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Saturday, December 28, 2002
We break up, we break up, we don't care if the school blows up... Ah, that's what we used to sing at primary school, and it's what I was singing today, as I now have a whole eight days break. Woo-hoo! We'll spend five days in Kyoto, then return to work on Jan 6th. After that, I guess it'll be back to England, and job-hunting horrors.  Have just realised I'm missing the Tokyo Character Expo, an exhibition of the latest trendy toys and characters, like the Gloomy Bears above. Teddies with long plastic claws...very sinister. Before leaving Japan I'm going to have to rush around the city stocking up on cool T-shirts and funky objects. Found a website called Ningyoushi that sells them worldwide, for top dollar. My fave character is still Afroken, or Afrodog, but he seems to be completely out of fashion here.I'm reading the second part of Philip Pullman's 'His Dark Materials' trilogy at the moment, 'The Subtle Knife'. It's incredible: so emotionally powerful and gripping. In the book, humans have 'daemons' - animal companions that they can never be parted from; this animal is actually the external embodiment of their soul. The first book is called Northern Lights. I recommend it to everyone.  Friday, December 27, 2002
So Christmas is all over. Got a really cool Trans Continents watch from Butter, some nice presents from home, including a Mooks robot T-shirt and, importantly, English chocolate, which makes me want to drool like Homer Simpson. The watch and T-shirt go together well in a retro-futuristic kinda way. Went into Tokyo for Xmas dinner – Good Honest Grub in Ebisu had a veggie option for 6000 yen (£30 – takai desu!) The city was its usual manic self. And we ate so much that we felt like a couple of stuffed turkeys. I really missed England this week. Have just been watching the news. TV news is sooooo boring in Japan – they’ve had the same lead story for months: the people who were abducted by the North Koreans and returned earlier this year. Okay, so it was a big deal (to the Japanese anyway), but do we really need a daily 20-minute update on what the father of abductee A bought in the supermarket today? The other big story of the year was about a seal who strayed into the mega-polluted Tama River and became known as Tama-chan. Actually, Tama-chan is a lot more interesting than the goddamn abductees. There’ll probably be a film about him soon: Tama-chan versus Godzilla. I'd watch it. Tuesday, December 24, 2002
 Merry Christmas! (That's Japanese for Merry Christmas.) This is going to be the weirdest Christmas of my life. Not just because it's the first Christmas when I can complain about the smell of fungus, coming from beneath my futon, or because we've got a tree - see above - that cost 100 yen (about 60 pence), or even because because I'll be able to take a train and go to the convenience store and do the things I do every day. No, it's the absence of all that's familiar at Christmas that is going to make this year's Xmas weird: my family, a roast dinner (kind of difficult when you don't have an oven), hyper-excited children, Quality Street, the Christmas NME, Christmas editions of TV shows, especially Top of the Pops (and I haven't even heard the Christmas No.1 this year, though maybe I'm not missing much) and the Queen's Speech. (That last one was a joke.) Anyway, we're going to have an as-near-to-normal-as-possible Christmas Eve. We have a bottle of wine, loads of nice cheese, two slices of the most expensive cake in the world, and a slushy Christmas vid, Sleepless In Seattle. As we were cycling home from the supermarket this afternoon I saw two Japanese guys dressed as Santa and Rudolph. Rudolph was smoking a fag. I rushed out with the camera but they'd gone. Maybe they're preparing to deliver presents to kids here before heading towards Europe. So if you hear the sound of coughing from the rooftop, or if Santa looks a bit skinnier and more, well, Japanese than normal, don't be surprised. Have added a couple of links to other blogs about Japan on the left - proof that I'm not as original as I hoped... Friday, December 20, 2002
 After the technical nightmares of yesterday, I'm feeling a bit more at ease in the modern world: the iPod has indeed miraculously fixed itself. It looks like the battery needed to drain. And at the risk of this blog becoming a blog about my blog (yawn!), I managed to fix most of my problems, except I no longer have any archives at all and have no idea how to fix it. If any Blogger experts stumble across this site and can advise me, please add a comment or email me. My students were amazed that Gackt was the most-searched-for Japanese man on Google. "He's too beauty," said one. Yesterday was draining - uncommunicative students (you try having a 45 minute conversation with someone who will only say "yes" or "no" and doesn't understand most of the things you say), hyperactive kids, my nose running in every lesson, which is a problem here, where blowing your nose is akin to throwing a kitten onto the train tracks. Actually, they probably wouldn't care about that. There's so much fur on display here - I had a student yesterday with a couple of dead rabbits hung around her neck. It's sickening. But our New Year break is fast approaching. Can't wait. Thursday, December 19, 2002
I have just registered with a site that allows people to add comments to your site. So let's see if this works... Oh great, now the whole site has gone up the creek. Template's vanished. Aaargh! Have been attacked by technical gremlins today, and it's crazy how stressed out I allow myself to get when things like this happen. Firstly, my iPod has died. Won't turn on, won't recharge; it's just a pretty white brick. So unless it miraculously fixes itself during the next few days it will have to go back for repairs. And this site is giving me grief too. The archives on the left should start at 1 December, but a week has vanished into the cyber-ether. Bugger. Still, on the bright side, I'm getting more hits - mainly people searching for Beyblades (the bit about them is in the vanished archive!) and Sumo wrestling. Wednesday, December 18, 2002
As you may know, Google have just published their annual figures detailing who searched for what and where. I'm sure loads of other bloggers have critiqued this so I'm just going to concentrate on the Japanese list. The top ten of most popular queries is filled with astonishingly dull things like wallpaper, maps and postal codes. More interesting are the most-searched-for people. I'm going to be honest now: I've never heard of any of the top ten women. Which just goes to show that I should never try to pass myself off as an expert on Japanese pop culture. I've just looked up the number one J-babe, Otoha. Unsurprisingly, she's a pop singer. But I don't understand why Ayumi Hamasaki and Hikaru Utada, the country's two biggest female singers, aren't on the list. Weird. could be because their fans are all teens who do all their surfing through their mobile phones and don't use Google? Anyway, the number one J-dude is Gackt, another pop star. He makes Boy George look butch:  Another pretty boy is at number two - Beckham - and there are three other footballers on the list: Nakata, Inamoto and Nakamura. Nice to see the soccer players outnumbering the baseball stars - purely because of the World Cup effect, I think. When I got here in March, the only reaction I got when I mentioned the WC was a shiver of fear at the thought of all the hooligans (fuurigans) who were expected to arrive in their thousands, loot the shops, rape the women and drop litter. By the end of the tournament everyone in the country had a favourite team (usually England or Brazil), a fave player (Beckham or, amazingly, Oliver Kahn) and a Japan team T-shirt. Watching thousands of blue-feverish kids go nuts in Shibuya the night Japan beat Russia, running back and forth across the road, jumping up and down on top of phone boxes while the police shouted at them through megaphones, is one of the highlights of my time here. I've just added an About Me page to this site. I want to add lots more - articles, book reviews, and a navigation bar! I have a lot to learn. Tuesday, December 17, 2002
Ventured into Shibuya today to buy Christmas cards and a stocking filler for Butterbird. Shibuya is the most manic, crowded part of the city - come out of the station and you find yourself at Hachiko Square, which is like Piccadilly Circus magnified and dipped in neon, with the volume cranked up to eleven. J-teens pour across the crossing towards the world's busiest Starbucks and the 109 Tower, a fashion Tower of Babel that sells all the clothes a Tokyo girl could want. (Latest fashions include enormous socks worn with loafers, woolly hats and T-shirts adorned with freaky English - often a random word, like 'Genital'. I always mean to write down the things I see on T-shirts here but always forget, pathetically.) One of Japan's top boybands, the unfortunately named W-inds, released their new CD today, The System of Alive. They're a bit like Blue, on helium. Their admittedly-catchy single was blasting out of enormous speakers outside HMV, and girls were queuing to get posters and to take photographs. No, not pictures of the band - they weren't there. They were queuing to take pictures of the cardboard displays announcing their heroes' latest release. I battled my way past them, got my cards and the soundtrack to the Eminem film, 8 Mile, then headed home. I've just been good and written a bit more of my novel, but it's coming along very slowly. I need to do some research into evolution and DNA and other scientific stuff. I hate doing research. I'm getting a cold, just in time for Christmas. Soon, I'll be able to join the hawkers at the station. Hurrah. Friday, December 13, 2002
One of the worst things about living in Japan, especially in the winter, is the amount of hawking that goes on. No, I'm not talking about birds of prey. I'm talking about this: Haaaakkkhhhhhhhh! In a country where it's verboten to blow your nose in public, there's nothing wrong with bringing up a lungful of phlegm and sharing it with everyone else on the train platform, making the most unbelievably vile noises ever. This morning, on the way to work, a salaryman drowned out the dawn chorus with a splendid solo hooooooikkkk-cchhhhaah! And coming home, another chap stepped off the train, produced a sound that I could never hope to reproduce, gobbed the resulting green stuff onto the platform, then stepped back onto the train. And nobody batted an eyelid.  A hawk Wednesday, December 11, 2002
The Wakayama District Court sentenced Masumi Hayashi to death on Wednesday (today) for killing four people, including two children, and poisoning 63 others by lacing a curry stew with arsenic in the city of Wakayama in 1998. Japan has a very low crime rate, but the crimes they do have tend to be a bit . . . weird. Like the curry murders, for which the aforementioned woman was sentenced to death today. A few years ago, a 14-year-old schoolboy cut off a younger boy's head and left it outside the school gates. See here. One of my fellow karaokers, Aimee, has put pictures of the guilty (um, guilty of noise pollution, not poisoning and decapitation) on Sony ImageStation. You have to be a member to look - it's free, but a hassle, and therefore inferior to Apple's fantastic .Mac service . . . but then, I have to pay for that one. Anyroad, if you want to see me and my colleagues singing (with no sound, unfortunately), check this out. Tuesday, December 10, 2002
  The land of the individually shrink-wrapped carrot in extra-early snowfall shock! Woke up with a killer hangover, after the school Xmas Party & Karaoke Sesh (more below), to find that the streets of Musashi-Shinjo had turned white. Apparently, it was record-breaking stuff for December - read more here! For the first time since I've been in Japan, the trains were running late. Unfortunately, by late-afternoon it had turned into grey, mushy slush, and has now all gone. Still, it gave me the opportunity to teach my students useful words like 'slippery' and 'slushy' and 'snowball fight'. And at my Japanese class (only the second; I started last week) I learned how to say, "I like looking at snow but I don't like walking in it.": Yuki o miruno wa suki desu demo aruko no wa suki dewa arimasen. Yuki is snow. By the way, the pictures above are of our apartment block and the allotments out front. It's practically countryside round 'ere. It's so cold in Tokyo right now - 2° C yesterday, about 7° today. Though my cousin Martin lives in Chicago and it's 2° F there... So . . . the Karaoke Party. As always, it was enormous fun. Personal highlights included a rousing version of 'Wannabe', my usual 'Hound Dog' and a duet of 'Go West' with Paul, with me doing the low bits. Larae did his usual perfect rendition of 'Ma Cherie Amour' and Scotto-san dressed as Santa-san, getting mobbed by a bunch of Japanese teens on his way out: he had men kissing him and trying to hold his hand. However, the b*st*rds who run the izakaya where we went chucked us out at ten. We'd hired the room from 8 o'clock, with an all-you-can-drink-and-eat-for-3000-yen deal. We didn't realise, however, that you had to finish your drinks by ten. So the staff came and literally wrestled the still-full glasses of beer from our hands. They weren't happy. Chris, who speaks Japanese, asked them if they'd heard the Japanese proverb about the customer being God. They were even less happy after that. So we had to go to another place where we drank even more beer, at even more expense, before heading home with a very inebriated Santa Claus, singing 'We Wish You A Merry Christmas' to our fellow passengers as we headed home. Saturday, December 07, 2002
Saturday is the busiest day of the week at the language school where I work. We arrive at 9:20am to prepare our lessons, which involves checking the day's schedule (8 classes a day), trying to find the files (with a big emphasis on trying), then attempting to find a lesson that none of the 3 or 4 students in the group has done recently (with a big emphasis on...ah, you know what I'm going to say). Our school has hundreds of students, but some come the same time every week and have burned through all the lessons, so this can be a nightmare. Anyway, we always manage to come up with something. We have to. Most of the students are lovely: friendly, chatty, cool and interesting. But there are a few who just sit and look at you, struck dumb, and these are the people who come at the same time every week. If I've learned one thing over the last nine months, it's how to keep a conversation going, about any subject: the weather, English food, me, sumo wrestling, Harry Potter, life as a systems engineer, me, whether or not window shopping can be classified as a hobby, me, the declining birthrate in Japan - which is happening because young women these days want to go to work and Japanese men refuse to do housework, apparently - and, um, me. Today's students were mostly cool, including some 'returnees' - kids who used to live in English-speaking countries but have now returned to Japan, their English-speaking abilities ebbing away. I also taught (God, I nearly typed 'teached' - it's catching) a group of hyperactive 5-year-olds. "It's an angel. It's a Christmas tree. It's green." I love teaching the kids, though - they're so cute, and I had them all singing "We wish you a merry Christmas" and "Jingle Bells". Although this version of "Jingle Bells" went "Ee ee ee, ee ee ee, uuh uuh uuh uh uuuh..." Still, they knew the tune. Have just been to the Post Office to pick up a parcel full of Christmas presents from my mum. Of course, I will wait until Christmas Day to open them. Tomorrow night is our office Xmas party: karaoke, which I LOVE. My top karaoke tunes: 1. Hound Dog by Elvis 2. Faith by George Michael 3. Billie Jean by Wacko Jacko 4. Hungry Like The Wolf by Duran Duran I have also been known to do a rendition of It's Raining Men, during which two gay guys kept trying to tweak my nipples. Friday, December 06, 2002
 Have just finished reading The Little Friend by Donna Tartt. When DT's first novel, The Secret History came out ten (count 'em) years ago, I was practically evangelical about it. It became my mission in life to press it upon everyone I knew: 'You must read this book, it's the greatest novel ever, blah blah blah.' Well, maybe it's not the best novel ever written but it was definitely the best book of the nineties, and to say I was quite looking forward to DT's new one is like saying children quite look forward to Christmas. So with that much anticipation, it was bound to be disappointing. And it was. But... it's still a great book. The writing, in parts, is astonishing - dense and lush and teeming with wildlife: snakes and mosquitoes that strike and bite; dead cats and killer dogs. Some of the scenes had me hissing with laughter, trying to suppress my mirth because Butter was asleep beside me (I'm so thoughtful!) As the story nears its climax, the characters' lives spin out of control like a wayward Beyblade, and DT captures the drug- and grief-fuelled paranoia of the players brilliantly. The main character, Harriet, is an outcast, a dark-minded child who lives in the world of adventure stories - she's a great creation. Her best friend, Hely, is great too. Actually, in a lot of ways, DT writes male characters better than she does female ones. Harriet is repulsed by the coming arrival of puberty; she doesn't want to be a woman. And neither of DT's novel's have dealt with female sexuality in any real way. In fact, she pretty much ignores sex altogether. The Secret History was a one-off: the most atmospheric, compelling novel I've ever read. And The Little Friend suffers beside it. It lacks that X-factor that the judges on Pop Idol were always banging on about. So it's definitely worth reading, but don't expect another Secret History. Buy it from Amazon.co.uk Thursday, December 05, 2002
I've just written 1000-odd words of my new novel, so I've earned the right to enter something here. Earlier this year, a friend, who I'll call LV, and I wrote a novel together - a stalker novel with a twist. Anyway, the BBC have optioned it (no, I'm not rich; far from it) but we haven't yet been able to find a publisher for it. Our agent is going to wait and see what happens with the Beeb - ie, will it actually go into production - and then start looking for a publisher. Hopefully, things might start to happen next year. Though I ain't holding my breath... One of my students told me today about the latest must-have gadget in Japan: a Bowlingual. It's a little machine that translates your dog's speech into human language. You hang this contraption around Fido's neck and when he barks, a translation appears on the Bowlingual's screen. For example *Woof woof* might mean, 'Hmm, your bottom smells delightful.' *Baaark* could be, 'I want to eat that cat so bad it hurts.' What would Gary Larson make of it, I wonder? And will there be one for cats? *Miaow* = "I'm so cool." *Miaow miaow* = "I'm so f**king cool." Etc. If you want a Bowlingual (which only translates into Japanese at the moment, I'm afraid) it will set you back about £75 (14,800JPY). Wednesday, December 04, 2002
Ah, the joys of living in Japan. A couple of weeks ago, I got an email from my mum asking if it was possible to get Beyblades out here, because they are the only thing my little nephews want from Santa, along with the entire pre-pubescent population of the UK, apparently. I'd never heard of such things, but Butterbird (that's my girlfriend) and I took a trip to Kiddyland, which has to the be the coolest shop in Japan, if not the entire world. Six floors of loopy, kawaii, singing, dancing toys and ultra-cute accessories; teen girls wandering glassy-eyed among the Afrodogs and Kitti-chans and a thousand other not-quite-right Japanese creations, like teddy bears with long claws and these weird wind-up dancing pink men. And there, on the fifth floor, were the Beyblades. Tons of 'em. They're last year's thing here, you see. J-kids have moved onto something new (hey, don't get me started on the Gameboy Advance e-reader...) Another cool thing about shopping in Japan is that they wrap everything for you for free. Actually, they've pretty much mastered the commercial side of Christmas - and if you think Christmas is commercialised in Europe or America, well . . . the Japanese have taken Christmas and removed the lip-service to family and religion, and made it a 100% money-money-money, glitter and baubles, fake plastic trees Santa-fest. It's also a romantic event here. On Christmas Eve, instead of hanging up their stockings, girls and boys head to the city's love hotels and take their stockings off. (We stayed in a love hotel as a special treat for Butterbird's birthday. The room wasn't themed - the themed ones are elusive and expensive - but was done up like a seventies hotel, with mirrors on the ceiling and condoms on the pillows; as soon as you open the door, pixellated porn appears on the TV, and there's a jet-bath to wash away your sticky patches. The receptionist sits behind a screen with her face hidden. And you can order dildoes on room service.) Anyway, we got the Beyblades  Have just watched Bjork's film, Dancer in the Dark. Feel a bit traumatised now. Bjork was fantastic, especially during the musical scenes. But the end . . . God - if you want a feelgood film, stick with Mary Poppins. 
The Golden Turd - High above the streets of Tokyo, the Golden Turd squats atop the Asahi Brewery Building (good beer, crap symbol), shining in the sun. This is my first post to MarkCity. I'm an English Teacher in Tokyo. Actually, teacher is probably not the right word, as that conjures an image of someone with qualifications, skills and a big blackboard rubber. I'm really an instructor, whose job entails chatting to housewives, salarymen, and the odd smattering of cool students, cute office ladies and j-dudes. They mash some English words together and I correct their grammar and word order. I've been doing it for 9 months and have 3 months to go. I'll be writing a lot more about English, ahem, instructing, over the coming weeks, as well as lots of stuff about Japan, writing, music, movies, my lovely iPod, my lovelier girlfriend, and the daily struggle that is being a veggie in the world's most carnivorous country. |