First Goodbye

Ever since my first week in Japan a year and a half previously I had been friends with Iain from Scotland and Henrik from Sweden. In fact, on the very first day of Japanese school I sat next to Iain quite by chance. That was when we took the test to decide what class we were destined for. As it happened all three of us ended up in the class cruelly named, “Japanese zero.”

Henrik in the early days seemed a bit of a clown; he would sit right at the front on his own, always smartly dressed in colourful shirts. With his bright blonde hair he was hard to ignore and often picked to answer questions. I remember in the early days his complete lack of self consciousness and easy ability to make everyone laugh by playing the fool when he didn’t know the answer. Over time the three of us got to know each other, and soon the rest of the class trickled away back to their own countries, each week another goodbye as the class of 20 turned into a class of five.

Henrik was always the one to organise get togethers; nights at karaoke, evenings watching films at Iain’s apartment in Roppongi, meeting to see festivals or eating countless numbers of meals. Together we visited clubs and bars, ate in some strange and lavish places: the Park Hyatt for my birthday, an Alice in Wonderland themed restaurant for Henrik’s. Through fellow student Deborah we attached ourselves to a large group of French people, eating in Izakiyas and then going out to clubs and spending the early hours waiting for the first trains in Internet cafes.


I remember on one of these adventures Henrik, in his intoxicated state, insisted we go into a sex shop we happened to walk past in Shibuya. This was no problem but I fondly recall Henrik’s insistence at the shop counter to buy the one thing that was not for sale, the cash register. He eventually settled for a leopard skin thong, and phoned me the next day asking why he had woken up in some station at the end of the trainline possessing such a thing.

And the many evenings in karaoke, forever will I hear Iain and Henrik’s voices in my mind singing Oasis, ABBA, that ra ra Rasputin song and the one that goes Linda Linda, Linda Linda Linda, Linda Linda, Linda Linda Linda – a song I actually never want to hear again.

It was on a night such as this that I learnt the power of Hey Jude – truly the best song to go for if you are ever forced to sing a solo with Japanese work colleagues. Even the shyest of English speakers can’t help but sing along to the na, nana, nanana that makes up the last half of the song. Either by chance or great deference to English speakers singing karaoke in Japan, the sound na is part of the Japanese alphabet. It is represented by the symbol な.

Then there were the nights of watching films at Iain’s apartment, always chosen by Henrik and usually god awful. I remember Stallone’s writing efforts in Cobra, “This is where the law stops and I start - sucker!” and our Godzilla night which started with visiting the statue


and ended with losing the will to live after Godzilla vs. Super Megagodzilla.

But such antics were coming to an end. I was the first to leave.

It ended where it started; we ate together for the last time in the tempura restaurant in Kudanshita, about a hundred metres away from the school we’d first met.

Here’s a picture.


Having just returned that day from my epic voyage I had lots to talk about but Henrik was in an odd mood. He kept interrupting with mocking questions and witticisms such as, “Are there many old buildings in the centre of Hiroshima?”

Iain and his brother Colin groaned at these asides but Henrik was undeterred in his gentle mockery.

Our final goodbyes were disguised sadness, we promised to meet up again someday and I think we will.

And thankfully there is the one word passing travellers can say to each other as they jet off to opposite sides of the planet, safe in the knowledge they can find each other again. Facebook.

Nagasaki Day 4

I found myself in a wind tunnel, kind of. There was a barrier to hold on to and a crowd of firemen watching me from the other side of a window. Yoko was with them too, staring at me being blown about.

The wind was going at 35m/s and it nearly tore my goggles off. It wasn’t that impressive though, I’ve felt worse walking to work during a typhoon.

Next up me, Yoko and her friend Ayaka San had the surreal task of getting through a set of corridors that were filling up with vanilla scented smoke. Vanilla smoke can get quite thick but smells far more pleasant than your regular smoke. We made it through the little maze pretty fast but I lost my position as leader when I was trying to open the door that the fire was coming from, woops. I wonder what was in there though, a monster bottle of flaming vanilla essence perhaps.

We also got to play a fire extinguisher game where we sprayed a big touchscreen TV with water to put out the onscreen fire. Each fire was started by a particularly clumsy housewife and it was possible to lose the game if you didn’t spray the water accurately enough – though this didn’t cause any graphic game over scenes of burning housewives.

You see, I was at Nagasaki Fire Station, not because my guidebook recommends it but because it’s where Yoko used to work. She had wanted to show me around and her old colleagues took it upon themselves to give us a proper tour.

In Japan whenever you go anywhere you have to buy souvenir sweets or cookies for your colleagues. Such is the strength of this rule that Yoko had bought cookies from Tokyo for her old colleagues in Nagasaki, and was going to return with Nagasaki cookies for her new colleagues in Tokyo.

One of her old colleagues at the fire station, whilst we were messing around with the fire extinguishers, admitted that she had never been so close to a foreign person before – meaning me.

Of course, I did what anyone in that situation would do; I moved closer to her, made a scary face and said, “Wahhhh!” She smiled but backed away from me ever so slightly.

Imagine that though, I was the first foreign human she had seen properly up close, the first different version of the same model. That concept was quite incredible for me; there are lots of foreign tourists in Nagasaki but I suppose I am probably the first to have ventured into the fire station.

The tour also included the Command Centre, a large room of computers and a large central display on the front wall. Their system can pinpoint where an emergency call is being made from and instantly retrieve a map of that area. Mobile phones can also be located via GPS and ambulance locations are shown live on the central map too.

Wanting to demonstrate all this they asked me one of the most bizarre questions you might be asked in a fire station, “Do you want to call 999?”

I declined the offer. Aside from the language issues I would just feel that I was wasting everybody’s time.

One of the most senior looking officers made the call. When it was answered he just said, “it’s…” and I saw the guy who’d answered the call in the Command Centre sit back down again.

Sure enough the map swivelled and scrolled to show our present location. Next they even demonstrated how live video footage from a mobile phone can be streamed to their screens – this is so they can see how large a fire is and provide advice. There were no fires to record at that moment so they asked someone on another floor to record their colleagues looking confused.

Sure enough the blurry but rapid transmission bounced off telephone antennas and maybe a satellite or two and landed back again a couple of floors up from where it had originated. It was all very impressive. And they gave me two free pens :)

As well as going into a Japanese fire station for the fire time today I also go to go into a Japanese house; before today I had only been to apartments you see.

Japanese homes, well going by the one I now know of, are not nearly as small as you might imagine. The gardens are so pokey as to be non-existent but this is because the design is to give as much house as possible for the land.

It was Yoko’s parent’s house and we went there this morning to eat Chocolate Pillows; the greatest cereal in Japan, though they apparently come from Shanghai. Confusingly though, the Chinese company who make them are called Oishi – the name being based on the Japanese word for ‘delicious.’

In all my travels from North to South I had sought after Chocolate Pillows in many places, but nai, there were none. The shop near Yoko’s house is only the second place I had seen them and that made it worth a photo.


So we ate our pillows and then I fell asleep. I woke up at some point and was pretty confused about where I was. I either figured it out or decided not to let it worry me because I woke up again afterwards as Yoko’s mum entered the room. Yoko entered too, thank god.

I stood up and tried to be polite but every time I spoke any Japanese Yoko’s mum would, sort of, laugh at me. “She seems friendly,” I said later to Yoko.

“She’s not friendly,” Yoko corrected me. So perhaps I am just an object of amusement after all.

That was certainly how I felt when I met Yoko’s neighbour. “He’s like a doll,” she bellowed at Yoko without actually saying anything to me at all.

That evening we went to dinner with the sister of Kengo San who I had met in Nagoya a few weeks earlier. She doesn’t speak English but I feel like I know her from the varied things Yoko has told me about her.

Well today was the last full day in Nagasaki. Tomorrow I fly back to Tokyo to say goodbye to Iain and Henrik. Tomorrow is officially the last day of my trip and I am thankfully relieved. I have been on the road for 30 days, stayed in 13 hotels and youth hostels and travelled many many miles. But in a way that was just the micro-journey, I have to close up the macro-journey over the next 3 days and it’s going to be a race against time. I fear the loneliness and the silence that will follow my return to the UK, but I’ve never looked more forward to it than I do now.

Nagasaki Day Three

My third day in Nagasaki was a none day.

We drove to a volcano museum about two hours outside of Nagasaki. It was really hot and I became ill in Yoko’s car.

The museum was next to this volcano.


Inside the museum was quite impressive; they had a large cinema type of thing where you could experience a volcano. Well, the floor rumbled convincingly and they blew hot air in your face.

Another part of the museum told the story of the original eruption which killed a huge number of people, but was fortold by somebody or other when they noticed how hot the ground was becoming a few days before eruption.

This story was depicted in large picture boards that slid about, all electronically choreographed to tell the story along with the narrator and sound effects. It was a really effective way to tell a story, and this from someone who didn’t understand anything the narrator said.

We ate some food near to the museum, which helped me feel better, but not much. The restaurant was in a large collection of buildings around some original houses that had been buried by the lava.


I fell asleep as Yoko drove us to some apartments where we could rest before driving back but I selfishly whinged about just wanting to go back to the hotel so much that we drove back to Nagasaki.

I got back to my hotel at around 7PM and slept all evening and night. As for the museum I will always have the sound of the posh woman from the English guide saying “pyroclastic flow” somewhere in my mind, a long with Marge Simpson saying, “Lisa needs braces…dental plan.”

Nagasaki Day Two

I was trying not to look at my reflection in the mirror. But was I being vain? Was my self esteem particularly low?

No. I was on the toilet at the time.

What kind of idiotic people put full length mirrors facing toilets? Nobody, wants to see what they look like doing a shit, or the other one too if you are of the female persuasion. It’s never going to be you at your best with your underwear at your feet and stuff coming out of you. God, if a toilet in front of a mirror isn’t bad feng shui then I don’t know what is.

But moving on.

The hotel breakfast was a standard selection of miso-soup, rice balls and various dishes of vegetables. There were no free tables when I carried my tray across the hotel lobby but I managed to get a seat with two Japanese women. One of them struck up conversation with me while the other woman looked shocked at what her friend just done.

I told them about my travels and they showed me a guidebook of Nagasaki and pointed out some good places to see. I couldn’t really understand what they were saying but all the while the pictures were interesting. Guidebooks in Japan are full of pictures; little coloured squares on every page with the text squeezed in around it. They look to me more like catalogues and much less useful than the text heavy Lonely Planet books we Western tourists cart around. But I hear the opposite complaints from Japanese people.

Yoko picked me up and we took the tram to Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum. It was not somewhere she was particularly looking forward to going, it had been my request and she’d said, “You don’t really want to go there do you?” As a tourist it seemed like one of the most obvious and important places to visit, as a local it seemed to her like a needlessly depressing place to go.

And of course it was depressing; I mean the ticket really summed it up.


A smaller structure than the Hiroshima museum it seemed more personal to its city too. I spent my time reading the signs but Yoko got tired, or sick of reading about it all, and told me she would wait for me at the exit.

We learned from the museum that a torii gate very close to the explosion had been severely damaged by the blast, but despite the collapse of one of its two legs it was still standing. Yoko asked at the Information Point and the lady there marked the gate’s position on a map for us and we went on our way.

A small man was selling ice cream from a small refrigerated cart outside the museum. Yoko bought us ice creams and explained that they were the kind of ice creams you get on school trips.

It was the hottest day I had felt in Japan; the height of Summer in the most Southern point in I had been. Yoko even had her black umbrella.

We stuck to the shade of the buildings as we made our way through the backstreets of Nagasaki. It wasn’t long before we came across the torii gate standing blackened but defiant at the top of some stone steps.


It’s the kind of relic that you could walk past every day for years without realising its quiet but powerful significance. The museum said that after the explosion it was a source of hope for the survivors.


Nearby there was a Shinto temple. At the entrance two large trees were standing with a twisted rope between them.


Shinto temples have a special feeling. It’s spiritual but also natural and friendly. In churches and cathedrals you can feel the sense of spiritualism but it comes wrapped up in awe at the scale of the building, a sense of fear at the huge effigies of Christ and confusing stain glass windows, then there is the feeling of everything being very old and the smell as you breathe through the asphyxiating silence. A Shinto temple is a tiny affair, with the wind blowing through it and the gentle sound of chimes.

That evening we were going to see fireworks from a boat sailing on the river. Yoko had entered a draw for tickets and won. We walked around a nearby mall for a while and I found another T-shirt to buy.

It says “Waste Energy” above a crudely drawn picture of a tiger. I don’t know what it means but I like to think that it cheekily rebels against all the carbon footprint, Global Warming, use energy saving light bulbs, walk to work, don’t breathe out messages that are now so prevalent.

The mall was full of teenagers, there was a festival atmosphere and as we walked to the boat the place was crowded with people and stalls selling food. It was the kind of place you find a portaloo.

The boat we had won tickets for was a big old sailing ship, all wood and rope. On climbing aboard everyone was given a tiny glow in the dark stone, I’m not sure why, maybe in case we fell in.


We got ourselves a prime spot, right on the edge next to where the fireworks would begin but far enough way from the guitar playing man. He could play the guitar quite well but painfully warbled through quite a lot of Beatles classics.

The boat went up and down the river a few times before the fireworks started as if it were looking for a parking space. I took some pictures.


The fireworks were all coming from a floating island in the middle of the river. Our view was superb, both of the actual fireworks and their reflection in the water. But taking pictures of fireworks is notoriously difficult.


I quite like this one though.


And that was my day of explosions.

Nagasaki Day One

Cleaners in Japan just won’t leave me alone but at least in this more expensive hotel they call ahead. “I’ll be out by 11,” I yawned down the phone.

Yoko was meeting me at 11:30 but before that I went hunting for quirky T-shirts; making use of Japan’s idiosyncratic fashion for what little time I had left.

And I found a few.

One featured a long extract from Treasure Island about Blackbeard the Pirate but with the text arranged into the shape of a skull and crossbones. Another I bought was green with a solar system octopus reaching its eight tentacles out to the planets. Being old school I thought, “Eight tentacles? But there are nine planets,” before I remembered Pluto and its recent demise.

I met Yoko and climbed into her car. It was a box shaped silver Daihatsu that suited her very well, not that she is box shaped. She told me that we were going to a restaurant for lunch and we sped through Nagasaki to a restaurant overlooking the sea.

Our meal was a proper one, unlike I had eaten in a long time. A tray was brought to me with a whole menagerie of Japanese food that looked like a miniature city; bowls and plates of different shapes and contents. It was hard to decide where to attack first: Tempura slopes, Miso lake or Sashimi…. pile of dead fish.

Next, we drove to Yoko’s parent’s house, but just drove there, going in will happen on another day I’m told. We hit a road out of Nagasaki to a place called Sotome.

The road wound tightly along the edge of the sea which spread far enough out to meet the sky. Proper houses dotted the mountains, not the apartment buildings of Tokyo but actual individual houses facing the sea. It was not a landscape I had seen before and yet I felt I had seen it before from films and TV shows.

We were heading to a museum that was right on the edge of a steep hill with almost 180 degree views of the sea.


In the distance large chunks of rock were poking rebelliously out of the sea and in its effort to reclaim them the sea had even worn one into an arch.


The museum was dedicated to Endo Shusaku, a Japanese author who died in 1996. He was also a devoted Christian and the museum had French hymns continuously playing. There were no English explanations, except for the Exit signs and a leaflet which at least let me know whose museum I was standing in and how much I had to pay.

There was a strange window looking out to sea through blue tinted glass.


Its edges were mirrored so that to look left and right you were seeing reflections but it appeared continuous with the real scenery. I am sure there was a point to that somewhere.


I decided that I liked Endo Shusaku because he was smiling in most of his pictures. In one he was even wearing a fake white beard and moustache - the bushy white wise-man beard that everyone from God to Gandolph has had thrust upon them.

After I had looked at all the pictures I sat in a room at the corner of the museum. Two of its walls were large windows looking out to the sea and surrounding hillside. There were comfy chairs too so it was an ideal place for a quick nap – I told Yoko she could take as long as she liked.

I felt unnerved in that room though; it was the view. The sea, in all its enormity of size and crashing violence against the rocks was making no sound at all. The large hawks riding the sea breezes around the museum were also mute. The glass of the windows was so thick that it let nothing in but light.

There was a large piece of glass opposite the window and I took a sillhouetey picture of myself in the reflection.


What with the Christian music playing too it felt eerily like the scene outside was just an illusion, a video recorded in widescreen with no sound. Or like a different world, a Heaven that I was separated from and could never travel to, like when you see a landscape of clouds from a plane window. When Yoko came to fetch me she understood my feeling.

Only now that I re-read the leaflet I was given do I notice that Sotome was the setting for Shusaku’s novel “Silence.”

The café attached to the museum, but not physically, had the same silent vista and French Christian music. It had less effect because of an ice cream float (ice cream floating in coca cola) which one of us was enjoying and the other just envying.

There was a beach which we tried to drive to but all the roads seemed to lead to each other. Eventually we parked and found a beach of large boulders. We stood and gazed at the sea and the sea cockroaches.

This is Yoko gazing at the sea.


Back in the car we drove to a spot that to see the sunset from.


The view is so good that they built a restaurant in the carpark so that you can stare at the setting sun and eat, like popcorn at the cinema.


The restaurant had a great buffet, or in Japanese ビキング, pronounced biking and coming from the word ‘Viking.’ The Japanese clearly see Vikings as men and women who would feast on great meals together, wash it down with gallons of liquid and then queue up to pay at the end. It’s a pretty quirky name for a buffet, but doesn’t help English speakers who come to Japan and struggle to understand the signs, “Biking?” oh it must be about bikes.” I suppose many cultures apply new meanings to words from other languages like this, I mean the word buffet originally meant a type of furniture.

We drove back into Nagasaki and then up to a mountain to see the nightview and a firework display down on the river. There before us were all the lights of Nagasaki from cars, buildings, fireworks, boats sailing in the river and… a lightning storm.

We were definitely in the right place at the right time; my eyes kept darting from fireworks on the right to lightning on the left. The storm was behind some mountains at the edge of the city, the flashes would light up the cloud but occasionally you could see the lightning itself. It was more than spectacular and made up for the rubbishy cloud I had seen at the Hakodate nightview.

Shame I didn’t take any pictures though.

To Nagasaki

Me and my rucksack were on our way to get the last coach of our trip. It was to take us East about 5 hours, around to Nagasaki on the nook of Kyushu. There we would be welcomed by Yoko and I could finally rest my weary feet in the last destination of the journey.

I stood at the correct bus stop and a coach pulled up marked for Nagasaki. I showed my ticket to the driver as he stood by the door and he nodded, marking my ticket with a squiggle.

I stored my rucksack in the bowels of the coach and climbed aboard to my seat. The coach gradually filled up with people and I closed my eyes. The driver was suddenly standing next to me, he bowed an apology; this was not my coach.

I stood at the correct bus stop and a coach pulled up marked for Nagasaki. I showed my ticket to the driver as he stood by the door and he puzzled over the squiggle. He didn’t say anything, but squiggled over the squiggle and that was that.

It was a long journey to Nagasaki; the scenery outside was all becoming identical, the tracks on my MP3 player all too familiar and the sight of strangers everywhere a sea of sameness that only a familiar face could punctuate.

As the coach pulled into Nagasaki I was smiling excitedly, I felt like I had come an enormously long way to get there. In the hiss of the coach doors, the last hunt for my luggage and the final feeling of being in an unfamiliar city, my long journey from North to South came to its final destination.

And there, was Yoko.

“Hello,” she said like an angel, “are you hungry?”

We went to a family restaurant in the mall next to the coach station. Family restaurants in Japan can be recognised by the very standard food, buttons on the table for calling the waiter and a Drink
Bar where you can help yourself to unlimited drinks in the most unnatural colours.

We ate pizza and talked for a few hours about what Yoko had planned for the next few days and the hotel I would be staying in. I sat cheerfully digesting this information with my pizza.

I told her about my journey, showed her the leaflet that Mitomi had given me. Yoko was surprised how tired I had become of travelling, how much I was looking forward to staying in one place for a while without having to worry about anything.

It was about 10PM when we walked down the street to the Toyoko Inn hotel where I was staying. From the large reception area with its computers, breakfast tables and shiny surfaces I could tell that this was going to be a nice stay. Yoko had asked for a certain amount of money that I gave to her in cash when I arrived. However, as she stood at the reception and gave them the details of the booking I could clearly see that she had grossly undercharged me. Yoko’s generosity knows no bounds but I vowed to make it up to her.

The receptionists began to explain something that would have thrown me if I had been on my own. I would have thought it was regarding some terrible problem with my booking and asked them to repeat more slowly. With Yoko there she simply turned to me and said, “What free gift do you want?”

I chose the socks.

We made plans for the next day, Yoko was going to pick me up in the morning from the coach station where we had met. This would be the first time I would see her driving, which she warned me, was very bad. “Don’t talk to me when I am driving,” she advised, “or we will both die.”

I ascended to my room and felt the familiar new room excitement, though this time it had more grounds than for my usual hotels. The room was lovely; double bed, spacious ensuite and when I turned on the television I Am Legend was playing on the movie channel.

The downside was that the film was in Japanese and about halfway through. Well, actually, I had no idea if it was halfway, and being entirely in Japanese the story confused me. By the end I really wanted to see the beginning.

I didn’t know it then but for the next few nights I would turn on the television and always see the film from the same point amidst much frustration.

I turned out the light and got comfortable for a good nights sleep before a free breakfast and a day out with a friend. Finally I felt like I was on holiday.

A noise was passing through the wall from the room next door. It was the sound of snoring. This cemented a new scale of hotels in my head: 2000 yen gets you a shared room with someone snoring loudly on the floor next you, but 5000 yen gets you a thin wall of protection from the snore.

What vast amounts of money, I wondered, would you have to pay for a snore free night?

Kumamoto

The problem with tourist leaflets is that sometimes they are unhelpfully enticing. For example the Kumamoto leaflet featured this picture.


It’s a bridge which looked to me like it had water shooting over it but the truth is that the bridge is a 150 year old aquaduct. Every so often ducts in the sides are opened that let the water flow down into a river, which cleans the water channels.

The woman in the tourist information appeared concerned when I asked her how to get to the bridge. She calmly turned aside to get out a map and laid it on the counter. A second later she replaced that map with another one because the scale wasn’t large enough.
“We’re here,” she said as she circled Kumamoto city, “and Tsujunkyo Bridge is all the way ovvvvver here.” Her hand seemed to move about 300 miles across the page and drew another circle in the middle of nowhere. “So I don’t think you should try and go there today.”

So it was that I found myself at Kumamoto castle, which is a huge and elegant construction surrounded by gardens and picturesque views.


The long climb to the top of the castle was worth it when I looked out of the window at the shadow I was now part of.


Some other pictures


This is a model of what the old city used to look like, back when the castle was by far the tallest building around.


The castle walls are built to be deliberately curved. It almost looks like you could climb them, maybe that’s the point.


And that was my day in Kumamoto.