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.
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