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.