Matsuyama

I first saw the owner of the award winning-hippy hostel when I was using the Internet. The computers were in a large room with a kotatsu in the middle (low Japanese table you kneel at) where he was sitting. He had a bushy beard that joined a cloud of puffy grey hair on his head. He was wearing a robe of some sort, looking very relaxed, care free and middle aged in that way where you can tell in an instant that there’s no wife around.

Someone arrived, a younger man, and they both greeted each other affectionately. This was all going on behind me but I could tell that they didn’t want me there; I could almost hear the eye rolling and head shaking. I left them to it.

Ray was still in bed when I got back to my room. It was a little past midday and each floor was a cacophony of noise, mostly vacuuming but also some banging from workmen on the large terrace outside the window.

I had met Ray the night before in the bathroom when we started a conversation whilst brushing teeth, yes it is possible. I went back to my room and tried to sleep when he came in and got ready for bed. Not seeing that as an appropriate time to start a conversation I waited. I was just about to say something when he turned off the light and there the opportunity was lost.

Hours passed, I couldn’t sleep and I don’t think he could either, there was no snoring or heavy breathing, just that awkward silence when every movement makes the bed squeak and you feel frozen to whatever position you found yourself in when the light went out. After a while I couldn’t hack it any more and got up to walk around the dark and silent corridors for a while.

I still couldn’t sleep when I got back in bed, but not long after Ray got up and left. On his return I took the opportunity to say, “Can’t sleep?”
“No,” he said in such a sleepless voice that we both knew we were on for a chat.

We talked for about two hours, until 3AM I think. He was Irish and had been in Japan for about a week, he had two or three weeks left on his Japan Rail Pass and wanted advice on where to go.

The Japan Rail Pass is like the golden ticket of rail travel, it allows you to use pretty much any trains, including the Shinkansen, as much as you like throughout the whole country (though not including subway trains like Tokyo Metro). As such they make it pretty hard to get one, you have to buy it before you come to Japan and it is hideously expensive. So when you have one it creates a dilemma: on the one hand you want to use it as much as possible so travel quickly from place to place, but on the other hand you end up not seeing anything, except in the Impressionist’ style of a train window.

We talked about Japan, Japanese language, food, people etc. I got some catharsis from telling him of my experiences, like when I told him about 6 year old children trying to reach into my anus on my first day of teaching, he didn’t say “oh yeah that’s called kancho, what did you expect you ignorant foreigner,” he said “what the fuck?” and I felt reprieved.

Psychologically, or socially, or something lly it was a weird conversation. For one because I didn’t tell him my name, and for another because it took place entirely in the dark. He was just a silhouette against the window and I was a shimmering edge from the light passing under the door.

When I got back to the room after using the Internet there was a knock on the door. A Japanese man was stood outside, he looked at me, said “eh” and then walked off shouting, “Gaijin.” This word means foreigner and is the short form of the word Gaikokujin. It actually has rude connotations that I tried to forget about.

A moment later the English speaking woman with the nice voice from the day before came along. She explained that we had to leave the premises between midday and 5PM. This was news to me, she hadn’t explained that to me the day before. I pointed this out to her, but it didn’t make any difference, I didn’t get a complimentary organic DVD or anything.

I caught the tram into the centre of Matsuyama, I wanted to get a look at the city from a higher place so found a department store. It was a boiling hot day, the sun was high in the sky and so I was surprised when the lift doors opened to the roof and I saw this.


An ice sculpture competition at the height of the Summer, odd but it adds a certain drama.

There were rows of blue seats and a stage where it looked like the winner would be announced later in the day. At that time there was a small crowd watching the busy sculptors.

I am not sure what this one is, it looks to me like two dogs kissing but I think it was supposed to be something entirely different.


Offcuts.


After the department store I walked through the network of covered pavilions to get some shade from the sun. Inside were lots of trendy Tshirt shops, the kind of places that, in the UK, I might feel a little apprehensive before going into, but in Japan there was no such feeling at all. I’m not sure why.

I was looking for Tshirts with comically bad English, but I couldn’t find any; annoyingly everything was spelt correctly. One Tshirt I did buy was of a Japanese comedian called Kojima Yoshio. This guy.


He looks stupid, wearing only a speedo, and has a stupid dance that is infinitely copied by kids across the country. However, he is a graduate from Waseda University, one of the most prestigious in Japan. I think this intelligence behind buffoonery makes him Japan’s Sacha Barron Cohen.

Anyway, I bought a Tshirt with an image of him on it, so that back in the UK Japanese people will nod and smile at me knowingly. However, I wouldn’t wear it in Japan because people would shake their heads and frown at me.

When the sun started to set I headed for the Western style fort. I could see it on the hillside as I made my way through tiny avenues between houses and crossing main roads until I got to the hillside. The sun was low in the sky behind the clouds and it looked quite mystical.


There were multiple paths leading up the hill, most seemed to enter a large graveyard that I didn’t think was the right way. Japan, I decided, was terrible for finding your way, be it because of signs with two conflicting arrows or just not enough signs at all.

I eventually found a good solid concrete pathway that snaked directly up to the fort with joggers running down and crawling up. It only took about fifteen minutes to reach the summit, but the walk was pretty steep.

Nearer the top the view of the fort turned into this.


And then from the top, this.


Rubbish isn’t it. It looked like a Disneyland ride.

The view was good though.


On the way back down there was a children’s play area that I hadn’t noticed on the way up. There was no one about so I went down the slide. But I didn’t, slide that is, I was so fat and so frictional that I had to pull myself down, accompanied by a sound like two balloons rubbing together.

A little further down the path and I noticed this guy.


It was a beautiful but eerie sculpture made out of bits from a local pottery company. The sculpture was so suited to the place that it looked not like a piece of art, but some creature with more right to be there than I.


I was quite mesmerised and spent a while trying to get the right angle for a photo.


I eventually decided this was this angle…


but I couldn’t hold the camera still enough because I was standing in a swarm of mosquitoes. The light was fading and my camera was on Night Mode, while I was on Oh Shit mode.

I couldn’t keep still long enough for a good picture, I walked away with only blurs and bites.


An hour later I was standing outside a small supermarket talking to Yoko on my phone. It was about 9PM and the supermarket was closing. As I spoke to Yoko a cat plodded up to me and let me stroke it. I described the cat to Yoko and she was jealous.

I was tickling the cat under its chin when it suddenly tensed up and stared in another direction. I looked over and saw another cat about 6 metres away. My cat stood up to face the other, who was standing tall with its back arched and its fur sticking out like the stereotype.

The other cat uttered that special cat noise, the nnnnnnnnnnnnugghh; like the moo of a cow with its mouth closed. Ok, maybe that description isn’t very good.

The sound is like the cat equivalent of DEFCON3, the one that comes after is the hiss sound which is DEFCON2 and then the actual tooth and claw fight is DEFCON1.

My cat reacted to DEFCON2 with the most pitiful and pathetic mew I’ve ever heard. It was the sort of sound you’d expect a kitten to make when it wants you to lift it up so it can lick a dripping tap.

The other cat responded by Running Away. I mean it didn’t just walk away, it ran, fast and deliberately away.

I thought about this for a moment and came to the conclusion that my cat must be some kind of a psychopath. You see, it had acted in a way that went completely outside the norms of expected behaviour, but in doing so it really frightened the other cat beyond any desire to fight.

A short time later I was sitting with another cat outside the hostel. This cat seemed very pampered and used to a lot of attention but he was happy to be stroked on the patio outside the main door. I was alone out there; the dining area was full of the other guests who could see me sitting outside through the window. An Austrian guy came out and smiled at the cat, and possibly me as well but we got talking anyway.

He was on a trip through Japan with friends who had been there before, so it was a stress free trip for him being led around. Being roughly the same age we talked about the scariness of future life and all that. He was just as introverted as I was, maybe more so, so I took a liking to him. We talked for a while too, in the international language of computer games, it never fails.

Back inside I checked my email on one of the three computers. To my left sat an oldish Japanese woman who worked and lived in the hostel. She was resolutely detached from everything going on around her; instead of reality, she was absorbed in a game of Solitaire on the computer.

I could imagine her sitting there every night of the week, as reams of people from all parts of the world came and went, she would remain constant. Her fingers would be sorting the cards into their families, a spark of consciousness when she thought she was going to win, but when she can’t it’s just two clicks and a whole new game appears. A new game, one she had never played before, plucked out of a universe of chance and coming loaded with possibility. I wondered how many other people there were in the world playing Solitaire at that moment, right across the world sitting in front of their screens in the morning, midday or evening light. As you read this she is probably there right now, working through a combination of cards as random as the people sitting next to her.

Later on I was in the bathroom with Ray and a tall American guy. The tall American guy was talking, giving his advice on where Ray should go on the back of his Japan Rail Pass. He spoke as if he had been to lots of places but everything he said sounded vaguely familiar. He had only been in Japan for a few days and as he spoke I recognised what he was saying from the Lonely Planet guide to Japan. I could almost here the new paragraphs and page turns as he spoke, the little extra detailed bits inside the black boxes and the switches from Getting There and Away to Eating and Sleeping.

Speaking of which.