From Sendai to Tokyo

I got up early to catch my coach from Sendai to Tokyo. I was happy to be getting out of the hostel but it felt strange to just walk out the door with no one behind the desk, no key to return, no linen to put in a bin, no goodbyes or come again. Not that I would, I was leaving forever when I stepped out that door with my life on my back again.

I made it to my coach. Sat on board feeling excited to be going back to familiar territory. Travelling is tiring in subtle ways, there’s something about always moving and everything being unfamiliar that gets to you after a while.

When Tokyo loomed out the windows I kept looking for places I knew, sights I recognised, but there were none. Tokyo was still full of things I hadn’t seen before. I got off in Ikebukuro and went down into the subway. There were police everywhere, and just like in Hokkaido the coin lockers were all sealed off from public use. Bloody G8.

A tough looking looking policeman was standing next to the ticket barrier and I went to ask him whether the lockers were unusable at all the stations or just the larger ones. His face turned into a smile and although he didn’t know the answer to my question he was extremely friendly. It’s nice to know that in this paranoid age when a policeman is given the responsibility to prevent major terrorist attacks while G8 world leaders discuss our impending environmental doom, he can still be friendly to wayward tourists.

I called my hostel in Asakusabashi, which rolls off the tongue after a few practices, to ask if I could leave my bag their early. The woman on the phone had a cheerful voice and said it was absolutely fine.

A few hours later I was back in Minami Gyotoku and walking to my old home, where I would see my old room as someone else’s for the first time. Walking the streets my mind was full of comparisons, I had seen more of the country and somehow things made more sense to me having seen their different incarnations. Like phone boxes, convenience stores, signs, people’s accents - they weren’t just Japanese anymore, they were this region of Japan.

The door code hadn’t changed to the guesthouse and Yoko had left me her key in her shoebox. I was a guest for the first time. Although she was at work she was their to welcome me in spirit. She had left her air conditioning on for me, left a plate of pumpkin rolls, homemade cookies and a bag Chocolate Pillow cereal for my breakfast, lunch and snacks.

I sent her an email called, “I’m in your room, is that scary?” and she quickly replied from her desk saying “no.”

The compressed mountain of my belongings under Yoko’s bed had not subsided over time and I hacked away at it again, filling another box to send back to the UK. Sweating I took my load down to the post office and waved it goodbye.

It was already feeling like a long day, but the main event had not happened yet. As well as seeing Yoko, Kizuna, Kosuke and Il Heung from the guest house I was also going to see Yang who I had not seen since Australia. The last time we saw each other was on the bus to Sydney International Airport when we were too rushed for a proper goodbye, both because we had different planes to catch and because we were living one hour ahead of everyone else (we got Sydney time wrong).

But for a few days he was returning to Japan to see Kizuna, his now girlfriend, a few other people and
me. I was meeting him that day, just waiting for his call.

And waiting

And waiting

Then Yoko came home. I welcomed her back to her own room like a polite squatter. We sat around her kotatsu (small heated table you kneel at with knees under cloth which hangs down) and talked the tales we had to tell. Though it had only been a week.

Around 7PM there was a knock on the door. It was Yang. He beckoned me out and we spoke in whispered hellos outside her door. Yoko opened the door and suddenly his performance began.

He was different. His Japanese accent had changed, he sat with a straightened back at the table, spoke very politely and I sat between them watching the whole thing. When they had nothing else to say to each other they would look to me to fill the void. Yoko was as surprised as I was, but she punctured his demeanour by embarrassing him in her cheeky way.

We went downstairs to have food with the others and it was like old times. I had my story to tell and myself, Yang and Kizuna had tomorrow to plan. We were going to go to Fuji Safari, a large safari park next to Mount Fuji. For various reasons I was not planning on visiting Mount Fuji on my trip but I wanted to get a better view of it and the Safari park would do the job. It was also roughly half way between Tokyo and Nakano, my next destination.

Amid beer, sushi and three languages it was time for me to get to my hostel. Yang wanted to walk me to the station so I bid Yoko a, “see you in Nagasaki” - the final destination of my trip which seemed an impossible distance and amount of time away.

Yang and I worked out where to meet the next day and then I made my way across town to Asakusabashi. It was already 11:30 or so but Tokyo rarely feels dangerous.

In the hostel they gave me a pile of linen to fit around futon number 3 in the room 4. Again there were no keys, just a piece of plastic to prove that I had rights to futon 3 of the room 4.

The room was dark when I got there but I could see bodies lying around the edges, some more asleep than others but there was a civilised silence. Each futon was divided from its neighbours by free standing wooden screens that could be folded up or opened out depending on how sociable you were feeling.

By the light of my phone I found futon number 3, took off the sign and fumbled around in the dark trying to put the sheet on, then the duvet and pillow case. I changed and went to brush my teeth.

Being the last one to go to sleep I closed the paper door and the rest of the light was extinguished. In the darkness I arranged my things, set my alarm and lay my head down to sleep.

I hadn’t quite fallen asleep when something landed on me. It had a distinctive feeling of being large, flat and not very heavy and I knew immediately that it was the wooden screen of the person sleeping next to me. He sprang up instantly and picked it back up saying, “Sorry” in a Japanese accent with a hint of panic.

Had he been able to see my face he would have seen that I was laughing. “It’s OK,” I said. New experiences, new experiences.

Matsushima

The time difference between the UK and Japan is eight or nine hours depending on British Summertime. The upshot being that in order to call at a sensible time I had to get up at 6AM which worked out fine for most of my trip but in the hostel in Sendai I was confronted with a problem.

One of the many rules of the hostel was about the door not opening until that certain time that the proprietor could be bothered to get up. But just as the air-conditioners in each room were only for show, so was the front door. Once I worked out that it was just like the shower doors back at the hostel, I found the little slidey catch and won my freedom.

It was my Matsushima day, the first of the Nihon Sankei - Japan’s three great sights. My guide book describes Matsushima as, “250 islands covered in pines that have been moulded by the wind and misshapen by the ceaseless slapping of waves.” The other sights are a spit of land that goes out to the sea that you are supposed to view between your legs because the sea looks like the sky. The final sight is… somewhere else on my list that I’ll go on about in due course.

One reason Sendai is a popular destination for tourists in Japan is because it is so close to Matsushima, just a 30 minute train ride to Matsushima-kaigan station.

When you arrive you walk straight out of the train station and follow the other tourists over a road, past some shops, through a small park and then to the edge of the sea where you get your first glimpse of the islands of Matsushima.


The smallest are just large rocks with a few trees but they vary in size with some being explorable, and boat trips for tourists weave between the most interesting.

Everyone else turned left so I turned right and walked parallel to the water’s edge. The path narrowed to go around a mini cliff and then I came upon an ornate red bridge connecting the main land to one of the islands.


The whole sight of it: so perfectly fitted to its function yet so beautifully made and with the calm sound of the water against the land and nobody about. I was getting a sense of why Matsushima is so special.

I crossed the bridge.


It only took a few minutes to walk around the island, but I took it slowly, appreciating the serenity of the place and the different views it provided.

Then I started to notice small statues of the Buddha hidden among the trees or standing along the pathways. Some of them had been weathered so that their faces no longer had features, like in the quiet of Matsushima they had removed their human masks to reveal alien faces. I was too unnerved to take a picture.

For some reason there was a foreboding tunnel through the rock leading back to the bridge, it was like a test.


Once through the tunnel I looked back and saw more faceless statues carved into the rock face.


Back on the main land I kept walking in my rebellious direction and ended up on a marshy beach which gave another view of the bridge. You can see the shrine too.


The beach wasn’t going anywhere interesting so I turned back and walked through the park again. A little further along was a strange shaped island with a large shrine.


I was struck by the right hand side of the island because to me the rock and the trees were curving like a wave towards the water.



But once on the island I was more interested in the view of the seagulls on a nearby jetty. I liked the way they were all looking in the same direction as if betting on which boat would come back first.


Further along the shore was an enormous bridge


leading to an enormous island, so big that you had to buy a ticket.

There were a few other tourists on the island but were enough pathways that we only saw each other at random intersections. I liked the quiet peaceful nature of the place, it was all around and not only to be found on rocks in rivers like Sendai.

That was until I walked down a smaller path and got cobwebs on my face.

I don’t like spiders but thankfully the trees obscured me as I danced around panic stricken and brushing the invisible creatures off my legs and arms. I stuck to the larger paths after that.

There seemed to be lots of nesting couples, nesting on benches with their arms around each other. One couple watched me as I scrambled down to a jetty that I thought would make a good picture.


You know those posters you often find in doctor’s waiting rooms, of a jetty going out to a really peaceful lake with mountains in the background. That’s what I wanted to get.

But it really didn’t work.

I tried to get the picture to be straight: get the jetty and sea parallel to each other. But then I realised that they weren’t parallel, the jetty was uneven. But I took another picture anyway.


On the other side of the island, another view.


When I was nearing my circumnavigation of the island I went down some steps and came to a large stretch of grassland, bigger than I thought the whole island was.


It was amazing, like stepping into an oasis or a hallucination. And it was so pretty with flowers and picnic benches. It reminded me of that bit in The Land Before Time when the little dinosaurs climb up the big mountain, get to the summit and see before them the magical fertile land they had been hoping for. Come to think of it I may have just spoilt the end of that film.

A little further on and I was back to the bridge. On the way across it I took this picture of a boat against the edge of the island.


And this one of a seagull sitting on the bridge.


From there I headed to Oku-Matsushima because my guidebook said, “natural beauty is the order of the day here. Sagakei is a 40m-high scenic canyon overhanging the Pacific ocean. Otakamori is a small hill offering a terrific panorama.” It told me to go to Nobiru station, six stops from where I was.

However, once you leave Nobiru station the adventurous music stops playing in your head and you realise that you are in the middle of nowhere. Over a bridge and you find yourself walking down a road through a forest of pine trees that leads to the beach. The pine tree forest is quite beautiful, it would make a great location for a film about being chased by a time travelling samurai.

The beach is a big empty bay of sand and rock, or at least it was when I was there. I found a sign pointing me in the direction of Oku-Matsushima but it gave me one detail that my guidebook hadn’t bothered to mention: 5KM.

“Gah,” said Left Brain.
“So what?” said Right Brain.
“That’s really far, that’s like…”
“3 miles,” added the Parietal Cortex.
“So, we can walk that. It’s not too dark, we’re young and bipedal,” said Right Brain.
“I don’t know,” said Left Brain cautiously.
“Oh come on,” pleaded Right Brain.
“You can go, I’ll just stay here,” suggested Left Brain.
“I don‘t like that idea,” Corpus Striatum interjected nervously.
“While you’ve been arguing we’ve already been walking for a minute,” The Feet cheekily pointed out.
“So much for hierarchical processing,” said the Bowel.

I walked through the pines until the path ran out. I walked along the road until the pavement started. I walked along the pavement past a large youth hostel. I walked past a lake and took a picture


I walked past a field of sunflowers and then the road widened. There was water on both sides and large cliff faces sealing it in. A boating lake was on the left and a shop was still open. I bought some water and carried on.

There had been no signs for quite a while but I kept going. The road started to curve around the cliff faces: the canyon my guidebook had described. Some wooden walkways looked promisingly like they might lead up to a viewing spot. But they just led over the marshy ground and back on the road. A man with a small digger was tending to the plants and gave me a strange look that I tried to ignore.

I was getting tired and the day was getting late. Then I came to a pathway leading up the hill with a sign next to it, but it wasn’t the right path. I thought about cutting my loses and going up that one but I kept going.

The road became a bridge and the lake became a harbour. Then fields appeared on the left with farmers pulling the plants from the soil. A bonfire was going at the top of the field, the smell of smoke was thick in the air. That was when I found it, the entrance.

I was very close to my destination now, except that it was above me. The light was fading quickly and I raced up the pathway, jogging over the loose stones between the trees. There was a random shrine tucked into the trees on the right hand side, but I had no time for it. I kept going and then AHHHH

Another cobweb, another panicky dance.

I walked after that, with a stick outstretched to break any webs. There were a few stretched over the path, some occupied, some not. I destroyed them as I went.

At a fork in the road there were two signs. Both had the same destination but different numbers of metres. I took the shortcut, the path was narrower and less trodden and eventually I came to an enormous spider in an enormous web.

The web was a triangle with about 3 metres on each side, it was clearly built to catch humans. I wasn’t sure where to start attacking it with my stick. Then I noticed a small gap in the web that I could duck through. I measured it carefully, bent over and stepped through.

Doing the panicky dance again I spun around to check the spider was still in its web and so not on my face. It was hanging in its layer, undisturbed by my tiny, insignificant presence.

Pantingly running I emerged back onto the main path and could see the summit in sight. A man appeared at the same time, also panting but walking steadily with a large camera around his neck and a wife trailing behind.

At the summit was this.


And this.


And this.


And I knew it had been worth it.


The wife rejoined her husband and they stood together staring out at the vista while he snapped pictures. I left before them, conscious of the long walk back.

I took the shortcut, ducked under the spider’s web again and took this picture.


Disappointingly neither the web or spider is visible, but trust me they were massive.

Nearly back to the road I left my trusty spider stick at the side of the shrine, as a sign of appreciation and respect on our parting. Perhaps someone will find it lying at the shrine and wonder about is story. Perhaps not.

Near the harbour I couldn’t resist having another crack at the jetty picture but it came out very dark indeed.


I decided to listen to some music on my MP3 player: Groove Armada, that CD the Guardian gave away years ago that I had ripped. The original CD was at my parents home in the cupboard next to the TV, but its songs were with me in the fading light on my walk back to Nobiru

There were no street lights on the road, and the man I had seen earlier was packing away, he might have said something to me as I walked past him but I couldn’t hear him. I tried to smile reassuringly at him that I knew where I was going.

It was a long walk but eventually I made it to a comfortable train seat that took me back to my hostel, and my last (snore free) night in Sendai.

A day in Sendai

Morning. Shower. Out. Heat. High sun. Low sky. Bicycles. Narrow roads. Onigiri from 99yen shop.

The bus station is below the train station in Sendai, conveniently located next to a large Yodobashi Kamera electronics store. After buying my bus ticket to Tokyo I went to cool off along the isle of air-conditioning units eager to show off how cool they could make me feel. As the circling sales clerks circled nearer I changed floors to the games.

A gleaming white Xbox 360 was on display with two controllers reaching alluringly towards me. I own an Xbox 360 but getting to play one whilst being far away from home, where mine was tucked under Yoko’s bed, was verging on heavenly. Nobody was around to bother me as I drove myself around some racing game or another. You might think that being on holiday, getting the chance to explore a city but spending the time in a shop starring at a screen was a heinous waste of time. But you’re wrong, it was great.

The best part of Sendai is this street.


It’s a really wide street with a tree-lined avenue running along its centre.

A number of statues stand in the middle facing each other like the last pieces in a mythic game of Chess. This is one of them.


Depending which way you approach this statue from you either get the back…


Or the front.


The trees make the avenue feel cooler than the rest of the city, and the filtered light through the leaves is calming. There are benches to rest and watch the cars go by: so close and yet unable to spoil the serenity.

On the same road is this distinctive building.


It is famous for its outer walls being made of so much glass, or something like that.

Inside is a library and some small galleries. I took the lift up to the free galleries and had a gander at some of the natural themed artworks on display.

The last one I went to was all about leaves and outside it was a desk where two elderly women sat. Their job, after much explanation, was to give people pieces of paper and scissors so that they could make their own leaves.

So it was that I found myself sitting in the art gallery at another desk cutting out leaf shapes. I hadn’t entirely understood what I was supposed to do but I was happy in my work and stayed there much longer than anyone else. After a while another visitor sat next to me and admired what I was doing, which was a sort of origami 3D vine.

When it was finished one of the women from the front desk came over and asked me if I wanted to keep my creation or whether it could go on the wall. I declined the chance to keep it and she led me to the wall of leaves where I discovered what I was supposed to have made.


Everyone else had drawn out a leaf shape, cut it out and coloured it in. Well, there were a few variations on the theme but none like mine.


I apologised politely for making something different but they were happy to have something else to go on the wall. They gave me a pin and let me choose the space for my vine to grow evermore (well until they throw them all out for the next exhibition). Bowing my way out I thanked them for my fun forty minutes and hit the outside heat again.

From that point on my day took a nose dive. I walked for what seemed like hours in the boiling air and blinding sunshine to get to the main art gallery, which was closed for renovation. Then I trudged to the castle ruins which were steep and little more than scattered rocks. Everywhere I tried to sit to eat my convenience store lunch seemed to be in the sunshine or next to people digging. I did find a quiet place at the foot of the castle where I sat on the most comfortable rock I could find and avoided the sun beams.

I went back to the library to use the Internet and moaned a bit to the lady who had been so angelic to me the day before. I felt a bit guilty afterwards.

About 3pm I headed back to Sendai main, over the bridge over the river when I saw a little path. The path led down to the river bank where there was grass to walk on for some way. I scampered off happily walking parallel to the river until I took a smaller path to the water’s edge where there were some flat rocks lying just above the water. I made my way to the one furthest into the water and sat.


This was my second favourite place in Sendai and I spent the best part of an hour just sitting, listening to the water, watching things flying and landing around me. At the precise moment I took this picture a plastic bag sailed into view. It wasn’t an American Beauty inspired moment of inanimate-object-becoming-animate art, it was just some rubbish that got in the shot.

Maybe I was catching Sendai at a bad time. Maybe it was in the middle of renovating itself, or perhaps it was because I wasn’t using the tourist buses that I was left feeling tired and bored.

I dusted myself off and went back to my hostel. On the way I listened to some music that I only listen to when I am feeling low, or need my energy back for an event. I probably only listen to it about three times a year, and have done for several years. The power of it is immense, I can feel it as a physical reaction within me. Perhaps that’s not surprising as blasting into my headphones it is as loud as thunder. It restored me as it always does, put a smile back on my face and made the world seem full of potential again.

In case you’re wondering what I was listening to. Wonder away.

Back in my hostel room was a Belgian man.
“Oh no,” I thought.
“Hello,” I said.

He was taking the opposite journey to me: South to North. He ran off a long list of places he had already been, showed me his guidebook with a map of Japan complete with circles for the cities he’d already conquered. He asked me for some advice on Hokkaido, I told him what I knew and then the conversation dried up.

He went out for some food. And later on so did I.

That night I was already under my futon and in the dark when he got back. He didn’t wake me up because I wasn’t asleep, but that was the only reason.

I did fall asleep at some point, and then woke again later to a deafening snore. My room mate was lying on his back, his stomach looking more immense now that it was horizontal, rising and falling like some great bellows to power his snore mouth.

I have heard loud snores before. In university I was woken up by the snore of a friend whose room was not next to mine, but opposite it. His snore was loud enough to go through two fire doors and wake me. He usually slept with the light on in his room, but that night The West Wing was on too.

It’s not an insult on The West Wing , I think he was just tired and being a city person he was used to falling asleep with noise around him. His snore had woken me up but The West Wing was keeping me awake. I knocked on his door to try and wake him, but my knock couldn’t compete with his snore. I called his phone and heard it ringing, but not as loudly as President Bartlet‘s phones.

We were living on the ground floor, and in the end I walked around to his slightly open window, managed to reach some oranges that were on his windowsill and throw them at him until he woke up. He was obviously confused: waking up to oranges flying towards him, and my arm and face at the window.
“Could you turn The West Wing off please, I can’t sleep”
“Ohhhhh, OK”

But in a hostel room in Sendai there were no oranges and no West Wing. There was only the Snore.

Trying to make the best of the situation I turned the Snore into a story.

“There once was a kingdom called HUCKSF where lived the beautiful princess FUHKFS who wanted to escape to KOSFH and slay the magical dragon JUSHF but her father the mighty HFUDAF used the magic of the crystal USCHG and the voice of the seamstress JFUAG to give his daughter the dream of PHOSFG

and so on.

To Sendai

A new day, a new island and a new map to illustrate it. I was travelling from Hakodate, in Hokkaido, to Sendai in Honshu - the largest of Japan’s four islands.


Now the Seikan Tunnel may not look like much on this map but it is actually the longest underwater tunnel on the planet: which obviously includes the Channel Tunnel between Britain and France.

According to the Internet this epic train journey would only cost me 13,800 yen (£70) which seemed cheap considering it was about 536KM (333miles) which is like London to Glasgow, and through a tunnel. So I was a bit nervous when I got to Hakodate station that morning to buy a ticket, in Japan buying a ticket in advance is not any cheaper.

In the train station I laid my notebook out in front of the man at the ticket counter so that he could see exactly which train I wanted. I was especially hoping that I had the right price because that was all the money I had on me at the time - it was a weekend and my Japanese bank had a habit of shutting down its ATM system for maintenance at the weekend regardless of how much money I had in my wallet.

The chap looked at my figures and agreed, pretty soon I had a wad full of tickets, including one to ride the Shinkansen, otherwise known as the Bullet Train.

I walked through the ticket barrier and got my first train, the Super Hakucho No.14. It took three hours and four minutes and the tunnel bit was quite a disappointment. I was expecting some kind of sign saying, “Seikan Tunnel in 3,2,1” and then blackness. Instead there was just little moments of blackness and then a long sequence of it, and then trees.

The only memorable bit of that journey involved train seats. On many trains in Japan you can rotate two seats to make them into four seats together. I was sitting on my own, next to an empty seat until a boy came on and caused trouble. I think he was trying to make four seats together for his family, none of which were meant to include me but he miscalculated. He got on and rotated the seats in front of me which meant I had to quickly grab my things from the little netted pocket in front of me before they disappeared. The boy looked rather perplexed at the new arrangement of seats he had made, which included me - a strange foreigner he had just uncovered.

When you are in that situation you suddenly feel very exposed, it is like someone has taken down your bedroom wall and replaced it with a family of four. The boy’s mother said something and apologised to me. The boy went to sit with his family, leaving me still feeling exposed but with too much pride to admit to it and put the seats back.

I bet there have been some Chaplin style sketches like that on Japanese TV. Imagine if a young couple are sitting happily together on the train until some unwanted person comes and swivels the seat in front of them. The unwanted man is now sitting and facing the couple, smiling at them and resting his hands on his cane. The boyfriend of the couple frowns, stands up and rotates their seat to get away from this nuisance man, but by doing so makes a new four seat collection. The unwanted man goes and sits in the new four seat arrangement so they can‘t get away from him etc etc. I fear that was too complicated to explain without losing all of its mirth.

I had to change trains in a place called Hachinohe and board the Shinkansen. The ticket for this world famous train line even has a special shape - and I had three of them. This foxed me a little as I didn’t know which to put in the machine. In the end I put all of them in and that did the trick, the machine was cleverer than I am and knew which ones to keep and which to give back.

The Shinkansen looks like this, or at least the one I caught did: their noses vary along the spaceship theme.


Inside, the Shinkansen has an element of luxury about it: the carpets are all clean, the doors swish open obediently, the seats are very comfortable and on some carriages you can even smoke. The ride itself is so smooth and quiet that it feels more like a plane than a train.


I searched for my reserved seat but couldn’t believe what I found sitting next to it so I checked my ticket again. Sure enough though, it was my seat. Sitting next to it was the only other white person I had seen all day. The train was not very full either, there were quite a few empty seats around. I wondered as I looked at the back of his grey haired head whether there was some function built into the Japan Rail systems that aimed to keep all of the foreigners together.

I had a decision to make: either to sit in an empty seat and face the consequences, or to sit next to this man and face the consequence. You might wonder why I was so against sitting there. Well we all like to sit alone don’t we, and what’s more I wasn’t really in the mood to be talking to someone else, especially in English. You probably think I was being silly, and in the end so did I. “Excuse me,” I said.

He looked, and then looked again in surprise. My seat was next to the window and he stood up to let me sit down.
“So, what part of Japan are you from?” he asked me, officially opening the conversation.
“Oh, a small island over to the East, it’s called Britain,” I said, though I had to untie my tongue during the sentence.
“And what are you doing so far from home?”
“Well, I’ve actually been in Japan for a year and a half. I was teaching English up until last week and I’m now going on a trip around Japan before I fly home in August.”
“Right, I see.”
“How about you?”
“Well I am also from Britain but I’ve only been here for a few weeks, doing missionary work.”

My heart sank. I know that’s a mean thing to say (not to feel, just to say) but this always seems to happen to me on trains. The most recent time had been while waiting for a subway train when a Japanese man in a suit had politely asked if he could ask me some questions. The first question was a very detailed one about Lincoln’s speech, and after I explained that I wasn’t American he moved on to Buddhism. He wasn’t a missionary or anything, he taught English and liked Buddhism. I enjoyed that conversation as he had more of an interest than an agenda.

The time before then I had been on a train in the UK, there had been no seats free and I was standing in the No Man’s Land between carriages. An American man with thinning grey hair had been walking down the train but stopped to ask me a question about something or other. From there a conversation began about where he had been and where he was going in the UK. From there he mentioned being a priest and asked me directly, “Do you believe in Jesus?” I gave him my honest answer, which is, “No.” From there he tried to convert me head on, peppering his comments with, “I’m not trying to convert you, but…” At the end of the conversation, otherwise known as Cheltenham, he said, “Thanks Nick. I can see now why I walked this way.” I was annoyed with that comment, he had failed to convert me in any way, actually he had put me off the cause even more. Yet he walked away sure that God had led him to me, and sure that he was on the right path in his life. But there is logical fallacy here:

Because he preaches without listening, he many never know that sometimes he puts others off his religion.

Polite nonbelievers will talk to him.

Impolite non believers he will ignore.

Therefore he can go around putting off nonbelievers and yet still feel he is doing God’s work.

Doubtless he got off the train and ticked another one off from his, “Let’s Convert - Travel Edition” book, while I walked away feeling ticked off in another fashion.

“Don’t bring up religion,” I told myself, “don’t invite him to start trying to convert me.” Perhaps because he wasn’t in the mood, or perhaps because he was British and more subtle, he didn’t mention religion head on. Mostly we talked about Japan and Japanese people.

I should probably describe him. He was probably in his early fifties with thinning grey hair and a bushy grey beard. He was wearing a shirt but had that unkempt look by which you could tell that he didn’t have a wife. When he stood up he turned out to be rather tall, I would estimate over six foot.

He too had been affected by the mass of police in Hokkaido, they had filled up the hotel he had been staying in and he said he was only to happy to get out of there.

We talked about Britain today and especially the paranoia there is about paedophiles and the safety of children. He mentioned how being an unmarried man he suffers some prejudice in the church and I mentioned how in Kent I saw a sign in a park saying, “Children under 12 only.” In Japan, we both agreed, the situation was very different. It is not uncommon to see young kids cycling around their neighbourhoods by themselves and doing grocery shopping for the family at a very young age. He mentioned being on a train and a child wanting to play with him. He obliged and at the end of the journey the child’s mother thanked him, “Can you imagine that happening in Britain today?” he asked me, the answer was no.

This attitude just does not exist in Japan. From my own experiences of having had six year old kids try to insert their hand into my rectum, and another who punched me in the genitals, the problem in Japan seems to be quite reversed.

After that I broke my own rule, I complained to him about street preachers who stop you while you’re out buying toothpaste to tell you that you are eternally damned but have a nice day. Once I was meeting my family in Birmingham and in between the station and the restaurant I got damned by a street preacher and blessed by a Salvation Army man collecting money.

I argued that it’s just bad marketing: telling people that they’re damned is not much of a hook to make you want to find out more is it. He argued that Christians have a responsibility to tell non-believers the truth. That sort of makes sense, if you saw someone on fire who didn’t know they were on fire then you’d have a responsibility to tell them pretty pronto about the awful truth. However, it takes a certain amount of audacity and arrogance to be so sure of your beliefs so as to confidently tell strangers that they are sinners and damned. I suppose that’s what faith is sometimes.

We talked of other things, of girlfriends, cities and the shinkansen. The train pulled up in Sendai and he stood again to let me pass as I made my way out into the hot air of Sendai railway station.

It’s a big station, big enough for a small tourist information kiosk where I got a map of Sendai and the kindly lady circled where I was staying with a red dot. It was roughly twenty minutes away by tired plod under heavy rucksack.

Sendai seems enormous when you get out of the station, there are two massive streets packed with shops and business that meet outside the station. A system of bridges carries thousands of people everyday from the street level, up to the station or across the roads. I found my way fairly easily, turning in to quieter streets and even quieter ones from there.

A sign pointing the way to the hostel told me I was on the wrong street and needed the next. I saw a small group of other backpackers entering a small hostel and tagged along behind them.

In the reception to the hostel there was the immediate smell of tatami matting, several fans swinging air left to right and a sweaty man behind a window.

The people in front of me showed him their passports and he gave them the speech of the rules you always get in hostels: when the front door gets locked, when you can have a shower, where the nearest laundrette is, what time you can buy the expensive breakfast from.

He sent them on their way upstairs not mentioning that there were no keys until they asked him. It’s a weird notion to be staying somewhere and not have a key. You could lock the room from the inside, he tried to reassure them, but still it’s not the point.

I got the same speech but different directions. My room was on the first floor, a room for three people. I was a bit nervous about this, it would be the first time I had shared a room with strangers for quite some time. “Is there anyone in there now?” I asked. “I don’t know,” he said.

Hot turned hotter as I walked up the steps towards my room. The whole place had a traditional feeling with the smell of tatami and the polished wooden floors, but it also seemed characterless like it could turn into something else next week.

The rooms had slidey doors that felt weird to knock on, but I did. No answer. I slowly slid back the door and found an empty room.

It was larger than the rooms I had been staying in but it was very bare. There were no beds, just futons in the wardrobe to be laid out on the tatami matting. There was a window looking down to a central open area in the middle of the building with a tiny Japanese garden. The air conditioner above the window refused to work, I thought it might be the remote control until I saw that the inner workings of the aircon were poking out of the bottom in a shameful fashion. There was an electric fan in the room but it didn’t seem to do anything to help.

I unpacked, trying to keep all of my things in one corner in case someone else arrived. I slept for a while, had a shower and then walked out into Sendai.

It wasn’t that dark, I wasn’t that tired and I had nothing else to do. I reached the station and began walking down one of the main roads towards the river. My map said there was a tourist information centre in the library that would be open until 9pm.

I walked for a long way feeling cheerful to be in a new place again successfully: the task of getting to my new bed was complete, now I just had to make it seem worth the effort.

I crossed over a bridge and got to the other side of the river. The light was fading now and the streetlights were taking over for the nightshift.

I found the library which looked closed but the doors opened for me and I walked through the dark lobby expecting to be accosted. A room with lights on beckoned me and inside I found shelves of books, some computers and two women standing behind a counter. Other foreigners were silently using the computers or reading newspapers. “Can I help you?” said one of the women in perfect English.

I asked her about some of the sights I had read about in Sendai, she furnished me with leaflets, information and smiles. I was impressed. She was so nice and so helpful that it seemed she could solve all my problems, if I could only remember them. I asked her about buses to my next destination, Tokyo, and she looked online for me, printed off a timetable and explained a special offer the bus company was running.

We got talking about other things, she told me that she used to teach Japanese in the UK to Japanese children. I didn’t know there were schools like that, to teach the children of Japanese people Japanese. “Oh yes, there are lots,” she smiled.

They were closing for the night, it was time to leave. I left enlightened and trudged back to my hostel before the curfew. Sendai was putting on its neon eveningwear, the stressed suits staggered around with each other and the young stalked the streets looking for fun. I passed through it like it was all the same to me.

My room was still empty except for a humid cloud of heat that had collected in my absence. The fan couldn’t disperse the cloud but was able to punch it about like hitting a beanbag. I rolled out my futon and turned off the light. I turned it on again to reposition the fan. I wasn’t sure if I could sleep with a fan pointing at my head, I could.