smoke and was on TV once apparently.

- That other one on Nakamichi shopping street near the curry stench of Café Montana and the best rāmen place in the world.

- Oh, what about that one on the other pedestrianized street just by that butchers that always has a queue outside it? Opposite Tokyu that huge department store I've never been in?

- And yes, above the station in that classy shopping center near the chopstick shop.

- Ooh, what was the fifth one. What was it. Oh yes, round behind on the other side, near Zara - you know, the one with the huge wooden deck.


So it turns out rāmen is unhealthy. Who'd have thought it? Must be that oily soup.

Signs and Wanders

Japanese conversation is punctuated by shrill and constant expressions of surprise. Mention that it rained yesterday in Britain, or some other statement of banal fact, and you will receive a breathy, Yoda-like "Ah, sodeska?" as if you had just stated the percentage of gay people in the Chinese government or something actually interesting like that.

My personal favourite is a singing gasp that rises in pitch and volume to a teetering precipice of stunned amazement. You might achieve such a reaction from stating that last year you had a cold, or making a shrewd observation like "Ooh look, there's a bird." Aaaaahhhhhhh!!!

How they Fuck you Over

Gently, calmly, so you don't even notice. It's subtle and, dare I say it, almost pleasing? Nothing at all like the crude violations perpetrated on you in Argentina. When you're being fucked over by a monopolic telephone company in Buenos Aires, you have a bird's eye view of your own rough penetration. In Japan it's more like being given a massage by a stranger on a crowded subway. And the subway is a great example. You load up cash on your magnetic card, and as you beep in and beep out, thousands of dollars fly out invisibly and unnoticeably like a gas leak in the house of a coma victim.

City of Water & Peace

Hiroshima is a relaxed paradise of interlaced rivers, trundling trams, friendly folk and stacks of adorable bars. The Peace Park, where the BOMB dropped, is one of those hyper-designed concrete and grass spaces that smooth out the kinks in your soul. It's studded with memorials and through its heart runs an axis from the centre of the wide museum building through a bizarre tubular memorial arch to the awesome A-Dome. A former municipal building whose frame and distinctive dome structure were somehow left standing by the nuclear explosion that occurred just above and to the left of it, it has been preserved in that condition as a reminder, and it is chilling to the bone.

The Museum is a 1950s building and its current contents might have seemed state of the art back then. It makes woeful use of its uniquely powerful subject. It's still hugely affecting to see the debilitating destruction caused through scale models of the city, bottles welded together by the blast, examples of the nuclear shadow and horrific human evidence of the deadly radiation. But the exhibition has poor lighting, antique displays and a 1 minute introductory video whose bellowing soundtrack of voiceover backed by strings accompanies on loop your entire journey round the museum. Put it in a box, guys. Why not phone Spielberg and ask him if he fancies taking a break from designing Holocaust Museums?

Future Perfect

The funny thing about the Hiroshima Museum's exhibition is that it probably looked futuristic once. Which is the case with most of Tokyo. It is like the futuristic city as envisaged 30 years ago by some delirious weirdo in a basement. Except shabbier. It's like the alternate 1985 that Michael J. Fox travels to in Back to the Future II. You know, one where he doesn't have Parkinson's. It's the bricks and mortar equivalent of verb tense the Future Perfect. It will have happened. Or rather some kind of bastardised version: It will have been going to have been happening. R.I.P. Douglas Adams.

For Pity's SAKE

At the Sanjō Sake Festival among banks of crates bearing over 900 varieties of the ol' rice wine, I met RICKY. A gigantic African American 57-year-old with a suspiciously non-specific job in the US Government that has led him to work in various bizarre locations around the world, he regaled me hilariously as we chucked down shots from our tiny cups. Let's face it, most of them taste the same. Even a Japanese guy said that, so I'm not being racist. Finally we learned the word 'karai' (dry), which unlocked the door to the good stuff. Ricky and I met up again the next day to go to Miyajima Island, a beautiful pile of forest and rocks out in Hiroshima Bay. It's covered in deer, oyster vendors and fascinating machines that pump out Hiroshima's famed cakes, which are maple leaf-shaped. Yes, that's right. Hiroshima is from Canada.

Dock this

The London docklands seemed a tiny, perfect concrete adventure playground. Buenos Aires port, once the conduit for a continent's wealth, was reminscent of a couple of scattered building blocks. The Tokyo docks, in their wide inconceivable vastness, lay before us.

Our mission: to collect items shipped from London two months earlier.

Several different subway lines and a monorail that coasts along a riverside deposited us two hours later before the yawning impersonal greyness of DOCKLAND. Giant buildings in the distance loomed like some kind of industrial Mordor. We trudged through sticky humidity, through a landscape not intended for pedestrians. In fact, we were the only ones. Trucks and shiny lorries sped past. We passed large empty parks, tracts of greenery supposed to relieve the desolate wasteland, but in fact making it all the more desperate. Like trying to tackle India's starving children with one bag of doughnuts.

Hours of hunger and thirst staggered by. No friendly bedouins about to toss us a canteen of water. We found ourselves in a dizzying wonderland of multicoloured cargo containers. Memories of The Wire Season 2 flashed before our dilated pupils. Could one of them be filled with dead Ukrainian prostitutes? Chance would be a fine thing. Several attempts to get directions resulted in blank looks or, worse, lengthy, tortuous attempts to answer a question to which it was quickly apparent no-one knew the answer. Awkward silences ensued. In-fighting sparked up. Where would it all end?

And then we found it. Seino Logix. A boxy office wedged in the crevice of a warehouse complex the size of East Anglia. Who were these people? Port handling, cargo collection? Import middlemen? Not sure. We had already paid the shipping company but this was a separate matter, apparently.



Those who have seen Kurosawa's film Ikiru, a critique of Japanese bureaucracy made in 1952, will be surprised that in 2010 the offices look EXACTLY THE SAME. Stacks of papers and dreary resigned facial expressions. There were no computers in 1952 but if there were you can be sure they wouldn't have been changed. Antique IBMs of that nondescript dirty grey colour and gigantic prehistoric monitors. Japan is not the hi-tec paradise envisioned by generations of manga artists. People bustled around fending off all work thrown their way like cartoon ninjas using breakfast trays to repel shuriken stars.

First we were charged US$ 140. More than we'd paid for the shipping. Why? Seino Logix had been kind enough to transport our stuff to their office and issue the paperwork. It's true the paperwork was obscenely copious but printing costs don't really come up to that sum. Well the transportation then - it would have been extremely useful had we not discovered we'd have to transfer it back to Customs ourselves to get it inspected.

Remonstrations and exasperated protests were met with repeated apologies. The Japanese apology, extremely apologetic in tone, actually has "Fuck you" as its rough translation.

Ok, we have to take the stuff that we've paid to have shipped here to Customs ourselves. Fine. It's a hassle, so just give us the stuff and we'll get it over with. No, you can't have the stuff. Why not? You have to go to Customs to get permission. And then come back to get the stuff. And then go back to Customs to get it inspected.

So what are we paying you for?

You'd better pay or we'll torch your boxes of crap and piss on the cinders.

Oh right, sorry.

A whole day passed in toing and froing through the docklands with and without enormous boxes of stuff, convoluted taxis, nowhere to buy food and but a setting sun over a monochrome horizon to elevate the spirit.

Silent labyrinth heralds rebirth

The bewildering whirr of the cicadas assaulted my senses. A Japanese symbol of rebirth, their dentist chair noises made me feel as if I were undergoing some kind of reincarnation operation.

It was my first night and we were hunting in vain and in the darkness for my bike I'd never seen, left in some place on the kibbutz-like university campus by an undefined friend. A guard approached with his torch: were we thieves? We weren't. We trudged away on foot to the apartment we were to stay in for a month. Or tried to.



Much of the area of Mitaka city is a suburban labyrinth of tiny houses with a veiny network of small alleyways bearing a constant stream of bikers and the occasional boxy car. We asked for directions in a faux 7-11 with a chicken logo and after intently studying a map found our destination.

Tokyo addresses are a code of numbers referring to sequentially dwindling areas of importance. Head backwards through this one:

1-29-17 Koganei, Higashicho, Mitaka-shi, Tokyo-to, Japan, Earth, The Solar System, The Milky Way, The Universe, Infinity

I drew a complex series of lines to represent the route. A tragically-mutilated spider. As we trotted past allotments, the occasional Coca-Cola vending machine, and strange dwellings boxed up and stacked against each other, the SILENCE was oppressive. Where were the people? I imagined scores of locals silently pressed up against screens behind closed walls. The heat and humidity were stifling. It was nothing like anything.

The charmingly noisy streets of Buenos Aires, with a fat man in any direction you look shouting affectionate insults at another fat man. The saturated and bubbling people mash of Thailand. These were all far away now. I slapped at my legs. Small, compact mosquitos feasted on fresh blood.

The apartment was a tiny, stifling cardboard box on stilts. The ceiling and the floor had little to keep them apart. A miniscule toy fan pretended to be doing something in the corner. The bathroom was a machine room with a hose. We lay on a futon gasping in despair. Is this life, I wondered?

The next morning we fled to the university to a splendid campus pad. Reborn in Cicada Land.

Grunt for the Instant Birdie

Sibley House, the location of our modest but fairly (in Tokyo standards) spacious campus apartment, replete with "Japanese style" sliding doors, kitchenette, bathroomcito and large windows, was built in 1957, according to the proud boast of a sign on the façade. The sign makes no mention of when it was renovated. That's because it wasn't. We're not far from the tennis courts, where thousands of rippling youths scream rhythmically in unison. Concealed by dense greenery, it is unclear what they are doing in there. But whatever it is, I'm sure it is less entertaining than the mental images produced by their synchonised grunting.

Much aggressive grunting comes from restaurant staff too. The other day I had my first experience in a rāmen bar, down a Kichijōji side street. Three white-uniformed rāmen ninjas bellowed and stood to attention as I entered. It was lunch hour peak and once I'd sat down at the long bar, every stool was taken. This was not a place for lunchtime socialising. Solo diners sit, bodies contorted and faces parallel to the counter, 2mm from the soup, whereupon they slurp and snort their way through the giant portions at a frankly incredible rate. I tried to order the bountiful chicken my neighbour was ploughing into. They gave me the pork, possibly sniffing my Jewish ancestry. The soup had the kind of moreish comfort quality of pulverised chicken fat. I scarfed down about 3/4 of my portion in the time it took for a complete turnover of the entire restaurant clientele. While I ate I observed the staff dynamic. One hung near the door for no apparent reason. The giant middle one took orders and barked them to the final one, who had a more skivvy-like aspect but a cooler way of carrying himself. He stood above a huge boiling vat with suspended noodle containers. It was about 35º and yet he was cool as wasabi lipgloss. The soothing sound of gushing water was punctuated by spurts as the giant middle ninja sprayed the floor with a gigantic hose. As I stood up I braced myself for the deafening scream.

Speaking of rāmen, I'm addicted to the instant variety. Similar in concept to the Pot Noodle, yet thousands of miles away in distance, you can buy a bewildering variety in the supermarket. I have no idea what any of them are but make my selections based on shape and colour, animal instinct and other arbitrary factors. As a budding physicist delights in his discovery of the boundless possibilities of matter, so am I constantly amazed by the sheer range of things that can be made to appear with the addition of boiling water. Today I opened a bowl-shaped packet to find a yellow polystyrene cube lying seductively atop the dried noodle blocks. Stirfried egg. After the requisite four minutes I peeled back the foil to discover three rice paper discs with a yellow bird cheerily waving hello. Obvious concerns about the nutritionary value of such food barely managed to temper my childlike glee.

The Land of the Rising Barometer

The unbearable stifling humidity of Tokyo is taking me by surprise. Actually it's taken everyone by surprise. A rednosed besuited wag on Saturday afternoon alleged that it has been the hottest summer for 133 years. Other more trusty news sources have backed that up, partly.

Apparently the autumn is shrinking to nothing. Sub-Saharan heat will dissolve rapidly into Antartic cold. The word 'temperate' keeps bobbing up in my memory like a table-tennis ball in a green pond.

I have walked the deserts of the Holy Land. I have moisted the depths of the Thai rainforests. And nothing has come close. Even the gasping exhaust-fuelled February peak of Buenos Aires is like a temperate day in an English garden in comparison to this.

Japanese men dab at their sweaty faces with small, charmingly-designed towels. I have one, blue and white, bought for me by a certain someone.

Women JOG in the NOONDAY SUN in long tracksuit trousers, long sleeves, visors and GLOVES. What the fuck is wrong with these people?

I'm confused. I feel as if I've entered a parallel universe where I'm a 19-year-old Japanese boy from the provinces just starting out at the International Christian University in Mitaka. Living on the campus might have something to do with it. The thick forest hangs outside my window, the cicadas keep their cement mixers and pneumatic drills in motion, their little hard hats occasionally falling to the soft earth and rotting there in the warm soil. The ICU campus is an isolated world in an obscure suburb of Tokyo, a petri dish of wildlife, wild intellectual stimulation and wild times, baby.

Adolescent students arm themselves into brittle factions. Sporty jocks laugh heartily and scream deafeningly, while jumping up and down repeatedly. Girls caked in make up and wearing charmingly-designed shoes (of varying models), charmingly-designed socks (of varying sizes), hair spraying forth in fountains and marvellous hilly eruptions, group together and totter awkwardly around, giggling nervously. American students wait for their moment to amaze other 'gaijin' (foreigners) around them by nonchalantly babbling away in perfect Japanese...

In short, it's a campus. And one quite different from the awkward labyrinth where I spent my own freshman year back in 1999. Now I'm older, larger, less cynical and more... secure? This feels more like the setting of an American college movie, transposed slightly. In any case I can look upon the herd with distance, and enjoy it. Identity crisis aside.

+ 4 YRS

Falling away like a grainy cord binding dangling blurry photos, grains of time grow to immense planet size proportions and I hop through anti-gravity up the ROPE OF SAND...