Nagoya Jo and Kengo

I was back to being the lonesome traveller. I use that word instead of tourist because having been here for over a year I feel different to the huddles of other foreigners I see making their way through Japan. However, this is probably just some strange form of pride I have and to a Japanese person seeing me walking around with my guidebook and camera I look like I just got off the plane.

The first time I was ever in a place where I really stood out was at Warwick University’s Hong Kong Society singing contest. I remember the wave of stares my entrance to the room brought with it, friends nudging each other until the whole room had noticed me. Even though there are lot of white people in Hong Kong, I was the only one in that room. The whole thing was in Cantonese and perhaps they were wondering if I would sing.

So it doesn’t bother me at all to be the only non-Asian, it bothers me more to see crowds of other foreigners here, and I think others like me feel the same. I heard someone say once that they wanted to be the only foreigner in Japan, at least 300 years too late for that. We want to feel that we are doing something different by coming here, so that when we go back home people say, “Oh you lived in Japan!” and not “Why do so many people do that?”

Having said that all though, today I went to Nagoya Jo, one of the biggest tourist attractions Nagoya has to offer. The translation of Jo is castle but from that you expect turrets, crenulations, a portcullis and a gift shop. Nagoya Jo looks like this.



But it does have a gift shop.

Getting into Nagoya Jo is much easier than it used to be. You buy a ticket from a machine, give it to a smiling lady who stamps it and then you walk through the massive reinforced wooden doors, which are propped open. You walk freely over the bridge that carries you over the moat, up some stairs and through the large metal studded doors which now bear signs against the use of flash photography. There’s even a lift.

There are about six floors to the place with displays in Japanese and mostly English too. Sadly there was no English explanation for this.


The other end of this gun was a normal looking wooden handle, but the barrel keeps going for about two metres. It must have taken at least four people to fire; one to pull the trigger, one in the middle for support, one to aim and another to get shot.

On one floor was a menagerie of pictures of the original castle being burnt down by Allied bombs during World War 2. A tour guide was giving an animated talk about this as I sheepishly walked past.

The top floor had great views of Nagoya, and of the stone dolphins that replaced the gold ones that used to adorn the castle.


From the top of the enormous stairwell I took some pictures but they came out obscured by ectoplasm. Pesky ghosts.


I explored the grounds a bit.


Two women asked me to take a picture of them with a replica of one of the golden dolphins.


I really do like Japanese gardens. They are so peaceful with their ponds of still water reflecting the carefully placed trees, rocks and wooden bridges doted about. A crow was perched photogenically on a stone lantern at the time.


After the castle I got lost finding the subway station again. Walking down one of the streets by the castle I heard someone playing a recorder. I couldn’t make out where it was coming from; there were no buskers or primary school children in sight. As I kept walking I found the source, it was a man in his car waiting at the traffic lights with the windows down and his recorder up loud. That made me smile.

Next I went to the Design Gallery at the trendy Nagoya Park shopping complex. I knew what floor it was from my guidebook and followed signs saying Design but somehow ended up in a gallery.

The artwork on display was pretty brilliant; no Japanese explanation was required because most of the pictures were based around clever concepts. Like one picture of a chicken, inside an egg, inside a chicken, in an egg etc. It was a playful take on the old mystery and even managed to be vague with which one of the two was at the heart of the design.

Another picture was of a stomach and intestines leaking sand into the bottom of a sand timer. I like that kind of picture, it’s a morbid thought that every second a little more of our life drains away but there’s no use denying it I suppose.

I found the place I had tried to be, a small museum chronicling changes in the designs of household objects like phones, cars and furniture.

The first display I came to was about phones. There was a 1920s candle stick type phone in the middle, a modern mobile phone on the right hand side and a phone technologically in between them on the left. They were in typical large museum cases but there was a tiny tiny square button beneath the display.

I pressed the button and heard a lot of heavy loud clunk noises that broke the silence of the place. I looked nervously around the room wondering what I had done. The sound was coming from above me and when I looked up I realised that I was standing in front of a monstrous contraption called the Collection Tower.


It was about 6 metres high and 3 wide and I could see 12 displays inside. Large arms and conveyor belts were moving the display cases around: lifting one up and another across in order to bring the next one down. But the button I had pressed didn’t just bring the next display into view but started a cycle for the tower to go through all 12 displays. The problem was that it was so loud and seemed to be making so much effort on my behalf that I felt I had to stay and watch, even though I wasn’t actually that interested.

It was like when you go and see an elderly person who mistakes your polite attention to their talk about porcelain sheep for genuine interest and then spends an hour digging through heavy boxes in their dark attic to find a particularly interesting example because the man who made it came from your town etc etc etc. In short, the effort it was making to show me the history of telephones was far greater than my interest. But I knelt on the floor and dutifully watched 80 years of telephones go by, almost in real time.

I made my way back to the hotel afterwards and hid from the baking sun. Later that night I was going to meet Yoko’s friend’s brother. Yes, that’s right, Yoko’s friend’s brother – two apostrophes. I had met this friend of Yoko’s before; she had been quite shy as she doesn’t speak English but made up for it with lots of smiles. And besides, Yoko has told me lots of things about her friend: her hobbies, her tastes and even how often she does a number 2. With this in mind I went to meet Kengo, her brother.

We met at 7:30, and coming up from the subway station where we were meeting I was sure it was him, sitting on the wall with his backpack. There was something about him that looked more real than everyone else walking by, like in old cartoons when you can tell what was going to move in the scene because it was more vividly drawn.

Since the whole thing had been arranged by Yoko and Kengo’s sister I was worried that we’d meet and he’d say, “So you wanted to see me about something?” Then we’d look at each other awkwardly and go home. However, like his sister he seemed to constantly smile but his English was very fluent. He liked to laugh and it was an immediately comfortable meeting.

We went to a vegetarian buffet. As soon as he suggested it my mouth said yes without my brain needing to get involved. I didn’t even know there were vegetarian buffets in Japan, let alone that I might get to go to one. I had been surviving on convenience store food and hope since the start of my trip so I was very happy indeed.

It was not a disappointment either; there was lots of different food, including chicken. I didn’t quite see how they had smuggled chicken into a vegetarian buffet but I didn’t let that stop my elation. “You’re going for more?” Kengo said to me, more than once.

We talked for hours, about games, anime, jobs, Japan, sisters, food, English, Japanese etc etc. We were the last customers to leave and when we did our waiter called out, “The customers are going home,” in Japanese. All the other waiters came rushing over and bowed to us chanting, “Thank you for coming,” when really they meant, “Thank god you’re going.”

After the vegetarian buffet we went to McDonalds, perhaps this was the universe rebalancing. I had a chocolate milkshake, the best thing McDonalds has to offer I think. In the UK people often tell me, “Burger King milkshakes are better.” Kengo eyed my milkshake critically, “Mossburger’s are better,” he said.

When he discovered that I had studied Psychology he asked me to analyse him. I thought he was joking but he had an expectant look. “Umm,” I started, “your name is Kengo.”
“Yes,” he said, unimpressed.
“You don’t like cockroaches.”
“Yes,” he confirmed.
“You don’t like to be alone,” I guessed.
“That’s true”
“Finished.”
“That’s all?” he was disappointed but I explained that I only got a 2.1

He lives in a dormitory complex offered at a cheap rate by his company. This means that he basically lives with his colleagues. They also have communal showers. “I was washing my hair,” he regaled to me, “and my supervisor came in saying, “Hey Kengo.” I forget the rest of what he said, that alone was too strange a concept for me.

Having studied in America his English was very fluent and his job involves talking to American and European subsidiaries. His company is some kind of engineering firm who specialise in aircraft parts. The queries he has to deal with get very technical with specific questions and specific parts. “I don’t know anything about the industry but they still hired me because I can speak English. In Japan, if you can speak English, you can work for any company.” He smiled at this truism and then told me the most useful English sentence in the modern working world, “Can you put that in an email to me.”

When he was 13 or so his teacher asked everyone to write down what their dream was. “Move to Hawaii,” he wrote.

“I want to live in Hawaii,” he told me when we talked about travelling. He couldn’t even say Hawaii without smiling with excitement.

At midnight we said goodbye and I went to my hotel. I was leaving the next day, slightly sad that I had no one to meet until Yoko in 12 lonely days and countless miles away – well I could count them if I could be bothered.

Nagoya Aquarium

I always seem to wake up before my alarm clock, maybe I am overly optimistic about how long I can sleep before the morning sun heats up my room so much I have to get up and turn on the air conditioner.

As I made my way to meet Kizuna the city seemed to be waking up, and where my hotel was this involved fish. I saw fish being delivered to shops, fish being sold, fish being arranged on beds of ice and fishy water being thrown into the street.

At the Nagoya Station tourist information office, now open, the lady spoke perfect English to me but was using it to insist I took the tourist bus. Kizuna had sent me a confusing message about where to meet, but the woman eventually cleared it up for me: Nagoya station has two clocks, a gold one that I had seen the day before and...the other one. We were meeting at the other one, a popular meeting place I was informed and she pointed the way for me.

I was half an hour early so took a walk down a market street. I bought my hundredth Tuna and Mayo onigiri and after about 10 minutes of wondering whether the street was worth exploring, I turned back.

There is an underground network of long malls leading to subway stations in Nagoya. Entrances to it dot the streets and they are like gates to another world. A wonderful world free of the glare of the sun, with air conditioning, toilets and shining floors. One such passage led me back to the station.

I ate my onigiri outside, sitting on a concrete cylinder - the kind you find in streets all over the world, and yet you don't know what they are really for. They don't look like seats yet are good for sitting on, they don't look like bollards but they could stop cars.

There was a man sleeping in the shade of a sculpture. Half his arm was lying in the sunshine but he seemed to be too lazy to move it back into the shade, as well as get up and go to work of course.

Like Hachiko at Shibuya station, Nagoya's station clock is a meeting place for cool and trendy youths. The cooler and trendier they are the more they gravitate towards the centre: leaning against the very clock itself.

Further out in the solar system of this place the people get uglier, with worse clothes and more nervous expressions. I took my place accordingly in the meeting cosmos, yes near the edge.

I noticed a guy walking with his hand raised up high. He was walking toward another guy who had his hand raised too. It was like they were bidding for each other at an auction. They met and embraced awkwardly. Soon after two girls met and hugged affectionately, they didn't need to claim each other, they just smiled.

When Kizuna walked out of the subway she didn't see me and I had to run after her. I was a little disappointed by this considering how far I had come to look distinctive.

Having greeted each other in that brief way friends do when they only saw each other the day before we went to find a coin locker. Once found, a woman with a bandaged eye asked us a favour: to put the money in a locker for her. A further favour followed: put this box inside for me, oh and please lock the locker and please read the number out to me. Finally she let us go in a shower of gratitude but I wondered how many more favours it would take for her before she found that locker again. And what if the thousands of people who had ever helped her met up one night in a dream, but could only wake up again once they had discovered what connected them all.

Nagoya Aquarium stars Ku, a killer whale that cost the government 300,000,000 yen to catch (no I'm not going to translate that for you, it's expensive alright). As such they are very keen to promote how great Ku is. As soon as you enter the aquarium an enormous glass wall lets you see Ku swimming around his enclosure.

But like many sea creatures Ku seemed to like swimming around the edges of his enclosure and so every now and again a huge killer whale would fly past the otherwise empty window and it was quite a sight. Then you could see him again in the distance swimming around the other side.

It was here that I took my favourite photograph of the entire trip.


A dolphin and Ku show was starting and we took our seats outside in the stadium area. It was everything you would expect: jumping, playing with a ball, splashing the audience. Sitting in one of the front rows we got pretty wet but being splashed by a killer whale is not something you are allowed to complain about. You are supposed to laugh and smile and not think about how this is the water a large mammal excretes in as it seeps into your clothes.

This is a video of dolphins and Ku doing their tricks. While it loads look at...



Ku being fed.


Ku causing a splash.


If you zoom into the huge video screen behind Ku you can actually see Kizuna and myself. She was wearing a chequered shirt that day and was standing up quite clearly. I was sitting next to her.


And here's a picture of Ku when he came up and sat on the concrete.


And here's a dolphin considering a waterproof watch.


After the show we began looking at the fish. The first display was a giant window looking onto a tank crammed with little silvery fish, brilliantly illuminated by spotlights. Because they all swam in one big group it was like watching a silver veil wisp gracefully around the water, sometimes collecting together tightly and then bursting out in a glittering explosion. It was quite a sight, so much that the 100 or so people watching would say, "Ohh" and "Ahh" unanimously when the veil of fish was at its prettiest.

Here is a video which you should click on,



but while it loads look at these pictures.


What rather let down this beautiful display of synchronised swimming, was the presence of this guy.


Some kind of small shark. The little fish were swimming hurriedly, tightly packed together and changing directions because they were stuck sharing a cell with something that wanted to eat them. Though beautiful to look at, these fish must have been pretty stressed yet the effect was mesmerising and Kizuna had to physically pull me away from the window.

Nagoya aquarium really works hard to impress, both in size with their killer whale at the helm, but also in quantity. Basically there are loads of penguins, too many really, it looked like Tokyo station on ice.


Actually no, it looked like the set of Batman Returns, the Tim Burton film with Danny Devito as the Penguin. They used real penguins in the film and the penguins in Nagoya Aquarium are lit up from below in the same eerie style.


These were emperor penguins and the glass of their enclosure was extremely cold. One penguin was about twice the size of the others, but was probably blind from all the people flashing at it with their cameras. The best penguin was a really happy looking chap that was starring back at its human audience just as intently as it was being watched. Occasionally it would flap its arms and yawn, which is enough to entertain any human.


What else did we see? An ugly fish.


And some of these, but more in focus.


After the aquarium we headed up the Port Tower to look at the city.


Kizuna paid to use the telescope but since this is Japan it was not the usual kind of telescope. It was more like a TV with zoom buttons. As she was looking into the distance blackness crept over her screen. "Ehh," I heard her say in alarm and she looked over the telescope to see that there was a woman standing in front of the window she had been looking through. "I thought a giant had come to Nagoya," she said.

From the tower we could see a weird collection of fake looking buildings, complete with a clock tower and small canal.


Kizuna informed me that it was "Italia Town" and I gasped in disbelief, and just not wanting to believe that anyone would build something so pointless.

She saw my expression. "It's a little stupid isn't it?" I nodded. "It's closed down now. I think Nagoya people weren't quite stupid enough."

But we went. Or rather, we snuck in between a railing and an abandoned pizza shop.

It was weird in the little plastic and plywood Italy. There was no one around, all the restaurants and shops were dark and all in some stage of dismantlement.

The gondolas bobbed up and down in a bored kind of way...


the clock in the tower was still...


and the scale model of Michael Angelo's David was not making anybody blush.


Ghost towns like this remind me of an abandoned town we went to in France when I was a kid. I have no idea where it is or how my parents found out about it, it's one of those memories in my mind marked us, "What?"

It was an old mining town, with all the equipment and houses still there. It was eerily silent and I remember feeling a little spooked but also like having great freedom to explore the abandoned streets and buildings. Parental concern about the safety of the buildings put a stop to the explorer in me. I remember throwing a stone at some stairs in a house to see if they would fall down. They didn't but I still didn't climb them.

Italia Town in Nagoya had the same abandoned silent feeling but with only a small bit of the freedom: it would be a brilliant place for hide and seek, and I mean really brilliant.


Our next stop was Oasis 21 and bear with me as I try to describe it. It's a platform, about 20 metres above a shopping mall. Most of the platform is taken up by a pool of water with a fountain in the middle.


Around the pool is a pathway and if you look through the water you can see the shopping mall below.


Likewise when the people in the mall look up, they can see the dark shapes of feet walking around above them.


It's like an Oasis because it's a pool of water. 21 because it is the 21st century. Cool yes, useful no.

Hours later we were in a tempura restaurant and talking about our respective worries for the future. She took the moment to apologise to me.

It seems that before now she had always thought of me as reluctant to take action. She pointed out that before this trip I didn't really go anywhere and would spend my weekends in my room playing games and eating chocolate peanuts.

She had been very surprised and quite sceptical about my plan to travel Japan from North to South, but to see me in Nagoya she had to admit that I was doing it. "It surprised me too," I reassured her.

Australia made me realise that I was in a rut. I went to work, came home, messed around and then slept again in time for work the next day. It was in a different country but the same rut, a better job but just a job and not a career. I got so settled into my rut that I could no longer see its walls. Holidays are great for taking you far from your life so that you can look back on it and see its boundaries, like seeing the Earth from space.

So I taught, I'll travel and I'll dream of the new ruts to come.

To Nagoya

Croissant in one hand, miso soup in the other. "That's a weird combination," remarks Kizuna. The hotel breakfast was catering to different tastes: traditional Japanese and Western continental but maybe you weren't supposed to mix them. I smiled at her and looked out the window. Suited figures were walking hurriedly to work, briefcases, umbrellas, coats, bicycles and frowns.

I thought of myself back a few months: who had sat here in this hotel restaurant and seen me at 7:50 in the morning walking to the bus stop, laptop bag banging against my side, looking at my watch every 30 seconds.

I went back for more food: tried some different jams on toast with rice balls on the side.

On the train. "What do you want to do in Nagoya tomorrow?" asks Kizuna. I see Yang look at the ground. "What is there to do?" She thinks, "The aquarium?" "Ok," we agree. Yang and I share a look, the next inevitable goodbye is on the horizon but we're all smiling.

Shinjuku station, they help me buy a ticket and find the next coach, but then I'll be on my own again.

I don't really want to be on my own again but by the end of the day Yang will be on a plane back to Australia and we are living on borrowed time already. Yang doesn't want to say goodbye either, he tells me he will email me.

Gone are the days when we lived just two floors away from each other, when he would teach me Japanese and I would help him with his English. Gone are the hours we played games in the common room and watched films in my room. Gone are the walks to the 99yen shop, past are the few days I spent in Korea with his family and the two weeks we explored Australia together. A fragmented friendship facing its biggest divide yet, one of years and hemispheres. As I climb onto the coach I am comforted that the look in his eye says we feel the same about our friendship.

The driver makes an announcement, I put on my seatbelt. The woman I am sitting next to explains, "you can sit anywhere." I look around, most of the coach is empty. She laughs politely as I find a seat leaving us both to ourselves.

After five hours the coach reached Nagoya and I was impressed. The station is enormous, being beneath two identical sky scrapers. I didn't know this at the time, but it is the biggest station in the world by floor area. Immediately outside is a large roundabout with a huge sculpture that looks like a Cluedo playing piece made giant. I felt nervous as the coach pulled up into the bowls of the station and it was time for me to look after myself again.

It was just passed 7PM and the tourist information office inside the station was closed. I peered through the glass into the dimness within to see if there was anybody inside, but I could only make out my own dim reflection.

I got out my trusty guidebook that I would be lost without, but am frequently lost with too. The Nagoya Rolen hotel was marked on the map, as was the station but there were few details to match the vague picture to the confusing reality.

A man came up to me, asked if I was lost in English. He was probably in his thirties, he had a hefty bag himself and shoulder length straggly hair. He looked like he was coming home after a trip away. I showed him my guidebook and he puzzled over the blob among the narrow lines that I needed to find.

A second later he was leading me out of the station, into the crowd of people moving along the pavements. "Go right," he said pointing, "and then take the first big left. Walk down there and you will find it." He smiled and disappeared into the rest of humanity.

A very friendly man was at the counter of the Nagoya Rolen Hotel. He checked my details, scanned my passport, gave me a key, a map and an explanation: "The toilet is in the middle of the floor, the washing machines are on this floor and the showers are on the 3rd floor. Your room is on the 5th."

"Great," I thought as I got into the lift, "I'm living in a department store."

The room was ridiculously small, so small that the room next door took up about a third of it. Where you would expect to find an ensuite bathroom there was a wall and the kind noises which give away that behind it was next door's bathroom. It was cheap though at 5000 yen a night (£20) and had the best view yet.


The column shaped building on the right is one of the towers of the train station. The building on the left is the Mode Gakuen Spiral Towers, which is quite a stunning creation.

I drew the curtains. It was time for tomorrow.

Fuju Safari Park

I woke up in the place I went to sleep in. Always a good start.

It was early, most of the other eleven or so occupants of the hostel room were still asleep or stirring but I had to get up. That day I had to meet Yang and Kizuna and travel with them to Nagoya, my next city, with a stop at Fuji Safari park on the way.

There are some things you notice when you walk down the street with a heavy backpack. Mostly this is chewing gum as you tread slowly with eyes down. That morning though I found the first Lego shop I had ever seen in Japan. I didn’t go in, I don’t go in the English ones. It’s just nice to know where you can get emergency Lego from, say if you need to build a bridge for some ants.

We met in Otemachi station, part of the huge labyrinth of Tokyo station. We had to change trains a few times to get to Fuji Safari and I had no idea where we were, but I was happy to be ignorant. We eventually arrived at a small train station in a small town somewhere in Japan. And then we had to wait for a bus.

The bus came, we got on and then somehow Yang and Kizuna realised that we needed to get on another bus so they asked the driver. The driver told us to get out at the next bus stop and showed us the bus we had to get on, which was about to leave. Yang and Kizuna were all smiles as we ran to our final bus which took us high into the pine tree covered mountains of wherever we were.

Soon the trees cleared and we found a Safari Park, not like in Jurassic Park where there’s suddenly a wide vista of exotic vegetation and exotic animals living in harmony: it was a carpark and a ticket shop.

In buying tickets we managed to break the ticket machine. Our simple error was inserting a plastic card somewhere it was not designed to go. Somebody came with a big pair of keys and unlocked the ticket machine and pulled out the card with some pliers.

When we had tickets we waited for the next tour wondering which bus would be our chariot through the animal kingdom.


It was the elephant bus.

The driver and tour guide was a witty fellow, I could tell by the way everyone kept laughing. I couldn’t understand what he was saying but I pretended that I did so as not to put him off.

There was a chance to feed some of the animals, you could buy food and feed-from-a-safe-distance tongs. This is Yang and Kizuna on the bus.


First animals up were bears but taking pictures of a moving animal from a moving bus through bars is quite difficult. I had never been that close to bears before and I learnt that they make a wailing nasal noise.

This bear before food.


This bear being given food.


Another bear that didn’t want food.


A lion


Three lions


Kizuna feeding a lion


A lion giving us the high fives, or trying to claw us through the bars.


A mummy lion and daddy lion.


Lions in a tree


Lions on a rock


This tiger wants to eat you.


Oh you don’t really care do you.


It’s just lots of bad pictures of animals.


A waste of the Internet.


But here’s two animals you don't expect together.


And what’s this?


It’s one of these, licking a tree.


And a goat up a tree.


A holy goat


Mountain goats


Yep


Ok that’s all the pictures of animals (that may be a lie).

When we were getting off the tour bus Kizuna tried to make conversation with the tour guide, but he was apparently very shy when not talking about animals.

We went for lunch and then to the Neko House, the house of cats.

Unlike other cat places I had been to in Japan this was actually like a house. There were sofas, bookcases, tables and ornate cabinets. It looked like the house of a cat obsessed spinster with an amazing capacity for cleaning.

There were cats and furniture everywhere, of all different breeds. Here is a one ear down kind of cat on a cabinet.


More cats, more furniture. The mirror reminds me of the one out of Ringu.


I think that animals, in general, don’t really like people, which is something that disappoints a lot of people a lot of the time. Domesticated animals like people, but only to a certain extent. When you go to a place full of cats you often get the feeling of being rejected. It goes like this:

See available cat
Creep up to cat slowly with hand outstretched
Cat sniffs hand
Stroke cat gently on its back
Stroke cat gently on the top of head
Cat runs away
Find new cat

And so it goes on with the sense of rejection and betrayal building throughout the day.

But what you can do is go for a sleeping cat and sit next to it and gradually start stroking it, slowly building up a trust and rapport with the cat so that it eventually doesn’t mind you being there. It doesn’t really want you there either, it just doesn’t mind and that is as good as you can get.

On the other hand it can be much worse. Kizuna was given a bleeding cut by one of the cats and that’s just the way it goes, that’s what we pay for. To be rejected and knifed by cute animals.

We were in the house of cats for ages. So long that it started to get cold and I started to sneeze. I had only dressed for the warm weather, my arms were bare and I had no other clothes. There was no heating in the cat house, it was actually quite drafty and I walked around trying to find the warmest place and stop sneezing. The staff looked at me worriedly, I smiled and tried not to look like I had allergies.

So I was happy when we left and made our way back to the station.

The original plan had been that we would all go to Nagoya from Fuji Safari park, but Yang and Kizuna changed their minds. They wanted to go back to Tokyo but felt guilty for letting me down, I had a hotel room booked in Nagoya for the night.

Yang offered to pay for a hotel room in Tokyo for me and help me get a coach ticket the next day. He was earning big money from working night shifts in the Night Owl convenience store in Cairns. I accepted the offer and we got on a shinkansen back the way we had come.

Last year I used to work in two schools. Tomioka was my main school four days a week but every Thursday I would teach in a nearby school, Maihama. This was quite a challenge because I had to prepare lessons for two schools, and also the Maihama class were first year kids - genital attacks were frequent.

I used to get the train to Urayasu station and then take a bus to the school. Between the train station and bus stop was a short alleyway with lots of bikes and at the end of if it was a hotel. I would always see people eating breakfast in front of the large windows of the first floor and feel so envious. I was making my way to a day I had been dreading all week and my eyes would watch hungrily those relaxed figures eating their breakfast above us suited minions heading off to work.

But that was the very hotel we stayed in, with a free breakfast too. I was dead pleased about that.

It was the nicest hotel room I had yet stayed in, and I was becoming quite a connoisseur. Kizuna had to go back to the guesthouse to sort some things out. Yang and I talked in my room for a while. He remembered quite late into the evening that he needed to call Kizuna’s parents for some reason.

Even though I couldn’t really catch what he was saying he was exuding politeness. He was walking around the room talking to Kizuna’s mum, physically bowing to her even though she was miles away. This is a common phenomena in Japan but proved how well he had mastered the culture.

Kizuna came back to the hotel with some sweets. I remembered that one of the reasons we had gone to Fuji Safari was to see Mount Fuji, but during the day we hadn‘t seen it once. This was typical for my experience in Japan, I had been to the top of so many buildings that claimed you could see Fuji but it was always too cloudy.

Kizuna listened to my comment, looked around nervously and then whispered to me that there is no Mount Fuji, it is just a lie to sell post cards and calendars. She said that I have to not tell anyone and that when I leave Japan they will ask me, “so do you believe in Mount Fuji?” and I have to say, “Yes” otherwise I won’t be allowed to leave.

Ahh, I thought, that explains it.