This teacher is quite tall and very fond of shouting. She doesn’t shout at us, she shouts with us – as in when she draws a character on the board she shouts its name and we have to shout it back, it’s exhausting. Her voice is also quite shrill and sharp so its like being told off by something saying “KaKiKuKeKo.”
The Japanese have a word for 10,000 which is “man” and one of their words for seven is “nana.” Put them together and you get 70,000 or “Nanaman” which I have great trouble saying because it sounds so much like Bananaman. If you are not familiar with Bananaman then just know that he is a weedy boy called Eric who, when he eats a banana, turns into a camp blue and yellow banaskinned superhero whose strength and ability to fly help him save the world from numerous none-fruit related villains. Here's the man himself:
And when you get 40,000 it’s called “Yon Man.” When our teacher screams this it sounds just like “Your mum,” which is one of the laziest British insults around.
After the lesson me, Ian and Henrik went to find a restaurant for lunch. As we were queuing to get in we managed to figure out that you have to choose your meal, order and it and even pay for it before you actually get to sit down at a table. This efficient way of doing things is good if you know what you want, I didn’t. As you may know I don’t normally eat fish or meat, but since coming to Japan I have started eating fish because it makes life so much easier. I know this is a questionable reason for bending one’s morals but I like to think that with the amount of fish I have NOT EATEN in the past 16 years I have built up some kind of fish allowance which I am now spending.
I don’t actually know what I ordered, they use picture menus in Japan and I just chose the picture which most obviously depicted a fish on a plate. What arrived was some rice, grated horse radish, some mysterious stuff, some more mysterious stuff, a small bowl of miso soup and a large fish on a plate with no head or tail but an intact skeleton. I had to eat this fish with chop sticks and using these to pull out a piece of fish, de-bone it and then get it into my mouth was like something out of the Crystal Maze. It was nice though.
When I got home I met Yan-San and we went to a bookshop where I browsed the shelves not understanding anything. I did look through a dog magazine which was exactly like a fashion magazine for dogs; every page a picture of a dog wearing a coat or, some other unnecessary accessory, and staring aimlessly into the camera. There was no such magazine for cats sadly, people have probably lost their fingers trying to make one. Another magazine I picked up was The Disney Magazine which is the most sickening catalogue of people dressed up as Disney characters hugging kids and whatnot. You can actually see the Tokyo Disneyland from the train when it goes over a large bridge. There is a castle and space mountain. It’s so odd looking into the distance and seeing a fantasy land about 10 kilometres away. Here is a picture of it, you can see the castle on the left and the mountain on the right.
We ate dinner in a Tempura place. I didn’t use the word restaurant because to me a restaurant is a place with not only food you can order but also tables and chairs at which to eat it. This place was standing room only. You point to what you want, they give it to you in a bowl, you pay for it then stand by the counter eating with disposable chopsticks. People came in, ordered, ate and left all in the space of five minutes. Another example of efficient food in Tokyo. Tempura itself is just deep-fried battered fish or vegetables; you have it in a kind of thin liquidy soup with noodles etc. It’s highly nice.
Most of the evening I spent talking to the other people here. Yan-San gave me a list of body parts to learn. Turns out that the Japanese word for wrist is a combination of the word for hand and neck so it is like the neck of the hand, clever innit.
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