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.
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