Belated Bleatings from China

This with the travelator not working, a wall of intense heat, and a suitcase 

Arriving at Hong Kong Central station a passing Israeli and smoking cameraman both helped me find the gigantic restaurant where tuxedoed waiters showed me to the waiting Mara and Midori and a table piled high with roast duck and goose.  Midori generously insisted on mostly treating us and then took us up the long escalator from Chungking Express part of which was out of service, me dragging my suitcase and all of us (especially me) drenched in sweat.

Each human has his or her own private relationship with sweat the way each does with money.  In the same way you'll never really know the details unless they are particularly extravagant or you spend a long time in close proximity.

In a bar filled with Aussies and the odd Taiwanese (she really was odd) I had a pint of Stella for the first time since I was 16.  Didn’t feel like beating my wife.

The top of Victoria Mountain, aka “The Peak” is essentially a shopping center offering various ways to shed cash.  HK one of those cities where you can always physically look up at someone more successful than you.

Chungking Mansions was just how I remembered it from 2005, a huge complex of apartments, offices, shops, filthy, stinking, strangely alluring.  Corridors lined with curry stalls and electronic shops, half the city swapping currencies in black-market bureaux de change, and a mysterious cookie stall mobbed with crowds.  A sign told us you can’t actually buy biscuits there unless you purchase a ticket the previous night in a different part of the city.  We looked down at a woman stuffing 100 boxes into three large suitcases.  “Are they good?” we asked, pointlessly.

Through a clerical error we missed our 19-hour train from HK to Shanghai. Actually, it was just wild stupidity.  We fought like crazy in a sweltering corridor.  Old, wise-cracking ladies had seen it all before.  And worse.  Leaning over the side and peering into the huge open center of the complex you can see doors and doors all leading to cramped quarters where all kinds of unspeakable things must surely be going on, inhabitants oblivious to our screams of frustration and mutual blame emanating from the 8th floor.  Like an angel a Croatian emerged from a private room and acted as couples therapist and travel agent for a very productive ten minutes.  At the end of them we were 450 dollars lighter and had two flights for Shanghai leaving...  NOW!

A BAD CASE OF BEIJING BURNOUT

Guo Mao, Beijing, just one stop on a cackhanded journey to nowhere

Hazy buildings looming, endless high rises composing a spectral city.  I felt like I’d smoked 40 cigs a day for the past week—trachea closing, nose clogged, solidifying film of mucus, hacking cough.  Tried to get to the mythical art village of Song Zhuang.  Followed directions on CNN website.  Emerged in Guo Mao station to find bus terminal underpass closed off, thin light making its way down ghostly stairs and a stopped escalator behind a puddle of water and an ominous bucket.  Outside, a breathing trafficky rush of cars, smoke.  Progress.  To cross the road you have to go with faith...  Walk slowly and allow the vehicles to swarm round you.  Our balls weren't in the right place.  A team of guys with no English thought they worked out what we wanted and marched us a long way back to the metro where we boarded a long train to Songjia Zhuang station.  A busy mother with some English received us on the border of a gigantic flowing effluence of traffic.  You don't quite see across the roads.  The smog forms into cartoon movement lines as buses and juggernauts roar past.  “Wrong place,” told us a lady downstairs and how to get there—that's right, back to where we were—and a few stations later my blocked face rebelled and a cascade of snot pointed to an abandonment of our mission to the cool off-beaten art village that is way more in-the-know than 798 Art Village which is just SO commercialized these days (went the next day—not great unless you love over-produced paintings of kittens, empty warehouses, and expensive cafés).  Instead we changed course and completed the day’s ration of 3 hours in the subway by heading due northwest to the Old Summer Palace, chosen over its neighbor the (non-Old, current, new) Summer Palace because we wanted to see what is effectively a Chinese memorial to the ravages of 19th-century colonialism.  In the end during the burning midday hours we hauled ourselves around a broiling park humming deaf with cicadas and thousands of Chinese tourists.  Walking a path between marble ruins was like trying to stroll on the rush-hour subway.  

I was undergoing a process of Chinification.  Swiftly aggressive in seizing empty subway seats, I was generating huge quantities of phlegm demanding frequent hawking in public as well as coughing with no polite covering hand.  I hadn’t begun to sport the “Beijing Bikini” (rolled up t-shirt atop proud belly).  Only a matter of time.

Jumping into an ice-cold taxi to zoom to the infinitely better (second, latter) Summer Palace was one of those profligate decisions that has one weeping with joy.  A stupendous lake circuited by forest and strange towering pagodas.  Boats drifting into the distance looking lost in the magnitude of it all.  I wore Mara's riñonera (a term “liver thing” preferable to the horrendous “bum bag” and the unspeakable “fanny pack”) and she took my foldable sleeping-bag-material Muji backpack—a sign of my flailing condition.  Somehow the clumps of Chinese tourists were less suffocating here.  The sheer size of the place, the vastness of the lake, giving everything a subdued air.  Mara bartered with a charismatic old lady who taught us how to say “sugar” and “no sugar.”

The way you repeat a Chinese word back to a person causes them to repeat it back to you until you say it right which you generally do by exaggerating the tone making it sound like a deranged squawk at which point they laugh and give you the thumbs up.  You’re not sure if you got it right or you just reached a satisfactory level of comedic effectiveness.  Another time we tried the “sugar” thing at a different shop and failed miserably while the proprietor’s wife plied us with free pickled goods.  I tried it in every tone and I’m sure just by pure accident I must have said it right at least once, but was consistently met with looks of blank incomprehension.  Possibly because it was by then so far out of context as to be meaningless.  Might be like someone shouting “shoo-gay!” “shy girl!” “sham goo!” “shoo gar!”  “Why won’t this person go away?”  I would probably think.

Wheezing and limping around Beijing Mara and I tried to avoid killing each other and often failed.  It was like Twelve Angry Men except it was one angry couple and Henry Fonda smoking cigarettes was replaced with dense clouds of toxic pollution.

FAKING IT

In the beautiful colonialesque bubble of central Shanghai we took a small detour to the 3rd world in the form of the fakes market.  Wise young merchants emerge from closets to offer all manner of replica goods.  The best part is their shelving units have SECRET CATCHES that swing open walls Bond-villain style and reveal inner compartments lined with “the good stuff.”  This is either a safeguard against police raids or a sales technique—“Now I’m showing you the good stuff.”  I fought down the price of a wallet I didn't really want to 100RMB (about 10 quid) and with Engen and Mara on either side of me baying “You don't have to get it!” my zombie self kicked in.  I saw myself as if in a cracked old cinema print pulling out a crisp 100 and handing it over.  The deed was done.  The girls gaped at me.  I didn't even like the wallet.

This tragedy spurred me to put together the pieces of my life and buy another wallet.  (The second task was easier.)  A guy called “Ben” locked me in his back compartment where a combo of sales patter, bromance and heat-induced delusion induced me to pay the exorbitant sum of 35 quid for an “authentic” Mont Blanc leather wallet.  Ben even threw in a pen (the one I am currently using) “not as a business offer but as a symbol of friendship” and I emerged sheepishly to the horror and fascination of the ladies.  Not the first time I’ve elicited those reactions.

DUCK PALACE

In a south Beijing Duck Palace

Roast duck—is it that good?  Or is it the ritual that we enjoy so much?  The dipping into the gloopy sauce.  The slices of fatty meat that never seem to be worth their weight in duck.  Mara's university friend and his mother and wife and child were waiting for us in an obscure Beijing suburb in a hotel-cum-duck palace with a personal miked-up waitress in a kitchen buzzing up the food.  Turns out the spinning glass wheel gracing the tables of Chinese restaurants of my youth is actually alive and rotating in China.

Mara's friend works for the government in intellectual property.  He has his work cut out.  Apparently such duck palaces as these used to be crammed with functionaries blowing poultry-shaped holes in their expense accounts, but a unilateral decree from on high recently put paid to all that and the quacking emporia have had to slash prices.  Not a single bill joke.

He told us stories of Mao in the safe confines of the hotel room.  Like when he ordered everyone to kill sparrows one year to supposedly deal with a food shortage.  His mother occasionally smiled at us and put away a surprising number of pancakes.  A spicy mutton stir-fry dish that you stuff into fried buns was spectacular.

Then he took us for a foot massage.  The three of us lay as we were administered to.  The Yin and the Yang rule meant Mara had a burly guy and her friend and I both had petite females.  I felt the forces balance.  Our companion complained his girl wasn’t strong enough.  You want balanced energies—and a good massage?  A widescreen TV displayed a popular daily show where job candidates offer themselves to a panel of company bosses.  We had optional extras with the massage.  Mara got the hot cups on her back and I had my ears emptied with a candle.  He told me it sounds like the rain, and it did.  We became horribly ill the next day.  That’s what happens when you unleash the Yin and Yang.

SHANGALONG

Took about 6 taxis a day in Shanghai.  They were wonderful.  Stupendous architecture across the water in Pudong where we never actually set foot.  The Jewish Museum featured female university students with excellent English and astonishing knowledge about modern Jewish history.  Shanghai was refuge for tens of thousands of Jews.  Moving stories and the occasional jab at Japan.  “Germany apologized, reformed its society, and never forgot its crimes unlike other nations we could mention.”

For some reason we thought that a museum called the Urban Planning Museum was going to be good.  It’s in all the guidebooks and top tens.  Its centerpiece is a fairly fabulous scale model of the entire city which lights up occasionally. There was also a 360º tour of the city from a UFO-like observation pod.  Apart from that acreage of maps, diagrams and soporific details. We skedaddled as power rain began to pummel the city.  In the nearby Museum of Contemporary Art there was a mockery of the Urban Planning Shanghai city model made out of poker chips [pictured].  Better.

Staff formality on show at the Forbidden Palace, Beijing

Formality.  In Japan museum staff wear buttoned up jackets, trousers and black, shiny shoes.  They'll stand in their spot unmoving for the entirety of their shift.  Compare.  The museum staff were in shorts and flip flops.  They lay languidly gossiping.  Talked on their phones.  Slouched around without a care in the world leaving whole rooms unattended.  An art piece that consisted of 6 painted dartboards invited users to have a go, which we did until panicked and horrified museum staff came and told us not to touch.  I was amazed we actually managed to provoke a reaction.

In a central park some 100 parents offered their kids up for marriage in the form of classified-ad like posters stuck onto a wall.  The progenitors milled smoking and gossiping.  The kids probably didn't know they were plastered on a wall in a park as potential marriage material.  The ads were mostly hadn-written with marker pens.  A few had photos. Most didn't.  Some candidates seemed suspiciously affluent and/or good looking, hinting at some unspeakable hidden flaw.  Maybe they're gay and Ma and Pa never sussed it out.

JAPANCHINAJAPANCHINA

Using a police van for shade in Tianamen Square. Who said the cops aren't friendly?

Difficult not to go around constantly saying “In Japan this is the exact opposite.”  Pretty much everything is.  Noisy vs. quiet.  Aggressive vs. respectful.  Individualistic vs. community minded.  Dirty vs. clean.  Pushy vs. polite.  Toxic vs. clean.  Similarities: noodles and rice.  And some writing.

Your identity borne along on a torrential tidal wave of people and progress.  The rush exhilarating and monstrous.  It’s like the Total Perspective Vortex from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy which drives you mad by showing how insignificant you are in the context of infinity.  In the context of 1.2 billion people my ego shrank to the size of a small packet of instant noodles.  Among hordes of Chinese tourists my mental expanse of hopes and dreams was a dust trail on a bus window.

Similar but expressed differently is the concept of FACE.  In Japan face-saving works in a roundabout way.  When a Japanese person says no to a request, you work hard to find a way in which he or she can comply help you out without directly going against the rule.  In China the face is plopped in your lap immediately like an unwanted Christmas present.  Taxi drivers go off on rants just requiring you to say they are right.

A nation with millions of only children.  Rules mean nothing.  Red lights are there to be run.

In Japan people go out their way to show you mean something.  The inclination of a head is obligatory to show you are even aware of someone else's presence.  In China you’re one of nothing.  Maybe I’m just speaking for myself.

But people in short moments were friendly, funny, helpful.  Hearts on sleeves, emotions out in the open.  Anyone who spoke English would approach in times of trouble.  In Beijing the response was muted.  Questions were typically answered with a raised hand pointing in a direction that could mean a range of things: “What you are looking for is over there.”  “In that direction is a bus stop.”  “Ask someone over there.”  “I don't know.”  “Get out my face fuckboy.”  Context is everything.

ART & FOOD

The food is another thing.  That’s opposite to Japan.  Refined, steamed, healthy are replaced by ladel-fulls of oil and garlic and chilli.  Psychotic levels of hygiene (notwithstanding radiation contamination) are replaced with a laissez-faire attitude to ingredient sourcing.  Organic food is present in China at least in the form of faecal matter.  Of course it’s bloody delicious at the same time.  One of the best a Shanghai hole-in-the-wall joint serving up soup with dumplings at negligible prices [pictured].  Another killer was a Szechuan multi-tiered restaurant in the trendy zone of Guo Mao in Beijing where we each received cauldrons full of diced fried vegetables, beef and chicken mixed with those cardboard-like red chills they like to add by the kilo.

Just as the cuisine was often better in the holes in the wall than the fancy restaurants, so was the art often better in the warehouse than the gallery.  The best of all was in the M50 art district of Shanghai, specifically an exhibition by multimedia artists group Liu Dao who put moving LED displays inside many of their works that reacted to the viewer.  One required you to pick up a light and shine it on the piece in order to elicit various sounds, others offered a video that reacted if you phoned a particular telephone number scrawled onto the screen in the form of graffiti. Little taster:

By Liu Dao, Shanghai M50

Transient Destruction

Last night I went into the Talion Gallery in Nishi-Nippori, where artist Taro Izumi is curating an exhibition. I pulled one of the paintings—a blue one with a metal grill—off the wall and violently dragged it across the gallery space. Then I seized another one and hurled it at the ceiling, then several times against a couple of walls, making a hanging sculpture swing precariously. I sawed one in half after battering it for a while with the handle of the saw. I smashed, sawed and peeled a hole in another one so it could be thrown quoits-style onto my outstretched arm. I span one which was made of differently shaped rock-like slabs of polystyrene until all the parts flew across the room. I soaked one with a mini-shower that I manufactured with a water bottle and an electric drill, drew a crude representation of another one on the wall with red marker pen, and bit and chewed another one to pieces.

Worst, or perhaps best of all, they were all my artworks.

Or rather, my character John Bose's artworks. You probably guessed that this was all part of the exhibition. Izumi was filming each of my actions, instigating them by giving me the instructions (eat, throw, etc). What impacted me most—apart from the adrenaline and ridiculousness, and the satisfaction at smashing up a gallery like a rockstar in a hotel room—was that the video, which will contain parallel works by the other "artists" featured at the exhibition, will be projected onto the wall at the gallery for a couple of days, culminating the exhibition which mostly consisted of its own constant state of advancing destruction. Just a couple of days. There will be no repeat projections, nor will it be posted online. The artist has no desire to do either. This rootless transient statement will be made and hang there, before evaporating into the memory like the drops of water on my showered painting.

I thought of starting a Tumblr blog, so I can easily upload pics and shorter comments—maybe a more dynamic way of blogging. I guess this has been a solution for a lot of people who have let their blogs slide but find FB too annoying. Yet soon the Tumbl weeds will rot unused in the far reaches of cyberspace, burned out planets, graveyards of unheard thought. Are the bits of data flying around conscious of these tracts of desolate urban decay, as we would be flying between ancient hulks of spaceships left by an unknown extinct civilisation?

The Taro Izumi exhibition (apart from its expressions concerning the nature of art) hit me for its fuck you to the universally permanent nature of online things. 80% of which don't deserve to be forever, always slabbed up for all to see—though few do see them. Not many people will see this exhibition either, relative to the number of eyes in the cosmos. Perhaps just the people who happen to surf that way (Nishi-Nippori), hit that site (physical place) and link to it (tell other people). Funny how I'm writing about it here, on this blog I have neglected for so long. My need to tack my bit of tacky permanence to the enterprise. Who am I telling?

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.

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.