Tokyo Construction

Until recently, there was a large space with two giant, derelict open warehouse buildings behind the kindergarten I work at in Meguro. They were there until the JCBs arrived. We’re on the 8th floor and for the past fortnight, watching the wrecking and disassembly of the buildings has been a brilliant daily distraction for teachers and toddlers alike. Well, for the boys- the girls are turned off while we all gape at the sheer power of it all and drool over hydraulics. Even the girls agree that the diggers look like dinosaurs though, and that’s got to be pretty cool by anyone’s book.

Normally hidden behind construction site barriers, I’ve seen those diggers exhibit their full repertoire of tricks, both delicate and destructive. The same clipper that makes matchsticks out of metal girders can pick up a hose pipe and drop it unscathed. The wrecking head that caves in a roof one second carefully nudges a cone out of the path of the digger the next. It’s awesome stuff.

However, the real stars of the show are undoubtedly the Japanese construction workers themselves. Late on one day we watched one worker demonstrating to another the perfect golf swing, using a piece of scrap metal. He actually walked him through it, showing how to swivel and move your body just like a pro on the fairway. Also, for no apparent reason, at least one worker will always aim a hose at whatever carnage the diggers are wreaking, and there always be one man dressed impeccably in uniform at the gate to the construction site.

Then one day the Shinto priest arrived. Barely visible from so high, tucked in a corner near the entrance stood a tiny torii gate. If it weren’t painted in the distinctive and eye-catching vermilion colour, we might never have noticed it. While chaos was orchestrated by the dinosaurs and the buildings came crashing down, the construction workers shielded the torii like it was the last living thing on earth- the entire site was covered in rubble and brick dust except for this one corner. The priest got straight down to business making peace with whatever god or spirit resided there. He cut an incongruous figure in ceremonial robes, standing shoulder to shoulder with the construction workers but asserted himself immediately, pushing them into the right place before beginning. It made for a hilarious slapstick scene and you could just hear him saying ‘No, not there, there!’ as they shuffled about awkwardly, helmets in hands. Next the priest threw some paper about, beat himself on the back of the shoulders with a stick of some sort and bowed and turned and bowed a lot. Clearly, I know about as much about the sacred rites as the construction workers. The next time I was able to glance down at the corner, the torii gate and the priest had gone. There should still be some buildings left though if you want to witness the greatest construction show in Tokyo.

Christmas socks, Christmas concert, Santa Hats drying on the line

 
 
 

Ambitions

I found myself on the longest road in Japan the other day. Somewhere near Togoshiginza station. It seemed kind of fitting for the evening that followed. My frisbee team had an End-of-Year party (Bonenkai) and a lot of the team plus a few new faces showed up. One or two of the new faces were co-workers of Jei and Kerry, both employed by Wall Street Associates, a recruitment firm. One of the new faces was none other than the ex-President of AJET, the main support network and social branch of the JET programme. it's a big position. She had moved from the top of the JET programme to Wall Street Associates and was soon to return to the States to work in the State Department under Hillary Clinton.

A few weeks ago, I finally took the Japanese Language Proficiency Test, for which I stayed in Japan. I happened to pick up full-time employment in a kindergarten / international school for Japanese kids whilst looking for enough to survive until the test and now that's what I do. I moved on from teaching English in the countryside, to teaching English in the city, and I can't help but wonder where did it all go wrong?!

二郎 Ramen Shop

Co-workers Kei and Kuni working in the Tavern pub keep a book, 'Uwasa no Ramen', or 'Gossip/Rumour Ramen' that Kei picked up in a second hand bookstore. It's kind of my bible. Kuni pointed out his recommendations, including the guide's no.1 ramen shop (at least, 2007's no. 1), just down the road from me. Jiro.

I thought maybe I'd gone too far but then I saw a couple of men queuing outside the doorway of an establishment. The first good sign. The second good sign, though I didn't realise it immediately, was a big barrel of a man with a squint in one eye and a greasy t-shirt on, loitering beside the customers sat at the counter. The third and final good sign was the lack of options at the token-vending machine. Many ramen shops use vending system, rather than burden the ramen chefs with cash handling and the machines usually display a good two dozen options of size, soup and toppings. Jiro had 6. There was no distinction between miso, soy or salt-soup ramen. You know a ramen joint means business when they don't even identify their soup. It's not miso, soy or salt, it's just meat broth.

Once a couple of customers had vacated their seats and hurried on, I took a place and the second good sign came good. A space had been created at the counter and the man with a squint starting passing over plastic sacks of meat. The good stuff. When my bowl of noodles and meat broth arrived shortly after, it was topped off with a chunk of meat the succulence of which I have rarely tasted in a ramen joint. And the final touch, a fistful of chopped garlic tossed on top. I didn't eat again that day.

Fuji City Gaia Cup Frisbee Tournament, Yoyogi Koen Gingko colours, Yokohama Triennale

 
 
 

Absent

It's been a while.

I moved. Still no internet in the house yet. Lots has happened and I've been itching to write, to tell all.

There have been happenings at school.

A few things, a couple of ideas have crossed my mind.

I've been on a couple of fun outings.

And then there's the sorry tale of how I was cuckolded. Well, I guess strictly speaking I wasn't cuckolded. But it's still a rather amusing tale. It'll have to wait.

Thethemodelmasherandme

I got sick and it knocked the stuffing out of me.

The traditional remedy of temporarily over-eating and steering straight did not have the desired effect. Throwing coffee and willpower into the mix seemed to only exacerbate things. So I fell back on on super foods and sleep and it's worked the magic. I'm back.

Friday afternoon in between waves of pounds and skull throttlingly painful headaches (mayeb I'm exaggerating) school finished up and I did a superman, sprang into my suit and dashed off to the Canadian Embassy to open the front door for people, for the most part, with far too much money and far too few manners. Actually that's a lie, it might have been a 60-40 split between the good the bad with the ugly nowhere to be seen. There was one especially attractive lady who strode through the door in ankle boots and a mini skirt and turned out to be the Japan entry for the Ms Universe competition. There were also a few ambassadors and some other smug young twits from Blighty, all swilling back expensive wine and bidding 10s of thousands of yen (er, actually not as much as it sounds) on cases of wine in live auction. It was a fund-raiser for a charity/English and many other language speaking helpline here in Tokyo. I thinkit worked out ok for them. I tucked into the free gourmet scraps on offer backstage in the volunteers room and gazed out on the view across Aoyama-Ichome, the rich district.

Anyway I wasn't feeling top of the world then, but now I'm back, as I said earlier. A parcel arrived from England, containing a masher, amongst other things. I take mashed potatos pretty seriously. And this is one serious potatoe masher. Knowing it was on its way across the world, I've refrained form buying one. And boy was it worth the wait. It's a beaut. All of my strength flooding back, I ground and mashed the life out of half a large sweet potato and several rubbery old Jaga Imo, plain old potoatos tonight. Mash mash mash, the power, the power....

Taking the fish

Back in Yamagata. Only for the weekend mind, but I spent the entirety of that cycling around on my mate Justin's spare bike gawping at the mountains, or staring at them from the back of his lady friend Michi's car. Saturday was a crisp blue day and we could see as far as the first snow to have settled on the Asahi Machi range, way out west.

Saturday night, dinner and drinks with the teachers I used to work with from Nana Chu Junior High School and my replacement, Jamaican Tamara, was really rather lovely. We went to Aramasa, an izakaye (Japanese pub eaterie) we used to go to a lot when i was there. The master is hilarious. He once showed me pictures of him asking for directions to the hospital when he got sick on his holiday to England. I guess he had nothing else to take pictures of.

We had some very typical Yamagata fare, in the shape of Imoni, an autumn taro potato stew. There was also purple chrysanthemums with soy, chunky pork rib meat with negi, a kind of Japanese leek, skewered and grilled and the house special, horse meat sashimi (raw horse meat). Hello tape worms. He also brought out a caraf of Jyuu Yon Dai, Yamagata's finest sake, a very smooth blend that is reputedly very difficult stuff to get hold of. But the headlining act on the table was the fish head, sliced in two down the forehead (do fish even have foreheads?), and served on two massive presentation dishes.




Now, I had reservations about how Tamara would cope at Nana Chu. More so, how she'd get there in the first place. I rode a bike every day, over rutted ice banks and through deep snow in winter and under oppressive temperatures by summer, 8km there and 8km back on the commute. Tamara can't ride a bike. But on this showing, she's doing just fine. I hadn't heard the Caribbean saying that people will take the bones for themselves and throw the meat of a fish to the dogs, such is their passion for it that they'll suck those bones dry of marrow. Which is exactly what she and the lovely Yoshida Sensei set about doing.



I thought the fish was done with once we'd eaten as far as the jaw line, but they continued. Tamara ate both eyes, spitting out the hard, 'eye of the eye' that collects in a hard little ball when an eye is cooked. The best bit, she claimed. I'll stick with chicken medallions thanks. Then she and Yoshida Sensei shared the jelly around the eye sockets and scraped clean the meat from the bones, and cracked them open and sucked them clean as a primitive whistle.



Thankfully my appetite wasn't affected and I happily devoured 4 donuts (I know, as disgusting as the fish demolition job) in a post dinner sugar search.

We went sweet potato picking at Matsuoka-san's allotment, Some Very Delicious Soba, Autumn not quite in full splendour at Yamadera

 
 
 

Shorts: Direction

I got a new watch for my birthday last year. Well, I say new. It was from a mate who later told me he got it from a mate whose girlfriend works in the liquidation business. She's comes into a lot of electrical products and freely distributes them for knock-off prices to her friends, although they're not always brand new. That and my last birthday was actually last December, so I suppose when you take the two together, it's not such a new ole' watch after all.

One of the kids was twisting my wrist or playing with my watch and when I looked down, I noticed he'd accessed some new screen I'd never seen before. I forgot to mention, it's a digital watch. The new screen showed a compass and displayed at any point which direction I was facing. Then it would fix that direction if you stayed still a second or two, and you'd have to enact a sequence of complex button pushes to return to a fresh compass.

Ever since I've been obsessed with it. I've been checking my direction everywhere. Which way I'm heading on the train. Which way my apartment faces, which way the school faces, which direction I'm headed as I walk along.

Shorts: Mices

I bought new mouse. The old one was slow and it took several swipes to drag the cursor to the other side of the screen. It moved in fits and lurches. I saved the old one for a day when I'm really angry at something. Then I'll take that mouse, and swing it by the cord, and crash it to a concrete ground somewhere (shouldn't be difficult to find a patch here) and smash it to eight zillion pieces.

But for now, I'm happy enough just using the new one. Except it's so damn quick I keep overshooting and getting the wrong thing. Like upgrading from an Astra to an Austin Martin. The power.

Fokyo Taker

Friends invited me to a design exhibition launch night and I arrived early. As it turned out, the venue, the Machihara Building, sits right beside the very river (the Meguro River) that I cycle along to work. In fact I cycle right past that Machihara Building every time I cycle to work.

I didn't know anyone there and instead of dawdling like a dork I went up to the reception desk to cough up admission fee. There was none. Instead they gave me a plastic cup, a piece of tape and a black marker pen, then told me to write my name and asked, Beer champagne or soft drink beer please thanks very much and free did you say? I went back for later.

At nearby tables there were platters of nibbles, all of which were white. I think that had some kind of significance. Soft-boiled cauliflower, marshmallows and mushrooms. Every now and then a gust of wind would lift and scatter the black plastic forks and napkins. The evening reached a zenith when I witnessed a man dressed particularly arty gesticulate in an exaggerated fashion with a fork, on the end of which was a piece of soft-boiled cauliflower.

My friends turned up and we perused the lights and tables and a strange leather loaf shaped container that bragged somesuch like, 'with use the grease from your fingers will darken the leather like a loaf being baked'. Some time later, I wandered out as freely as I wandered in.

mr favourite new place

is exactly where I thought it would be. Just up the street from me. In a splendid synergy of expectation and realization that tasted all the sweeter for it's rarity in a land devoid of logic, the little chop house at the top of my road came up good. One hell of a gem in Oimachi, Toyko.

Honma's place is the kind where you're not given a menu, merely asked how hungry you are. One that thrives on regulars, big enough as it is or maybe 9 people around around the counter and some more upstairs.

Apart from a few others up on the 2nd floor, I was the only patron that evening until a 'jyouren' (regular) arrived, rolling up sleeves and taking a set=at at the counter as I was gathering coat and brolly. The master called me 'wakadana' all night, which I guess would roughly translate to 'young man' and chided me for draping my coat across a chair, hanging it up instead. He joked about women and at first took me for a translator. I went in prepared to answer all the regular questions you get asked as a foreigner in Japan and while some of them came up, for the most part it was other chat.

And the food was bloody good. Grilled skirt steak on a stick with a dot of wholegrain mustard on the side is the big boast of Honma's place. Fat and juicy and fatty and juicy. He even produced several magazines touting his eaterie with a picture of the famous 'kushiyaki' (grilled on stick thing). Offal curry swimming in oil with toast. Fried egg and potato salad. I forget the name in Japanese but the sit-down dish was two thick slices of smoked pink duck breast and rolled egg omelette.

It was all bloody good. Shame I'm to move away from Oimachi. The cockroaches finally got to me and an offer to live with people (other people! social contact in the home!!) came up and I'm off to trendy Nakameguro, spitting distance from Shibuya. Bam.

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Lost things

I had a very sharp pang of loneliness this evening. It wasn't a particularly regular feeling. I think it might be the first time I've encountered this variety, like catching a cold with all kinds of different symptoms in minute ways.

I read in the annual old boy magazine from my old school of a friend's wedding. I couldn't quite believe it, but that's all back-story anyhow. Today I logged onto facebook and saw some photos of the big day itself. I hadn't known the date. There was my old mate, a guy I used to spend a lot of time with, dressed in Sunday best and beaming. A further root around profiles and photos albums and another good mate cropped up, the best man, another really good mate from whom I've drifted. Another shot, I could name all but one of the lads standing looking at a different camera to the one that took the picture I was scrutinizing.

I suddenly felt like going back to England and had a jolt. Not really homesickness, because I stopped trying to make homes anywhere a long time ago. I wondered who I'd pick as my best man if I got married and no-one came to mind.

Twinkle Nights at Tokyo City Keiba race track, Cow Parade in Marunouchi Nakadori, Fixed Gear bike

 
 
 

Two new bits of Japanese I've learnt lately

オッズ - O'Zu, 'Odds'

There's an odds machine at the Tokyo City Keiba horse race track that prints out the odds for the 'Twinkle Nights' evening races.

欲しい行こう - 'Hoshii ikou', literally 'I want to go'.

Some of the kids can't say bathroom yet. Sink or swim little fella, sink or swim.

Making friends

I came to Tokyo not knowing anyone in this town really. A couple of friends in Yokohama and one very welcoming family in the Hommas aside, slim pickings. It's been fun putting things together, scratching out a life, pursuing old hobbies in a new environment and looking at new things. Here are a few people I've met so far.

Fumie was a small ad of 20 or 30 words in the classified section of Metropolis, a free, weekly English language magazine. She wanted to speak English, I wanted to speak Japanese, we came to an agreement and went for a coffee. Next we visited the Tokyo Metropolitan Teien Art Museum for sphinx torsoes in an art deco setting. Although she's working as some kind of legal scribe right now, she recently found work designing and painting prosthetic limbs and she was very enthusiastic about this new venture. She wouldn't have to deal with the daily crush on the trains, so tight she can't make space to indulge in one of her passions, reading books. Our next language exchange will be in Hibiya Koen, which is where I met

Bryan, an American from Southern California. I was in the Marunouchi area on a cow hunt (there is a Cow Parade) and decided that since the weather was so clement and my legs fresh, I'd take a stroll through the park. I'm thinking about writing a piece about fixed gear/single speed bicycles for Japan-i, a portal-style travel website I've gotten involved with. There was Bryan with a fixed gear bicycle with very fetching purple and white wheel rims- one purple, one white. He told me all about putting his bike together and we swapped e-mail addresses. Just after we parted I saw a marriage reach the confetti mark and a lady walking a boar on a leash. It could have been a pig. I think it was connecting with one of the charity booths put up for a Global Fest.

The Little Professor is a kid at the kindergarten I work at. The Little Professor stands 3ft something tall and likes to draw circles in the air, on table tops, walls, anywhere he can whenever his mind takes that turn. He was very excited with last week's geography topic and the chance to actually draw a typhoon in circles and circles and circles of colour. When it comes to putting them on or taking them off, he fumbles with his shoes a lot. The head teacher once saw him standing on the platform with his mum, doing nothing more than watching trains. The Little Professor also likes to stick with his routine and the old routine of taking five minutes to look out from the window of our 8th floor kindergarten at the bustle beneath. He flaps a little when the routine changes and so I'm being especially careful to try and befriend the Little Professor gradually. New faces are sometimes a problem for kids with Asperger Syndrome.

All sorts beside. Rebekha, with whom together we vowed to make a company upon her return to the states for some event management at a Soapbox Derby. Martin, the Austrian pilot I met at frisbee by Tamagawa River and who had flown in the previous day, was set to fly out the following day and had decided to use his time in Tokyo indulging in some exercise. Garth, the landlord in a pub at which I've ended up doing one night a week, recently hospitalized for some alcohol-related operation, off the booze and on the pills but still sorely tempted to ensure the London Pride wasn't off when a Japanese customer claimed it was a little sour. Turns out the customer didn't know what he was talking about.

Interview

I can write this now because the interview is over and a week has passed.

The job wasn't something I was necessarily interested in, but then isn't that what a lot of people say about the field of work they end up in? 'I'd never thought of the business and then one day I looked around and saw I'd become a Black Sea fisherman'. Not so many, 'I just knew the day I went to the circus I'd end up reading fortunes from strands of hair, and here I am'. Besides, I had a good referral and was asked to submit an application, so I did.

I've worked for the company in question before, but on an ad hoc basis as a database entry to be called upon at weekends. Each seasonal stint presented different work- Halloween parties in October, Christmas in December and a range of interview and speech competition judging work too. Each time there was the same mandatory orientation session, which would find us trainees bouncing around the room at some point, proving we can lead a game designed for kindergarten and elementary school aged children. Everyone must play the part of the kids when not demonstrating their assigned activity.

And thus enfolds a scene of bizarre role-playing, with much squawking about, bad impressions and mouths bending around words carefully and slowly e-nunciated to a group of intelligent, young adults. You always leave the room a little lighter, for having shed a skin of dignity.

This all happened at the interview for this latest, more permanent job too. There was also a special someone flown in on the shinkansen from Osaka, a man high enough up the ranks to present the introductory, promotional video screened at the orientations and interviews. The video was screened and the man in the video was the man in the room was equally bizarre as the game demonstrations. More of a 'rub your eyes and blink twice' bizarreness rather than a 'screw your eyes up tight and hope it ends soon' leaden-feeling-of-sorrow kind of bizarreness.

The presenter of the video then interviewed us with one other man, one-by-one. It came to my turn, the others had already been discharged en masse and the man from the video began questioning me. Now, I haven't attended too many interviews before, but I can tell even in my own relative naivety that if the interviewer starts to look beyond you, at the wall behind you, as if reading a camera-mounted prompt whilst you're answering his questions, that can't be such a great sign. I found out a few days later I didn't get the job, but I have another one, so it's ok.

CICADAS

Your days are numbered.

Tom

I started taking Japanese classes. In my former life in Yamagata, once a week I would meet 'Kiki', or Tokiko Suzuki to give her her real name. She and I would chat in Japanese for an hour or more and that was as far as my schooling went. Once or twice she took me out for something to eat. Once we went to a soba noodle restaurant called KiriKiri tucked away in a quiet suburb near Tendo. The home-made tofu was so fresh it was still warm. Soft and grainy and eaten with a smooth wooden spoon. The tempura was crisp, the soba cut to perfection and the surroundings seemed like a refined farmhouse restaurant. On the way back she let me drive her top-down sports kei-car (one of those cars with a teeny engine) and I only felt a little bit like a toy-boy chauffeur... Anyway, a brief period of lessons with a Japanese lady from the International Centre who had time and a textbook aside, I taught myself Japanese, as is the fashion in the north.

I was excited to join MLC. I joined a class specifically orientated towards passing the Japanese Language Proficiency Test in December, so I guess I have no reason to complain about how dry the lessons can sometimes seem. We study by grammar point. We read through example sentences using the grammar point and then try to come up with sentences of our own, cold. There are listening tests and kanji tests and to be honest, as materials I can't readily get my hands on, those and the expensive fee I paid at the start for the month are the only reasons I'm still going to the classes.

My classmates: an American girl and a Vietnamese girl, both of whom I was excited to meet at first. I foresaw heads knocked back in laughter by the water-cooler, a shared discovery of the finer points of Japanese, perhaps going out for a drink after a lesson to chat about life in the big city. But they scarper as soon as the lesson is done. There's no interest in any kind of conversation before the lesson, in awkward moments when we've arrived before the teacher has. It's not exactly what I expected.

With this in mind, on Tuesday I welcomed Tom, the perennial absentee. A slightly older guy with a thick cotton shirt and glasses and a very quiet demeanour, I thought Tom would balance things out a bit in the classroom. Tom could read kanji very well, but when it came to coming up with example sentences of his own, he struggled and passed several times before the teacher apparently decided he shall not pass. He agonised over it for a while. The teacher tried to prop up a sentence, probing him for words and suggesting the correct verb form. Tom carried on sweating it out and then suddenly, he started to gather up his books. He'd had enough. He packed his things quickly and awkwardly squeezed out of the tight, souless classroom while the teacher remained bemused and completely at a loss as to what to do.

I don't think we'll see Tom again. Which is a shame, as I won't have a chance to congratulate him on the bravest thing I've seen anyone do since I've been in Tokyo. Tom, I salute you. It's time I followed your example, quit the bland lessons and found another Kiki.

Shinagawa, Tokyo

I've landed up in Shinagawa Ku, Tokyo. Thee are 23 'ku's in Tokyo, comparable to London's boroughs. I quite like my Ku. There are two kanji for Shinagawa. The first is three little boxes, one piled on top of the other two and squashed a little more horizontal, like someone sat on it and hid it away out of reach. The second kanji is three vertical lines, signifying river, the left line bent a little. I quite like the simplicity of it in such a crazy crazy city.

I'm slowly coming to grasp the sheer number of people in Tokyo. I get on a train at 9.30 at night thinking by that time the crowds are bound to have thinned, and I end up with my face in someone's armpit for the journey. Thankfully only a few stops. I get on the train at 10.30pm a few days later and experienced exactly the same pattern of emotions: faint hope, mild self-reproach that seems hand-in-hand with 'I told me so' and of course slight discomfort upon being mashed into contact with eight other people.

What a fantastic location I thought, what splendid transport links, I can get up here and down there and over to there in but a blink of the eye and 7 stops. What I failed to realize, of course, was that the more spokes that sprout out from a transport hub, the more people the more are likely to use the station more, at more and more varied and unexpected hours.

With all those people, strange then that I should jump at every foreigner I see. There's been quite a few of them. I live in an apartment building of 10 single-person rooms, all of which are occupied by foreigners. Every time I see another foreigner, I find myself kidding myself they must live in my block. Although I've now seen more than 10. Breaking old countryside habits appears to take longer than I'd reckoned on.

Leaving Yamagata and the countryside and the north, I left a lot of things behind. Computer speakers? Too much space, get rid. Spare t-shirts? Need some new style if I'm going to cut it in the city anyway, chuck em. Plastic drawers and bed sheets, potato masher and coat hangers, tea-towels and trainers, I gave it away and binned a lot and when I missed the bin day for big things, my friend Akiyoshi took me to the place where all rubbish goes and dropped his mate the demolition man's name and I dropped the rest of my stuff. Trouble is, I didn't think about how I'd recoup all my losses in Tokyo...with no money.

Tokyo is brimming with possibility. It's so alive, there are people and exhibitions, festivals and nights, sports clubs and gigs, gigs!, coffee shops and department stores every where, but it all seems a little inaccessible. I've all the time on a part-time job, but not the money to tear off too much from this great gargantuan.

A new home, Hakodate Market Crabs, Lilies and bridges, Hokkaido

 
 
 

A week with the Hommas

A week with the Hommas! Mayumi the consummate housewife and Yasu the picture of his son Yosuke, perched on the front of the couch watching T.V. or when eating, quickly, silently, until he'd finished. Yosuke is a good mate from University and frequently stayed at various friends' homes for the summer holiday instead of flying back to Japan. I think his parents were only too willing to welcome me into their home for the second time.

The first time I stayed in Eda with the Hommas, I had a foot the size of a football and was freaking out thinking I'd contracted Deep Vein Thrombosis. It was the start of the year and my friend Julia and I had come back from a sun-kissed holiday in Thailand. Waiting on the platform for the train to Eda Julia read out the symptoms of DVT after my foot had grown in size and my pain threshold had shrunk correspondingly. It turned out to be just an infection caught from dirty sea-water and bad sandal grazes but Mrs Homma diligently took care of me nonetheless.

This time round I got a better taste of the Hommas' day-to-day life. Both work hard. At the start of the week, Yasu would return late and collapse in front of Kitajima Kousuke or Fuahara or another of the Japanese Olympians. A couple of days he returned very late, eating supper after ten and retiring to bed soon after that. On Saturday and Sunday, he worked at his laptop typing minutes for meetings held with the lawyers. A company had fiddled the books, the chief exec had fled to Greece (his last known whereabouts) with a few million and Yasu was on the case discovering new lies and scandals on a daily basis. He said it was the most interesting thing he's ever had to do at work.

Mayumi got up at 5 or earlier to prepare breakfast for Yasu and me each day. She taught a couple of Japanese lessons each week, volunteered at a hospital for children sick with cancer and discussed plans to write more childrens books with her partner, the illustrator, also sick with cancer. They've already co-authored one. Last Saturday was a house-warming party for one of her old students, Nuala from Liverpool. I was invited along too and saw a completely different side to Mayumi, excited, bustling and flitting around like she was half as old as I suppose she really is. It was nice to see, especially since I met a lot of other foreigners at the party who all made me feel like I need to grow up and start thinking of the Future and making a Plan. Each had their own story to tell of just how they'd wound up spending over 10 years, 15 years in Japan. More than one of them identified the point at which there was no turning back and several were married to Japanese spouses or carrying babes in arms. I met a few guys who met for golf and wished I could play better than swiping at the ball with clumsy, steely-eyed strokes. It was alarming, in a way, to meet people who'd stopped thinking about when they were going to return home and starting thinking about when they could holiday home.

Mayumi kick-started Japanese study seriously again for me. The evening I arrived she started tugging out and throwing at me textbooks and thick kanji books from a cupboard full of them. Before a spare key was cut for me, she encouraged I study at home when she was out, until lunchtime or whenever she'd return. In fact, it's probably time to look at some more kanji now.

Odds and ends- last last weekend

I spent a lot of time on trains, in train stations in the back end of beyond, hanging around waiting for lifts, going from Mamurogawa to Sakata and Nishi-Hama last last weekend. The football team of the school I work at were crowned champions of the city a couple of months ago and the prefectural tournament finally came around, held in Mamurogawa. The three day event clashed with the last chance I'd have to spend some time with friends up in the north and had me poring over train schedules and pleading for lifts that all came good.

It was a scorcher last last weekend. Now it's lifted a little, just right now. On the commute back from school the other day there was one beautiful moment when I startled a flock of swallows or small birds from a verge beside a great expanse of rice fields. They took flight, darted across the path and weaved over the rice thrushes that were whipping and billowing in bunches to the play of the wind. Beyond, the mountains smudged into dark clouds grown fat with rains that would come suddenly and shortly. There was a real feeling of tranquillity, and of threat, made keener for the earth's recent bouts of jiggery-pokery, quakes and trembles. It cools with rain.

I spent a lot of time in Shinjo station. In the station building they had a Shinjo Experience Centre, full of plastic boxes of the most monstrous beetles and bugs I've ever laid eyes on. They had horns and pincers bigger than mice. They swiped pathetically against the plastic walls. I soon got bored and went for a coffee and wrote this:

Sometimes the end of the day would roll around at 4.30 and I'd high tail it out of school. Sometimes I would have planned to stay for soccer club and wouldn't. There'd be something special I wanted to cook for dinner, or someone I'd have to call back home on their lunch break, no other time would be possible. Sometimes I'd stay for soccer club, right until the end, until the meeting at the end when Coach Yamakawa would murmur a few words and Mamuro Sensei would too, until the 'Ground Aisatsu', lining up facing the pitch and bowing and saying thank-you to an empty space and the mountains in the distance, a rugged horizon and a great expanse of sky above. Once, I stayed until 5 minutes before the meeting, decided resolutely that I was having no fun at all and left.

A long time ago, it seems, suddenly Coach Yamakawa was there. One time, after a long absence, he came sporting a metal-grill eye-patch. The kids raced over to the ground fencing and crowded round and it transpired he'd had an operation. He smirked and wasn't very responsive to me when I asked after it.

I wasn't very sure if he could strike a ball well until recently, when I watched him volley in a stray ball off the crossbar and the back of Shunichi's head. Shunichi is the keeper. Another time I watched him kick a dead ball from a one pace run-up and place it precisely in a corner, rolling down the inside of the goal frame and settling innocuously with the merest bounce.

The time that Naoya's big brother started coming I can place more precisely. That was more or less a year ago, once Naoya became a senior player, as he started to become a star amongst the senior players. Naoya's brother has also grown his hair out and wears it better than I and drives a Golf and commands the respect of the team and encourages them and advises them. I once tried to give some words of encouragement to the team in English, at the bidding of Mamuro Sensei. I noticed Coach Yamakawa chuckling and whispering to one of the kids as the team circle broke up and wondered what he'd been saying.

And that's as far as I got in the place I got a coffee in Shinjo station.

At the tournament, there wasn't a place on the bench for me, like at previous tournaments. There are strict regulations about numbers- I remember the first tournament I went to, two years ago, and being ordered from the technical area by the referee and linesman, after behaving exactly as an Englishman would, pitch-side to his team. So I got over that a long time ago.

I watched them win on Saturday and kill off a game they deserved to win at the death, 3-2, on Sunday. Siobhan gave me a lift through the mountains to the beach on Sunday afternoon. A large group of us spent the evening barbecuing, wallowing in the sea and swimming out to a point for no other reason than the fun of reaching it and turning back. There was Suica-Wari, a blindfolded hunt with a stick for a watermelon. We danced around the campfire to Dorrie's old Brownies camp-site sing-a-longs. And we toasted marshmallows and called them smores between biscuits. The next day I woke before the sun had warmed itself. I waved a silent goodbye to all my friends in Sakata, still slumbering in tents and waited at a train station with no-one else, to get to Mamurogawa and watch the team squander a 2-0 lead in penalites to lose the semi-final and a possible place in the North Japan tournament.

Odds and ends- End of Term

Last day at school. I've been out drinking and farewelling since last Wednesday, a bender I just can't get my round. End of term ceremony, farewell ceremony for me. The Kocho Sensei (Head), Harada Sensei had written a song and performed it live at the ceremony, piano and all. Later he presented a cd recorded version of it. Up on stage there was a speech in English then Japanese by Jun Hasegawa, a Third Grade kid I coached for the Recitation Contest last year. This year his classmate Yuto Takeda will represent NanaChu school instead, with a speech about his trip to Italy and Switzerland with the Japanese Red Cross. He talks about not having the words to communicate with a lady called Chris and how it was ぎごちない. As we translated the speech into English, Fujita Sensei explained　ぎごちない　isn't a word Japanese people are comfortable using, nor a condition they like to express. It translates to 'awkward' or 'clumsy'. That really would mess with the Wa.

I think Yuto's speech trickled in one ear-hole and gathered somewhere deep inside in a little well. My speech turned out part response to Yuto's speech, part advice to the students about studying English, part expression of my feelings about studying English, (the methods and joys of studying English in Japan), partly inspired by Max's account of his speech to 1000 High School kids, partly inspired by Julia's account of her speech to a whole lot of girls somewhere in Sakata. Here it is.

暑いから、少しだけ話します。先生方に、誠にを世話になりました。日本の中学校の生活に関してよく学べました。私の母校に比べて、あらゆる事が違います。もし私も日本人なら、どんな学生だろうとよく考えます。

生徒達に英語の勉強についてアドバイスして上げたいんです。先ずは、英語は学校の教科としてだけと思わないで下さい。その上に、通信手段です。「勉強」として思わないで、「自分の考えを述べる手段」として大事してみて下さい。英語であっても、日本語であっても、人のよって考え方や言い方は違います。自分の言い方探してみてください。

また、日本語の何千何万もの漢字の読み方などを知ることが難しいように、英語をすべて学ぶことも本当に大変です。それで、話している時に分からないことがあったり、伝えたいことをうまく言えなくても心配しないで下さい。七つの「しん」のことを考えて、特に「信じる」の「しん」。話している時に自分を信頼して、自信を持ってみて下さい。自分のベストを尽くして。

最後にいっぱい楽しい思い出本当にありがとうございました。心に残っている。以上です。

I wanted to tell the kids not to worry about not having the words, or enough words. You can never have them all, it's like those cereal packet collectibles. For some reason there's always one or two missing from your collection. There's too many and myriad. People have their own way of thinking and speaking, so as much as we think we communicate, really we just take the words as we see fit, where someone else might see a different cut to them. I wanted to tell the kids to find their own way of speaking, of expressing their selves with words.

I also wanted to tell the kids to have conviction in what they do say. I borrowed from the student council's slogan for the academic year- SHIN + ING, Shining 7. Ridiculous to look at, but quite profound to think. 7 different kanji, each with one of their readings reading, 'Shin'. The kanji all occur in word like 'Belief' and 'Depth'. I picked on Belief and bullied it til I made it my own.

So you see, for Yuto, I had to believe what I was saying, because that's what I was advising. I also had to try and set a decent example of speaking in a foreign language for him. How could I coach him for a week (until the contract expires) about public speaking if I myself was incapable? For Jun, I had to believe and have conviction too- after all, he had just delivered a speech in English to me up on stage, in front of his peers.

In terms on content, the get-out clause was that it didn't matter if it was perfect Japanese or not: this was my own way of speaking. But then the flaw was that this was a foreigner borrowing Japanese words for a speech and perhaps using them in roles unfamiliar to anyone there- who knows if our manners of speaking collided with each other, who knows if the message got through or not.

Pure Poetry

Ramen
Tastes good.
Chaashuu, Miso, Tonkotsu,
I love them all.
Mmmmmmmmmmmm.

Yamagata
Mountains, people,
Snow and sweat.
Did I live here?
Nda.

Japanese
Itchy knees
One two threes
I still don't understand!
Moozooi.

Orang-utan;
Big, orange,
A lot of fun.
But why so hairy?
Thinking.

Run the four poems I came up with in the 3rd grade classes yesterday and today.

It's fun translating what the kids want to write. One kid wrote about steak and finished his poem with the word 'MEATGOD'. Another wrote about morning, a new day starts and ended it 'Good Morning', the quintessential English class refrain, which I thought was really quite clever.

The atmosphere is completely different in class. All of the kids rise to the challenge of expressing themselves in a foreign language and they're proud of what they've created when they're done.

For something as fluid as poetry, it's funny to see how the textbook goes about encouraging it, and how effectively teachers are invited to stamp the life out of it. Poems must begin with one word and follow from there and there are assigned topics for each line. Rules are set and where so much poetry thrives on undoing such fastenings, Japanese-English-Junior-High-Poetry does not belong.

I read in a book of one case noted by one Teruhisa Horio a while back 'in which the Ministry of Education failed to approve a well-respected work of literature because it did not use the official onomatopoeic word for a river's sound; "We can only conclude from this that the Ministry's inspectors feared that the children might get the idea that it was all right to play with the national language in ways which would encourage them to think of it as something belonging to them rather than as something whose use is controlled by the State for them"'.

Perish the thought they might consider what they've learnt of English as anything belonging them either.

The Day I Learnt to Fly and Other Stories

Sometimes it's difficult to know where to start. You can size something up as much as you like, peer at it and scrutinise it from every angle and still hesitate to kick things to life.

2 years in Yamagata is nearly up so I feel I can justifiably write about where-it-all-started on this jolly vaunt. It started not so much with the sizing up and the peering and thinking, but a leap into a big blue screen, perhaps looking like a leap off a cliff on the silver screen months later. I didn't know what I was getting my self into, I didn't know what was ahead. I didn't know if I'd land on my feet or fall flat on my arse. If you can spot a parallel looming, full marks and ping pong to you.

SundaySaturday I went to an ultimate frisbee tournament with students from Yamagata University. I missed a farewell occasion in Sakata with a lot of other English teachers and a lot of friends in order to go. Chatting Skype with one friend, Sakata was karaoke til the sun came up and a cupboard in the karaoke booth and I felt wholly content straight off I'd not gone along but headed the opposite way to a frisbee tournament. A little piece of Japan I'd carved out for myself, not another inherited friend, not something prepared, something I'd found and worked hard to make good.

But let's hop back to the start and sizing up something or rather a jump off into the blue. Saturday was swelteringly hot and I crispened and flattened out from fingertip to foot-sole for lack of water inside me. Sunday the teams were jumbled up, in the spirit of the game, and I found myself playing with strangers. At the death of the game, I threw a bum pass that was intercepted. He who'd marked me raced into the end-zone to receive the scoring pass that would take the game away from us. Markee now marker and lagging behind, I tracked my man and saw he'd just beat me to the pass. Nothing for it, I threw myself into the air, I took off with one last thump of a leg, I flew,

I flew,
I'd learnt to fly.

I still missed the pass, we lost not tied the game seconds later and our team slipped down a position in the final tot-up, but that's not the point. I'd learnt to fly.

For the rest of the day, I dared someone to throw a pass I could fling myself at, desperate to try it again, to leap off into the blue. The grass was very soft after all. I didn't have another opportunity, but being as I wasn't hungover Sunday and everyone else was, I pulled a blinder out of the hat (!) in the final game, with my team-mates from Yamagata University again.

Sunday en route back sat in an aluminium chair in the buff and the spit coming down before a torrential summer shower, at the onsen, I felt wholly content. Facing a bare wall plastered over with pictures of beautiful places somewhere else slowly drying off, I took one more dip inside and a large man passing barked out one single shout in my direction with a face held steady. The sound swelled fullsome, as sound keeps in a bath-house. Later Junji explained he was Yakuza, paying respect to another Yakuza, possibly the boss, sat 2 yards next to me in the scorching water but that there's one other of those stories.

Daikon Team

There's a game I play, well there's lots of games I play, but it's kind of a game within each game I play, more of a joke really rather than a game so let's call it a joke not a game and I don't suppose it would be very funny for anyone except a group of 30 or so Japanese elementary school kids so maybe not even a joke but just something I do, or have done, an awful lot at elementary school.

I've done it so much that I decided to spice it up a little last Friday to make it more interesting for me rather than anything else but I ended up making a terrible, terrible mistake in front of 30 or so elementary school kids.

It's really very simple. I divide the kids into teams for lots of games. Each time I do, I name the teams...see where we're going with this? I give every team a normal name, except one team which I give a funny name. The funny bit is, it's always the same funny name, and it's always the last team I name that gets the funny name- Daikon Team. Daikon are 2ft long white radishes that sell for tuppence in season and crop up everywhere in Japanese cuisine. Like their distant cousin, the turnip (I should imagine), they are an ugly vegetable. Hence the joke.

It gets better. I draw a strawberry on the blackboard for Strawberry Team, or an orange for Orange Team or whatever and then at the end, I draw a giant white blob with the slightest tuft of green for the greens at the tip. It's really rather funny, or at least, the kids would have you believe so.

Well anyway. Last Friday I did the same, but on the spur of the moment I thought 'F&*k it!' (I was at elementary school after all), I'm going to draw a big bum-shaped daikon and see if anyone notices. A big bum with two big fat bum cheeks. I started drawing my Bum-Daikon and drew two big fat bum cheeks at the bottom and heard kids laughing and shrieking BUM!! BUM! i BUM!n Japanese and I thought great they picked up on it, but then the terrible thing happened.

I drew the bum cheeks, but then the tail of the vegetable kind of ran away from me and tapered into a fat wriggle at an angle from the bum cheeks so as to suggest it was neither Bum nor Daikon nor Bum-Daikon, but in fact, something much, much worse. It was only when I stepped back from the blackboard that I could see the big picture, I'd drawn it that big. I'd drawn a Penis-Daikon.

Letter from home (forgive me Dad)

23rd June

Dear Guy,

Good to hear from you this afternoon and you will be pleased to hear that the doctor is happy with my blood pressure and all the tests I have had (middle-aged man's regular check to make sure that I am still here) except cholesterol which I have to 'resit'. I am supposed to fast for 12-14 hours beforehand and didn't, so that the test was useless.

Should I suggest that your school football team enters Euro 2008? They could almost certainly beat some of the teams who got through. I have Spain in the Office Sweepstake and we are through to the semi-final so I may win the £32-00 at stake (whoopee). I have done a profit sharing deal with three other teams so that at least there will be a drink in it.

Grandma's 94th birthday is on July 2nd if you are near a phone (0044 1--2 ------) otherwise I will pass on an e-mail. We have a gathering planned for 6th July although mostly my age group rather than yours.

The village fete went well: I was the Book Stall this year and pulled in about £80-00 selling at 50p a throw (less for kids on pocket money). Good time had by all, but some dog came and crapped on my hat which I had left on the ground. Gross! Still it will wash off.

The vegetable garden is causing concern. Black fly has ravaged my broad beans but the tomatoes, lettuces, courgettes, potatoes, artichokes (Jerusalem) and herbs seem alright and I have also planted sweetcorn and beetroot. We'll see- speak soon and let me have contact details in Tokyo and beyond.

love, Dad.

Boris and the Cotswolds

 
 
 
 

Mud, blood and cherry stones

I'd figured it might be the death of my bike to take it down the slopes of Mt. Zao through tall grass and plants where before I'd only known snow and a landscape a good giant taller. So really, I shouldn't be annoyed or surprised at the outcome. The front brake is now held in place with a plastic tie, both wheels are bent and rub against the brakes, brake cables have splintered, the tyres run down right through beautifully even track to a smooth evenness marked by gristly patches where something under the rubber shows through...

Rainy season starting to live up to it's name, Hiroshi came round and picked up our bikes right to the top of his car and attached them to the roof rack. Oba-kun came over too and one stop more at Omi's place and 5 people 5 upside strapped in bikes were on our way to Zao. Max had bags of cherries, just one from the cute next-door neighbour with just the one small razor blade hidden inside. We ate and spat stones out of the car window, and as far as we could from a manhole cover in as straight and true a line as we could when a little bored as Hiroshi strapped the fifth bike in.

Not hiking nor biking but more hike-biking we slid and crashed through mud over rocks along a trail that wasn't perhaps meant for bikes, after we'd passed through the clouds in a ski gondola with only a pair of tourists aside braving the rain for god knows what. Moments when enthusiasm wilted with the leaves under the weight of the rain nicely countered with the sheer joy of sliding down a muddy bank on arse, the hilarity of watching someone else slip on the mud.

Whimpers from the bushed, bugs and mozzies, old cuts not yet healed shredded back to life, brakes pinging out mid-ride, a horrific moment listening to a rock crash down the undergrowth and the hill with awful volume and a numb terror we might have bitten off more than we could chew or spit without choking when it looked we mightn't get off the trail for a while.

All of that washed off with the mud at the bottom, in Zao village. An open onsen spot in the ground with pipes worming between rocks and over the sulphurous, pale green onsen water. Some glances from out-of-towners wandering about with brollies.

BUGGER!

What happened to my blog?! All I wanted was a little picture at the top!

Time spent Complaining

When Air China and Heathrow combine!

Amongst what I can salvage from last night, Max and I sat on his balcony a short while before everyone else came and the meat was bbqd and the man upstairs called Yamagata South High School who called Max to tell him we were all being too noisy while the cute next door neighbour popped her head round with a bag of cherries then came over and joined us later in rough roll where again there was too much noise and this time a policeman came in telling the master, Daisuke, to turn that bloody racket down as the complaints flew left right.

Max taught a private class how to complain in English, 'Now listen here' and '-was a disgrace' and the ladies all loved it but I can't help feeling Japanese people already know how to complain, if at least not face to face.

A complaint of my own has winged it's way into a deep dark e-mail box from which it might never be retrieved, rather like the hours spent in transit from London Heathrow to Tokyo and Narita.

All smiles and hugs with Dad and glad I didn't decide to fight through London to get to the airport after all.

20.25 came and went but the plane just arrived and idled. Something wrong with the cargo door, someone with a tour booked in Beijing said.

23.00 rolled around and we were all shuffled on to the plane but the 23.30 cut-off got the jump on us and we all shuffled off. Noise pollution.

01.30 and the first coach left for Heathrow Holiday Inn. I lay down on an airport seat and got on the fourth or fifth coach at 02.00 or so. 02.30 and I got a room that smelt of still stale smoke and might have had a view.

10.00 the next day and finally the plane leaves. 03.00 China time Air China gets us into Beijing, China, and my connecting flight left all those lost hours ago left in between time differences and the cracks between the cargo door and the hold. In China, in the wrong place, officially with no visa to enter the airport. Lucky for me China are so good at overlooking the official parts.

05.55 and the guy at the Air China desk I'd been sitting opposite for 25 minutes lets 5 minutes slide and oh oks me to check-in and even puts me in the exit seat I later discover- the second lucky break I had over the course of one long day smeared across three.

09.30 and the first lucky break, out for the count on another airport seat with my suit bag lain across my me and a strange dream barely aware somewhere back there at the back of someone near me and a cleaning lady pokes me awake with a vacuum nozzle and gabbles something in Chinese and points to the gate and no queue and a plane outside with a cargo door firmly in place all revved and ready to go and just me left to float on and take the last seat, the exit seat and collapse opposite a very attractive air hostess. The third lucky break.

Which just left Monday afternoon to breeze away til night in Tokyo and a night bus back to Yamagata.

I think I should try complaining to Air China again now this time listen here and really give them what for.

Home

Back in England and everything is cut in more vivid colours shapes and noises than ever before it was, or at least it seemed to me to be back then. The buttercups more yellow than yellow itself, in plain or in translation, from whatever pallette you take it. The fields stretch further, the wind blows familiar and strange all at once. Honeysuckle froths like babies do, at the knuckles of the stem. All kinds of things I'd never noticed before, or paid attention to.

A week or two ago I sat in a room next to the computer room, with broken desks and old pcs pushed up against the wall. I called in '!Next' and when that failed, I slid the door open and motioned in the next first year student. As part of the speaking test, Kikuchi Sensei had them memorise and sing to me the chorus

Country roads, take me home
To the place, I belong,
West Virginia, Mountain Mama,
Country roads, take me home.

Mangled would not do justice their performance. Another few days along and the school anniversary, 'じゃがいも' (JagaImo- Potato) and their full compliment of young old older from all around the community centre who'd gather there and prepare songs of their own and songs of others and deliver them a whole lot better than any first year kid could a chorus in another tongue. One of which (another and not their own) was Swing Low, Sweet Chariot...... Coming for to carry me home.

I had another strange moment entertaining the first year kids, tykes, in Meiji Elementary school around about the same time. They'd never seen me before. I introduced myself, my family, my country of birth. I pinned up pictures of them all. I drew a blue chalk line between a two blobs of the U.K. and four blobs of Japan and a little fat round plane in between. I did it all like I did two years ago, when I had to introduce myself to every class in three elementary schools and one junior high school. Everything the same, except when it came to guessing my brother and my sister's age and realised they'd moved on two years along with everything else.

And now I find myself back for my grandfather's funeral on Friday and a reading from Philippians not Filipinos.

Count to 10... In Greek.

Release dates for
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008)

France 18 May 2008 (Cannes Film Festival)
Belgium 21 May 2008
Egypt 21 May 2008
France 21 May 2008
Morocco 21 May 2008
Argentina 22 May 2008
Australia 22 May 2008
Brazil 22 May 2008
Czech Republic 22 May 2008
Denmark 22 May 2008
Estonia 22 May 2008
Germany 22 May 2008
Greece 22 May 2008
Hong Kong 22 May 2008
Hungary 22 May 2008
Iceland 22 May 2008
Indonesia 22 May 2008
Israel 22 May 2008
Mexico 22 May 2008
Netherlands 22 May 2008
Norway 22 May 2008
Poland 22 May 2008
Portugal 22 May 2008
Russia 22 May 2008
Serbia 22 May 2008
Singapore 22 May 2008
Slovakia 22 May 2008
South Korea 22 May 2008
Spain 22 May 2008
Sweden 22 May 2008
UK 22 May 2008
USA 22 May 2008
Venezuela 22 May 2008
Bulgaria 23 May 2008
Finland 23 May 2008
Italy 23 May 2008
Latvia 23 May 2008
Romania 23 May 2008
Turkey 23 May 2008
Pakistan 30 May 2008
Japan 21 June 2008

Mostly last month: late spring flowers

 
 
 
 

Small town

The trees in the hills all burst into fresh bright vibrant green new leaves, throwing the dark leafed evergreens into relief.

Last week at the Plant Festival in my neighbourhood, I was accosted by two high school girls, thrilled to spot a foreigner. They insisted on taking my picture with Keitai mobile phones.

Yesterday I sat outside, but under shelter at Tully's, watching the rain they'd predicted come bucketing down. Moments before, one of those girls had passed, sat herself down and began searching for the photo she'd taken, to show a different friend she was with nicknamed Nago.

Before she found that picture, he showed me two more pictures of foreigners. The first, hilariously, was of two Mormons she introduced as Christians. I see them all the time, pairing up on some poor kid on his or her way somewhere, caught between the red man and an earful of Godspeak at the traffic lights.

The second was of Clare, in Tendo, and was equally hilarious.

Hair today

Eiko, one of my supervisors at the City Hall finally said something about my hair. Cut it. I want you cut it. But she wasn't the first.

Yesterday, little Shota-kun in 3-3 had the sheer bloody gumption to say outright, as we climbed the stairs seconds after arriving at school, 'You know you should cut your hair' (well, he said 髪きたほうがいいよ).

Gassan

The flyer for Gassan boasts April to July open months and pictures boarders and skiiers in t-shirts, in a nice glossy colour A3 fold-out. The snow is bright white and the sky, blue. It all suggests a rather lovely little spot- which winter sporter could resist the opportunity for such a novel experience, especially in a country where novelty is gobbled up like

Tugging on the boots, finding your gloves have stiffened and tightened without weekly use, not really bothering with gloves on the hill. Most novel of all, all that life bursting up and through what's usually a barren, white crispening of everything standing or laying. Spiders amble over dirty snow, in between reedy leaves peeking out. The snow shrinks back from clumps of green, the view is rich, not muted in a poor man's palette of blue and black and white and white.

But enough of all that. Skiing on Gassan was like skiing in the Afghan mountains. There are only four lifts, and of those, one is a chair lift. Two others consist of a thick metal rope, run round on a loop only when someone needed to go up, and not any other time. One manned by a single guy sat under a parasol. We hiked further up, into the cloud that shrouded the top. It was still bright, like someone was standing just, just beyond with a searchlight and a mist machine, or like we'd wandered off-set into the blanks between the tape ream stills.

We crossed a grand open bowl, scoring clear white lines with our tracks in the lead grey snow. We went down too far and looked to be heading down the wrong valley, so we hiked some more, and cut back across to the man sat under his parasol and the restaurant building. Inside there, I'd eaten a black pork maan (a doughball). The poster advertising them was hung sideways from the ceiling. I saw them in the hot glass cupboard and wanted one. At the counter, behind the counter, a guy and a girl both young looked on at a croquette in the deep fryer. Poked it a little. Picked it out, dropped it, giggled. 大丈夫？　大丈夫そう。　大丈夫。　Is it ok? I think it's ok. It's ok. they exchanged, before pulling out a tannoy mic held together with black duck tape to announce the food order to the customers, sat one table away from the counter.

Camping

There was a miscommunication and me Al David Jenny joined Jeff Dorrie Dyl Jess Jessie Becca at Oku-Nikkawa camp-site with no food to cook for dinner. Trains don't so much stop as hesitate at Oku-Nikkawa train station and there was a long mountain dirt track pocked with pot-holes, a pile of traffic and the dark between us and the nearest shops. So we piled into the only building apart from the house where the drunk farmer lived- the restaurant.

'Restaurant' is quite is quite misleading though, and to look at the place, I'm not sure anyone would call it that. More a mountain retreat with a side in selling food. A place where you never really get to drunk since there's no-one else around to see you drunk, least of all yourself in the toilet mirror or the bottom of your glass.

We caught them off-guard and they warned us it would take about an hour and 45 minutes til they could could feed us a hearty curry rice, steaming and wholesome grub on a drizzly night that'd shrubbed out the morning sunshine. They had to get another batch of rice on the go in the rice cooker.

We were welcomed by three Tokyoites, a mother and two children who sat peeling baby bamboo shoots into a cardboard box. There wasn't space to sit since the other tables were occupied- one surrounded by four country-types who cooked meat on a portable hot plate in front of them, the other strewn with empty Super Dry bottles and scraps of 竹の子(baby bamboo) shells, green, wet, scattered. It looked as if a large group had just left, although I think the smoking lady who took to Jeff immediately might have been solely responsible, judging by the lilt to her voice. The Tokyoites soon left, making way for us. Apparently they too were clientele, although we'd all taken them for proprietors or at least friends or relatives.

Two plastic trays of baby bamboo were thumped down in front of us, spilling sprouts like pencils rolling free. A squirt of mayonnaise for each tray and entreaties to eat, eat eateat please soon followed. There are places tucked away in cities too in Tohoku (north-east Japan), at which there's no need to order, instead sit back and await the food that is brought you, anything they have, or anything they want to give you. 山菜 (SanSai) mountain vegetables with bonito fish flakes and soy followed, then accompanied the rounds of bamboo.

In spite of a heavy night before and to spite the bad weather, inevitably it came to beer for us. One of the country types leaped to the chill to fetch us bottles of Super Dry and asked 1 2 4 5 how many. He ambled back along the narrow gloomy corridor- bitten into with stuff and piles of stuff and stuff collapsed on stuff on the floor- that reached away from our table and handed us our beers. A little later, he too bid the owners goodbye, apparently just another punter helping out.

Becca returned from a foray deeper into the restaurant in search of the lav having first found the owner's living room instead. Jeff strode to the table strewn with empty bottles, his hand was clasped between two, warmly, and he and three of the locals, or perhaps more transient Golden Week vacationers started up joshing one another in clipped Japanese I had no ear for. We all et up our curry. A grand old time was had.

桜