Hokkaido!

My legs are full of bites, I'm seeing weird bugs everywhere, heat clings to me like mist. It is definitely summer in Nagoya.

Yup.

Therefore my employers generously decided to give us all two weeks off before we imploded. So we went to Hokkaido!

Look at it! Isn't it great?

Hokkaido is the northernmost and most newly acquired part of Japan, annexed just after the Meiji Restoration in 1868. As a result, it's a pleasingly confusing mix of Japanese and Western influences, stark and modernistic and lush and comforting and all those other things that shouldn't really fit together but do. Also there's loads of fields and mountains and ponds. Best of all, the climate is bearable in summer. In Japan, bearable is as good as summer gets.

This was always going to be a more slow-paced holiday than usual. Ideally we would have explored the whole damn island, but it's just too big to cover without the aid of a teleport and/or loan sharks who can put up shinkansen fare. So we centred our trip around the capital, Sapporo, with a two-day trip to Hakodate at the beginning and a small day-trip to Otaru later on. Although Hokkaido is a popular summer destination for Japanese tourists, none of these cities have huge amounts of touristy fare to offer, so the focus was mostly on sucking in as much beer, ice cream and cool sea breezes as we could get. I wasn't too sad about that.

Hokkaido highlights part 1 - Hakodate!

At the south end of Hokkaido, on the heel of what geographers term "the shoe-shaped stringy bit", lies the port of Hakodate. In brilliant fashion I decided to start the trip by taking a plane to Sapporo and then a four-hour train, even though there's an airport actually in Hakodate. Whoops.

Hakodate is a weird one. Heading southwest from the station, I couldn't decide what it reminded me of: a film set for a Western, a small Irish town, a city in Russia, or - well - a Japanese port. It looked like all those things to me. The retro trams - some decorated with kawaii characters, others solemnly beige - added another layer of enjoyable incoherence.

As we walked past the end of the tram line, still pressing on towards the mountains crammed into the furthest corner of the peninsula, the environment shifted a little, this time like a New England beach town or maybe some little outpost in Austria.

I know that doesn't make too much sense. It didn't make too much sense. I loved it though. There's a stronger occidental influence here than in other parts of the country - Hakodate was the first port in Japan to be opened to foreign trade after the lifting of sakoku - and I loved the weird ways in which it showed. When I looked at my feet, the pavements looked like ones from home. (Except for not being covered in gum. Or seagull shit, even though it's a port. Dunno how Japan does it.)

Apologies for crappy layout. It's 1.16 a.m. 


The guesthouse we stayed in was brilliant. I'd picked it for its cheapness and availability in a panic, but I'd recommend it to anyone. The room was lovely, with a sea view that was barely marred by the eleven or twelve mosquitoes we had to kill to get a decent night's sleep. The proprietors were super-nice too. They'd furnished the place with retro gramophones and wooden TV units, there were old records and English-language manga left about for our perusal, and they even gave us cookies when we left with a thank-you note!

I had a lovely conversation with the woman who gave me the cookie just before we left. She was washing the stoop (ah, so they clean things. That's why there's no shit around) and feeding pigeons. I asked what the word for 'pigeon' was in my, erm, pidgin Japanese.

"Nihongo de?" 
"Hato desu."
"Ahhh! So desu!" I decided to stop talking before I told her I already knew that, because of a Japanese dating sim where you start romances with super-intelligent pigeons in a post-apocalyptic boarding school.

Nagoya (the city where I'm based) is also a port, but more of the 'we ship metal things from here' kind of port, not one you'd ever really want to visit for your marine-based kicks.  I grew up by the sea; despite living in a coastal area for six months this was the first time I'd really seen it in Japan. I was surprised by how calm it made me. Like I was a boat that had finally moored or some shit.

We spent the evening desperately trying to find any restaurant, and ended up at the top of Mt. Hakodate, about a twenty-minute walk and a cable car away, which genuinely seemed the most convenient option at the time. The restaurant at the viewing point offered mostly seafood (which is gross) so I had to settle for an omelette, but the view was one of the highlights of the trip.

A cosmopolitan curve of a city. Yet another of Hakodate's many faces.

We only spent another half-day in Hakodate after that, wandering round the fish market (again: seafood is gross), eating delicious ramen at a hole-in-the-wall restaurant (egging on the chef as he flicked cockroaches away with a teatowel), and taking the tram out to a spot where you can bathe your feet in natural hot springs. On the street.

A long game of I-Spy ensued while we soaked our weird hairy toes and admired how pink our skin turned.

I'm glad we only allocated a small amount of time to Hakodate; despite the glories of its night-view the centre was a little sparse and there weren't a huge number of attractions on the maps we were given. However: walking out to the guesthouse, passing tram tracks, beach-houses, oddball architecture, and spending a quiet few minutes watching the waves roll into a tiny little corner of the bay rank as one of my favourite holiday moments ever. Having said that, maybe it would have been trumped if I'd seen these:

Coming up: Hokkaido Part 2: Sapporo

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

Dear Person Standing On The Right Side Of The Escalator

Hey, it's funny how everyone else is just standing on the left side, isn't it? Leaving that convenient vacant pathway on the right side. It's almost as if it's vacant for a reason, isn't it? Almost as if people leave that side free so that people in a rush can get through.

Isn't it weird how sometimes you almost get the feeling that there are other humans in the world who have goals and chores and places to get to? Like, totally weird.

Ah well. Look at all this extra space on the right side. The perfect place to stand perfectly still and ignore everything that's happening around you. I mean, it's a space, it's empty, might as well put your body in it. Go ahead. Ooh look, an advert for hats! Rad.

See you fucking again tomorrow, inevitably.

Hugs,
Ciara

This has one day left on iPlayer and you should watch it now

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p01x5k4n/under-milk-wood

Alas, I'm late on the mark for the second time this year. This new production of the damply lyrical, Welshly brilliant and brilliantly Welsh classic turned up on BBC iPlayer about a month ago then buggered off. A few days ago it buggered back again. You've a few hours yet to enjoy it.

If you've never watched/listened to/read/absorbed through osmosis Under Milk Wood, it's a shortish play for voices by Dylan Thomas, describing a day in the life of a seaside village. Cockles and milk bottles and that. Also bigamy, poison and death. The latter elements though are never heavy or self-consciously dark. It's funny, grim, stunningly beautiful and hungrily melancholy, not by turns but all at once. Just a phenomenal thing to listen to, really. Get a hot beverage and take it all in. I listened to it at dawn, not through a fussy sense of romance but through circumstance (it's humid as shit out here in Nagoya and sweaty sleepless nights plague me like flies); quite frankly it's the best thing that's happened to me in weeks.

This version is new, as far as I can tell, and it's mint. It has Joneses Tom and Griff Rhys in it. (Those guys are brothers, right?) And Charlotte Church, as a surprisingly well-casted Mrs. Ogmore-Pritchard (usually more easily pictured as an angry old fishwife than, well, someone who looks like Charlotte Church). Michael Sheen kills the opening lines. The variety of actors and delivery styles, and the slightly stop-start nature that it brings really works for me, as it stops the stream of words from becoming lost in sameiness (something which I find happens with the well-known Richard Burton version, and a great shame it is too since the words are so bloody unbelievably ace all the way through). The only duff casting for me was that of Polly Garter, which just felt a little odd and out of kilter, but I'm willing to have my mind changed on that. I was a little skeptical at first of the standard "ooh look, they're texting and using Skype, look how modern we've made it!"-type stuff, but it doesn't detract or become cloying, and acts more as a vaguely interesting framing device than something which actually involves itself in the narrative.

Overall, I definitely prefer this to the Richard Burton version, which I know is beloved by many but I've never really connected with it. For me, that version relies too much on RADA-steeped actorly voice and not on the wonders of the language and the ideas. Burton cruises on the back of his impressive vocal chords, skating briskly through the lines without allowing for pauses, nuance, enjoyment. I'm intrigued to seek out other productions and see what they do with it, but for now I'd just like to recommend that you watch this, now, now, and then I'd like to take my computer off my lap because it's still this fucking humid and my knees are sticky.

Jihanki panki

Let's talk about vending machine coffee.

(Forgive the brusque introduction; teaching conversational English has led me to develop a vaguely synthetic directness in my speaking, causing my apparent personality to lie somewhere between impatient chatbot and badly-written movie policeman. Because almost all my students have limited English, my interactions in class need to be simple, with minimal language and minimal choice involved for the student. Ask me a question about my country. What's your favourite type of train pass? Tell me about your last vacation (also, my school teaches American English, leaving my kidneys to slowly eat themselves every time I say "vacation", "math" or - bite your tears back and say it - "candy"). This type of let's-not-beat-around-the-bush probing came rather unnaturally to me at first, since as a shy person and an Englishwoman my preferred method of conversation involves never making any direct requests, and preferably hiding behind some sort of furniture if any direct request is made towards me. Yet not only have I got used to it, but I've found it seeping into my interactions outside of class. Part of this might be good - I no longer come on a bit faint if I need to make small talk. It might be contrived and insincere small talk, but that's the essence of what small talk is. However, I'm not sure if I'll be happy to come back to the UK and have my friends discover that my awkward dorkiness has been replaced by a glaze-eyed smile and an insistence that they tell me what they like to do in their free time.

A second issue - and one you're no doubt being frustrated by right now - is that my need to constrain my speech may be causing somewhat nauseating floridity in my written communication.

Soz.

So to return to the beginning, let's talk about vending machine coffee.)

   

What can be said about this...substance? 

I'm not sure you can call it a drink. I'm struggling to identify appropriate words for description, but I'm pretty sure I'm on safe ground with "liquid". As far as I can tell, Japanese industry is built on jihanki (vending machine) beverages. It is the secret weapon of the Japanese workforce; the magic which reanimates the bodies of office workers after their third successive night of drinking, long after they should really be a crumpled heap of business suit. Toyota, Hitachi, Toshiba, all built and oiled and refreshingly spritzed with coffee-in-a-can. It comes hot, as well, which when I first came here seemed like a scientific achievement on par with the polio vaccine. I didn't know, of course, that having your tongue burned to numbness is the ideal way to serve this coffee, in the same way that blinding yourself first is the ideal way to enjoy a video of a lamb getting a vasectomy.

The purpose of jihanki coffee is to drug yourself. No salaryman drags himself to the office after an all-nighter and downs a can of Emerald Mountain Blend because he enjoys the bouquet. Caffeine, sugar, adrenaline, most likely some sort of meow-meow-esque club drug is in there too. When you take a sip, your heart clones itself and sends the clones rushing around your arms and legs. Your whole body beats like a bassline. You can bypass your exhaustion and function well, at least for a couple of hours. Thus after a sleepless night, despite the odious taste, one drinks it through gritted teeth (which is rather counterproductive since it just spills all over your shirt). 

I'm not sure how to describe the taste, but "sugar-glazed horse turd" approximates. A lot of these beverages have 'Blend' in the name. This is a mistranslation. There is no 'blend' in the taste. With every reluctant sip the flavours form an orderly queue and visit one's palette in neat succession: first a mouth of bland dirt, then aberrant bitterness, and finally a tooth-bleaching, venomous sweetness. You could set your watch by them. And I say "the taste" using the definite article, because there is only one taste. Five thousand million brands and types, and every single one tastes the same. Some are dark brown, some are light brown; they are merely different shades of the same evil wallpaper in the devil's chemical palace. 

In case you couldn't tell yet, this coffee is not very nice. (I've had one which was almost passable, from the Tully's brand, but have not been able to find it since. Most likely I imagined it in a fever dream). And yet in spite of all this, I feel like when I return to the UK, I'll miss it. Of course, heroin addicts probably feel like they miss heroin. But I don't know if back home, I'd be able to find any energy drink or dodgy steroid which packs quite the same punch, or can turn you from dead-soul-in-a-skin-suit to efficient human being with quite the same no-nonsense briskness. Plus Red Bull doesn't come out of the vending machine warm.