Tokyo Apocalypse Diary

The rumours are conflicting. Some 600,000 people more left the City today, driving battered cars through the quagmire of people. I saw some guys on crutches dragging their bloody limbs off on the long road South. All they had was a flashlight and a sack of instant ramen. Some of the roads and bridges leaving the city have broken down. There are reports of some exit ways being clogged by bands of uniformed guards. No-one in, no-one out.

All supermarkets in Tokyo are sold out of bread and related products. Some sweet cakes can still be found. Pasta remains in certain places though. The locals seem unaware of its stodgy qualities. The 99 yen shop down the street was sold out of all instant ramen except a suspicious looking pot covered in flame drawings. I had to club an old lady with my bike chain to get to it, but I'm eating it now, crumbling it in my hands and licking up the grease. That could last me another 24 hours.

I've been boiling water and adding mouthwash to it instead of iodine, which is hard to find since the pharmacies were looted. I'm concerned that my sixpack of Listerine "Cool Blue" won't last the week. Milk and dairy products are to steer clear of. The putrescence of the cow population is common knowledge. "So fresh you can hear it moo" is no longer comforting.

What will happen when the food runs out? I've been reading Cormac McCarthy's The Road for recipe ideas. I just opened the window with my head in a paper bag to catch the definite whiff of burnt popcorn. What's going on out there?

The bread stockpiling is a mystery. Not a single egg can be found either. Secret French Toast parties. Probably the brain-addled freaks of the northern sector. It makes me sick to my stomach, but all I can retch up is a green, oily substance that reminds me of when I used to smoke Royals.

On the way back home today the subway broke down and we had to get out and push. All the men in their identikit black suits and the ladies with their shopping bags. The suits are filthy, have been for days, the shopping bags empty. People carry on.

Messages are sent through social networking sites. People who I haven't seen since Kindergarten urge me to flee. Don't they understand it's too late? The poison in my system has to be sated by continued ingestion. Or my organs will collapse. I read it on the BBC.

The wound I sustained during the Quake has start to glow faintly. I used it to heat up my last apple and then sprinkled it with the last of my cinnamon.

Better order pizza tonight.

Quake and Bake - Shinjuku Fallout

I just got back home at 9:10am, 18 hours or so after the Quake, to find the fridge had journeyed to the center of the room and a sprinkling of shelf contents on the floor having bounced off my computer. Working backwards, there was a cold sunshine bike ride back from the station, a horribly packed and painfully slow train journey on the first train, some long waiting, a nocturnal ramble, a witnessing of the insane fallout when an urban machine goes haywire.

I was in Japanese class when it started, leaning back against the flimsy interior wall. I have had a few minor quakes here so was quicker this time to realize it was not a machine dryer on in a nearby room. At first everyone giggled - small quakes happen all the time and are fun. But this was already too much. The earth heaved to and fro like the deck of a ship. It's very unsettling to feel the terra not firma. I remembered the old maxim and placed myself in the doorframe. It might have worked if I wasn't barged out of it as everyone escaped in a mad panic. Outside the sun shone and drivers stood by stationary vehicles. Suited businessmen milled on the pavement. Japanese girls were witnessed without make-up - a once in a lifetime opportunity. Small dogs were comforted. One ran round in very small circles looking like it might explode. A distinct odour of sulphur in the air - was it Japan's geothermal water table or a burst sewage pipe?

Aftershocks bubbled for an hour. Sometimes you thought you'd felt a tremor and had to look up at the buildings' antennae, or the rocking trees to be sure. Phones were inoperable, classes, work, trains were cancelled, some people went bravely off on bikes. Buses moved by packed with people who already knew they had to get out of the city any which way - and fast. The organizational fallout had begun.

Streams of people filled the avenues, haemorrhaging in all directions. Worried faces were outnumbered by ones happy to be off work early. Hundreds congregated outside the many exits of Shinjuku station, trying phones again and again, looking lost. Squadrons of uniformed guards stood in front of every box or ticket gate, patiently answering questions from the onslaught. Every public telephone had at least 20 people waiting to use it. A vindication of old cable technology. In a pub images of destruction appeared on the screen and punters bedded down for a long wait.

In a sushi place I chatted with a guy whose office was on the 38th floor, which had led to chairs being thrown about. He wanted to talk about Premiership football and insisted on paying for my meal as a point of samurai honour. I decided to try make it home.

I bumped into an Israeli friend heading back on foot. He lives one stop away from Shinjuku. My place was at least 3 hours walk away in uncertain directions.

Walking through one side of the massive conglomeration that is Shinjuku station, thousands of people stared helplessly at closed ticket gates, repeatedly asking the same questions of the guards, sitting on the floor to wait all night. Would trains be running later? No. Tomorrow morning? I don't know.

The bus terminal was comical. Every stop bore a queue stretching downstairs through tunnels to curl around the bowels of the station. No buses were turning up. I pulled off a coup by finding a little-known bus stop with a mysterious route direct through to my neighbourhood. But it all turned out to be a cruel hoax.

The patrons of Shinjuku's million tiny bars had the same silent glumness they always have. It was difficult to tell the difference. A street tout from Togo invited me on a little tour of some bizarre places ending up in a weird subterranean R&B bar where he unexpectedly produced his father and brother. I sneaked past the check-in counter of a karaoke place and into a recently vacated booth where I slept comfortably for a couple of hours. By now it was 5:30am - time for the trains to start?

People slept, stood, stared with glazed eyes. Japan Rail's finest were maintaining a solid defensive line against an increasing multitude. Complex messages were communicated via megaphone. I don't know how long I stood there, at the front, watching these bizarre procedures go on. Stretches of yellow tape were stuck here and there. Pieces of paper were moved around. A tiny woman in an air hostess get-up would come over now and again to the yellow hard-hatted guy with the bearing of a lieutenant. A big guy in a suit strode around looking menacing. In their Japanese way, the masses silently waited. Astonishingly, one guy started shouting complaints at a bespectacled guard in a comedy Gestapo uniform. Everyone was quietly enthralled.

When the floodgates opened it was all elbows. My pass didn't work so I kicked my way through the barriers. No-one cared. And up on the platform was Heaven's First Train. Implacable and gleaming, closed doors cruelly keeping us in the cold but nevertheless, magically there. The means of escape. A bedraggled man next to me touched his hand to the metal, softly, with love. Half an hour went by until we could stuff ourselves on and inch along the line at 5mph all the way home. The urban machine was functioning again and as I rode my bike back I was amazed to see people starting their Saturday where they should have been after all.

Hot Springs and Hope Springs

Masks

There's something deeply sad about the city or it might be the winter. On a one-to-one level people are fantastically warm and friendly. As a grand movement there is something frozen and lost. On the train the stares and mouths drooling open. The eyes trained on phones, games. The shuffling, the face masks. It's enough to make you freak at times. Big cityness in all its impersonality.

More inspiring face masks could be found at the Setsubun festival in Shimokitazawa. It is a festival that celebrates the coming of Spring even though it's still plainly winter for another six weeks. Still, it gives you hope. Little children in devil masks threw soy beans at men dressed as devils. The littler ones wept and screamed with fear while their parents laughed. A good way of bringing trauma into normality at an early age. The soy beans were quite tasty and would make a good bar snack. But no-one else was eating them, preferring to lob them at the devils and then crunch them under foot until the streets were dusted in brown powder.

My coat burned to a crisp in a little bar in Asagaya where the barman supposedly plays Beatles songs on his guitar sometimes though that was during the holiday period and now when we were there it was definitely not of a holiday atmosphere and the coziness was provided by small electric braziers which were rather close to the customers, which is why my coat caught fire. By the time the thick smoke had become too invasive to ignore, the barman and some wrinkled regular were already in the doorway beating the fire out with vigour. I used to have a whole coat, and now I have a coat with a hole.



Onsen Mania in Nikko

We went to Nikko famous hot springs area to "take the waters." The hotel was fabulous and our window gave onto an enormous lake encircled by snow-capped mountains. The view from the milky mineral and viciously hot water was a cement wall. There were lumps of snow and icicles around, which were something to look at, but Mayumi was upset. Though not by the food which was elaborate Japanese gourmet style, with hundreds of tiny tidbits such as sea urchin pâté and sea cucumber, roe, sashimi on a plate made out of rock salt, beef stew, a DIY shabu shabu involving big red fish with large eyes and a "risotto" that was basically an eggy-rice soup cooked in the old shabu shabu water. We sat in yukata robes and felt imperial. The whole being naked in the onsen thing is okay. You have a little towel that David explained was a "modesty towel." Still you could catch glimpses of other men's knackers if you so desired. There was an incredibly thin man whose entire back was a bone and had no bottom.

The procedure is: go in, sit on a stool and wash yourself thoroughly with a high-pressure shower. Try not to think about the history of the plastic stool you're sitting on. Get in the various hot spring baths available. The one outside here was searingly hot and unbearable while my feet and hands were inside. I had to balance my feet out on the wall and use my middle back as a fulcrum to keep from drowning. It was quite effective.

Onsen etiquette seems to forbid chatting with strangers, at least in my experience. And also if there is more than one pool, you might want to move along when someone else comes. At least that's what everyone did when I turned up. But maybe that should be telling me something.

Monkeys and Dragons

The famous world heritage site Toshogu temple had lots of construction and an world heritage-worthy price tag. There was a big black and white dragon swooping around on one of the interior ceilings constructed to give out a ringing echo when a monk smacked two sticks together underneath it which one kindly did for us four times. The snow was deep everywhere and weathered men shovelled it with multicoloured spades. The three monkeys of "see no evil..." fame were carved in bas relief on the front of one temple. A parable of blissful ignorance, if you can get your three monkeys coordinated, which seems a bit of a tall order. Better off giving them typewriters and waiting for them to produce the Complete Works of Danielle Steele.

Mara and I continued to Kinugawa Onsen, a set of concrete blocks in the middle of a ring of snowy mountains. We ate lousy pasta and for the same money got the run of a huge hot springs emporium with eight baths for men and separately for women, including jacuzzis and one freestanding copper tub that I didn't go into because it had been recently vacated by a fat old man. The outdoors ones were something. On a promontory extended into the wide valley, sitting in the 42ºC rock bath, the snow fell thickly all around. I closed my eyes and emptied my head to the rush of the water and the patter of the falling snow.

Hermit Holes

Those crazy little bars are limitless. Going for these bars requires a leap of faith. Scaling stairs that would look especially dangerous and urban in the middle of Hackney can lead to a lush emporium of swish chairs, cocktails and elaborate decorations, or a small dark corridor filled with mumbling men. But how are you to know from the 30 year old battered neon sign outside? Answer: you're not.

Up on a fourth floor up some horrible steps, behind a door with no sign, we found a little red place packed with hanging musical instruments, chandeliers, birds, old telephones, an avalanche of period props. There was enough room for probably five people but our arrival pushed it to ten and the warm convivial atmosphere was an excellently-decorated rush hour subway train that's not going anywhere and doesn't want to. The barman put on some jazz - and then I realized that it was he, playing on an upright piano under the bar.

Then there was that place, Mother's Ruin in Shimokitazawa, with a gigantic dragon-cum-lizard on the ceiling, made of solid gold and threatening to crush the drinkers in case of earthquake. The toilet had handpainted wallpaper showing scenes from the Ramayana or something like that. I had a hot rum with a knob of butter floating in it like it couldn't care less.

Flowers on the subway. Tress in winter dress. Empty branches. Cold frozen ground. Plum trees blossom in the center of the university campus. The days are short and blue and very sunny. The air is dry and originates sometimes in Siberia.