On bunnies.

Well, here we are. The end of another year.

One of my first photos of the year - view from our window, January 2014.

This one's a bit different for me. Every year since I was five, when I looked back on the previous twelve months I could be guaranteed to see the same thing - two school years with a summer in between. And yet even though my year could be separated into three ostensibly different chunks, each chunk was mostly not that different from the last and it all became a bit mushy and indefinable. But I moved to Japan on January 27th (give or take, once you factor in all the messing around with time zones) so pretty much the entire year was given over to one big Thing which was different from all previous Things. Hooray for that, I guess.

It's not all been excitement. There was an adjustment period with a lot of sleeping and food-related suspicion involved. There was adjustment to full-time, long-term work, to full-time living in a relatively small space with another human, adjustment to newfound illiteracy. I'll spare you all the self-discovery bollocks, I'm not that tedious. But to cut it short, I found new things which I didn't know I could do. I learned to deal in a foreign language, but far more importantly, I learned to deal when my knowledge of that language wasn't enough and I had to wallow in embarrassment and confusion and come through the other side. I climbed a mountain. I talked to strangers every day, for a living, and walked into rooms with them time after time and sat down to chat with them like I was their friend and as if there wasn't anything remotely weird about the situation. I've pretended to be Cthulhu for the amusement of foreign toddlers who haven't the faintest idea what Cthulhu is. I've been to Kyoto, Hiroshima, Miyajima, Tokyo, Kamakura, Sapporo and Hakodate. I've been to three different types of animal café and a ramen museum. I've dressed up as a crab for work purposes. I've conquered my fear of waterslides. I've seen sumo. I've forgotten what a train delay is. I've had a matronly old woman firmly swish a cross through my imperfect calligraphy, again and again until with a smug gleam of satisfaction, I made it perfect. I've eaten eel. I've failed to ski.

Sorry, I forgot the part about cutting it short. The point is, I grew and all that bollocks.

If you're curious about what my plans are for 2015, they still lie in murky, swampy, squelchy uncertainty. I'll be staying in Japan for at least the first half of the year, but have chosen to switch to a part-time contract after March. This means I will have to spend a little bit less on sweets and goth dresses, but will have more time to study Japanese, travel, and work harder on personal projects like making my writing less awful. After Japan? I quite like not knowing yet.

If you're curious, the last week of this festive period has been quite quiet for me, though I like it that way. Christmas is fairly unremarkable in Japan; although there's a lot of commercial hoo-hah and lots of Christmas songs playing in the shops, the actual day itself matters to few and the most hallowed tradition is eating KFC. Nonetheless, we had a very nice Christmas with a tree, a viewing of the second Hobbit film, lots of complaining about the rubbishness of the second Hobbit film and an all-you-can-eat buffet for dinner. The last couple of days were also pleasantly low-key (or lazy, if you prefer): mostly walks, coffee-drinking and one small trip to a bunny café.

Now it's the early hours of New Year's Day, and today/yesterday was just as quiet. Which is how I like it, because I've always hated New Year. But we did slip out for an hour to Osu Kannon - the first temple we ever saw here, and our favourite - to see people lining up to pray and ring the temple bell. (Each temple bell can only be rung exactly 108 times on New Year's Day, so getting the opportunity is a big deal.) We only stayed briefly, but the atmosphere was warm, and unlike in the U.K. almost no-one looked like they were about to glass someone. A man dressed as Darth Vadar even turned up, to comfort those who had been waiting a long time. I saw a lot of people eagerly waiting for the countdown so they could open their celebratory beers. I saw an older Western man smoke a cigar effusively and laughing. And I saw many officials with loudhailers telling people to stay calm, though they didn't really need to. When midnight struck, the first waves of templegoers rushed to the front in the most orderly, polite manner possible, so they could pray for their wishes to be granted. I hope yours are too.

あけましておめでとうございます. Happy New Year.

You're So Foxy: Fushimi Inari, Kyoto

Autumn comes late to Nagoya and flits away in weeks, allowing us only the briefest glimpse of its orangey fruitfulness before giving way to shitty, shitty winter. A few weeks ago we seized the chance to enjoy the relatively good weather and took a day trip to one of Japan's most famous sights - Fushimi Inari at Kyoto, a mere 30 minutes away by bullet train.

Inari is the Shinto spirit of rice, merchants and prosperity, and Fushimi Inari is Inari's main shrine, though there are thousands of child shrines all over Japan. Inari's symbol is the fox, which in Japanese culture is seen as a wise animal to be revered (not, as in the UK, a shrieking harbringer of disease and persistent disturber of bins). Thus, the path to the shrine is kitted out with fox statues, some more disturbing than others.

I say "the path to the shrine" because it's actually at the top of a mountain, which takes at least a good hour or two to climb if you're not rushing. However, the path is carved into gentle steps all the way and is never demanding, so you never really think of it as a mountain hike so much as a really long staircase. At occasional points it flattens out, so you can stop for an ice cream or make a wish (for a price):

You can also write your wishes on these little foxhead boards, as well as drawing faces on them because religion is fun:

The further up you get, the quieter it gets, and vaguely more solemn in tone. At the top we saw some Shinto priests and their congregation engaged in some kind of ritual I'm far too ignorant to expound on, except to say that it involved chanting and chanting always sounds brilliant no matter what the situation. We stayed a respectful distance away and felt smugly superior to the Japanese guy who got yelled at for trying to take pictures.

But most notably:

The pathway is lined most of the way with thousands of squillions of these torii - vivid, striking gates which mark the boundary between the sacred and the profane. (The colour of these gates is called makka, translated as 'pure red'. I haven't had the heart to tell anyone here yet that it's actually orange. Funnily enough I had the exact same dilemma fifteen years ago when my grandparents insisted they had painted their house "peachy coral".) Fushimi Inari might be an important site for Shinto, but arguably it's the stunning sight of this endless path of gates which draws so many foreign tourists.

As I mentioned, Inari is the god of merchants, and every gate leading up to the shrine was donated by a business or...purveyor of business, I guess. Here you can see the dates of their donations painted on the gates:

The size of your gate even varies depending on how much you donated. At the top there's a whole tonne of tiny model gates piled up, little talismans donated by those who couldn't afford a gate big enough to walk through but were still looking for favour.

Capitalism has never looked so noble.

And thanks to the little souvenir we brought back with us, capitalism has never looked so adorable:

The City That Sometimes Sleeps in Pods: Part 3

My last day in Tokyo! See previous posts here and there about my Tokyo trip way back in September. I wish I'd written this earlier, so my memories weren't just weird fragments of bugs and robots. But alas, we cannot change the past. After a couple of further posts on old trips I'll be ready to get on with talking about up-to-date things, like Christmas and how small the dogs are around here.

***

Day four of four, and our first port of call was the Parasitological Museum in Meguro, a couple of train stops outside the city centre. A quick Google for popular tourist attractions revealed that this small, vaguely obscure hall of learning had become quite a pull for visitors looking to goad their stomachs into wrestling with the $60 sushi they had that morning. I'm generally quite squeamish, but I was curious about this place, partly because Tokyo puts you in a weird mood, partly because I'm an obnoxious leftie at heart and wanted to see if the museum gave any credence to my theory that the only true parasite is man.

The museum was a fifteen-minute walk from the station, down small-town streets that seemed a world away from relatively nearby Shibuya. The building was unassuming and modest, more like a piddling local ward office than the cavern of monsters I was hoping for, and we thoroughly perused everything in the space of about twenty minutes. Nonetheless, a good time was had by all. There were a lot of jars with very small gross things and a few jars with big gross things, as well as some fascinating handwritten notebooks by parasitologists, who appeared to be Japanese but writing in English, I guess so that they could distance themselves from the Cronenberg horror they had to calmly make sketches of every day. There was even a little attempt at interactivity, in the form of a bit of white thread meant to illustrate the length of a tapeworm, which you could mess around with at your leisure:

And I was totally not sick and everything.

Our afternoon was to be spent in Odaiba. Odaiba is an artificial island in Tokyo Bay which was basically built in the 19th century as a site for military sea fortresses, then wallowed in half-existence throughout the late 20th century, whilst civil engineers put together various unfulfilled plans for it and watched billions of yen of investment go down the toilet. Kind of the Millenium Dome of Japan. In the 1990s, the plan was for Odaiba to be a futuristic neighbourhood with the delightful name of Teleport Town, meant to showcase super-modern homes and amenities, but nothing really went as planned. Then the Japanese economic bubble burst, leaving those plans sodden in the shadow of a soapy trickle.

However, the story ends okay. Odaiba has flourished in the last few years with shopping malls, hotels and tourist attractions, though the development is a little uneven, leaving awkward walks through nothingness in between the various new excitements. "And why the fuck not" appears to be the spirit of the place, which features a copy of the Statue of Liberty and a life-size Gundam.

We had to be back in the city centre by the evening, but we wanted to while away an hour or two in the Miraikan - Odaiba's museum of science and technology, which houses the kind of friendly androids and bizarre innovations that one thinks of when imagining stereotypical Japan.

Unfortunately, fate intervened, and we absolutely couldn't spend more than a short space of time in the main exhibits, because as we walked through the lobby we discovered that this temporary special exhibition was on:

Yes, it was entirely about toilets and poo. And interactive, too. Obviously we had to spend 95% of our time at Miraikan examining this particular exhibit.

A picture is worth a thousand words, so:

In Japan, everything must have a kawaii mascot.

The Bristol Stool Scale for measuring the water content of faeces, developed at my very own alma mater. *wipes away tear of pride*

                                     

                           I got to wear a poo hat and slide down a toilet. I lost my poo hat halfway down :(

This toilet hates people because they're unappreciative. Well, no more!

Lyrics to the...national....anthem of toilets?

Notes people left on their ideal and least ideal toilets. Wise words here from a fellow countryman.

You can giggle like schoolchildren all you want, but I really did learn some interesting things about plans for innovative new sewage systems in the developing world, AND I got to make poo out of playdough. By moulding it in my hands, I mean. Not by eating it.

After all that excitement I actually lost my ticket, meaning I had to leave and buy a new one in order to get into the rest of the exhibits. By the time I got in I only had about twenty minutes to enjoy some horrifying androids:

In this exhibit, one person can go into a booth and control the movements of the android (gynoid?) and speak through it with a microphone. The other can have the leg-joltingly awful experience of sitting on a sofa next to the almost-human and having a nice conversation with it. Not only that, but once you've shyly dipped your toes into the shallows of the uncanny valley, you can fully plunge in with this....this:

This is about the size of a baby, but is just a head with a blank torso. Again, one person stays to communicate with the....thing, while another person gets in a booth and controls the....thing, but only with head movements this time. (Of course, everyone who tried it made it stay deathly still for ages and then jerk the face around violently like something out of The Exorcist). We gathered that the designer's idea was to test the boundaries of human-to-human communication - to explore the most basic canvas you could create which was still similar enough to a human being that you could identify with it, which is presumably what they wrote on their research proposal because "shit people up for laughs" doesn't get anyone a grant. Our morals thoroughly offended, we had a quick tour around the rest of the robotics room and then hurried to our train back to Shinjuku for the final stop of our trip.

The Robot Restaurant is one of the most popular tourist attractions in Tokyo. The idea is basically dinner theatre, but instead of watching a regular show you see people dressed as robots and monsters fighting each other on vehicles whilst scantily-clad women cheer them on. It was very, very tacky and everyone loved it. I'm about 80% sure that it's the pet project of some eccentric yakuza or corrupt Russian oil baron, but it really goes full throttle with the tack and that can't help but charm you. After the first few moments of uneasiness, when you step into its neon clutches on one of the Tokyo's sleazier streets, you are escorted to a bar when you can have a drink in the glitziest room you've ever seen whilst people in robot costumes play jazz. And that's even before the show begins. I don't want to spoil it for future customers, but it does involve robot boxing, sharks fighting manga superheroes, interplanetary war and Lady Gaga covers. The lighting wasn't too conducive to good photos, but this should give you a rough idea:

I can't comment on the food because we were advised not to buy it, but the show was definitely something you wouldn't see every day. It made a pretty good final note for our first trip to Tokyo. I feel like we managed to see a lot of the city's more unique sights without exhausting ourselves, though there are still definitely lots of things we could do on future trips and I'd like to go back soon to explore at a more leisurely pace.

I don't have a good end to this. Er, Merry Christmas!

The City That Sometimes Sleeps in Pods: Part 2

I wrote about the first half of my trip to Tokyo here, if you missed it. This will be about my third day in Tokyo, with a final post coming later. Let's return to September and pretend that this isn't what my living room looks like right now:

You didn't see this.

Day 3


In the morning we saw kabuki, which is far too sophisticated and important to sully by taking photographs (also the lady told me not to). A full play is usually three or four hours long, but Kabuki-za in Ginza, Japan's premier venue for this sort of thing, sells cheap(ish) tickets on the day of the performance so you can see a smaller play or section of a play. This was ideal, since we didn't know too much about kabuki and, eager though we were, did not much fancy sitting for four hours through something we couldn't understand anything of. The act we saw was interesting, and you can certainly see the skill of the performers - their movements and vocal inflection are very specific and almost surreal to experience - but I'm glad I opted for the short version. Without speaking fluent classical Japanese I'm not sure I could fully enjoy it, and even then it might, well, go on a bit. Also kabuki only uses male actors, and -  while there is supposedly a high level of skill and artistry involved in playing the female characters, and these characters are supposed to be exaggerated tropes and not played realistically - the performance of the female characters just comes off as silly and distracting, to be honest. The actors' voices are thrown and broken all over the place, and grate on the ears. I'm sure I'm being totally crass and uninformed on this subject, but I still went and saw it so I'm more cultured than you.

Stop number 2: the owl café. Japan loves theme cafés. There's cafés where you can play with cats, and rabbits, and maid cafés (and I mean, there's this). I've been to a cat café (only once so far, unbelievably), but Nagoya has yet to bless us all with a place to cuddle owls, so this was one of our priorities in Tokyo.

We were here an hour, which felt like about fifteen minutes. Time flies when you're trying not to get pooed on. We were given a brief talk on how to handle the owls - which was all in Japanese, but the gist was "if they bite you, they don't like it" - and then were allowed to hold and pet them with the supervision of the staff. Big owls, small owls, some as big as your head. At the end we all received a drink (covered in clingfilm, so as to protect from aforementioned pooing) and a little souvenir. The recipients of the best gifts were chosen in the traditional Japanese manner (rock-paper-scissors), but we ended up with some very cute novelty chopsticks. And I got to hold several owls. Several.

Stop number 3: The teen fashion Mecca of the world. Harajuku. My thirteen-year-old self just nibbled her own fingers in delight.

I've wanted to go to Harajuku ever since I discovered its important role in the wars of the Edo period yeah okay, since that Gwen Stefani album came out. Nowadays, I just appreciate it as a good pop album with a lot of solid karaoke choices on it, but when I first listened to Love Angel Music Baby - wow, ten Christmases ago almost to the day - it became the core around which I built my fantasy future identity. Put yourself in my scuffed-up school shoes - I was greasy and uncomfortable and had this big red spot on my forehead that just wouldn't go away. Listening to that album, even looking at the cover and turning the glossy pages of the inlay, took me somewhere far away from school and home and my own increasingly gross body. Travelling to this Harajuku place that Gwen was singing about - this magical quirky district on the other side of the world - was my firm goal. It was full of amazing people. It was full of amazing places to discover. Going there was somehow - somehow - going to transform me into the kind of super-cool, original, fearless person that I desperately wanted to be. I'm still not the super-cool steampunk fantasy icon I imagined my adult self as, but the spot did go away eventually. And I did finally get to go to Harajuku.

It wasn't quite the fairytale I used to picture - a dengue fever outbreak had sprung up in a nearby park and the subcultural kids had all sloped off to hang out somewhere else for a while - but I still got to do a bit of shopping:

I also ended up with a pair of shoes and a lilac pinafore dress from an Alice-in-Wonderland themed shop, because I'm a goddamn grownup and I can do what I want now.

(If this post feels incomplete, it's because my trip to Harajuku felt a little incomplete - it was dark and almost closing-time when I went shopping, and I didn't have time to explore the smaller side-streets, and then there was the whole massive disease thing. I enjoyed myself, but it felt more like a quick stop than the fulfillment of the dorky dreams of my youth. Definitely something to return to another time, so my tween self can more fully spread her oily, disgusting wings.)

Coming up: The City That Sometimes Sleeps in Pods: Part 3

The Staff At Japanese Starbucks Won't Let Me Have Two Sandwiches

"Sorry for the wait. May I help you?"

"Yes. Could I have a tall hot latte, one ham and cheese sandwich and one Ceasar salad wrap?"

"A Ceasar salad wrap, here you are."

"Oh, sorry. And a ham and cheese sandwich?"

*puts away the wrap, gets the ham and cheese*

"Oh, and....the wrap...?"

*starts to put the ham and cheese back" 

"Sorry, sorry, the wrap...the wrap too?"

*falters*

"Ah, it's ok, it's ok. Don't worry about it."

I should point out that a Ceasar salad wrap at Starbucks is about four inches long and wouldn't fill up a baby. And that when I get lunch on a weekday, my work schedule means I won't have a proper dinner until at least half past ten, something which I share with the average Japanese office worker. Ordering two petite, irrationally priced sandwiches - and then taking them to a table and eating them in immediate succession - really isn't that weird. I saw a businessman in Toyota eat three Big Macs once, and I bet he had a McFlurry as well. But this hasn't only happened to me once. I tried to order two sandwiches at Starbucks again today, and it took a good few attempts before the suspicious barista let me. And this is a barista I see every week before my Sunday shift, so if we didn't have that relationship of trust I don't know if she'd have been willing to take that journey with me. The decision to buy two sandwiches just seems to cause a short-circuit somewhere.

Fast food places are the same - try and order two portions of fries, even if there's clearly another person standing with you, and often you just won't get them. And I know it's not my Japanese, because I've been here eleven months. I learned the words for "root canal treatment" and "hangnail" so I think I can cope with "hambaagaa, mediamu saizu" (actual Japanese there, not just me doing a racist comedy accent). I even put effort into using grammar constructions that emphasise that I want two things and not one. I guess most people here just aren't as gluttonous as me, or think I can't be trusted to make my own decisions (which is probably fair).

One of these days I'm going to order three and see if anyone shits. I'll keep you posted.