Sumo!

Sumo is honestly the best sport and I want to bring it to the world.

Cruel fate denies me a regular dose of my secret love, as there are only five tournaments a year and only one of those is in my city. But I've still been able to go twice now, and it's easily one of the highlights of my year. Far from being a simple slapfight between two fat men, it's one of the most elegant yet intense things I've ever seen in my life. I have never cared about any sport before this.

You haven't lived until you've seen a smaller, lighter wrestler - 'lighter' in this case meaning about three of me, plus a dog - face off against a gargantuan rippling behemoth (there are no weight classes in sumo), and watched the lithe David dart around his opponent like a wasp, trying to tire out his Goliath, until Goliath gets bored and nonchalantly flicks him out of the ring. Or seen the second-best sumo in the world charge at a junior wrestler, who simply sidesteps out of the way and allows him to fall on his pillowy face. Learned to notice the different styles - those who prefer pushing, those who like grappling, the fast and slow movers. The gymnastic prowess cloaked beneath all those pops and folds of flesh. Learned to glean the different personalities from the way they slap their thighs. Cheered for the local favourites (Endo!) and the underdogs (poor Ikioi).

I just really like sumo. Please watch some.

On ikebana

Shaking just a touch, I type out the phone number. This is the moment I've been psyching myself up for all day. Okay. Here we go.

"Moshi moshi." (Hello.)

"Eeee to. Koukoku o mite, denwa shiteiru....ikebana o shitemitai." (Ummm. I'm calling because I saw your advert, I'm interested in trying flower arranging lessons.)

If you haven't much experience of learning foreign languages it can be hard to conceptualise what it's like to have a phone conversation in a language in which you are not fluent. Maybe this will help you understand: it's a bit like crawling through a tunnel made of TV static, blindfolded.

Somehow I managed to get through almost the whole thing with complete understanding and with the other person understanding me too. Unfortunately I hesitated for a moment after hearing one particular phrase I wasn't quite sure of, which was enough for her to switch to English for the rest of the conversation. Might have been more convenient, but I can't say my pride wasn't wounded.

We meet outside the subway station. Like a lot of people who teach Japanese stuff to foreigners, she's a tiny sixtysomething lady looking for someone to nurture and chastise now her children are too old for it. She's very kind and her English is good (after my single mistake on the phone, we still never revert back to Japanese). It's raining, and despite the fact that I have waterproofs on, she ushers me furiously under her umbrella. People in Japan get very upset if you don't use an umbrella.

In her flat, several ladies are getting on with flower arranging. I am told her family has lived in this flat for generations, and I suddenly wish I remembered to put on clean socks that day. We settle down to ikebana.

She shows me how to cut the flowers, and how hold the arrangement in place by impaling their stalks on the rather bellicose-looking device known as the "frog". Heavy and covered with spikes, it looks like a rusty metal hairbrush and could definitely be used to kill an intruder. I remind myself to always knock before I enter any room in this house, and to never jump out and shout surprise. She demonstrates a simple arrangement, with a lot of discussion of angles and geometry which I immediately forget. She asks me to copy her arrangement and I get it wrong. The Japanese style of flower arranging is beautiful but very mathematical, and I don't feel I can pass my mistakes off as creative flair. I am inadequate.

As a break from the flowers, she invites me to practice tea ceremony with her. I've practiced Japanese tea ceremony a couple of times before, and enjoy the precision and grace of the somewhat alien rituals. Unfortunately I dislike green tea. Love all other kinds of tea, don't like green tea. The bitterness is supposed to be balanced by eating wagashi, traditional Japanese sweets, just before you have the tea, which would be a perfect solution if I didn't loathe wagashi even more than green tea. (Imagine making a jelly, but instead of putting any flavour in it you just added more sweetener, to the point where even Augustus Gloop would feel like gagging. Imagine your aim is to make it really, disgustingly sweet, but at the same time not have any actual taste. Then add beans. Voila, wagashi.) Nonetheless, I have a go at tea-ing while my teacher tells me about her sliding doors. At the end of the class she realises I don't have any of the equipment I need to take my arrangement home, so she walks me all the way to a secret wholesaler where I can get my own terrifying spiky impalers for cheap. She even takes me to a shrine on the way, just for kicks. And when the wholesaler offers us more wagashi, she clearly notices my face and says it's okay if I don't eat it. The generosity of some people here is wonderful.

I'm not sure if I'll return to ikebana, unless I'm allowed to be some kind of radical about it. I like having flowers around the house though, and the spiky hairbrush of violence, so maybe I'll do a bit at home every now and then. And I really enjoyed my class, just for the experience of meeting such a lovely lady and hanging out for the day. Also for the great sandwich shop I discovered near her house, which does paninis with ciabatta. Do you know how long it's been since I had ciabatta? You never know what you've got until it's gone.

いいね 金沢

Sign hanging in front of the station: "If you're going to come to Kanazawa, spring, summer, autumn or winter is good, I think."

A few weeks back, I had the opportunity to spend a day in Kanazawa, temple hotspot and home to the famous Kenrokuen Gardens, one of the three great traditional gardens of Japan. (This sounds impressive, but Japan seems to have an entire industry of top-three lists of things. Go to any nothingness town and they are guaranteed to be the proud home of the third-most-famous rice cake or the second-best traditional leather breeches.)

Someone put some little toy cars and a toy supermarket on top of the postbox. Vroom.

Another person was apparently selling vintage radios out of their garage, or perhaps just showing them off. I'm not sure.

I'll show you a few sniblets:

There were a lot of swallows flitting about, who it turned out were building nests out of flim and flam and spit and whatnot. Apparently they're enough of an issue that some places now use shop-bought artificial swallow nests to try and guide the birds into settling into the most convenient places. They are gross but nice.

Kanazawa is a centre for the production of gold leaf. We somehow wandered into a gold- leaf souvenir shop and the shop assistant invited us to watch the leaf being made. We agreed, a little warily, but no-one pressured us into buying anything and the ojiisan who explained the process to us was lovely and informative. He had gold flecks on his chin and I wondered what it would be like to be around gold so much that you can be so blasé about getting some on your face. I watched one of the craftswomen pick up a 1-micron-thick sheet of gold with tweezers. When she breathed on it, it rippled just like water.

In spite of my cynicism in the face of Japan's incessant listmaking, the Kenrokuen Gardens are beautiful. One small section was closed off to the public. In the middle lay an eerily placed rock, like an unexploded mine.

In the Japanese style of saying much whilst saying nothing, I got a very clear and effective sign to keep away, just from the unnverving placement of this rock.

***


My favourite part might actually be Kanazawa station though, for its fantastic fountain clock. Instead of reading one of your boring old analogue clocks, or one of your yawnsome digital clocks, you can read the time at Kanazawa station through the medium of water:

"Welcome to Kanazawa"

"Kanazawa: isn't it nice?"

It's hot.

Like, really really hot.

Summer came slowly - up until now we'd been having a good few months of warm breezes and pleasant t-shirt weather. A couple of days ago the blasting heat and humidity suddenly hit like a big hot hammer. A wall of solid discomfort. I can look forward to another couple of months of this.

It's sort of like having a toddler, in that you're always tired and everything in your house is sticky.

The air conditioner in my flat is a) expensive b) environmentally questionable c) only covers my living room. As with last year, my sleeping routine now consists of going to bed, waking up an hour later, splashing myself with water, going back to bed, being unable to sleep, going to the living room, turning on the aircon until the room gets decent before turning it off and falling asleep, then waking up again. Repeat every day for a season. The daytime is currently bearable, but I'm probably going to spend a lot of time in shopping malls and cafes just to stay somewhere cool. I've got healthier at cooking but I'm going to struggle to motivate myself to exercise. It's all just a bit crap and I wish I was at home just for this bit of the year.

Off now to rub ice on my arms.

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: