Thunderstorm!

This afternoon I was dressed and ready to go to Nagoya's Oktoberfest, which like all good Oktoberfests takes place in July. I was totally ready to write a blog post complaining about overpriced beer and mediocre sauerkraut, as well as the slightly eerie square-shaped orderliness of Nagoya's parks. But it was not to be. Thunderstorms.

I've been in storms before, of course, but they followed certain mild-mannered British customs. Always keep thunder to, at its loudest, a discontented rumble, the kind you might make if you were considering writing a stern letter to the council. Give good warning with bouts of rain. Make sure everyone knows where things stand. I've never lived in a climate like this before, and it turns out I really don't know the local thunder god's etiquette.

Just before we walked outside, Nick checked the weather on his iPhone and mentioned the possibility of storms. Out the window I could see that the weather was dry, if you take 'dry' to mean 'moisture not visible in rain form, but instead pooling in the air and making your vest sticky'. Dry means no storms, right? iPhone's talking bollocks, mate. Off we go. 

The walk to the station was hopefully the closest I'll ever get to being in the apocalypse. Everything was silent, tense, and felt fundamentally wrong. We saw two people running home and decided to shrug it off. The sky felt foreboding and close, in the way I imagine it to feel when I read ancient Greek poetry - the wrong colour, lit by fires and crackling with the woes of petty gods. The thunder didn't even sound like British thunder, so we were almost convinced it was just some nearby rumbling from the warehouses, the kind that pepper the streets of Nagoya and appear to make nothing but bits of metal for fitting to other bits of metal.

About three blocks down I felt a drop - one drop - of rain on me. Nick felt nothing. There wasn't any spotting on the pavements. Maybe thirty seconds later a few drops more, and Nick asked if I wanted to abandon our plan and go home. The instant we turned around, the heavens opened. They opened like a trapdoor.

It felt pretty great, to be honest. We ran back through sidestreets in a kind of mad childlike way, not even really knowing if we were going an accurate way home, and there was a stupid indie-movie-ish joy in it. If there's rainfall of that magnitude you can't even attempt to avoid it. And the summer's so humid here you're basically wet all the time anyway. It's just a more honest type of wetness.

We scrambled under the porch of a block of flats and had a good laugh about the whole thing, sharing smiles and "cuh! eh?"-type looks with the nice ladies that lived there. I saw an ice-blue bolt of lightning. A slick of my hair stuck to the side of my face and made me look like a character from a sci-fi movie with an elegant curly face tattoo. And then two minutes later it was gone and everything was normal again and we were on our way to town (but with updated plans: instead of Oktoberfest we went to the quirky streets of Osu, to look at old games we can't understand or play on our consoles but still desperately want anyway).

I was going to finish this by saying how brief and tempestuous and mad the whole thing was, and how, in a way, isn't that a little bit like life, really? But then I realised how annoying and predictable that would be, so I'm going to take a sharp turn and say it was a bit like the short-lived reign of Tudor queen Lady Jane Grey, or the government of Gordon Brown or something instead. The thunder god has taught me it's good to keep people on their toes.

I wanted to post a video I took but it's pretty poor quality and doesn't seem to want to upload anyway, so here's a generic picture for you. In case you didn't know what lightning was.

Gokiburi.

I don't like bugs.

I have never liked bugs. They are pointless. The sounds and the movements they make are pointless. And yet their pointlessness, their pettiness and their grim determination to keep on involving themselves in my life cause me anxiety. Their bites and stings don't hurt much more than an aggressive nuzzle, yet the anticipation I feel when a biting or stinging insect is nearby falls somewhere on the scale between opening-of-bloodstained-envelope and doctor-approaching-with-comically-oversized-rectal-bulb. Two nights ago I woke up four or five times in the night because I heard a mosquito. That's it. A barely perceptible whine, like a release of air from the world's saddest balloon, was enough to make me jolt awake in a cold sweat. (In fairness, the sweat was probably unrelated to the mosquito. It's 99% humidity here right now. All moments are moments in sweat.) Last week, the presence of three flies in the living room caused me to suffer what might politely be called a "frenzy". There was an incident with a wasp. It's complicated.

The point is, I don't like bugs.

So you can imagine how pleased I was to discover that summer in Nagoya is cockroach season. (Ever the multitasker, Nagoya also hosts typhoon season at the same time. I can only presume that the combination cockroach-whirlwinds come a little later, maybe early September when the roaches have their aerial displays more fully rehearsed). It's hot, it's damp, the roaches, they love it. You can even check the probability of seeing a cockroach on this website, Gokiten, the name of which is a portmanteau of the Japanese words for 'cockroach' and 'weather forecast'. (My suggestion that they start an English-language version called Cockcast must have got lost in the post.) It's a very colorful and shiny site, with lots of simple emoticons - today's emoticon for my prefecture is a grumpy face with a bead of sweat - and the whole thing just projects cheeriness. Back home, cockroaches in the house are the sign that you've failed in life. In Japan, cockroaches in the house are the sign that you live in Japan.

Thus far, I've been lucky. Though I've seen a few outside, crawling around by convenience stores and looking entirely unbothered by the rest of the world, I've only seen one in my flat. And I only screamed at it for a bit, and it was pretty quickly captured and defenestrated - not by me, I might add. I'm a wuss. I got to have a look at it while it scuttled around its Tupperware prison, just before it was thrown to the pavement two floors down (a fall which it probably shook off within seconds before strolling happily into the Italian restaurant we sometimes eat at). It was my first cockroach, and seeing one for myself in a situation where it couldn't crawl on my face made me feel a bit calmer about the whole situation. It's like horror films - once you've seen the monster, it's a lot less scary. I thought I saw a second one a few weeks back, running under the bath, but the thought doesn't even cause me to want to eat my own legs anymore. And we got some traps that are supposed to be very effective. They look a little out of place on the tatami but they seem to be doing the trick, and overall I feel a lot more secure than I did when it was spring and everyone was telling me horror stories.

One thing I will say for Japan is that they're pretty good about making you feel okay about cockroaches. All the pictures of them on websites like Gokiten are cute little cartoons. Although a few people certainly dislike or even loathe them, they don't carry the...stigma, I suppose you'd call it, that they have in the UK. Many people I've met have treated them as not much different than stray cats. Even the name - gokiburi - seems to put across a sense of cuteness, maybe a vaguely cheeky charm. It sounds like something you might gurgle to a baby while tickling their chin. I would much rather see a gokiburi than a cockroach.

And after hearing about Japanese killer hornets, they don't even reach my top spot of most awful tropical bugs that make me want to stow away on the next plane home (in an oblivious businessman's suitcase)!

Hurrah.

Business trip hotel room trouser press briefcase big phone trouser press business: Shizuoka Day #1

A few weeks ago, I was presented with an opportunity. I was called up by my associates on my special business phone (which is my regular phone) and invited to go on a trip to the fine city of Shizuoka, some 175 kilometres away, in order to cover another teacher's classes for a few days.

"Business trip," I was told. "Complimentary hotel room pillow mint, per diem networking business conference."

"I see."

"Minibar?"

"Not until Wednesday."

"Latest numbers shoehorn. Good business to you."

So that was that. Off to Shizuoka I went.

During my preliminary research I discovered that there isn't a lot to do in Shizuoka. Or at least, not in the main city. The surrounding area is known for its beautiful forests and mountains, including Japan's own king, queen and errant prince, Fuji-san (which I have to tell you, with crushing sadness, just means 'Fuji-mountain' and not 'Mr. Fuji' like I thought in blissful innocence for several months). None of this natural beauty sneaks its way into Shizuoka City, at least not in the streets immediately surrounding the train station/school/hotel, which I loyally kept to like a dog leashed to a peg.

But does Fuji have a hostess bar where men dress like Arabian princesses? Probably not. Shizuoka City one, Fuji-san nil. Regardless of its mediocrity, this was my first trip on an employer's dime and I was determined to have a good time. Maps in hand, I strained the zip of my backpack over my rat-king of charger wires, threw a pair of socks in my handbag and set off.

My journey began like all journeys should - on the shinkansen (bullet train), the one Japanese word it's not pretentious to say in the middle of an English sentence. Fun fact: due to the phonology of the Japanese language, shinkansen sounds like it has three syllables but actually has six; shi-n-ka-n-se-n. Just say it. Shinkansen. The syllables swoosh like three strokes of a razor in an advert. . The word feels just like the journey. Put that on your next chest tattoo.

My trip took a little less than an hour and felt rather pleasant - views of rice-paddies, blue rooves, adolescent bumpy hills and grass that was luminous green. I only have one gripe: unlike my last journey on the shinkansen, there was no lady sitting next to me who gave me a still-wrapped box of chocolates for no reason. I'd kind of hoped that was a regular feature, perhaps some sort of tax-funded programme meant to foster international goodwill.


After reaching the station, I have little to tell. I took a quick trip to an electronics store for a new pair of headphones, which took ten minutes to get out of the packaging and then immediately broke in one ear. I traipsed back towards the station, went to my school for my shift, clocked out at 9.30 p.m. and went for dinner at Subway, like the connoisseur I am, my daily meal allowance crumpled and clutched in my hand like a toddler's tissue. I had the teriyaki chicken, in honour of my host country.

It was now around ten and I was walking to my hotel, surrounded by suits and taxis and feeling very grownup indeed, when I realised I'd left my backpack at school. Naturally I reacted to this situation with aplomb and grace, by galloping unevenly through underpasses and passageways until I got back to the building, wiped the sweat from one part of my forehead to the other part of my forehead and garbled half-explanatory nonsense to the staff. When I made my way back to the hotel I evidently still glowed with suspicious foreigner-sweat, since the concierge wiped everything I'd touched as soon as I was out of his eyeline.

This was my first time in a hotel room on a business trip, so as soon as I closed the door behind me naturally I danced around the room chanting "HOTEL ROOM! BUSINESS TRIP! HOTEL ROOM! BUSINESS TRIP!" The room was brown but acceptable. It took me twenty minutes to locate the wi-fi information and four seconds to see the guide to the porn channel: in pride of place on the desk, on top of all the less interesting material such as the breakfast menu and list of fire exit locations. I couldn't read most of it, but I appreciated their attempt to keep TV alive in the age of the internet.

Coming soon: Shizuoka Day #2