Enough, enough!

Ewww. I've been subjected to too many medical images this week which ordinary members of the public should not see. On Friday I did a photography job at an eye doctor conference. It was nothing special, just photographing the speakers on stage, but I got paid well for it. Just as well, because not only was I subjected to the boredom of the event (although I did learn the Japanese words for 'corneal transplant' and 'conjunctivitis') I had to endure a constant barrage of close-up video footage of eyes being operated on - see pic below. The handiwork was impeccable, but some of the implements they use wouldn't look out of place in a torture chamber.



And then today I went to have another check up on my eardrum, which is still perforated. The doctor treated me to an ear-cam view of my own eardrums, which completely freaked me out. At least at the eye conference I could tell myself they were other people's eyes, whereas here I was watching my own eardrum get closer and closer the further he put the tube down my ear. Luckily the perforation is only about as small as the one in the picture below, but that gives you some idea of the joy I was presented with today.



So like Iso (see 'Last One To Bed' blog on right), I get to join the ear-operation club too! Yay! :-(
I'll have it at some point after I come back to Japan in April. I'm kind of knobbed off that the incision made behind my ear will cut the nerves to the top of it, but then there are worse places you can lose sensation.

New Links

I've updated the links bar at the right to include links to friends' blogs, other galleries and so on. Enjoy!

Birds of a feather...

Is there something someone's not telling us?

All Hail The Eternal Emperor!

Is this an omen?

Film 2006 with Mr Moshi Moshi

A couple of weeks ago I joined the local DVD rental shop. Cinemas are expensive here - a bare minimum of £7 for university students, in my experience. For that amount of money I can watch about 6 DVDs, and so for the last few weeks I've been picking out all sorts of films that I've always wanted to see but never had the time for.

Elephant (Gus Van Sant, 2003). I can't believe I didn't see this at the time and I really recommend this film if you haven't seen it. I saw it a few days ago and it's been lingering on my mind ever since. It's not quite the approach you'd expect a regular director to take on Columbine-style school shootings; it drew a lot of controversy at the time, for many reasons. Whether you end up loving it or hating it, you really should see this film. The actors are almost all untrained schoolkids and the film benefits enormously from this. It's hauntingly beautiful and frankly, just haunting full stop.

Night on Earth (Jim Jarmusch, 1991). Jim Jarmusch is one of my favourite directors, and his film Dead Man (1995) is my favourite film of all time. Night on Earth is a really funny and touching set of five stories, set in LA, NYC, Paris, Rome and Helsinki, all set in taxi cabs. I found the NYC and Paris sketches hysterically funny - all of them really tap into the place and the people they depict.

Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (Jim Jarmusch, 1999). Set in the contemporary New Jersey side of NYC, Forest Whittaker plays a lone assassin who lives by the code of the Samurai. It sounds naff, but it's a very powerful mix of cultures, philosophies and outsider characters.

The Last Samurai (Whoever, whenever). This would have been a really intelligent film about the demise of the Samurai in Meiji Japan had it not been for the last five to ten minutes when Hollywood studio bosses clearly had a greedy orgiastic wank-fest over it and completely rewrote one of the most defining points in the history of Japan so as to get a cheapo, schmaltzy, utterly ahistorical ending. In one shitty scene in the downward spiral of shittiness that concludes this film: the entire Samurai clan get wiped out in a hail of bullets except for fucking gaijin Tom Cruise who takes one in the shoulder just so as to survive and make it into the even shittier ending.

Maborosi/幻の光 (Kore-eda Hirokazu, 1995). Very painful film about loss. Exquisitely filmed without going over the top. One of the films that gave me the momentum to apply to do Japanese at university.

Nobody Knows/誰も知らない (Kore-eda Hirokazu, 2004). Based on a true story: four kids between 5 - 12 years old abandoned by their nice but somewhat fucked-up mother who has kept them secret from the neighbours. The kids are the best child actors I have ever seen - the film is charming and funny to start with but heartbreaking and bewildering by the end.

Super Size Me (Morgan Spurlock, 2004). As I mentioned in an earlier post, this year started off with me going to McDonald's far too often. By two weeks after that post I had gone to McDonald's more times in a month than in the whole of 2005, about 10 -12 times. Drastic action had to be taken. Having seen this film, I swear to God I will never, ever go to McDonald's again. I would rather go hungry. Everyone knows to some extent that McDonald's is not really good for you, and that it has a bad effect on local commerce, but it's too easy to put it at the back of your mind and keep going there. You need to see this documentary to have all the information laid out in front of you in one go and realise that they (as in McD's and the other fast food chains) are literally destroying the US. This film really opened my eyes to some personal truths about why McDonald's is such an easy habit to fall into - it's literally an addiction that they aim to get you started on in your childhood. It's really not an exaggeration: if you want to know what that means, please see this film.

Stealth (Some shithead, 2005). The worst film of all time. Hands down. Absolute barrel of cunty fuckshite. This film made me puke in the aisles.

All right, I lie. I haven't actually seen it, but the trailer alone was enough to lead me to this conclusion.

Brokebacktastic!

I'm dying to see Brokeback Mountain. I've been aware of its making for about a year now and the suspense is only worsened by the fact that Japan gets films even later than England. A month ago Mr and Mrs Smith was the big deal here, for fuck's sake.

In celebratory anticipation, here is an article on how 80% of the kind of men who would kick up a homophobic fuss about Brokeback Mountain actually secretly would like to star in it.

Meanwhile, here are some brilliant parodies using the Brokeback score to rejig some older movies.

Brokeback to the Future.

Brokeback Heat.

Brokeback Hour.

Oh Fucking Hell...

Apparently Mt Fuji is going to blow any second. There's been particular speculation this winter because there was no snow on the peak despite the record levels of snow everywhere else in the country: a possible sign that it is heating up from inside. Since 2000 there have been several-month long periods of constant tremors around Fuji, which indicates magma moving underneath, possibly upwards; steam piping out of microchannels in the side; locals feeling a constant sense of unexplainable unease and now this:

"It seems the natural world fears that Fuji-san is about to blow, too. Since the start of 2004, frogs and stinkbugs once prominent in the area have virtually disappeared. Some see this as a sign that they've sensed something untoward is about to happen and they're avoiding the place like the plague. Observers have noticed this phenomenon, too."

That is NOT a good sign. Bees always return to their hives before a storm comes. The tsunami in December 2004 also revealed this phenomenon in animals:

"Scientists noticed, though, that the tsunami disaster of 2004 killed very few animals, whereas the number of human victims was immense – over 300,000 people. There are a lot of hypotheses to explain such a mysterious phenomenon, but people paid attention to animal's ability to react to imminent natural dangesr in ancient times already.

The first incident was documented in the year 2000 A.C. The ancient manuscript says that people noticed that weasels suddenly disappeared from their usual habitats in Crete shortly before a very powerful earthquake rocked the island.

Snakes suddenly appeared on the surface of the ground in the winter of 1975 in China. Snakes are cold-blooded animals; they hide in shelters and become dormant for winter periods. Local authorities treated such a “violation of biological norms” seriously and evacuated the residents. As it turned out later, the snakes forecast a mammoth earthquake, which was measured 7.3 on Richter scale. The history of the 20th century proves that animals possess a remarkable ability to foresee not only earthquakes, but tsunamis as well. There were incidents, when animals abandoned valleys prior to avalanching; London residents paid attention to cats and dogs' behavior before air raids during the WWII years.

A beacon worker in South India said in December of 2004 that he had seen a large flock of antelopes fleeing the coastal area towards nearest hills just several hours before the tsunami disaster. Eyewitnesses say that elephants were trumpeting, breaking chains and escaping inland in Thailand. Having a presentiment of a forthcoming natural disaster, flamingos left their lowlands and flew in the direction of mountainous areas as well. Employees of the Malaysian zoo noticed that all animals had a very strange way of behavior: the majority of zoo animals hid in their shelters and refused to go out.

The tsunami disaster killed over 30,000 people in Sri Lanka. However, almost all local elephants, deer and other wild animals survived the monstrous attack of tidal waves. It is worth mentioning that only one wild boar of 2,000 animals of an Indian reserve was killed in the 2004 tsunami disaster.

According to US biologists, 14 sharks, which were kept under regular observation for several years, had left their usual places of living 12 hours before Charlie hurricane hit Florida. The sharks disappeared in deep waters of the ocean and returned only two weeks later, although they have never left their natural habitat before.

Animals obviously know something that humans can never comprehend or learn. The tsunami disaster of 26 December 2004 made scientists look deeper into the mystery. Researchers have already proved that different animal species living all over the world possess the surprising ability to envisage natural catastrophes."

Some humans can feel these things too, I think. My Mum said she was in Algeria when the huge earthquake hit Morroco in the 1960s, and the day before all the birds and dogs were dead quiet and you could feel something strange in the air. I had this experience once when I was in Japan last time. There was a night when I just couldn't sleep - I was lying there so tense and rigid because I could just feel that there was going to be an earthquake and then eventually at 3am it happened - it was the biggest that happened to me in those six months. The second after it had happened I fell straight to sleep.

Ummmmmm, I don't like this. I don't like this at all. I'm keeping an eye on the Tokyo crows from now on. Come to think of it, I haven't heard a single one today.

The Mysterious Apple

I've been a Mac user since I was about 11 years old. I love Macs and am delighted that they should have a new surge in popularity thanks to the iPod and that they've come to be known as "Apples" rather than (dirty men in) Macs.

My Powerbook G4 is my first-born child (my A3 printer and my new camera being my 2nd and 3rd children.) But it seems to have reached its teenage years (3 and a half human years) because recently it's been rebelling against me. The disc drive packed in about a year ago and had to be replaced at great expense. The battery lost the power of its youth and had to go into retirement (2.5 years in human years) and that too had to be replaced. Then, programs started to shut down suddenly of their own accord, without warning, without saving.

Then, about a month ago the new battery, only a year old died of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome - it just stopped working and would not charge. So my laptop then became the world's most compact desktop; if I pulled out the cord it switched off - the battery literally had no power in it.

But tonight, ladies and gentlemen, there has been a miracle. My flatmate's girlfriend managed to trip the circuits in the flat yet again, making my computer take a sudden nap right while I was in the middle of a "very important" google search. My irritation at having to restart my computer quickly subsided because the power cut must have had some kind of Frankenstein lightning effect, cos the battery has come to life again!

It's charging at the moment, so fingers crossed it's going to stay alive.

While I haven't experienced all of the problems this guy is talking about, his delivery is pretty hilarious to anyone familiar with crApple motherMACers.

And this video is a brilliant take on the future of the iPod.

Cybermartyr

Picture my Dad: born in 1940. Started using the internet in 1997. He was telling me the other day - gradually working himself into a rant as he was doing so - about how recently he's been getting two spam messages a day and there was no block function on his mail program. So what to do? He pressed 'reply' and wrote an email back asking them if they would kindly take him off their mailing list. Surprise and indignation ensues when spammage increases ten-fold.

More poetry

Dear Mr. R

I e-mail it many times, and I'm sorry.
I took business papers to have a person in charge of accounting of a university swing a salary of you a while ago now.

Then it was said to the person in charge that I wanted Mr. R　to confirm whether you acquired "an activity permit out of qualification" by the university where Ｍr. R belonged to if you was a foreign student. It was not said to seem to submit permit in itself, but it was to seem to take confirmation.

Do you take me?

---------------------------

Dear Mr. R

Thank you for giving an answer at once.

It was said that there was not a problem when I asked the person in charge of the accounting if Mr. R came in "working holiday visa".

I did credit of trouble.

Japan tends to be formal, and I am sorry to you.

I pay properly and consider your salary to be it in this.

Tokyo Random Walk

I went to a kind of art fair today, which the gallery was participating in. It was unusual: set in a plush hotel, and each gallery had a room with en-suite bathroom in which to display its work. Most galleries didn't make full use of the opportunity to do something new and unusual in a hotel space and just used the space like a regular gallery bar the odd bed and sink. But there were a couple of really atmospheric video projections in the glass shower cubicles and occasionally some inventive uses of bathtubs and beds as platforms for exhibiting art works.

It was in a pretty leafy riverside area of Tokyo, near my university campus and so afterwards I decided to do a random walk around nearby areas which I'd never been to and see where I ended up. Here's an image of the strangeness of Tokyo's urban landscape:


I wasn't entirely comfortable with having to walk underneath this colossal death-trap for the next five minutes.

But my random walk turned out to be amazing: one after the other I kept running into random places I'd been to just once before but had had no real idea of where they were in relation to the rest of Tokyo because I'd always gone there by tube. Two of the places were right around the corner from each other and I'd had no idea. Everything started to fall into place and it was like this epiphany or something. And then I came across this funky bookshop!


One of those days when fate likes to toy with you.

I never knew I had it in me.

Having temporarily run out of other things to put into Google, I decided to find out more about my mystical middle name. The overwhelmingly Jewish-related results further deepen my suspicion that there's something my parents aren't telling me.

"Dagan"

God of crop fertility, revered in West Semitic religions, including Canaanite and Phoenician religions. Dagan was a very central deity from around 2500 BCE until 1500 BCE, when many of his powers were transferred to his son, Baal. His name, "Dagan", was in both Hebrew and Ugaritic language the word for "grain".

Dagan was among the most important gods revered in cult centres as Ugarit, where he had an important temple. It appears that here he was for long periods of time second in the pantheon only to El. According to the Bible, he was also a very popular god in Asher, Gaza and Ashdod. He was known at other cult centres as Aliyan Baal.

According to the myths, Dagan was the inventor of the plough.

Well there you go! Get down on your knees and plough, mere mortals, for I am the God of crop fertility!

It Snow Tokyo!

After weeks of hearing about the blankets of murderous snow smothering the provinces, I was mostly quite happy that Tokyo wasn't being bogged down by this problem. But then secretly I was kind of jealous that we couldn't have our own winter wonderland here too. And then it suddenly snowed in Tokyo today!! And proper, fat inches of snow too! This is what I like about Japan, the weather mean business: when it rains, it rains - none of this drizzling misery that you get at the very least once a week in London.

So I went for a walk around the Yanaka area of old Tokyo that I blogged about a couple of weeks ago.


Just around the corner from my flat.


A bit corny, I know, but still.


I've never experienced snow in Japan before. Right now I can't imagine a country which would feel more mysterious and magical than Japan in the snow.




Me.


Me in a previous take realising I had the camera on the wrong setting and walking back to reset it.


Relatively rare old building in Tokyo.




Chilly immigrant camel.

Don't. Just don't

For want of anything else to blog about, and since it seems to be all the rage, periodically I'm going to take on the role of fashion Nazi in the style of Vice magazine's uncompromising do's and don'ts feature. Except I imagine I will be focussing more on people's spectacular don'ts rather than their do's.


A note to foreigners in Japan: if you can't find your way out of a tube station here, don't worry, there'll always be an egg yolk mullet fairy with a head of golden fleece to lead you the way.


What the fuck are you, Mr Tibet on a backpacking holiday in Shibuya?


Just what you need to see when you've crossed the road, a garden knome retard striking its best nonchalant Estée Lauder pose.

Ceci n'est pas un hamburger

Photos from late Summer.

I just developed a film which has been sitting around for the last few months. Here are some of the shots from it:


This was the amazing sky over San Francisco as I saw it from the airport just before leaving. The black shape at the bottom isn't cloud, it's the thick, undulating fog which was creeping over the mountains like it was alive.


A pigeon feeding frenzy in Trafalgar Square like I've never seen. They were piling on top of each other to get at the food.


Hampstead Heath at dusk. "The Writer" by Giancarlo Neri, a giant table and chair about six metres tall. One of the best public artworks London has ever had.


The atmosphere of that evening was so calm and pure.


London's huge, open parks are something I really miss here.


Strangeness in arty East Berlin.

Watch this space.

One of the salient points of George Orwell's description of Big Brother in 1984 is that the Party was able to rewrite history as it saw fit. We have already seen this with the Iraq war, how Bush and Blair switched their justification for invasion from finding WMDs as the No.1 reason, to regime change and "liberation" as the main objectives. Now we're seeing it happen with Iran:

Aug 2nd 2005, Washington Post reports that the US National Intelligence Estimate predicts it will take another 10 years for Iran to build a nuclear weapon.

Dec 27th 2005, Israel Insider quotes the Chief of Mossad, Israel's Secret Service as saying that it could be 2 to 9 years (2008-2015) before Iran has the bomb.

Jan 12th 2006, the BBC News Website reports that the International Institute for Strategic Studies estimates Iran would not be able to produce a nuclear weapon until about 2014; they don't have enough centrifuges.

Jan 16th 2006, the BBC News website quotes Mohamed ElBaradei of the International Atomic Energy Agency: "If they have the nuclear material and they have a parallel weaponization programme along the way, they are really not very far - a few months - from a weapon."

This is not exactly a scientific study of what's been reported in the media, but some of the articles on the first page of results from a Google search on Iran's nuclear capability. What's probably closer to the truth is that nobody fucking knows how close Iran is to producing a nuclear bomb, but since we need to consolidate control of the oil, then fuck it, let's bomb them anyway. And we certainly don't want to let them start trading in Euros instead of Dollars as they plan to do in March (see this article). The article even claims that Cheney has made preparations to attack Iran with conventional weapons and tactical nuclear weapons should there be another 9-11 style attack on the US. Even if Iran is not connected.

And the best thing about all this is that we can make it all look like it was their crazy leader's fault too. How convenient that the relative reformist Khatami is gone, we could never have pinned it on him.

I'm getting married!!

To my sofa-bed!! We only met two days ago and we've only spent two nights together, but it's love!!

It took ages to find the right one. Most were too big or of the few that came in single size, many just looked like wheelchairs which unfold into hospital beds...


Wheelchair


Hospital Bed


Unidentified Object for Hospital Use.


Stretcher

The Pied Piper of Pyongyang

I saw a guy who looked exactly like Kim Jong-Il at Shibuya Station today - same sticky up hair. I actually managed to get a photo and was gleefully going to upload it on this blog. But when I got home the memory card was saying "corrupted data" for that one photo... Now I'm thinking perhaps it wasn't a mere lookalike after all. North Korean secret agents must have been milling in with the crowd, using special transmitters to block cameras.

Well, for the time being I'll just have to use a picture from the internet.


Smooth Operator...

And here's another gem from the Onion.

Meet the Back Dorm Boys

Otherwise known as Asian Backstreet, these guys rule!

See them here and here.

Only in Japan...

do you get on a train and come face to face with a middle aged guy who's wearing a bright blue shellsuit, gold rings, Jackie O style big brown sunglasses, a white construction helmet, shocking pink lipstick and stinks of piss.

I so desperately wanted to take a photo with my cameraphone but in Japan you can't switch off the loud "click" sound, just so as to protect the modesty of young women and old men with pink lipstick.

富士山

I've never had a clear view of Mt Fuji from Tokyo until today. The air is only clear enough in winter. I went to the viewing deck on the 45th floor of the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building to get a look and again, like in the last picture I posted a couple of months ago, it was hard to believe that Mt Fuji is a big mama of a volcano. She was bashfully hiding behind a cloud for fifteen minutes before she finally came out to say goodnight.

The War on Convenience

And remember: absolutely no prining!

Let's biggu it uppu

The Japanese often take something very simple from the English language and develop it further than we have. Adverts for vitamin drinks aimed at salarymen who need something, anything to keep them alive through their excruciating working day, offer the chance to "pawaa uppu!" (power up). I've also heard of people taking a "steppu uppu" in their careers.

The other day I saw a sign by the roadside urging drivers to be attentive to one another, to "manaa uppu." I'd love to use this term when someone's speaking too loud on their mobile on the train back in London - "Manner up, biatch!"

I guess this "uppu" logic could be applied to the history of the Japanese nation: long periods of quiet followed by short bursts of turmoil, whether it be the Meiji Restoration in 1868, the Great Kanto Earthquake in 1923 or the rise to fascism by 1939/41. Ie, when things go wrong in Japan, they really fukku uppu.

Googlicious videos...

To make you laugh...

laugh some more...

gasp in wonder...

and cry in utter disbelief.

Sofa Monkey

Apparently the term "jump the couch" has officially entered US slang, meaning any unusual or OTT behaviour anyone is exhibiting. The term was born following Tom Cruise's notorious appearance on the Oprah Winfrey show.

I challenge you to watch it. It's excruciating. Actually quite frightening. If anything, I am more freaked out by the audience's hysteria than Tom Cruise's ever increasing insincerity.

And here's an alternative version to ease your mind.

And to illustrate the unlimited pointless distraction on offer from google video, an alternative version of Madonna's Hung Up video.

If you go down to the woods today...

Being New Year, everything's shut here until at least tomorrow, so I've been at a bit of a loss for things to do outside because galleries and museum are all shut too. So I thought I'd take a walk in Yoyogi park today. "Yes that'll be nice and quiet," I thought. Oh no it wasn't, the whole of Tokyo had decended on Yoyogi park so as to visit the Meiji Shrine. And when I got there people were mostly leaving, walking en masse down the avenues of the park and caught up in this moving crowd I felt like I'd ended up on some kind of protest march.

Except why protest when you can spend money?! That's the genius of capitalist democracy! And the soothing female Japanese voice that eminated from the loudspeakers hidden in amongst the trees seemed to know this as it lulled people with soft calls of "coffee, tea, ramen, rice balls, cakes and sweets - why don't you come and rest your legs - we humbly await your custom."

I was in no particular rush, so normally I would have walked for as long as it took to get out. However, with making an exit now a priority, the park seemed to triple in size so as to keep me trapped within its leafy bosom for as long as possible. When I finally got out I was greeted by people with signs saying I should repent my sins to Christ. I wondered if eating at KFC and McDonald's three days in a row could be considered a sin, realised I'd now learnt the Japanese word for sin and content with that, moved on, sinful and unrepentant as ever.

Suupaa saizu mi

I got up late, past lunch-time and went out to find just about everything shut. I couldn't be arsed to look for anywhere else, so I went into McDonald's. I got lots of fries! Lots and lots! So many it wasn't even worth counting! And a Big Mac is something bigger than a medium-sized grapefruit. I know this is a disgusting start to the year 2006, but I don't plan to repeat it often. At least the food I eat this year can only get better from hereon.

Finger lickin' good

Sometimes I don't eat lunch until late afternoon, and then hunger starts really suddenly. Usually this kind of hunger craves something western, because much as I love Japanese food, it's too refined to fulfil such a brutal flesh-eating desire. So I usually go to KFC. Where they serve Japanese-sized portions. Today, as usual I was given a Chicken Fillet Burger the size of a medium-sized grapefruit - but more importantly I was given a bag of fries containing a mere 10 fries. Yes, I counted. A mere ten full-size fries and 3 more runty ones that don't count. KFC may do fat fries, unlike McDonald's thin ones, but I'm sorry, being able to count the number of fries with the fingers you have on both hands represents one simple fact: there are not enough.

This is down from 15 full-size fries the last time. Is this for convenience? Fast food used to be about time: serving you the food fast; but maybe now it's about quantity: giving you so little that you are not burdened with the inconvenience of having to eat very much. You can part with your money and be out of there in no time.

In America I had to order the smallest size of any popcorn, coffee, anything because this would still provide me with something that would be regarded as large-size back in England. Here I have to do the opposite and order everything large to get a medium size by British standards. I went to the cinema with Tom a few weeks ago and made the mistake of buying a small-size popcorn (£2). There was so little popcorn in the box that until Tom picked it up he actually thought it was empty.

Merry Christmas!!

Before coming to Japan, I thought I would be indifferent to not spending Christmas at home in England, but as the day got closer and closer I became unexpectedly sad about it. My Christmas Day could not have been less Christmassy, but I ended up having a really nice time! It was an absolutely stunningly beautiful day and I discovered to my joy that Japanese post even delivers on Sundays, so my parents' Christmas package arrived on the very day, which made me so happy! This contained much chocolate and the full DVD set for series three of "24".

This has turned out to be unexpectedly problematic - ie, my parents may as well have sent me a bag of heroin: it's that addictive. I'm sitting on the edge of my seat, biting deep into my nails, literally feeling like my heart is going to explode out of my chest, it's so gripping. I actually burst into tears at the end of one episode, just out of pent up suspense.

I saw friends in the afternoon and ate a very unChristmassy lunch. Then met up with another Japanese friend just back from Canada, who I haven't seen for a year and a half, so that was cool. He took me to this really weird basement pub. After walking the jam-packed streets of Ikebukuro (and I associate Xmas Day with totally deserted streets in the UK) we go into this "pub," all brown wood and authentic-looking except that there are ventilation shafts all over the ceiling. We're greeted by a dead-serious waiter wearing a Rudolph the Raindeer furry mask, except it's an ultracheap version, so it looks more like a felt balaclava with a couple of small floppy horns and a red nose lolling off his schnozz. Almost as proof that I've spent too much time in Japan already, none of this actually struck me as odd to begin with, but then I looked at him later and I realised I was being served by a member of a comic splinter-group of the IRA.

Unfortunately I didn't have a camera. I wanted to make it up by getting another photo of that strange triceratops salaryman thing that was standing at the ticket gates at my station, because it was all kitted-up like Santa in the week before Xmas, but that too was gone... I guess he must have delivered all his presents already and gone back to his hut full of elfosauruses up in Northern Hokkaido somewhere.

Dust is a Must

The end-of-year thing here seems to be the big clean out. At the office and at home. I don't fancy cleaning out the office, so I may try and pull the foreigner card and pretend I don't realise I'm supposed to take part. Meanwhile my room could do with one. I don't know why but rooms in Japan accumulate dust so quickly - it piles up like tumbleweed in only a matter of days. Little dust bunnies, everywhere...

You'd think that like the dehumidifier they would have invented a machine that sucks the dust out of the air before it can build up on furniture - a dedustifier, shall we say. But then, this being Japan, even if they did have such machines, we'd probably be out of dust-season by Japanese standards and need a dustifier with a little swizzle nozzle to spout out dust in time for the big clean up.

Shame

I feel kind of shitty for making a big deal about teaching English to an S&M dancer in my earlier post. I've given her a couple of lessons since, and she's such a generous, profoundly kind-hearted person, one of the most fascinating people I've met in a long time. But above all, in so many ways she defies stereotypical assumptions about what someone involved with S&M would be like, and I feel bad for sensationalising the very fact I was going to teach her. As the Japanese say, 反省します (I'm reflecting on my behaviour.)

Old Tokyo

I met up with some friends of a friend today and we walked around a beautiful old area of Tokyo that still has a lot of wooden houses, going in and out of little shops selling handmade shoes, leather wallets and so on. We also went to some extremely tucked-away little galleries above cafes - it was such a chilled out day (literally: very cold, but beautiful blue skies and sunshine). We also went to this house/studio of a sculptor who died in the 1960s. It was so huge, two-storeys tall with a pond in the middle of the kind you'd find in a temple. It's so great that there are still places like this in Tokyo.

And in other news...

Nyaaaaaaaaa

Reverse culture shocks

Sometimes things strike me as odd here and it takes me a moment to figure out why. Kogo and I went out to an area of Tokyo called Heiwadai, not that far out of the centre, but as soon as I left the station I could tell something was different - it felt like I had walked into another city. I could tell it had something vaguely to do with there being fewer high-rise buildings around. Then it clicked. There was more sky. So much blue. In most of Tokyo you have to look up to see the sky, because buildings take up your field of vision, but here suddenly it felt so open.

Another example was when I went to the bookshop the other day. As I was looking around, I suddenly felt something was different. And then I realised: the whole floor was completely quiet! There were people, but no announcements or promotions over any speakers. Bliss! This is so rare in a Japanese commercial environment. There is so much noise everywhere and you get so used to ignoring it and associating only your home, small backstreets, parks and art galleries with quietness that to find yourself in a quiet bookshop is a real surprise!

(I finished another book today - I'm so happy!)

Yokohama

I had a really good day in Yokohama today. It's about 30 - 40 minutes away from central Tokyo and is technically Japan's second largest city, but physically it's just another part of Tokyo, sprawling down the bay.

I saw a beautiful exhibition by a Korean Mono-ha painter called Lee Ufan, who I wasn't that keen on up until now, but he is actually really good. I then went to the BankART gallery, which I'd not been to before and found copies of the catalogue to my friend Lieko's photo exhibition in Osaka this spring and which I couldn't see, obviously, because I was in Cambridge slaving over the many books I had to skim read in time for my exams. Finding these catalogues totally made my day.

I noticed more than ever before how much more of a low-rise city Yokohama is compared to Tokyo. It also has many more public spaces, squares and wider pavements, so it's quite comfortable to walk around and I can see why so many westerners end up living there. The whole of Japan is strange, in one way or another, but Yokohama's schtick is that it has that corporate utopia feel to it (at least, the bayside bit I was walking around today). Everything is decked out in fairy lights at the moment and a flowerbed on the pavement was even singing "Oh come all ye faithful" in a rich old baritone voice. Yes, it was. This is Japan.

Here are some photos of the strangeness of the urban environment of Yokohama and some of that strangeness rubbing off on me.


This is a really cool fountain outside the Yokohama Museum of Art.


Landmark Tower, Japan's tallest tower with the world's fastest lift which makes your ears pop. This photo is taken from the balcony of the BankART Gallery.


Green with envy.


Tickled pink!


This is an example of Japan at Christmas time: Neo-PostModern-Pseudo-Western-Kitsch-Something.


An unusually colourful entrace to the underground.


Down, down, down.

Books! Lovely Books!

I'm proud to say that I have actually read a book over these last ten days. From cover to cover. The past four years of Cambridge have until now utterly killed my ability to read anything to its end, even short newspaper columns. It was the systematic process of being given a reading list of five or six books in preparation for an essay or a presentation and having to read them all by a fixed deadline, usually ten days away. Given all the other translation work etc that we had to do, this meant that I would either only read the recommended chapters, or in the case we actually had to read the whole book, I would skim read it for the most relevant bits. This, combined with that fact that I was either not that interested in many of the topics these books were about, or I was downright bored shitless by them. On getting home I'd immediately divide the total number of pages by the number of days I had to read them to break it down... and then not read them anyway. Not a healthy reading situation.

So in four years, I think I've only read about four novels of my own choice during the holidays and three of those were by Haruki Murakami, so not the most demanding stuff. I've repeatedly walked into bookshops and had to leave promptly because I'm overwhelmed with the feeling that there are so many books I want to read and no time (or basic ability) to read them. I always froze with fear whenever Saara offered me a book to read (which somehow you always have in your handbag, ready to offer whenever we meet up over any given cup of coffee. Though I have to say I was proud to have read the Jon Ronson book you lent me this summer - note, once the heavy hand of Cambridge had released me from its grip - that was the trick you see: if you'd kept them simple, with big type, like Babar or something, I would have read them all.)

So now I'm returning to the halcyon days of my teenage years when I read like crazy. This is made so much easier by the fairly long amounts of time I have to spend on the subway every day in Tokyo, just to cover the pretty large distances from A to B.
I've been reading Noam Chomsky's "Imperial Ambitions," which totally exposes the blinding hypocrisy of the way rich and powerful countries treat weak and poor ones.

Michael Klare's "Blood and Oil" is the one book you need to read if you want to understand why things have come to be the way they are now and how global politics will unfold over the next decade or so (the clue is in the title).

And, knowing that reading another book about how fucked up the world is might send me over the edge, I bought "Carlos Eire's "Waiting for Snow in Havana: Confessions of a Cuban Boy" - a beautiful account of a Cuban exile's very intense, magical, at times frightening childhood in Havana at the time the revolution started.

I'm so happy to be reading for myself again!

Ooh Mulder, stop! You're getting me all excited!

This is fascinating.

Kinky!

So I'm teaching English to an S&M dancer.

We met when I went back to a bar in Golden Gai for lunch last week. She works as a barlady in a couple of bars around the area and we had a really good chat while I was having lunch. I met a couple of other really odd but harmless artist people while I was there. And she really wanted me to teach her English so that she could explain what kind of dance she does to foreigners. She said she'd pay me my usual hourly fee plus give me free drinks, so I agreed.

She has a very distinctive name, so I looked it up on google and found out what kind of dance she does and what kind of crowd she hangs out with. I have to say I was slightly concerned at first that I might find myself getting tangled up in something unpleasant, but then I was like "fuck it, she was really nice."

So I went to the bar she was working at tonight, which is called "Bikini Machine," pretty small and decked out in 70s colours and fur everywhere with loads of bikini-clad female shop-window dummies. And bikini-clad Barbie dolls on all the shelves. My beer was even served in a glass shaped like a woman's body wearing a bikini. We started chatting:

"So, what did you do today?"
"Uhh, first I went to school, then I danced. But it was really bad, I made mistakes."
"Oh? Like what?"
"Well, I fell over."
"So, the kind of dance you do, does it have fixed patterns which you have to get right?"
"Well, it's SM, so I wear bondage gear..."
"Essay?"
"SM"
"Uuh, like writing?"
"No. Bondage. Leather. SM."
"OH! S and M! I get it - yeah, Sadomasochism... yeah, for some reason we shorten it to S and M in English."
"Yeah, I have to wear really high heels, and sometimes I fall over."

And so on.

Then, after about half an hour a group of about thirty Japanese people comes piling in, celebrating something and the bar goes from being completely empty to rammed full. So I wait around kind of awkwardly for her to finish serving customers (apparently it never normally gets that busy). It was really odd, because usually I inevitably become the focus of at least one person's attention, if not several - but it was truly like I was invisible. You wonder all your life what it would be like to be a fly on the wall, and for about 20 minutes I was, like some anthropologist living with the natives. Then somehow that changed and I ended up behind the bar serving people for little while. And then I agreed with her that it would be better if I came back on a quieter day.

My walk back to the station was made considerably more enjoyable when I walked past another tiny 10 person bar with a lone salaryman in it doing a karaoke version of Numa Numa (I love this video).

Merry Christmas Indeed

This evening, on my way to give an English lesson, two middle-aged women both walking white labradors came across each other and the dogs took a particular fancy to each other. Straining on their leads to do a 69 sniff-sniff, I could barely contain myself as the two women tried to make the kind of polite conversation that dog owners are forced to do when their pet pooches want some poon. They were both being pulled around in circles, the leads tangling up, the dogs knocking over parked bicycles, which made a nearby man pick them up and the women practically bawling "I'm soo sorry for the terrible inconvenience. Thank you for your kind help."

I thought that was going to be the highlight of my evening, but then I came across this, next to the ticket gates at my subway station:

Boom boom boom, let's shake the room.

There was a big earthquake while I was at the gallery today and it did this to the office:



Well....

Actually....

Just kidding!

I cunningly cropped the photo so that you couldn't see the books which hadn't fallen off the other shelves. Basically, the brown shelves had been sagging for some time and one had even collapsed, and so the directors had already ordered in some new, stronger ones which were delivered today. Having been assigned the job of assembling the new shelves, I spent most of my afternoon strutting around the gallery with a powerdrill, asserting my straightness. Then I heard a crash and a scream from the office, and this is what I actually saw when I came in:





Someone must have given the brown shelves the last little push they needed before they gave up and the entire set of five shelves had come crashing down. You can even see two of the measly little pegs that were holding them up. The new shelves are properly screwed in - WHO'S the man?!

The new shelves also came with little hard-plastic straps which you screw onto the top of the cabinet and into the wall so that in the event of an (actual) earthquake, the books may fall off, but at least the cabinet won't topple over and kill you. The weird thing about all this was that not long after I arrived in the morning, before I even knew that the new shelves were being delivered, I was looking at the old cabinets thinking about suggesting to the directors that we buy some of those plastic straps because they were a towering death-trap. The irony also is that exactly the same collapse-due-to-overweight happened at the gallery while I was there last year and these crappy brown shelves were already replacements for a previous lot!

Evolution Before Breakfast

It's got really effing cold here all of a sudden, and the problem is compounded by the total lack of central heating in Japan. Given that they heat the seats on the underground, you'd think they'd have found a way to have heating under the pavements... at least in the home - but no. Gas heaters only. The situation has got to the stage where I'm swapping my usual morning shower for an evening one, because I just can't face the cold in the morning anymore.

To illustrate this, I'm posting a picture of me emerging from my chrysalis.



This stage comes shortly after a short crawl from my futon to the gas heater, and is followed by a period of bleary-eyed staring at the computer, hoping for emails that you fuckers never send me. This culminates in me mustering the courage to shed my chrysalis and flap like a butterly, if only to grab hold of the nearest jumper to put on top of my pyjamas so I can actually leave my room.

Nyaaaaaaaa

The Japanese have some really good sounds for animals, and some really crap ones.

Dogs go "wan wan"
Pigs go "boo boo" (like fuck they do)

And cats, they go "nyaa nyaa." I love this sound so much that I find any excuse to slip it into daily conversation.

The Invisible Enemy in the Air

My flatmate is one the nicest guys I've ever known and I don't want to diss him, but I've realised recently that I am actually living with the stereotype of someone obessed with something. In his case, it's karate. This is a good thing, because it's got me doing karate again after a six-year break and it's fun going to the dojo with him and meeting new people, none of which I would be doing if it weren't for him. And his obsession is paying off, because even though he's a green belt (about half-way to black), he's way better than many of the people above him.

But somehow I can't get over the bizarre novelty of living with someone who gets up in the morning and watches videos of karate first thing, actually rewinding and replaying certain moments several times over. Obviously I don't mind cos I have my own idiosyncracies which he doesn't hold against me.

So yes, my main idiosyncracy at the moment (and it looks like it's going to last some time) is my ongoing battle with the moisture in the air. The first thing I noticed when I got here is that the atmosphere is like a wet sponge. The pages in almost all of my books and magazines are going wavy as if I'd left them in the bathroom - some of my writing paper is so moist that it fucks up the felt pens that I use to write with; I'm having to go out and buy ballpoints. I have to hang my clothes up to dry in the living room/kitchen because I refuse to add yet more moisture to the air in my room. So I decided to buy a dehumidifier. This was not easy because it's winter and the Japanese seem to find this season dry!! They're actually selling humidifiers in the shops, which are a sight to behold: dozens of little machines filled with water which have twizzling little nozzles that spout out steam from the top. So of course I got funny looks when I asked for a dehumidifer, but luckily, of the very few they had in stock they had one that looks more like a Bose speaker and matches my iPod aesthetic very nicely.

That was ten days ago, and I emptied it for the first time yesterday. It hadn't been on all the time and yet it had accumulated about two pints' worth of water - just from the air!!??

Russian Squirrel Pack 'Kills Dog'

The stuff of nightmares.

Sakhalin is only just north of Japan. I wonder what might happen here...

"Stuffed animals all over Japan put down after Hello Kitty gives child rabies?"

Golden Gai

Tom and I have found the coolest bars in the whole of Tokyo. It's this small area of Shinjuku where there are three small, rickety streets of tiny bars, most of which can only hold about ten people max and would collapse in a second of a major earthquake. The area is called Golden Gai and you can read about it on the web. I think it was built after the war for lowlifes and prostitutes, but ended up being where all the philosophers and artists went and still do, apparently. I can't believe it's still here, and that it doesn't seem to have been overrun by celebrities or demolished for an office block . They all have their own weird little theme, which you can't really tell until you step in.

The bar Tom and I went into was covered in pirated CDs, mostly English, and posters to obscure 80s bands everywhere. All the punters were friends of the barman. According to what other people have written on the web, there are proportionately quite big cover charges and some total rip off bars, or ones that don't take foreigners, but I don't care. Emily and me are going there tonight! And I'm not going to any other bars anywhere else in Tokyo now.