Hello again!

There was a short hiatus, as you probably didn't notice. I went back to the UK for a week to attend a friend's wedding, and when I got back I found it difficult to slip back into the good habits I had built up for myself before I left - blogging, studying Japanese, keeping the flat clean. Fortunately, after a few weeks curled up in my own filth, repeatedly pressing F5 and ignoring my responsibilities, I am finally getting myself sorted again. Today, after work and Japanese class, I ate an actual nutritious soup that I cooked with my own bare hands, worked out, and, well, did this. Before bed I also hope to squeeze in kanji practice, have a quick go on a Japanese vocabulary app on my phone, and read a few pages of something or other. Okay, so it's 1am and I'm probably leading myself towards a 12pm wake-up time tomorrow. But if I spend a couple of minutes on each I can at least say I've done them and feel all smug.

So, how was the UK? Pretty good, actually. I was worried I'd either:

a) go back, realise how much I'd missed everything, never want to leave and cry my eyes out when I returned, or
b) go back, realise how shit it was, and never return.

Fortunately I landed neatly in the middle. I like lots of things about Japan and lots of things about the UK. I like the kindness of Japan and the humour of the UK. I like the ingenuity of Japan and the landscape of the UK. I love konbini chicken and sausage rolls. I love my friends in both countries.

I was happy to be there, and happy to come back, and you can't really ask for better than that. Maybe I'll write something more detailed about the trip in the future, but I doubt it since the highlight of the whole week - apart from the wedding - was eating a roast dinner. If you're in the UK now, seriously, go and have a roast dinner tomorrow. You wouldn't believe how good they are after you haven't had one for a year and a half.

What am I up to now?

General life update -

• I've got a new part-time job teaching business English in Japanese offices, which is fun because I get to pretend I actually know things about business. Being in the Japanese office environment is a little strange - everything looks a bit 1990s. (I saw actual fax machines. In the UK you can only see those in museums now, like mangles or travel agencies.) But the students are great and it's a nice bit of extra work to supplement my income now I'm a lazy good-for-nothing part-timer.
• I'm trying to get fitter and more into cooking. This week I made chicken soup, aubergine parmigiana, and some kind of stew with an egg on it. I feel extra-excited about cooking since I recently discovered a new halal mini-market about 20 minutes from my house, where I can buy hummus, halloumi and other culinary wonders heretofore unbeknownst to the shores of this mysterious isle. As far as fitness goes, I'm not doing any intense workouts yet, just a daily dose of 20-30 minutes of exercise videos in my living room (gyms scare me; I don't know what all the levers do). But the ultimate goal is to get really jacked and challenge people to fights.
• I'm taking the JLPT (Japanese Language Proficiency Test) in December. I'm only taking N4, the second-lowest level, which should hopefully be easily doable by that time. I could theoretically have super-super-challenged myself and chosen N3 but it would be a lot of work for an exam I've never tried before, so I'd rather build up my confidence by taking something more manageable. With this in mind, my current plan is to do at least 5-10 minutes of kanji practice every day, use my Memrise app to quiz myself on vocabulary, review the work I've done in my Japanese classes each week, and work my way through the exam practice textbook I just bought. I love buying textbooks. They're pretty much the only books I can buy here that I can actually use, and they're all so colourful and nice-looking. 
• Last year I read about 30 books, so I'd like to at least keep up with that pace, though I'm not sure I'll be able to. I've only read 11 so far in 2015, although one of them was Don Quixote which was unfathomably long (but very good - I think a lot more people would read it if they knew how much it involves people being silly and hitting each other on the head with sticks). I just finished High Rise by J.G. Ballard, which was great - a dystopian satire set in a block of luxury flats, which was written forty years ago but reads like it could have been written yesterday. I'm kind of flagging and can't really think of what to read next. Any advice welcome.
• This month is the beginning of summer festivals in Japan, which gives me a lot to look forward to, such as doing traditional dances where you unconvincingly pretend to be a coal miner, and trying to take pictures of fireworks even though you know they'll come out shit.
• nekoatsume!

If you like cats and wasting time, get this free app. It's only in Japanese, but if you copy and paste the name (ねこあつめ) you'll be able to find it, and you don't really need to understand Japanese to play (there are Youtube tutorials, wikis etc. to help if you feel you need it). It's very simple and adorable - buy food and toys for your garden, cats come to visit you, they bring fish, use the fish to pay for more food and toys, get more cats, the cycle continues. It's not Dark Souls, but there is a time for Dark Souls and a time for watching a cat sit in a virtual hammock. Plus, I can convince myself I'm actually practicing Japanese when I play it. Good thing to check on if you're waiting for a bus, or need to look at your phone during some kind of awkward moment.

Bring on July!

Bunnies

If I say "Hiroshima" to you, what do you think of? Is it this?

Probably not.

Hiroshima Prefecture might genuinely be my favourite part of Japan. I've been there twice now, and both times I've been blown away by the beauty of the countryside and beaches, the clarity of the water, and the peacefulness of the islands. The city itself is pretty great as well; good food and a cosmopolitan vibe. The memorials and the museum are of course, not too cheery. I thought about writing a blogpost on them last year but decided I had nothing new or profound to say about it, so preferred to leave it be. All I'll say is that going to the museum was probably the toughest experience I've had here, though really important and I'd recommend it - if 'recommend' is the right word - to anyone.  But the reason I wanted to write this post is to show a different side to Hiroshima. In the west we mainly know it as the site of the first atomic bombing; the name is associated with tragedy and little else. But the US didn't choose to bomb some backwater; Hiroshima was (and still is) one of the most important cities in Japan. If you're not walking around the small part of the city specifically dedicated as a memorial to the attack, it just feels like walking around any other major metropolitan area of Japan, which is heartening if a little unsettling. It feels like you should see reminders and misery on every corner, but you don't. I don't want to make judgements on a place I still barely know, but to me the city feels like a testament to how life can find a way to spring up again after destruction.

Anyway, bunnies.

Off the coast of Hiroshima Prefecture, a couple of hours from the city, there's an island called Okunoshima (rough translation using my rough Japanese: Big Eternal Wilderness Island), better known as Usagijima (Bunny Island). (Last year I went to a different, but equally lovely island in Hiroshima, which you can read about here.) It's quite out of the way, so it's not super-touristy, but it still attracts a fair few people due to BUNNIES.

In the Second World War, the island was used as a research base for developing poison gas. After the war ended, the base was abandoned and the rabbits used for experimentation were released. Apparently no-one bothered to fix these rabbits, because a few generations later BUNNIES ALL OVER THE SHOP.

There isn't much left of the research facility, but the shells of the abandoned buildings are still there, taken over by adorable new tenants. Again, life springs up from destruction. Aggression and death paved over by ADORABLE BUNNIES LOOK

Check out that thumb action

I even got an ice cream with some fake rabbit poo in it - "Original Joke Ice Cream", as it was called. To be honest, the ice cream itself was good but the poo bits were not nearly as chocolatey as I expected and a little dry. Better poo needed.

Also, as you may have noticed from the top image, not only is the island full of gorgeous furry little bundles of love, but it's also just one of the most beautiful places I've ever been. The water is absurd. The sand is too nice. The greens are too verdant. The blues are too aquamarine. There are little caves. I want to sail all around there when I'm retired and I barely know what a boat is. I wish I could do it justice with my phone's camera. You'll just have to go there yourself.

Anyway, I hope this barely literate piece of Original Joke makes you think a bit differently of Hiroshima, if you haven't already been there or thought of going. 

bunnies

On the Election: Some Semi-Formed Thoughts

Some thoughts on the election, having spent a few days digesting it all:

1)  It's now more obvious than ever that first-past-the-post can lead to absurd results. It's no wonder there's so much political apathy when huge swathes of people have their votes made practically meaningless, simply because of the demographics of the area they happen to live in. I despise UKIP, but they're a valid party with about 15% of the votes and just one seat out of 650 (and they probably wouldn't even have that one if the candidate hadn't been a longstanding MP recently defected from another party). The number of overall votes per party compared with the number of seats borders on the bizarre. This isn't a new thing, but it makes it clear to me how important electoral reform is, not just in the name of fairness but also to increase political engagement.

2) Being an undeniably politically-correct tree-hugging loony lefty, I would be angry that the Conservatives got in, no matter what. (And no, I don't believe this makes me a 'sore loser' or that I don't believe in democracy. People have the right to choose whatever party they want, and I have the right to believe that choice was a bad one.) But I think this result angers me because of the way the debate was laid out to people, and the misinformation surrounding it. If everyone had the facts at hand and chose the Conservatives because they believe in the conservative ideology - pro-small state, pro-business, pro-traditional family values etc. - I would disagree, but there's not an objective right or wrong there, just a different set of values. I would still debate it, but the debate would be on a more fundamentally equal level.

However, what frustrates me is that I feel a lot of voters based their decision on ideas that are being constantly fed to us, yet are simply, objectively, factually wrong. Ideas like 'the recession happened because Labour overborrowed' - go on Google for two minutes and you can get the numbers which show that Labour's borrowing was at a reasonably low level until AFTER the crash, when we bailed out the banks. Indeed, their borrowing was far lower than Osborne's has been. You don't have to like Labour or agree their government was a good one, but the idea they borrowed us into recession is an easily disprovable myth. Yet it's completely entered the public consciousness now. Everyone thinks it's a fact, and saying it isn't true usually provokes a reaction like you've just said lobsters can fly. Likewise you have ideas like 'too many people are on benefits' - on average people think 27% of benefits are fraudulently claimed. The actual figure is 0.7%. In fact, benefits are underclaimed, not overclaimed i.e. far more people are entitled to them, but don't claim them, than fraudulently claim more than they should. But again, everyone seems to agree that there's a tsunami of lazy benefit fraudsters washing over the country and draining our finances. Again, this isn't about ideology, it's just about facts - if you believe the welfare system shouldn't exist, or should exist differently, that's fine, we can argue about that. But I'm not sure most voters are hardcore ideologues. I could be wrong, but I think the majority of people are probably pragmatists who base their views on what they think are the facts. It frustrates me that the UK on the whole gets a distorted idea of what those facts are.

I'm sure this spread of misinformation is complex, but I think the reason I'm so angry about this election result is that it feels like a rigged game. Conservatives help the rich, so the rich mainly support Conservatives. The rich are also powerful and influential, and can do things like, say, buy the newspapers and tell them what line to follow. The newspapers tell everyone things that will make them want to vote Conservative, and the whole nation's frame of reference skews to the right. I'm 23 years old, practically a baby, and it astounds me to think of a time where Labour could actually discuss socialist ideas and put them into practice without being branded maniacs. There was actually a plurality of ideas, rather than "let's do loads of cuts and stop all the foreigners" vs. "let's do slightly fewer cuts and stop only some foreigners". The idea that cuts are actually BAD for the economy doesn't even get a look-in, even though that's what most economists will actually tell you. So it's not the result that upsets me so much as the whole bloody state of politics.

Just to finish: this is not me saying that everything is the right's fault and the left are blameless victims. Labour have been an incompetent opposition and incompetent in the election campaign, and they are now pretty much totally directionless. The left in general majorly needs to sort their (our) shit out.


If you read all this midnight bollocks here's a reward:

On April

April is the turning point in the Japanese calendar. Specifically, the point where the air turns warm overnight and we begin the doomish march to summer, with its 100% humidity. But before then we might have at least a few scant weeks of spring - balmy skirt weather, cakes in the park, cherry-blossoms. I got to see the very earliest blossoms in March, actually - by coincidence I booked an appointment at a hairdresser's on a street in Nagoya which, for some reason, gets the sakura about two weeks before anywhere else in the city. It was completely unexpected and I threw my cardigan off in delight.

Sadly, the rest of the all-too-brief cherry-blossom season was disappointing. There were a lot of rainy days, and I was too busy with the new school year and a visit from my family to attend any proper hanami parties (read: outdoor drinking, picnic blankets, ordering pizza delivered to your local park to be eaten under falling petals). While I was with my parents, however, I did get to see some great blossoms in Hikone, a town well-known for its castle. To be honest, with the hanami season the blossoms aren't always as impressive as you might hope, but I think it's its role as the harbinger of spring which makes it so lovely - the gooey air mellowed by breezes, the food stalls, the skies. All will be well for the next couple of months, apart from all the MASSIVE BUGS EVERYWHERE. (Today I saw an ant the size of a dachshund, and accidentally crushed a bug that left a bright orange mess all over my hands, all in the space of five minutes.)

April was generally a bit chaotic, with the new school year and introduction to a load of new kids, classes and schools, as well as my family visiting, so there's not a lot to report. I do have one other highlight of the month: the fire festival at Tejikara in Gifu Prefecture, which is wonderful and definitely really, really dangerous.

I'm not competent enough to explain the historical significance of this festival, and I suspect there really isn't any, apart from 'we like to show how good we are at running through fireworks shirtless', so I'll link you to Gifu's tourist board website here, but basically a lot of shirtless men carry portable shrines filled with gunpowder, a bunch of fireworks are set off, and the men walk through cascades of firework sparks carrying the shrines with seemingly little trouble. Also, some of the shrines featured Jibanyan, a character from the popular kids' anime Yo-Kai Watch, for whatever reason. It was difficult to get pictures due to the lighting, general chaos and the fact that I'd been playing on my phone all day and had 4% battery left. We also had to stand very far away, because of all the fire and fireworks and fire, so it was pretty hard to see the men themselves with my own eyes, let alone through a crappy phone camera at night, and none of my pictures of them carrying the shrines through the fireworks really came out right. But I hope I can get a bit of the spirit across here.

That last picture is the most important one.

On The Inadequacy of the Silkworm: my trip to Takayama

Spring! It's actually warm here in Nagoya and my coat is nestled away with the spiders. After a chaotic few weeks I'm settling into part-time work and starting to plan all the things I want to do with my newfound free time. First on the list is conquering my backlog of blog posts I want to write. Theoretically there are things I want to write about that happened as far back as last January, but realistically I'm not sure I ever will. Instead, I'll tell you about the trip I took back in February, so take off all your clothes and stand in front of an open fridge so you can better imagine the scene.

A couple of hours north of Nagoya lie the mountains of Gifu Prefecture. Whilst my home prefecture, Aichi, is mostly known for car manufacturing and rudeness, Gifu is known for its skiing, hiking and hot springs; think of it as the clean-living aunt to Aichi's quietly angry uncle. Nestled obscurely in the mountains you'll find historical villages which are famous for their gassho houses, with their trademark steep triangular rooves. You might have seen them on some Buzzfeed list or other, looking like the Frosty Village track from Diddy Kong Racing:

Nick and I had wanted to visit for a long time, especially during the snowy season (which, to be fair, lasts about eight months of the year in north Gifu). Finally, towards the end of winter, we had four days off in a row, and were able to book a hotel to spend a couple of days in Takayama, the biggest town in the area, and Shirakawa-go, a famous traditional village where the houses have been preserved for visitors.

From Nagoya, you can get to Takayama via a special train called the 'Wide View', which funnily enough gives you a wide view. The windows are floor-to-ceiling length so you can best admire the scenic route through the mountains. Above you can see the incredible teal colour of the rivers that pass through Gifu (and maybe, if you look closely, my scrunched-up little face in the reflection of the window).

Takayama itself was bigger than I expected; I'd imagined a village but it's actually quite a large town. It was fairly quiet when we went - peak season was over - but there were a few restaurants and shops that were used to catering for tourists, and a fair amount of English around.

Although I would argue they haven't really understood what 'a lot of pizza' is supposed to look like.

After lunch at a burger place that had been highly recommended, we traipsed up to our ryokan (Japanese traditional-style inn), trampling our way through perfectly white, crisp snow. By coincidence, there was a lovely folk village/museum just five minutes' walk from the ryokan so we decided to have a look round before check-in.

The first thing we noticed in the folk village was a massive lake, completely frozen over, with a suspicious trail of footprints circling aimlessly about the fresh layer of snow that topped it. Specifically, bird prints. We were visiting out-of-season and our only fellow guest was a swan, who seemed uninterested in the local history. We learned a few things at the village, mostly about the local silk industry and how completely useless silkworms are at surviving without human help.

A resolution to carve "about 120,000 statues". I didn't know lifelong goals both so bold and so vague.

The answer is: laaaaaame.

Back in the ryokan, I spoke a handful of Japanese to our hostess, who responded by explaining all the ryokan's rules to me in fluid native-level Japanese. Somehow I understood the majority of it and grinned proudly at my beloved, like a toddler that's managed to use the toilet for the first time. Unfortunately it turned out that after (correctly) taking my shoes off in the lobby, I'd (incorrectly) put on some wooden clogs that were only supposed to be worn in the bathroom, and was traipsing around all the lovely rooms getting poo germs everywhere. The hostess was very nice about it.

We ended our evening with a delicious dinner at a nearby noodle bar. It was the kind solely inhabited by elderly locals with voices like Rizlas, who consider the patron at the end of the bar of fifteen years' standing to be suspicious because he's too new. Happily, they weren't unkind to the two young foreigners suddenly in their midst, just a bit shocked that we'd managed to appear there. A few of the typical questions came up and we gave typical answers - we're from the UK, yes we can eat noodles, yes we can use chopsticks. (There was all-round amazement at the fact we could eat noodles, but seemingly no concern that we wouldn't be able to understand all the Japanese that was being spoken.) Our fellow customers even took our side against the proprietor when she got our order wrong - the proprietor being part of that eccentric breed of elderly Japanese restaurant owners that take your order by barking questions at you repeatedly, disappearing halfway through the order and coming back with a dish chosen at random. The random dish was very tasty.

The following day we took a bus to Shirakawa-go, the village famous for its wintry beauty and perfect gabled houses. The main thing I can tell you about Shirakawa-go is that it's really bloody cold. The next, perhaps less obvious thing I can tell you, is that it's really bloody difficult to see because the bright sunlight reflects off the snow and directly into your bloody eyeballs. Usually I carry my sunglasses in my handbag all year round, but I'd just emptied it recently in an attempt to ease my constant shoulder pain. So I can't tell you much more about Shirakawa-go, except that it's extremely beautiful and looks like the northern end of the universe - when you actually brave snow-blindness and dare yourself to look at it.

The Last Express Could Have Been Amazing So Why Didn't I Enjoy It As Much As I Should Have

Unedited, vaguely stream-of-conscious-ish review today. The Last Express is an adventure game published in 1997 and played by me, your blogatrix, in 2015. In some corners of the internet it is still much-loved, with many people even calling it one of the best adventure games of all time, and I'd heard about it from a few people before I decided to purchase and play it myself. I have a bit of a weakness for point-and-click adventures, despite lacking the unique brain-wiring which allows me to successfully work out that you need to hit the sandwich with the balloon to open the fourteen-sided codex, so I usually need a walkthrough and a fair bit of patience to get through them. I'm also a sucker for anything that seems to have a compelling or unique setting, so this game seemed perfectly positioned to charm me. So why did find myself getting so angry at it? Why did I have to drag myself through it over a period of about a month when it shouldn't have taken half as long?

I really, really, really wanted to enjoy this game. I hate doing all the background info because I struggle to write about it without sounding clunky, but essentially the game is set on the Orient Express just prior to the outbreak of the First World War. Tensions are high among the guests, and within the first few minutes your character, a mysterious American who boarded the train without a ticket, discovers his friend murdered in his compartment. What follows is the gradual unfolding of a mystery, featuring romance, gold and anarchists. (I'm sure saying this will get my blog put on a list somewhere, but I think there should be a lot more anarchists in things. I like any time period where there's lots of anarchists hanging about.) The most notable thing about the game is that all the train's passengers and staff live their lives in real-time, wandering about the carriages and hanging out in their compartments, having dinner and chatting. Your job is to solve the murder and work out what strange things are taking place on the train, by exploring, eavesdropping and interacting with guests. All in all, it's a brilliant concept.

First of all, I want to say that despite coming away from it with some negative feelings, the game is a pretty impressive feat and I feel quite bad for being harsh on it. It's easy to pick on the flaws of a twenty-year-old game, especially one which aims so high and therefore has a long way to fall if it misses. My knowledge of game design is pretty basic but the real-time mechanic must have been difficult to handle, and anyone who at least tries something interesting and new gets an eager thumbs-up from me. The art is beautiful and the setting enchanting. The voice acting is pretty decent for videogame voice acting. When I wasn't getting frustrated at the various issues I'll talk about in a second, it was really nice just being there. Sitting in a train car and watching a Russian noble sit down for a cigarette with an uninterested French lesbian. Listening to a chef and his apprentice bicker in the kitchen. Finding the attendant's secret drawings of all the passengers whilst he nips off to check the compartments. There's also a couple of newspapers you can find with full stories you can read, which gives an insight into the complicated political situation you are perhaps unwisely wading into. Some have complained that if you solve the train's puzzles quickly, you are left with a lot of downtime where you just have to wait for stuff to happen, but I liked having this breathing space. I liked knowing that I didn't have to rush, and that there was no problem with me just leaving my character in the smoking car and hearing the chit-chat of the characters around me. For its flaws, it is truly beautiful.

The flaws though. Grnnn.

The most immediate thing that strikes you is that the controls are like using your nose to guide a slice of wet bread through lumpy custard. You play from a first-person perspective, and the point-and-click mechanics feel especially clunky when you have to use them to turn yourself around or look up or down, which you often have to do when sneaking into people's carriages and looking through their baggage and whatnot (all in a day's work for a totally legit amateur detective). There can end up being a lot of "no SHIT no I didn't want that door I wanted the other door no oh wait what wall is this do I go this way NO I WANTED THE OTHER WAY". There are also a couple of fight scenes, which feel equally awkward. I initially bought The Last Express on my phone so I could play it on my commute, but had to switch to playing it on PC because the controls were so bumworm.

There are also a lot - a lot - of dead ends. If you don't do things right, your character will be killed or arrested and you will have to rewind, taking you back to the last time the train stopped at a station. This could mean you lose up to an hour's worth of playtime because of something you did, or didn't do, that you have no idea about. Fair enough, you need a bit of trial and error to work out what you need to do, and it is sometimes nice to get to replay bits so you can discover new things happening that you didn't catch last time around. However, the deaths feel a bit too random and caught up in adventure-game logic and these restarts just feel infuriating as a result. At one point a woman ended up clobbering me to death about five different times for reasons I had no idea of; furthermore there weren't any obvious connections between her and what I'd been doing so I didn't know how to get out of that dead-end. Using a walkthrough I didn't have to waste too much time on these mistakes, but without help I think I would probably have given up. One time I found an object which was then taken off me by another passenger; the game doesn't end when it happens, but apparently if you continue the game there is just no way of winning and you would have no idea. In order to actually finish the game you also need to do something small and seemingly insignificant halfway through the game, and again there is no way of knowing this. I don't need to have my hand held all the way through a game, but I think there's a certain level of obscurity where it's unfair to let someone play all the way through to the end of a game without letting them know they've prevented themselves from actually finishing it, due to not giving the whistle to the balloon vendor between 3.15 and 3.30. Maybe it's just the nature of adventure games but the things you have to do often seem artificial and like you're just trying to get the game to progress rather than actually solving a mystery.

I really wanted to at least enjoy the ending, but unfortunately the ending is awful and for me almost ruined the story. I won't spoil it, but basically it adds in a bizarre psuedo-magic element that was totally unexplained and completely unnecessary, and introduced it in the context of a stupid quick-time event. (The most radically world-changing, brutal war to ever take place on the face of the Earth is about to start! You don't need wizardry to add drama!) Still, now that I've had a little bit of distance from it, I look back on it with more fondness. I prefer to remember those bits in the middle, just idling up and down corridors and chatting with chubby true-neutral arms dealers.

So, should you play it? Erm...yes. I think so. For a bit. With a walkthrough. Maybe. Sorry, I really still don't know. Leave me alone.

Welcome to my exciting new year of part-time work!

First day of part-time: it rained. We went to a friend's house and annoyed another friend via text, messaging them pictures to show how much we were enjoying not being at work. It got elaborate - there were shadow puppets and handicraft involved - and then it all got a bit exhausting and we went home. 

I wore some very blue eyeshadow, and realised that if I now have the freedom to wear whatever makeup I want four days a week, I'm going to have to wash my brushes a lot more frequently. 

I also just remembered I have to do laundry.

See you tomorrow.