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.