The City That Sometimes Sleeps In Pods: Part 1

I went to Tokyo in August. It's now the dying half of November and I still haven't written about it. Soz. I'm lazy, and I like clicking pointlessly around my internet tabs for half an hour more than I like writing, at least right now. I promise it'll get better when I get to that bit in my life where I write effortless short stories and learn Russian and look super-super-jacked and my hair doesn't ever do that weird thing. I predict that'll be next month, maybe.

Day 1

We stumbled off the shinkansen and into Tokyo station's nearest park, blinking in the light. As I went through the ticket barriers I made a mistake and had to be helped through by the station employee. Already I looked like a tourist, which felt like a great indignity despite the fact that in Tokyo I am one. The nearby 'park', wide and manicured, turned out to be the grounds of the Imperial Palace, which appeared to be shut, but had plenty of tourists milling about it anyway. Having a lot of white strangers around me felt a bit surreal; I look forward to having a freakout when I arrive back in the West and realise we're everywhere. The vague stress that comes with going on a trip to a new place was soothed by an ice cream from a vending machine and taking a good, hard look at this brilliant statue of the honourable samurai Kusunoki:

We lounged around on the lawns for a bit, probably both secretly imagining ourselves as samurai but not telling each other about it. After finishing our ice creams and saying goodbye to Kusonoki, we crawled into the massive spiderweb that is the Tokyo underground system. Our first proper stop was to be a museum of pre-16th century ceramics famous for the extremely fine detailing on the ahahaha actually we went to a Mexican restaurant.

This was a lot more exciting than it might sound. For visitors to Japan, one of the highlights might be getting to be experience good, authentic Japanese food. But I'd been in Japan for two-thirds of a year at this point, and for me Tokyo was a chance to get my hands on some good non-Japanese food. Frijoles is a burrito restaurant tucked into a square of Roppongi, a district known for its heavy concentration of expats. The awkward experience of ordering food in a mix of English, Spanish and Japanese, switching in and out of them mostly at random, is really quite something to go through.

This was followed by a trip to the Pokemon Centre, naturally.

I found myself getting childishly hyped up in here, despite it being a) essentially just a gift shop and b) being mostly dedicated to shit bazillionth-generation Pokemon drawn when everyone had got really tired of the whole idea and gone "oh just make it a spider and put a triangle on its head or something". A lot of the designs were a bit odd as well, despite this being the official store; note the horrifying stretched-out Pikachu (not Pikachus, I guess, since you don't pluralise in Japan). Amongst the nightmares I found a rather tasteful Raichu notebook, and my significant other got a pencil case from the limited-edition Hallowe'en-themed "Spooky Party" collection. I love spooky parties. Spooky parties all year, I say.

By the time we left, our toys clutched in our warm chubby hands, it was dark. We decided to head to Shinjuku, the business district, in order to find the Park Hyatt hotel bar, which we'd heard had a wonderful view (and also happens to be the hotel from Lost in Translation, for those of you who like films which end with a man saying a thing and you don't know what he said because he said it really quietly).

 Despite being a big deal, the Park Hyatt hotel bar follows the grand Japanese tradition of bars holed up in creepily empty buildings that you're not sure you're supposed to be in. (You come across this a lot in Nagoya, I think due to the scarcity of land space. There are a lot of small bars and restaurants which are set up in random office blocks, which means that going to a new place for the first time usually goes hand-in-hand with feeling like you're walking into an elaborate setup for a kidnapping.) The building's deserted, echoing lobby turned creepy cold corner after corner until we found someone who told us in unnervingly mannered English how to get to the bar. The place itself had a stunning view, was very classy and abhorrently expensive. Also any time you left the confines of the bar someone asked to know where you wanted to go, very politely but with undertones that suggested you might try and rob any room that wasn't the toilet.

We finished the night by woozily slurping up ramen and then spending the night in a capsule hotel, or rather, capsule hotels plural. Japanese infrastructure is built around dealing with two things - natural disasters and drunk businessmen. There are quick-and-cheap eateries on every corner designed to feed businessmen late at night, and vending machines full of coffee and weird energy drinks every eight feet designed to heal businessmen's hangovers first thing in the morning. For the inbetween stage, there's the capsule hotel - a cheapo dormitory where you can catch a few hours' sleep in a Spartan pod not much bigger than your own body. You know, the kind you might use to go into 'hypersleep' if you were in a film set on a spaceship. Unfortunately hardly any of these hotels cater to women, but we found his-and-hers matching hotels next to each other in Shinjuku. The women's building only had a handful of actual science-fiction-style capsules and the rest of the sleeping spaces were just crappy little ledges with blankets on them, like something out of an orphanage in the 1940s. But for around a tenner you can't really complain, and the rest of the hotel was surprisingly nice, with a sauna, dressing tables and even a little library where you could read manga. I desperately wanted to join the three middle-aged women watching TV in the corner, smoking in their dressing gowns, talking in voices like vintage boxed wine and clearly not giving any shits whatsoever, but I was far too in awe. And using 'not-giving-a-fuck' grammar forms is a good ten or twelve lessons away in my Japanese textbook.

Day 2

After dodging lots of grumpy women in robes, I got out of the hotel and met up with my Significant Beloved Lovely-Faced One so we could get breakfast and then go to the legendary Akihabara.

Akihabara is Tokyo's geekiest district, littered with arcades, electronics stores, and anime posters. It's somewhere I've wanted to go since I was about twelve and finally being there was a little bit odd - I was excited to finally be somewhere so legendary, but due to already having spent many months in Japan there was nothing that individually seemed strange or new to me. I'd been to all these places before, there was just...more. A lot more. I wish I'd taken it in better, but I was feeling pretty ill after a few nights of poor sleep and bad food decisions. It was also around here that I got bit by a mosquito and became paranoid that I had contracted dengue fever, since a small outbreak had recently occurred in the city. But we did manage to put all that aside and crawl up the five-storey all-round nerd emporium Mandarake, poking around at the figurines, combing through the games, and gently sidestepping around the porn. To be honest it was a little overpriced and I've seen better deals back in Nagoya, but I'm glad to know that there's somewhere in the world I can buy a Dreamcast for £1000. Also their motto is "Rulers of Time", which is a touch grander than "Every little helps" or whatever.

We spent the evening in an arcade, of which I have few photos due to running low on battery after desperately Googling "dengue fever symptoms" every two minutes, but here's a game where a professor challenges a deadly mech/beast hybrid with a series of maths questions:

We played a few rhythm games, a RUBBISH Transformers rail shooter, a bizarre beat-em-up featuring the cast of Persona, a side-scrolling bullet-hell shooter on the biggest screen I've ever seen and some other odds and ends. I forgot about deadly disease for a bit and rounded off the evening with some comfort food (burgers at Bebu, a fancy-but-not-too-intimidating restaurant in the middle of yet another uncomfortably massive hotel building).

Again: in Tokyo, good Western food - i.e. Western-style food which hasn't been bathed in mayonnaise for some reason - is a salve on the little hangnail of my soul, the part that gets homesick for semi-detached houses and train delays and Walkers crisps. This Ceasar salad, and the burger I had with it (teriyaki chicken with cabbage - see, cultural) was so achingly good I brought my parents back here when they came to visit a couple of months later. The staff were accustomed to foreigners and spoke a lot in English, leading to yet more awkward slipping back and forth between languages. This is one thing I think I prefer about Nagoya - most of the time you will be spoken to in Japanese, and when you say you don't understand someone, they will either just say the exact same thing at the exact same speed again, or decide you are incapable of anything more than basic bodily functions and give up. You know where you are with that. It gives you more opportunity to practice, and feels like you're being given a bit of credit and not like you need to be pandered to. It feels better for my ego, even if it means I sometimes end up being given diarrhea medication instead of hayfever tablets.

Coming soon: The City That Sometimes Sleeps In Pods: Part 2

On Korankei

Seasons are a big deal here.

It's a well-known cliché among expats in Japan that Japanese people think theirs is the only country in the world that has four seasons. Japanese people will tell you proudly about the uniqueness of having spring, summer, autumn and winter, and then be thoroughly weirded out when you tell them the exact same meteorological sorcery happens in your country. (And they will be doubly weirded out when you point out that Japan actually has five seasons if you count the rainy season that separates spring and summer). There's a grain of truth to this stereotype, but from my lofty velvet chair of Knowing Just Slightly Above Fuck-All About Japan, I think it's also an oversimplification. Yes, most of the world has four seasons, but there's a certain specificity to the seasons in Japan that the UK's temperate climate just can't compare to.

"It's really bloody hot!" you say to yourself one morning in June. It will proceed to be really bloody hot for the next three months. To someone unused to a stable, predictable, blaringly enthusiastic summer, the next few months seem not like a series of days and nights, but like a single unbearable epoch (especially since you can't sleep, which might otherwise have broken things up a bit). All your clothes that aren't shorts and cotton vests can go in the bin. Then one morning you say to yourself "oh, it's not really bloody hot any more", and it's autumn. Enjoy the next two months before it's really bloody cold. It's almost like someone flips a switch overnight, and it's not really surprising that so much of Japan's culture revolves around these distinct changes when the lines between the seasons feel so crisp and clear, and bring about a noticeable change in environment and mood. (The prevailing mood of summer being "everything can bugger off so I can go home and lie on the floor in my pants forever".) Not only are the physical elements of the seasons quite distinct, but Japan also tends to go in a lot more for seasonal foods, clothing, decorations and activities. This time of year it's all about koyo - the turning of autumn leaves.

The most famous spot around here for koyo is Korankei, a valley in the countryside just outside Toyota (a nice city, but one which failed to live up to my expectations by not being entirely made out of cars). We actually went there twice - actually actually, two-and-a-half times - due to accidentally going too early the first time and ending up viewing the slightly-muddy-but-still-quite-nice colours instead. This first trip was a bit of a palaver: first we wasted an hour hanging out in Toyota's McDonalds trying out the autumn special, which was mushroom risotto balls. (6/10, would not repurchase, but an interesting cultural diversion.) Then we spent another hour wandering around the bus stops trying to crack their mysterious codes. Then we finally got on the right bus, only to find that the driver had a habit of narrating the entire journey on a Madonna-style headset ("we're turning right now....we've had to stop because of a traffic light....okay, the traffic light's changed, let's go.")

It was worth it, though. The air felt fresh, alpine, and the gorge was, um, gorgeous. We arrived about half an hour before sunset and got to see the trees illuminated after dark:

I'd pictured Korankei as some huge national park-type thing, but it's actually a pretty small area, a couple of narrow paths either side of a river maybe a mile or two long before the intensity and variation of the colours dies down and the lines of tourists fade off. I actually prefer this; it made the area feel more special and like something you could peacefully spend time in without feeling a completionist urge to go all over the place.

***

A couple of weeks later we had some time off and decided to visit again, but in the daytime, since the trees were supposed to be in full...bloom? whatever the autumnal equivalent of 'bloom' is. This did not get off to a good start. We spent forty minutes on a tube to Toyota and then discovered that despite being one of the most popular tourist spots in the area, at its most popular time of the year, the buses only went twice in the morning and then not again until close to dark. Having missed the morning buses, we tried to placate ourselves by going to the local art museum instead only to find it was closed. Until November of next year. We went home to nap, muck about on the Internet, and try not to think about how much time we'd wasted.




The next day, we attempted the journey again - and, hoorah! Okay, we did have to take a completely packed bus home, standing for most of the 90-minute journey. But look how pretty:

You can even see the difference two weeks made, if you compare the picture above from the first visit - the oranges and yellows are a lot more vibrant, and the rare sprays of red weren't around at all before. Another sign of the sheer precision the Japanese seasons go in for. A couple of weeks more and they'll be gone.




Now, if you will excuse me, I'm off to build a tent out of blankets. I feel "really bloody cold" season coming on.

Nagashima Spaland: On Fear and Levelling Up

This is my childhood nightmare.

All through the blazing, sticky-moist, dog-star-pooing-all-over-your-shoes summer, Nick was keen on going to this waterpark. Supposedly the best in Western Japan, and world record holder for highest number of waterslides per square metre. His enthusiasm was like that of a small child being offered a kaleidoscope or a playing card smeared in chocolate or any object. I was a little more reserved, for reasons that anyone who has seen me try to swim will understand.

I don't like water. I have grudgingly accepted that I need it to live, but outside of the appropriate parameters I'm not really happy with the whole concept. I don't like water in my eyes or up my nose. When I am in a body of water, I am not graceful, nor do I accept the situation with grace, instead flailing as if fighting the water will turn it back into air and earth. My P.E. teachers laughed and cried and stamped their feet in a series of one-man operas. I can swim well enough to not die, probably. Anything past that gets a bit murky.

But new things are the order of the day. I live in a faraway country. I tried weird fish. (Carp-e diem?) Most importantly, shut up I'm not a chicken YOU are. Off I went to a waterpark!

Nagashima Spaland is comprised of a shopping centre, a set of waterslides and a set of rollercoasters, and the most reassuring thing about the waterpark was that the rollercoasters looked far, far worse. A fear to conquer another day. I approached the first slide with jellylegs. It was the kind where you swirl around in a bowl, before falling into a pool through a hole in the middle. It reminded me of the charity bins you used to throw coins into in McDonalds.

Not pictured: my screams.

"Can I go ahead of you?" I asked Nick. "If I don't do it right now I won't do it at all." When I took a breath and pushed myself down the slide, there were a few nanoseconds of pleasure interspersed mainly with upset and lizard-brain fear. After a few dodgy laps of the bowl I dropped through the hole like a weight. I think my foot found the surface first and through waggling of all limbs I somehow uprighted myself. The lifeguard at the bottom looked concerned.

Two or three more slides followed. I had the same feelings: anxiety, trepidation, small bursts of adrenaliney something that might have been fun. It was on the fourth slide, I think - a tube slide mostly in darkness - when it clicked. I was about a third of the way down when it happened. I stopped being scared. I got it. The lurches in my stomach became exciting, the twists and turns exhilerating. Suddenly I was laughing and not afraid at all. I was enjoying myself. I didn't want the slide to end. I actually said whee. And then I finished and wanted to get right back on again.

This is probably really boring for anyone who isn't me. But in life you generally grow up subtly, imperceptibly. You realise that it's been a few months since you found anything growing in your coffee mug. You wonder when you started being able to dispose of spiders. You gradually care less and less about what people think about you, to the point where you can write an obtuse and barely-read blog and not really worry because you do it for yourself. There aren't many moments where you level up, in an instant. I was lucky to have one. On a waterslide. With my arse squeaking against a dinghy.


After that I almost completely stopped being a chicken, at least about water-related things, and even went on the biggest ride in the park, which goes vertical and causes gravity to eat your stomach. It was a pretty amazing change for someone who's been crap with water their whole life. I even wanted to go back to Nagashima the following week. Everyone else did too. Highly recommended.


Many thanks to Nick and Alyssa for not laughing at my stupid face and brain. Many thanks to the lovely staff member who helped me when I got stuck on a wet mat (don't ask). Many thanks to Nagashima Spaland in general for being great and fun and making me feel warm fuzzy things inside.

Many not-thanks to the one shitty slide I didn't enjoy after my epiphany, not because it was scary but because it was clearly old, poorly-maintained, bumpy and gave me big old bruises on my elbows. Fuck you, slide.

This fucker.

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