Nick Grills's blog

Epilogue

2009-10-24T04:33:00.000-07:00

Having been back from Japan for a week I was wandering around Goodge Street in London before meeting an old friend.

I was reminded of all my wanderings around Japanese cities in the weeks before, but in London the wandering was a depressing experience; something about the grey sky and the miserable looking people having conversations I’d prefer not to understand.

Something about being finally back too. I was missing people, places, a whole life built up and then torn down until there was nothing left but a set of passport stamps, some souvenirs and a mass of stagnant memories.

But in a shopping centre off Oxford Street I found something akin to a ray of light.

It was Uni Qlo, a Japanese clothes shop that I had been to frequently in Tokyo and which only recently opened stores in London. The sign outside was written in English and in Katakana, identical to its appearance in Japan.

I went inside feeling reverse culture shock, the culture I had left being recreated in my home country. The layout was the same, the clothes seemed identical but it all felt profoundly odd. I could stare at a rack of clothes and imagine I was still in Japan, but it just wasn’t the same because I felt different.

The shop assistants appeared to be Japanese to me and I hovered around one of them as they spoke to a customer. His English had the right kind of tinge to it and I wanted to start a conversation in Japanese.

There were different ways of going about this: just say hello in Japanese and see what happened, ask a question about clothes in English and then slip into Japanese, ask them if they were Japanese etc.

Excuse me
Yes
Are you Japanese?

I said this to a female shop assistant folding T-shirts. She nodded and I greeted her in Japanese. She was slightly taken aback but replied in turn. I tried to say that this was the first time I had been to a Uni Qlo in England, and was finding it strange. She clapped twice and smiled saying that my Japanese was good, in the classic way all Japanese people do no matter how awfully you speak their language.

Once we switched to Japanese I felt myself change. My voice became higher in pitch, I began to smile more and feel enthusiastic. She too seemed to be enjoying the conversation and was incredibly friendly. We talked about England and Japan, everything not to do with clothes, I’ve never had a conversation with a shop assistant that was so casual, it may have seemed almost inappropriate in a shared mother tongue. She asked me my name and told me hers, though we were strangers there was suddenly a connection.

She asked me if I wanted to carry on learning Japanese and I said yes but that it was hard because there are not that many Japanese people in England. “There so are,” she said, “there’s a Japanese community in London.”

However, I don’t live in London, I live in a tiny village in Gloucestershire which Japanese explorers have probably still not gotten around to discovering yet. I asked her about the Uni Qlo stores, whether they always employ Japanese people and she said, “Yes, about 30%.” So there was my solution for Japanese practice; I could just find my nearest Uni Qlo, sidle up casually to a shop assistant and use the old, “Excuse me, are you Japanese” line.

A supervisor of hers was walking past and she started folding clothes again. Even though he probably didn’t know what we were talking about he could tell it was not about the clothes. He asked her a question about something, but I think the real meaning was, “Please get back to work.” I took the hint too and said goodbye, she told me to come back again soon.

I walked away smiling.

Being English in Japan is an experience I am familiar with, but being English in England having been to Japan is suddenly new and exciting. Cultures and language are no longer constrained by oceans and borders and in a city as multi-cultural as London I am finding new places and people that I wouldn’t have noticed before.

My grey mood lifted and I began to look around me in a new light. Suddenly I saw Japanese restaurants, Wasabi noodle bars, Samurai sushi shops, Mitsukoshi Department stores etc.

I went to a shop selling bento boxes and sushi. Inside they had onigiri, my staple food during my trip. For the first time in my life I was finally able to understand all of the different flavours, but admittedly at the cost of them being twice the price and half as good.

It is hard to avoid the feeling of loss when leaving a life behind, but that doesn’t have to be the way it is. I have the feeling now that my life in Japan doesn’t have to be dead and gone but can continue in certain ways that I am yet to discover.

But in this paragraph lies the end of this blog. It began two years ago with “So it all began on the 27th of March when I woke up at 4:15AM remembering that I had something to do today.” And now back from my long travels, older, wiser, more bilingual, I wonder what I’ll do tomorrow.

The Surprise

2009-10-19T05:36:00.000-07:00

And so dear readers in the last instalment the protagonist, me, was on a plane flying from Japan back to England. Since this blog recounts my time in Japan you might hope that now, finally, with my not being in Japan anymore, this blog would at last come to an end.

But no dear readers, it goes on.

You see, there is another story to tell, one of love, deceit and distances. So hold on to your RSS feeds, here we go again.

As an introduction, because that bit you just read wasn’t the introduction by the way, I must explain that the following post will contain a certain amount of secrecy. Although I have been open and honest with you, dear readers, taking you with me to give urine samples and dress as Santa Claus for example, this story shall contain some hidden details.

For you see I have been in a relationship during my year and a half in Japan. I left my love at Heathrow before I set out and returned to them the day after I got back. For various reasons, though, I cannot name this person, or describe them in any specific way. It’s a kind of Montague/Capulet thing, but hopefully with a better outcome.

So please do not feel snubbed dear readers, it is not you, it’s me, and besides, who needs a name? I shall use a symbol, it worked for Prince, for a while. The chosen symbol is this one (:-) call it what you will.

People say that long distance relationships never work but myself and (:-) can prove otherwise. The secret, dear readers, is good communication, i.e. Skype.

However, even with Skype things were becoming strained between us after a year apart and especially with my decision to stay on even longer, (:-) was starting to feel a little left behind.

(:-) told me, “I know you love me, but this doesn’t feel like a relationship anymore.” And they had a point; all we did was speak on the phone about anything and everything, in a comfortable bond of trust. But you can do that with the Samaritans.

I pleaded for some more time and we got through this difficult patch. I started teaching again in May but decided to cut short the rest of my time in Japan and come home again at the start of August. I missed (:-) and felt that I’d spent enough time in Japan, I had done what I intended to do and it was hard to say exactly what was keeping me there. You see dear readers, I felt that having a good time was just not enough; I needed to feel I was still growing in some way, not just be living day by day but heading in a chosen direction. Like my imaginary grandfather would say, “The Heavens may give you the stars, the ancients may furnish you with maps and the scientists craft the finest compasses; but every man must find his own way.”

I was homeward bound, I hatched a plan to come home in August, but I hatched another plan at the same time. A deceitful plan to surprise (:-) by arriving home a whole month earlier than expected, and turning up on the doorstep.

I had a flight booked for the end of August. Had I been staying then I would have moved the flight later into the year, but as it was I moved it earlier to the start of August. This was before I had done anything else, like even telling my company that I was quitting. “That’s all booked for you sir,” the woman on the phone said definitively. People can talk a lot about the things they will do but when plane tickets are involved, that’s real commitment. I had a lot of work to do.

As you know I finished my school, said my goodbyes, explained away to my colleagues and the kids why I was returning home. All of this was without mentioning (:-) but it was the thought of (:-) that kept me going.

When I had finished teaching and set about my month long trip around Japan, that was when the deceit really started. For you see dear readers, in order for my ploy to work I had to convince (:-) that I was doing things a month later than I really was. To give myself the best chance of carrying this off smoothly, I made up a month of lessons and weekend activities to feed (:-) so that they wouldn’t guess that during July I was really wandering around Japan.

But the plot thickened, dear readers, for you see our method of communication had been over the Internet but when travelling I didn’t want to carry my laptop with me. I had therefore to find a lie for (:-) that would explain my online absence. This I did by explaining how my laptop had broken, Windows had corrupted and it would no longer start up properly. (:-) with great sympathy gave me quite a few suggestions on how I could repair the problem, and I have to say I was quite impressed. Had I really had the problem I was claiming to then I’m fairly sure the solutions would have fixed it. As it was I just had to say, “Yeah I tried that yesterday, didn’t work. Good suggestion though, I was sure it was going to solve it.”

I know what you are thinking dear reader, how was I able to have this conversation if it was not over the Internet. Well, I embraced the world of International Phone Cards. In practice this meant many a morning of waking up at 7AM, and crawling out of my hotel room to slouch over a phonebox.

However, there was one morning when (:-) called me on my mobile phone unexpectedly. This was at a time when I should have been up and ready to go to work, but I was really sleeping in a hotel room. The sudden stress of sounding really awake and ready for my day was so great that it gave me a migraine.

But it worked dear readers, and when I flew from Tokyo to London (:-) was none the wiser.

I arrived back at my parents house and dragging my luggage through the garden on the way to the front door I just could not believe that hours previously Yoko had been carrying that same bag. The place I had just come from seemed so infinitely far away that I could not possibly have travelled between the two in a single day. The guesthouse and my parent’s home barely felt like the same planet.

The next morning I was on a train to London, to surprise (:-)

You might think I would be too tired to make my way to London so soon, but no dear readers, the thing was I was still travelling. I was on home turf but I had not yet stopped, the journey was not over.

I read the safety leaflet sticking out of the pocket of the seat in front of me. “The English is all correct,” I commented to myself. Then I remembered that I was not in Japan anymore, the English should be correct.

When I looked out the window I saw hills and they looked strange to me. And, I couldn’t believe how low the clouds were. All these differences seemed like the fleeting thoughts you get for a few hours after you arrive in a country; before the detail of the old place slips from your mind, you have a little time to compare. I was so impressed with how low the sky was I took some pictures.

I felt strange arriving at Paddington station. It was 11:25AM and I had no idea where (:-) would be. Having come all the way from Tokyo I was most concerned about the final few miles between us, hoping for the best possible outcome for my long planned surprise.

I left the station and found a quiet street from which to call (:-) from. My mum had given me a mobile phone to use, a great help but presented me with a problem. Chances are the number that would appear on (:-)’s phone when I made the call would be very different to when I had been phoning from Japan. I got around this by using the 141 trick to disguise my phone number and I quickly explained that I was using a different phonecard. (:-) said “Yes I didn’t recognise the number.”

I casually asked (:-) about plans for the day: to drive back to home to pick up some more things - (:-) had recently moved into a new flat. “What time are you going to go?” I asked nervously.
“About 2 o’clock” came the reply. That gave me two and a half hours to find the flat, more than enough time.

I told some more lies, well delayed truths. I had worked out what day it would have been had I really started travelling when I told (:-) I did. It would have been the 10th day of my journey, the day that I spent with Yan and Kizuna at Fuji Safari park. Standing in a narrow street in London I told (:-) about my day at Mount Fuji Safari park and how I had just arrived at my hotel in Nagoya city.

A police car drove past loudly. “You are in your hotel?” (:-) asked bemused.
“Yes…but I’ve got the window open” I explained.
“Oh.”

Coming down the road were two people pushing a heavy trolley and that was a noise I couldn’t readily explain away. I started walking up the street to give myself more time before they reached me.

But coming the other way was a man talking on his mobile phone. Perhaps I could have explained away the sound of a phone conversation, but not one in English! “Ah, my parents are calling me, can I phone you back?” I said, another previously prepared line.
“Ok” (:-) said and I hung up.

At Paddington Station underground entrance there were some dead turnstiles covered in out of order signs. People were just walking through them but coming the other way was an Asian woman and her son. “Achira” said the son pointing down the corridor so I knew they were Japanese. I wanted to see if they were ok, I’m not sure why, still a lingering attachment to Japan I suppose.

The woman looked at the turnstiles, then went to an information window which was devoid of anyone to help her. Correctly she decided to carry on walking down the corridor through the turnstiles. Regardless of the fact that they didn’t need my help I told myself that I had to move on from Japan now and concentrate on (:-).

An hour later I arrived at the station nearest to (:-)’s flat. I had the address and a map to the nearest postcode. Opposite the station was a road that sounded suspiciously like the one in the address, but my map was not pointing me in that direction.

I followed the map to a large roundabout, but it felt wrong and going by postcodes alone is unreliable. I turned back and went to the street I had seen before, I didn’t know it then but (:-) was just a hundred metres away.

It’s hard to explain how much time I had spent wondering how to break the surprise. For months I had been going over the possibilities and discussing them with people. Back in May I sat everyday at my desk in school imagining the moment and all the different ways I could play it out. I could, for example, have rung the buzzer and pretended to be a delivery person in order to get (:-) to come downstairs, then I could have jumped out or left some tell tale clue that it had actually been me. There had been hundreds of possibilities depending on where (:-) was, if I could find the flat on my own, whether I had a phone etc etc etc.

As I made my way up the road I realised that the possibility the universe had chosen to become true was a kind one. (:-) had been easy to find on my own and the fact that my mum had spontaneously provided me with a mobile phone made the surprise easier still.

I made my way up the road to the flat, saw (:-)’s car outside. I turned around and walked back to the bottom of the road.

On the train I had written out ideas for what to do in this possible future, but it was now time for me to try and make one possibility become real.

I called (:-)

(:-): Hello
Me: Hi
(:-): You’ve spoken to your parents already?
Me: Yes
(:-): How are they?
Me: Fine.
(:-): Oh.
Me: I miss you.
(:-): I miss you too.
Me: I love you.
(:-): Awww, are you ok?
Me: Yeah but I’ve been here in Japan for too long and I’m sorry.
(:-): That’s ok, you’re coming back soon.
Me: Thank you for being so understanding and patient.
(:-): Aww, what’s brought this on, are you feeling lonely?
Me: Yeah I am, it’s lonely travelling. I’m walking at the moment.
(:-): Walking to get food?
Me: I’m walking from the station past a pub called The Anchor.
(:-): A pub?
Me: Yes, and a Jet petrol station.
(:-): What? You sound like you’re in England.
Me: I’m walking up a road, past a residential home.
(:-): Ok…
Me: Now there’s a road on the left, it’s called…William Crescent.
(:-): Where are you?
Me: Now I am walking to a car, it’s got a parking permit for London SE13
(:-): What!
Me: And there’s a bag in the backseat, See Woo food suppliers.
(:-): Huh? Where are you!
Me: Now I am walking up the road and there’s a building with big windows and red brick walls. Number 87 to 89.

(:-) looked out of the open window and we saw each other for the first time in eight months.

Still talking on phone:

(:-): (laughing) You’re really outside. Why aren’t you in Japan, you’re a month early.
Me: I wanted to surprise you.
(:-): Oh wow, I can’t believe it. I’ll let you in

We smiled at each other and (:-) ducked back inside the room. I waited at the front door and after a moment heard, “Hang on, I can’t find my key,” which sort of ruined the flow of the moment. (:-) came down the stairs and opened the door. Still grinning at each other we hugged affectionately and I followed (:-) into the flat.

(:-): But what about your trip? Why did you come back early?
Me: I’ve been feeding you lies for about two months. Everything I told you happened at least a month ago.

(:-) asked me when I had really finished my job and I struggled to recall the true date myself.

I explained that I’d gotten back to the country yesterday, that I had done my trip around Japan in July.

During this lecture (:-) showed me around the flat and kept saying, “Wow I still can’t believe you’re here” and really neither could I.

“I didn’t twig at all” (:-) said. I felt a bit smug at my fiendish achievement. “You are a very good liar, I’m going to have watch out for this in the future.”

This was an outcome I had no plan for; although my intention to surprise (:-) was born out of love, it might convince them that I’m actually a pathological liar.

I got out my laptop to show some pictures. “Is your laptop better now?” said (:-). I didn’t want to make the scale of lies seem even worse, but if I just lied again and said that my laptop had recovered then that deception would always linger.

I told the truth, that my laptop had never been broken.

(:-) looked at me and shook their head, “You.”

My journey around Japan had sort of been a journey back home and back to (:-). From the moment I had changed the date of my flight I had been on a road home. That road had taken me from Northern to Southern Japan, then back to my parents home in the UK for one night and finally to a small flat in south east London. I had been on buses, trains, planes, cars, trams, cable cars, and boats, stayed in nine hotels and three hostels but finally I was sitting on the carpet next to (:-).

The journey was over. The origami crane I had been given in Lake Toyako, which I had been carrying all the way across Japan and the journey home, finally had somewhere to land.

The Day I Left

2009-10-11T13:49:00.000-07:00

I woke up at 5:30AM. My flight was leaving at 11AM and I was heading for the airport at 7:00AM with Yoko, Kosuke and Kizuna.

My problem of 10kg overweight hand luggage had not magically disappeared in the night but the Internet revealed a potential way of avoiding the £40 per kilogram fine. There was a post office at the airport where £40 would let me send at least 10kg home.

Just before seven I said goodbye to my last room in Japan and pushed my two bags into the lift. The others were meeting me at the hotel and when I got out I saw Kosuke and Yoko walking from the station.

I was annoyed at myself that I was not better prepared; the last obstacle had crept up on me but it was my own fault for not reading the luggage restrictions more carefully. Yoko was adamant that I should stop worrying because I already had a solution, but I didn’t feel like worrying was my choice.

Kizuna met us on the train, and Il Heung came too, which was a nice surprise. So, on leaving Japan I had an entourage of four people and a wealth of expertise from three different nationalities.

Our train route required us to change stations by crossing a bridge and going through a shopping mall, all in less than six minutes. I had done the journey before but never with an entourage. I explained the route and the time limit to the others and when the train doors opened we were first out.

Racing down the escalator and to the ticket gates my ticket wouldn’t work. Kosuke snatched my ticket and shoved his wallet containing his travel card into my hand. He ran off while I went through the ticket gate with his wallet. It was a bit like a war film where the injured guy gets saved by the hero who runs off alone to create a diversion.

Outside the station Il Heung, Yoko and Kizuna had gone quite far ahead before realising they were alone. I found them and then looked back to Kosuke, he was running towards us and we regrouped at the bottom of the escalator to the bridge.

While I pushed my big bag Yoko steamed ahead with my hand luggage, through crowds of people coming the opposite way. I barged my way through too, forcing people to give way. I had a big bag to argue my point and I was leaving the continent in a few hours, a licence to be determined.

In the other station I bought a ticket with Il Heung while the others went through with their travel cards. Someone took my case and when I entered the station the others were already on the platform waiting for me, and our train. We had done it, I congratulated them like a proud boss and they mocked me for it. I thought back to an old computer in the library of a school that isn’t standing any more. After asking me lots of questions it made me laugh by telling me that my ideal career was… Army Officer. Then again, maybe it had been right after all.

Our unit divided. Me and Yoko sat dwelling on one side of the train while the others sat opposite playing Indian poker and giggling.

Yoko asked me for some paper and I gave her my notebook, there was a blank page next to a list of my trip’s expenditure. She asked for a pen and started to cross out all the prices. First I thought this was quirky but then I got angry because later I wanted to work out where all my money had gone. “Why are you doing that?” I said, she didn’t answer, “Stop it.” I grabbed the pen from her. “Why did you do that?”
“Because I am annoying,” she said.

At 8:30, two and a half hours before my flight, we got out of the train and into a lift for the departure floor of Narita Airport. The queue to the Virgin desk had only been open for ten minutes but it was already crowded with people. I eyed the luggage of my fellow passengers. There was a man with six different bags piled precariously on his trolley. I found this immensely reassuring until a gaggle of six children joined him.

The woman at the desk looked confused when our group surrounded her but only one passport was handed over. Actually, at that point my entourage was causing me a little stress because this wasn’t a normal flight, I had things to explain and audiences make me nervous. I had changed the date of my flight and still needed to pay a fee of £50. She checked in my bag and then weighed my hand luggage. She seemed pretty surprised when 16kg came up on her screen. I explained how I had been confused by information on the website but she was in no mood for excuses.
“Please can you let me go to the post office and get rid of some of the weight,” I pleaded
“Ok,” she said, “but come back once you do it. You have got an hour and a half before boarding starts.”
Our unit had a new mission.

While they ran off with my luggage to find the post office I had to go to another desk to pay for my flight change. The last cash in my wallet disappeared.

When I found the others again; they had already gone to the post office, bought a box and begun filling it with things from my bag.

An American woman was also at the post office trying to send things home. She wore a long furry black coat, round gold earrings and her hair was the colour of someone’s decision. Her manner was very self-assured but her helplessness was obvious. She was trying to speak only English and this had gotten her as far as a price in Yen for sending her box home. She asked me what that price would be in dollars. Yoko helped me answer but she didn’t like the result. I suggested sending it by ship, which is what I had been doing and she liked that price much more. As I filled in the form for my box, Yoko helped the American lady. God bless the bilingual.

The two heaviest things in my hand luggage were my Xbox and my Laptop. I was taking them as hand luggage because they wouldn’t survive any other way. I knew that the Xbox alone weighed 5.5kg so there combined weight would still be over what was allowed. I had learnt from the Internet that Virgin allows a shoulder bag to be taken on board with the kind of items people use on a flight; books, a CD player etc. Someone suggested I put my laptop in my shoulder bag and sneak it on that way. I didn’t like the idea because I didn’t think I would get away with it, but my laptop fitted perfectly into the shoulder bag so this became the plan.

As we were discussing this, the American woman came over to our group.
“Would you people like these?” she said holding out a clear plastic bag filled with small toiletries. “What we do is we take all these things from the hotels we stay in and then give them to homeless people. There’s everything in here; shampoo, conditioner and even sunscreen.” None of us said anything. In my head I was analysing how charitable it is giving homeless people things they don’t need that you got for free. To be kind, Yoko took the bag and the woman walked away happy.

With 10KG all packed up ready to send home I needed a cash machine to pay for the postage. Yoko and Kizuna went off separately to ask people where such a thing could be found and both came back with the same location. Since we had to go back to the Virgin desk afterwards Kizuna offered to go and stand in the queue for me until I arrived. I turned down her offer because I had suspicions that getting cash would take some time. Yoko and I went off in search of cash machines while the others stayed with all my things.

I’d been having bad luck with cash machines lately. I no longer owned a Japanese bank account worth accessing but I did have my English one that had been working for 80% of my time in Japan. Recently though, every cash machine I had used throughout the land came up with different errors and refused to give me money. I had checked my account online and knew it to be fine, I could use my credit cards in shops with no problems but cash machines were not on my side.

I told Yoko my fears and she became frustrated at my always expecting bad things to happen. We tried several different machines, I tried all my cards and lots of different buttons but my money was refusing to head East. I sighed and sighed and sighed, life was throwing me problems at a rapid rate.

Yoko was not sighing, I think she was enjoying the race against time, the challenges to be faced and the adrenaline they produced. I on the other hand, was miserable. When I am miserable I frown and I sigh and let it out. “Smile,” said Yoko and I wanted to hit her.

I have a problem with people telling others to just, “smile.” To me it means, “I don’t like to see people look sad so please smile so that I feel better.” It doesn’t mean, “I want you to feel better” because getting someone feeling miserable to smile is like covering scars with
make-up or giving homeless people cologne so that they smell better for a day. If you really want to make someone feel better then you say, “Are you ok? What’s wrong?” or you change the subject, provide a solution, make them laugh or just leave them alone.

To me sighing is good because it expresses how you feel but trying to hide it is bad because it is like ignoring a problem. Voicing my expectations of bad things to happen is another of my habits and it comes from an irrational belief that stating my worries makes them less likely to come true.

Yoko has a different philosophy. She believes that everyone has a small atmosphere surrounding them. If you smile, laugh and say positive things then your atmosphere will be positive and good things will happen. To sigh, to worry and to complain creates a bad atmosphere and life becomes harder.

Neither opinion is really true; the world works in various shades of chaos, differing only in their subtlety. All this might sound like waffle but in my last hours in Japan Yoko was making me angry by constantly telling me to “smile” while I was making her cry with my bad atmosphere. I couldn’t understand her; we were both working for the same cause and I wasn’t giving up, I was just miserable with the situation and felt I had every right to be. She couldn’t understand me; I was creating such a bad atmosphere that I was making my own problems worse and dragging everyone down with me, we would find a solution, that was certain, so why not get to it feeling positive.

Yoko lent me the £25 I needed to send the box home and we rejoined the queue for the Virgin desk. It was about 10AM when I got to the desk again, the plane started boarding in ten minutes. I explained about my hand luggage being over weight earlier. My luggage now only contained my Xbox but when we put it on the scale it read, 8KG. “What!” I thought; when I had weighed it that morning it had been two and a half kilos less. A flashback of that moment came to me and I saw my Xbox alone on the scale, not in the bag. The combined weight was still over the limit at a cost of £80.

Yoko stepped in arguing for me in Japanese. I didn’t have any idea what she was saying but the lady listened and then nodded. She put a sticker on my hand luggage and then stepped from her desk and behind me to put a sticker on my shoulder bag. I didn’t know what was going on, I was sure she would feel the weight of my bag which, thanks to the skinny nature of laptops these days, had a deceptively light appearance. But she didn’t, she sat down behind her desk again and Yoko gestured that I could go.

We five stood together, me now smiling, before the entrance to the security area, the real border between Japan and the nowhere between airports. We talked, I apologised, they told me it had been exciting. We took some picture and asked someone for a picture of us.

It was well and truly time to for me to go. I couldn’t stall any longer. We had a group hug, final goodbyes, well wishing and then I joined the queue.

I can remember that moment from different perspectives. I see my hands rolling my bag, slowly following the queue, I see the others standing on the opposite side of the barrier, I feel my wavering expression and the tears welling up in my eyes. Alternatively, I can see myself standing in the queue looking upset, Yoko, Kizuna, Kosuke and Il Heung around me as if I had still been standing among them watching someone else.

I was split then, a thing in pieces. I felt like I was less than I used to be, that people could walk through where I was standing and feel only a whisper against their skin.

My body reached the front of the queue and it took out my laptop to show to the security guards. The metal detector confirmed that I didn’t exist and my hands gathered all of my possessions back together. Walking towards the escalator to the gates I became whole again. My friends came back into view; they had been waiting for me on the other side of the soundproofed glass wall between us.

I touched Yoko’s hand from the other side of the glass and got on the descending escalator. The four familiar faces slid out of the final frame of Japan until their floor became my ceiling.

Japan had ended.

A woman came up to me, she knew my name. “Just you” she said as we began running towards the gate. “Yabai,” I replied, which is informal Japanese for when you are in trouble. She laughed and seemed like the most cheerful woman in any airport in the world.

At the gate I was the last person to go through. My window seat was next to a Japanese lady who politely stood up to let me sit down. I looked out of the window at Japan for the final time.

We flew.

Last day in Japan

2009-10-10T09:33:00.000-07:00

On my last day in Japan I had important things still to do. First I had to get my luggage to the right weight for the plane and decide if I needed to send another box home. Then I had to close my bank account and send the money to my English account. Also, I still owed £40 to the guesthouse company so had to go to their office in Shinjuku, which was convenient as I also wanted to go to Shinjuku Park one last time. I also wanted to make a DVD of photos for my friends from the guesthouse, and get some photos printed as a goodbye present for Yoko. Finally, that evening there was to be a sayonara party for me as a final goodbye.

I learnt the word for weighing scale in Japanese that day. I asked at the hotel front desk if they had one and explained that I wanted to weigh my luggage. The lady showed me exactly what I needed. “For your luggage” she confirmed before handing it over, clearly afraid that I would try clambering onto it.

The Virgin Atlantic website said that I could take two bags of 23kg each, as well as hand luggage of 6kg. I got my bags down to 23kg and 16kg respectively. Everything fitted and I didn’t need to post another box home. My luggage for the flight was sorted. Tick.

I dropped off photos to be developed and then took out all the money I could from my bank account. I had over a thousand pounds suddenly to stuff into my wallet; there were so many notes that I couldn’t close it – that’s never happened before. I knew that I should go to the bank and close my account properly but I was reluctant to. Opening the account in the first place was very complicated and no one spoke any English. I expected the problem to be even more difficult trying to close the account and I didn’t have the time.

I know people shouldn’t do this; the world is full of letters sent to addresses that people no longer live at, about accounts they no longer care for. My account is still open now, with 636 yen, and I know that for years to come letters will be sent to my name and my old address. They will pile up, first seen by people who remember me but over time I will be just another forgotten name; a 636 yen echo from the past.

But who knows, maybe one day I will return and close it properly.

When people ask me where my favourite place is in Tokyo, and I feel like replying honestly, I tell them Shinjuku Gyoen. Having said that I haven’t been there many times because it’s very exclusive. Not only does it cost 200 yen to enter but it closes everyday at 4pm.

It lies amongst the skyscrapers and busy streets of Shinjuku, one of the biggest wards in Tokyo. Laden with lawns, trees and lakes it is the kind of place Tokyoites have to go to remind themselves of what the world is supposed to look like. Inevitably it is full of couples walking hand in hand and groups of mothers pushing prams orbited by toddlers. For me I just like to be surrounded by trees and yet also skyscrapers, the sudden peaceful world amongst the chaos. It is a good place for reflection and since it was my last day in Japan I had a lot to reflect on. I ate some sushi while sitting on the grass and then took a walk and some pictures.

One of my favourite buildings in Tokyo is right next to the park.

It reminds me of the Chrysler building in New York but the windows on this building are better, see how they reflect the shape of the tower.

There was a beautiful light on everything and I took pictures of the tree lined pathways.

I thought about my time in Japan, tried to remember if there was anything else I needed to do in the short time I had left. There didn’t seem to be, it was time to move on. I left the park for the last time humming the Next Stage music from one game or another.

Heading down the street I saw this.

The sign belongs to a mall called Oicity, and this is the Men’s department, but metaphorically who knows what it really meant.

After wiring money home at the post office I headed for the office of J and F Plaza, whose accommodation I had been renting for over a year. I had actually moved out a month ago but due to some confusion I still owed them £40.

The thing was, I was leaving the country the next day and that gave me an invincible like status. There was nothing they could threaten me with, whether to pay or not was entirely my own decision.

I had been thinking about this dilemma for a few weeks and my eventual decision to pay up was for these reasons:
- I had the money
- It had been a brilliant place to live
- Japanese society, on the whole, has a negative enough view of foreigners being dishonest as it is that I don’t want to add to it. Actually, I want to actively dispel it in my own little way

I didn’t realise it until I got to the nearest of Shinjuku Station’s sixty exits, that the last time I had been to this part of town was the day after I had first arrived in Japan. Now I was back there the day before leaving.

The streets are very narrow, packed with tall buildings with business on eight floors or more. It’s very hard to find anything without a map or a guide. I stood and waited for the latter.

I was happy to see that my guide to the office was the person who had checked me out back in July. He had been stressed and anxious the last time we had met, having never checked anyone out before he didn’t really know what to do. Actually he had taken £5 from my deposit because I had been one minute late leaving my room, which he later returned to me after growing a sense of morality.

I think I flattered him by remembering his face and approaching him before he reached me. He asked me about my trip, he laughed a lot and told me that he was envious. Once inside the office though he became more serious. I was instructed to sit down at the same table I had sat at more than a year previously. They gave me tea and he and another man started fussing over writing me a receipt.

The other man seemed to want to practice his English, he asked me if I was a student. I explained that I used to be, “I studied Psychology.”
“Oh, you must be very clever,” my guide interrupted, they seemed to be competing for conversation.
“No it wasn’t that hard, it was more boring,” I said modestly, “I just had to stay awake.”
He thought about this for a second and then burst out laughing, the less serious part of his personality having survived from the street outside.

When it was time to say goodbye everyone in the office waved me off in that ridiculously rehearsed way Japanese companies do to try and make you feel like a king. At the travel agents I used to use all the forty or so members of staff are trained to react to the sound of the lift doors opening. Their group response is to yell out, “Goodbye, thank you” to whoever is about to descend. The people with desks nearest to the lift actually stand up and bow to you and the whole thing is so unsettling that it made me want to use the fire escape instead.

Heading out of the office and back to the subway I paused for a moment at the top of the stairs leading to the maze of corridors beneath Shinjuku. I imagined myself walking up those stairs a year and four months ago. At that time I had been early so taken a walk around Shunjuku for a while. I remembered being impressed by the wide streets, the tall buildings and large screens shouting out commercials. I remembered feeling nervous, everything was new and I was alone, I hadn’t even met Yan yet.

Now, having finished my job, taken a long trip around Japan and paid off my final debts I envied my previous self. The difference between us was simple. I had walked up those stairs a year before wondering what would happen, and now, I knew. There was no mystery left anymore, except for what would happen after all the goodbyes. Back then I hadn’t even said hello. It was the opposite journey for me now that contained mystery; back into the subway, back to Narita airport, back to Heathrow, back home and, only then, back into the unknown.

The light was fading on my final day in Japan. I walked for the last time from Minami Gyotoku station to the guesthouse, a journey I had done hundreds of times before. I decided that roads are roads except for the first and last time we walk down them, then, they are something different.

I was not in a sad mood as such, there was too much for me to think about. Leaving is always harder, at first, for the people being left; they are losing something plain and simple. For those doing the leaving there is a whole barrage of things to prepare for and worry about before, finally, in another place, you realise what you’ve lost.

I made my way quietly into the guesthouse and quietly into the living room. My friends were walking around busily, carrying plates of food to the table. It wasn’t a big event and it shouldn’t have been, no music or banners, just food and goodbyes.

The selection of food was tailored towards me; there was no meat at the table, just vegetable sushi, tempura and soba – all my favourites.

There is surprisingly little to say about that. We looked at photos from our escapades together on the big TV and Kizuna, seeing a picture I took of fireworks in Nagasaki, made a joke about mushroom clouds.

Goodbyes were said. Inevitably I didn’t know what to say, given enough preparation I could have found the words but I was lazy and tired and I don’t know; a goodbye is a goodbye no matter how grateful you are to someone, how much you like them and have appreciated them. When you are standing in a group of people gazing at you the words just don’t come.

I got back to my hotel exhausted. My luggage was all unpacked after I had been frantically looking for things earlier in the day. I had weighed everything previously so I just needed to put it all back together in the morning, one bag of 23kg and one of 16kg. I was fine.

On the Internet I read some news and checked my flight details. I checked again the baggage allowance and then my sense of security exploded in my face. The baggage allowance I had previously read (two bags for 23kg and one hand luggage bag of 6kg) was not relevant to my flight; it was only for flights to America. For Asia the allowance was just one bag of 23kg and a 6kg hand luggage bag. My hand luggage bag was 10kg over the weight and guess how much they charge per kilogram? That’s right a fortune: £40 per kg.

It was 1AM, my flight was leaving in 10 hours and my bag was 10kg overweight with a potential cost of £400, or getting rid of a lot of stuff that I wanted to keep.

I didn’t sleep well that night.

Tokyo Disneyland

2009-10-07T14:30:00.001-07:00

It’s hard to avoid Tokyo Disneyland, and yet I had been doing precisely that for a year and a half.

It would beckon to me though, from outside the windows of the Tozai subway train; the Tower of Terror looming in the distance.

Then at my school you could see Space Mountain clearly from the top floor, and for a time when I taught in a different school the nearest train station was just outside Disneyland. I would walk between effigies of Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck each Thursday morning to get to work.

Yoko had been suggesting we go to Disneyland for months and with only one more full day left in Japan it was now or never. If that wasn’t enough build up already then I’ll point out that I had never been to Disneyland before. All in all that’s about 15 years of waiting from when I first heard of Disneyland to finally walking through its gates.

Yoko was there too, but also Kizuna (friend and manager of guesthouse/ Yan’s girlfriend) and Kosuke (friend and lived in guesthouse too). On the way to the park Kizuna commented on how boring Mickey Mouse really is; all the other characters have got something special about them, but Mickey Mouse is just a gimmick. Also, she proposed that he and Mini Mouse are infertile as they still don’t have any kids of their own despite being a couple since 1928. I still propose that they’re secretly related, I for one would never get into a relationship with someone who looked exactly the same as me except for a dotted red bow.

We were going for the 3000 yen (£15) evening tickets available after 6PM when the park is at its quietest. There was a nice Summer evening light on everything as we walked through the gates and I got my first view of what it’s really like in Disneyland.

It was like a big fibreglass European town square with a large globe standing in the middle.

All in all this was much better than I was expecting, I thought the place would be a corporate brainwashing camp where armies of Mickey Mouses stalk the grounds converting kids to a lifetime of watching cartoons, buying merchandise and procreating in order to bring their own offspring to Disneyland in one big money making cycle.

Speaking of which, Kosuke and I tried on some Disney hats.

First ride was The Tower of Terror, a generic name for a ride that goes up vertically and then down like a falling lift. The thing about Disneyland is that the rides are all quite lame but they look really good. More adult theme parks will have their Tower of Terror just standing exposed for all to see, but Disneyland builds a giant haunted house around it, adds a story and special effects.

The story is something to do with a Japanese explorer stereotype, though he had an English name for some reason. He set out to find an ancient wooden idol belonging to some tribe of voodoo witch doctor stereotypes. Anyway, the idol drove the explorer mad and he locked himself in the tower. What the story doesn’t explain is why the mad explorer built a theme park ride in his house, but I suppose that’s being pernickety.

The queue for the ride takes you through a large ornate room with pillars, candle sticks, cobwebs and a real sense that you’re on a film set. Eventually you’re taken to a room where the door shuts behind you and a voice explains the story while a video plays. You see the mysterious idol sitting on a plinth with a spotlight on it but, right at the end of the story, it disappears.

There’s no flash while a mechanism removes it, there’s no smokescreen, it just fades away and you realise that it was never actually real at all. I don’t know how they do it, but it’s damn impressive.

The ride wasn’t great; the best bit was when you feel yourself going up but don’t know how high until you reach the open air at the top of the tower. Below you can see the rest of the park and views of Tokyo in the distance while the cold wind blows through your hair. Then comes the down, then the up, then down and so on like a yoyo.

The scariest thing about the ride was Yoko’s reaction. She had said many times that she doesn’t like rides but we managed to persuade her onto this one. Once it got going she seemed to curl up into a ball in her seat with her head disappearing inside her body like a tortoise. She stayed like that for the whole duration not making a sound and even when the ride stopped she didn’t move for a few seconds. I was scared that she’d gone into some kind of chrysalis.

We all nudged her and told her it was over and slowly her head emerged from wherever it had been and she smiled.

Another ride we rode was Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull, where you sit in a jeep type carriage that goes through underground tunnels. Occasionally the jeep stops and an animatronic Indy Jones acts out a scene from the movie; introducing whatever terrible collision the jeep will narrowly avoid next. The animatronic Indy Jones looked considerably younger than the real one but their acting was about the same.

My favourite ride was the least dramatic, it was an underwater adventure where you sit inside a tiny submarine and stare out the windows. Each window had a torch that you could direct outside to see further into the mysterious depths.

Not really being underwater the ride cheats the effect with water inside the windows and air pumps to produce bubbles. But even with this obvious cheat the journey the submarine took was quite mesmerising.

First there’s your usual rocks, treasure chests and fish, but then you see a strange creature waving some long stick at you. The submarine moves past more of these creatures as you enter their underwater civilisation. Further on an enormous octopus tentacle comes right up to the window like its going to attack. A moment later and you see the rest of the thing, a huge animatronic red monster living in the murky darkness.

The thing about this ride was that it was set in a different sort of world and that somehow made it more convincing. It wasn’t trying to take you through canyons or on the flight of a jet, it was just a gentle journey under the sea and it worked brilliantly.

At about 9PM the fireworks started. Disneyland is well known for having fireworks every night, which must take away the magic of fireworks for the staff. Anyway, at the centre of the park, where the fireworks were going off from, was this.

It’s a dragon, quite a beautiful one at that.

During the fireworks the dramatic music played and the dragon reared up its head and flapped its wings. At certain moments it breathed fire into the air and sparks showered from its wings.

The fireworks and music accompanied the beast as it danced its piece and then faded back into inanimacy. Everyone clapped, including me.

When the park was closing we walked back through the maze of different areas, passing through all the distinctive zones. There were the European town, Egyptian, jungle, marina, scary, volcano, futuristic areas and finally the exit gate. Walking through the park at speed made me appreciate the design of the place; it’s surprisingly well done with no tackiness or Mickey Mouse robots at all.

First Goodbye

2009-09-30T14:29:00.001-07:00

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

2009-09-20T15:27:00.001-07:00

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

2009-09-20T14:01:00.001-07:00

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

2009-09-19T04:31:00.000-07:00

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

2009-09-17T01:49:00.000-07:00

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

2009-09-15T13:37:00.000-07:00

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

2009-09-13T05:47:00.000-07:00

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.

To Kumamoto

2009-09-11T03:06:00.000-07:00

Today I was crossing from Shikoku to the final island of my trip, Kyushu.

The third bed in me and Ray’s room was occupied by an older chap who left at 6 in the morning. I know this because he made it very noticeable. His tactic was to get packed noisily but fast, rather than quietly but taking longer. I don’t know which idea is better, it’s the old opening a crisp packet in the cinema problem – either annoy all the audience for a second, or just the people around you with half a minute of fumbling.

I got up at 7:15 and went down to the showers. The one I used that morning had a smaller cubicle and I entered it backwards for some reason. Water immediately started spraying at me before I had closed the door. “Is this another Japanese invention; an automated shower?” I wondered. But no, on walking backwards into the cubicle my posterior had pressed the on switch without my noticing – I’ve never said that before.

I had been given orders by Ray to wake him up in time so that we could both go down to the station together. Unfortunately he is quite a deep sleeper and waking him was a bit of an effort.

I stooped over him and tried his name. “Ray,” I said, “Ray, it’s 7:30, time to wake up.” He stirred, meaning that he opened his eyes, looked at me, stretched, rolled onto his side, murmured and fell back to sleep. “Damn.”

I tried to delegate the role to my alarm clock but it was even more useless than I was.

I called his name again and he stirred, but with one eye open long enough to see that the other bed was empty. This kick started the Tell Anecdote part of his brain and he was awake.

Apparently his foot and that of the other guy had touched during the night. Ray had thought it was a mouse and jerked his foot away with a big kick, probably giving the guy a free souvenir bruise.

We got ready and left about 8:30, which was cutting it fine for my 9:11 train.

On the tram to the station I remembered that I still hadn’t told Ray my name.
“You don’t know my name, do you?”
“No, I was thinking about that actually. It was going to be the last thing I was going to say. You know,” he continued, “we could make a game of it, I could guess.”

So he guessed. How long would it take someone to guess your first name? He got it in ten, much to his surprise. I never knew I had such a standard name.

Our goodbye was cut short because it was 9:10 and I had one minute to run to the station, buy a ticket, find the train and get on. Needless to say, I didn’t make it.

The lady at the ticket window treated my rushed questions about where the 9:11 train was with unsympathetic calm. It took her a frustratingly long time to talk to me because she was also checking the tickets of everyone entering and leaving the platform. She told me to hold on a few times too and when I heard her voice suddenly behind me I realised she was doing the announcements as well.

The one woman train station did inform me that I could get the express train which would get me to Yawatohama in half the time but double the expense.

At 11AM the express train was slowing down for arrival in Yawatohama. I looked out the windows gloomily at the lack of shops or potential ATMs for me to use. I only had 80 yen (40p) on me and needed money to buy a ferry ticket. Credit and debit cards are very hard to use in Japan, especially foreign ones, so cash is a must.

I was actually willing shops and convenience stores to appear, as if they could just pop out the ground brimming with cash machines.

Yawatohama seemed to be a very narrow place; it’s built in a tight valley with steep hills tiered with farmland in neat rows. I had not seen that kind of landscape in Japan, it looked more like Spain to me.

I got directions to the town’s ATM from a station person. The ATM charged me for my transaction but at least it spoke English – literally it greeted me and thanked me with pictures of people bowing.

I had to find the bus to the ferry and not the port – this was an important distinction.The station had a travel agency for booking cars and holidays, not really a place for giving advice to tourists but I thought I would try my luck.

“Follow me,” said the lady behind the counter after I asked about the bus. “I’m leaving for a moment,” she called out to a hidden colleague.
“Where did you come from?” she asked me on the way out.
“Matsuyama”
“Why are you going to Beppu?” she said this in English and with a fascinated tone like I might be going to fight great creatures, collect a magical energy known as Manna and return the realm to nature’s order.
“Holiday,” I shrugged.

The bus stop was not the one she thought it was. “Wait here,” she gestured and then ran off around the corner.

A lady sitting at the erroneous bus stop asked me where I was going. I told her and she indicated that I should go around the corner my guide had just run towards. The lady said lots of other things too and I just said “Ohh” and walked around the corner. She was one of the only people who helped me on my trip that I forgot to thank.

My guide had found the bus stop and was smiling profusely. She seemed like quite a character, I could imagine her growing onions as house plants and laying a place for her cat at the dinner table.

I thanked her doubly to make up for bad karma and she ran back to her office.

The heat was sweltering, so hot that people actually dress up to protect their skin. A woman cycled passed me wearing long sleeves and gloves, and, even holding up a black umbrella.

Fortunately there was a seat in the shade for me and after a while I was joined by another character.

Her name was Mitomi Yoshikumi and she was an actress who had just finished her 105th performance of something or other in Tokyo. She gave me a leaflet for the something or other, I still have it, a musical about a man called Botchan.

Well anyway, she was cute, confident and cheerful in that way Japanese women sometimes are. She had no apprehension about talking to me and she seemed interested in everybody.

We were both getting the same ferry and she helped me buy a ticket. It was so nice to have someone else to do the hardwork, I had really missed being a backseat traveller.

In the queue for the tickets Mitomi San advised another woman about tickets. Later, upstairs when we went to eat something Mitomi struck up conversation with the woman again and she invited us to sit at her table.

They both quizzed me about my journey, teaching English and Japanese food. I’ve gotten more used to being the centre of conversation in Japan but it still unnerves me a little. I mean, they are both Japanese, they can say lots of in depth interesting things to each other about the nature of space and time, or just say, “Hey, what about our Prime Minister hey, he’s all forehead.” Instead they just concentrated on me and my simple Japanese answers. We fell into silence with me thinking that I’d failed somehow.

The woman, let’s call her Ladyshy, seemed a bit taken aback by our entry into her life. She had never travelled abroad and didn’t reveal what she did for a living. I think it was a bit of a shock for her to be lunching with an actress and a foreigner she had met only five minutes before in a ticket queue.

Ladyshy left the restaurant for the boat before us, she had already finished eating and other generic excuses for just wanting to be alone. I think she hid from us on the boat too as we didn’t see her.

On the boat I and Mitomi took pictures on the deck.

Everything looked stunningly perfect from the boat. That is the great thing about Summer, everything shines.

Conversation with Mitomi was easy because she peppered her Japanese with English, and I did the same.

After a while we went back inside and found a large room with comfortable floors but no chairs. It looked like a cheap tatami room, but with carpet instead of weaved matting.

We both fell asleep, in different parts of the room. Talking together we might have looked like a couple but in sleeping I noticed that my arm was reaching out. I looked over and saw that Mitomi was also reaching out, and neither of us toward each other but to some absent others.

I awoke to find her staring out of the window like a child who has never been on a ferry before.

“Good morning,” I said

She showed me pictures of the cast she had been working with. They had rehearsed in Aimori, in Northern Honshu, and even lived together, all 13 of them.

She was also carrying fan letters which seemed a bit egotistical to me but they must come in useful if you lose faith in yourself on the way to the shops. She didn’t seem egotistical though, I think she was the kind of person who actually replied to her letters.

Time passed quickly and Beppu soon scrolled into view across the windows.

On the way out we met Ladyshy again and Mitomi insisted we take pictures of the 3 of us. She was so eager that it crossed my mind whether she needed the pictures for an alibi or something.

We three were going to the train station and Ladyshy relaxed a little.

At goodbye Mitomi gave me her details, and I gave her mine, Ladyshy had already gone.

Alone I bought my ticket and got on my train after some bready lunch. Waiting on the train platform the sky was full of dramatic clouds.

The train was old. It had red rusted metal on the outside and wooden floors within. But the furnishings were new and it was wonderfully comfortable. It was the rapid limited express, which meant it didn’t go to many places but did go to them quickly and expensively.

On the way to the toilet I was thrown left and right by the speed of the train along perhaps uneven rails. I enjoyed the feeling; it was like a roller coaster, though made urine trajectory management more of a challenge.

I felt exhausted on that train. “It’s the last train of the trip” I told myself. I had a four hour bus ride the day after next and a plane ride the week after but this was the last train and that seemed significant. All in all though I wanted a holiday from travelling, I was knackered.

In Kumamoto at 9PM with no tourist information open I had to find my hotel. This naturally leads on to a long boring story about another trial, but no, I did it and that’s all that matters.

I had an idea for something to do in Kumamoto, a special pilgrimage I wanted to make.

I had been reading a book called Hokkaido Highway Blues by Will Ferguson throughout my trip. It’s about the author hitchhiking from the Southern most point in Japan to the most Northern. It was the complete opposite to my journey, in both direction and transportation. I was doing it the easy way, with just confusing train timetables and G8 Summits to contend with. However, Kumamoto was one place on both our journeys.

Anyway, Mr Ferguson mentions writing graffiti in the toilet of a bar in Kumamoto called the Rock Balloon. The book was written in 1998 but my guidebook still had the bar listed, even mentioning the graffiti. Another factor on my side was that coincidentally I and Mr Ferguson are the same gender, an important factor in toilet pilgrimages.

I got changed and made my way out from the hotel I had just checked into. It was 10PM and the man at the front desk said “Oh,” like a grandfather just waking up from a doze as I gave him my key. It made me smile.

Within 15 minutes I was standing in the street of the Rock Balloon. I started the search hoping it wouldn’t be a scary place with big burly bouncers at the door wearing lipstick; you just wouldn’t know how to act would you.

So what was this graffiti that I was on a pilgrimage to see? Well according to the book it reads, “What is konnyaku? Where does it come from and what does it want?”

To answer this first question, konnyaku is a kind of grey gelatin that looks pretty strange and doesn’t taste very nice. It is used more for its texture than taste and I have experienced it mostly in school lunches where it gets cut into small cubes from which you could build a little gelatinous igloo.

The Rock Balloon was proving hard to find. The map in my guidebook was unclear about which street it was on as it was shown between two streets. One of these streets was part of an enclosed shopping area which had buskers playing despite the late hour of the night.

I couldn’t find the bar on either street. I walked down both again more slowly and managed to find a restaurant listed on the map so I knew I was in the right place.

Two white guys had been talking in the shopping area and they were still there when I was on my second round. I asked them if they knew the bar. They did, or rather they used to.

“It closed down.”
“Oh”
“Are you using Lonely Planet?”
“Yep. 2005”
“It closed down about 5 years ago. I’ve written to Lonely Planet about it and other things in Kumamoto that aren’t here any more, other people did too and they’ve finally updated the new edition.”

I was really impressed. Lonely Planet is like a binding soul between foreigners visiting Japan and that conversation proved my theory. From my simple question he knew why I thought the Rock Balloon was still there and even which edition I was using. He could have whispered, “Number 20, page 644 is a lie” and walked off mysteriously and I would have understood.

And so my pilgrimage came to a disappointing end. The guy did tell me about another rock bar nearby but it wouldn’t be the same unless they happened to have shipped over the toilet walls from the Rock Balloon, seemed unlikely.

I made my way to my newest home disappointed at not getting to see the reality behind the book I was reading, the author’s own handwriting no less. But the moral is that time changes all things, and that Lonely Planet takes a while to keep up.

Matsuyama

2009-09-08T14:07:00.000-07:00

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.

Shimanamikaido

2009-08-30T13:21:00.000-07:00

Getting up to catch the 7:02AM train from JR Hiroshima station is not easy, though I suppose it’s easiest when you’re in Hiroshima. The train carried my sleepy carcass to Onomichi, the start of the Shimanamikaido. For this day I was to attempt to cycle from one of Japan’s main islands to the next via this system of bridges connected by small islands. Here is a map.

The whole thing is 77KM (48 miles) but there are hostels and so on along the way. I had done my preparation work; I knew to get the map from the tourist information office at the station and then I would rent a bike from the Municipal Parking Garage behind the Green Hill Hotel, 5 minutes walk from the train station. All planned out.

I got to Onomichi station at about 8:30AM and rushed over to the tourist info booth. The lady at the counter gave me the map but apologised because it was all in Japanese.

And indeed it was. All the place names in difficult kanji with a big scary diagram of the whole bridge network. There were some friendly cliparty pictures of people cycling though so that gave me hope.

I had to explore for quite a bit before I found the Municipal Parking Garage for bike rental. In my search for it I came across Pontefract.

In case you don’t know, Pontefract is an English town in the county of Yorkshire. It is also where my mum is from and so I have been there many times to see relatives and so on. It isn’t particularly famous or particularly pleasant a place (sorry relatives) though it does have a Morrisons. Anyway, I was frankly astounded to find it in Japan.

It was the name of a plant shop, a “Herb House.”

As you can see it was closed when I was standing outside it in confusion. There was no one to ask about why on earth this shop had that name, nobody to finally demand that Japan make sense. But really, the minute Japan makes complete sense it will wink suspiciously and then fly into space.

When I did find the bike rental place, it was underneath Pontefract, there were some polite ladies choosing bikes. The owner of the place, a large but small man in a white Tshirt, was barking orders at them. I saw one of the women make a, “what’s wrong with him,” face which I was also included in. As the women chose theirs bike I walked around wondering which one I should get. Not having ridden a bike for around 6 months I was feeling nervous about this whole idea.

It wasn’t long before the women were gone and the man in the white T-shirt beckoned me over. He sat down at a desk and I sat on the other side, there were forms to fill in.

The Shimanamikaido has many good things about it. Bike rental is pretty cheap, you can get the bike at one end and leave at the other and there are signposts and the leaflet. Online there is not much information, but somewhere is a Japan Cycling Guide with pictures and so on that I had looked through.

I was filling out the form as best I could, writing my name in katakana, the alphabet used to write foreign words. In katakana my name is ニク　グリルス The bike man looked at what I had written, sighed and demanded, “Don’t write in English letters.”

Now I don’t know about you but I think there’s a big difference between my name written in English, Nick Grills, and in Japanese, ニク　グリルス.

“It’s in katakana” I complained to him, he didn’t seem to hear me.

We struggled through the rest of the form and I handed over the money. He explained lots of things to me for which I used my pretend-to-understand nod.

At some point he became nice because as I got on my bike he got on his to show me where the ferry port was.

I couldn’t get my bike to unlock though, all the bikes in Japan have inbuilt locks that you use a tiny key for. Probably any 5 year old in the country could do it, but not me. He smiled and did it for me. “It’s different in the UK,” I said pathetically.

We cycled to the ferry for the first island, which was about two minutes bike ride from the shop. He checked I had the correct money and then shook my hand. The ferry left a second later with me on board clutching my new stead.

Two minutes later the ferry had arrived, it was a pathetically short journey but all the advice online says to get the ferry from Onomichi to the first island, Mukajima. There is a bridge between the two islands but it is not very cyclist friendly.

I got off the ferry and found myself on the bend of a road, there was hardly anyone, or anything, around. A picture of a bike on the pavement indicated the cycle lane which I thought must be the right way. I started cycling, picking up speed and easily balancing myself with my backpack aboard my back.

It was starting to get hot but there was a breeze, things were fine…

but not for long. After about 15 minutes I was unsure whether I was going the right way, there were hardly any signs and it had been a while since the last one. There being cycle marks on the pavement was nothing much, in Japan everyone cycles on the pavement. I stopped outside a small restaurant and went in to ask for directions.

Alarmingly, they had never heard of the Shimanamikaido, even when I showed them my leaflet they both looked worried – on my behalf. “Good luck” they told me as I left.

I carried on the way I was going and then turned left onto a more main road that seemed to be the right way. The going was hard as I was cycling on proper road now and it started going up hill. The sun was high in the sky and I was already very sweaty.

After 15 minutes I came to a carpark with some trucks but no drivers. I hid from the sunshine in the shadow of a truck and drank some precious water. I got going again.

On and on. The road became more scenic and sloped down next to the edge of the sea. I felt better now, and as I went around the corner I saw a bridge to the next island which I recognised from online.

But when I got over the bridge I had a left or right decision. Both looked the same. I looked at my map but after trying to fit the red lines on the map to the roads I had been on I realised that I wasn’t even sure what island I was on. I went right and followed the road down between fields and orchards. It was pleasant now, downhill and quiet, the road became much smaller and led into a small cluster of houses with a shop.

And another junction. I went left.

Onwards and I found myself having to stop more often to rest. The road came to a pitch black tunnel that I could see the end of, but was fairly long and looked unsafe with no lights. A steep path led up the side and I ditched my bike and mustered the energy to climb the path and see how easy it would be to avoid the tunnel. It wouldn’t be, so I braved the tunnel.

I came out the other side unscathed and grateful for the shade.

The road sloped down by some houses and then a large truck came along, it was going down the same road, next to the sea. I was just metres from the water, the view was beautiful.

The truck stopped in a car park with other vehicles digging at the ground. The road I was on turned into a hill and I soon had to get off and push.

A voice in my head, called Reason, was telling me to stop. I was already exhausted, hot and honestly didn’t know where I was. I was certain that I was lost but I didn’t know how lost I was. I also had the unnerving feeling of being somewhere I really didn’t belong. This was the back end of the middle of nowhere; there were houses but no one around, not one solitary figure. The signs were unreadable, my phone had no signal and the map was useless to me. It was all going horribly wrong.

Resting in some trees I decided it would be all or nothing and that I had to act either way and stick to it.

You know all those films, or should I say all films, where the central character has something they have committed themselves to doing but there comes a point where he or she nearly gives up. Well Western culture keeps this idea running strong: in order to achieve something you have to stick at it, you get out what you put in, never give up. In any story anyone ever tells you where this situation occurs you expect them to tell you that they put in the effort or they found the solution and got there in the end.

Well not this story.

I decided to give up, not just go down the hill to the tunnel, not just go back to the bridge or the first island. I decided to go right back to the man in the white T-shirt and give him his bike back. It was clear that this was beyond me. As I cycled back there were no people, no cars, even the trucks were gone.

I got more lost trying to find the way back. I cycled along roads desperately trying to remember any familiar houses or trees or anything. After trying many identical roads I eventually found the tunnel and it was my hallelujah, I knew the way from there.

Back near the shop, well I thought it was a shop but it was actually a house with large windows and a vending machine outside, I got a drink and sat in the shade. I remembered staying in tiny villages in France as child and having a fear that I would wake up and my family would have left me. This was years before I knew any French and the sense of fear and helplessness the idea gave me was very powerful. Somehow I had gotten myself into a similar situation.

Back over the bridge and I saw a rare sight, a westerner. He was a proper cyclist in lycra, reflecting sunglasses and basically everything that proper cyclists wear. He was going the other way to me. I stopped and watched which direction he went at the end of the bridge. Instead of going right he went left and I watched as he rode along a flat road following the sea, it looked like a beautiful road; it looked like the correct road. Again I asked myself if this was the right path for me. I answered no and stuck to my guns.

Back on the road next to the parked trucks it got even harder, I hadn’t realised how steep the hill was but once I was over the crest of the slope the rest was easy and I sailed back to the ferry.

I was elated to get back to my starting point, back into a place connected with the parts of Japan I understood: trains, restaurants, shops, airports. The whole excursion from it had lasted over 3 hours and got me nowhere but upset and exhausted.

I stopped outside the bike place to remind myself of some key Japanese expressions for the conversation I was about to have.

“I got lost” I announced as I cycled in and the man in the white T-shirt looked up from his paper. He seemed surprised to see me, and then flustered. I was just hoping to park the bike and walk away but he insisted on getting the paperwork out again.

He needed me to sign to say that it was now all void, he seemed very nervous about this until I got out my Hanko – my Japanese name stamp, equivalent to a signature. He was then concerned that he could not give me my money back, I told him that it was fine, I did not expect any money back. He did give me my 1000 yen deposit though, which was a plus, and then I got the profound luxury of walking away.

On the way, cycling back just before the carpark with the trucks, I had looked up and seen a road sign about 10 metres above me. It said in English, “Shimanamikaido” and pointed up a steep fly road that joined onto a larger road. So most of my day had been spent entirely on the wrong path and although I then knew the right path it only confirmed my decision to take the train. The moral is, if you are on the shimanamikaido follow the cars and look up a lot.

I was so happy to be free of the nightmare of being lost in the back end of Japan.

I went back to the tourist information office to ask about buses. It would take two buses to go across the 77KM of bridges and get to Imabari Station

I changed my clothes from the sweat rags I had on in a toilet. On the way out again a cleaning woman looked at me and said, “That was the women’s.” We both laughed.

I put my bag in a locker and went to Mr Donuts. I felt such elation; it was like a massive problem had been lifted from my shoulders. I mean it had been replaced with the problem of how to get across to Shikoku by other means, but this would not involve peddling around purgatory anymore.

I was getting my bag out the locker again to catch the bus. I put my water bottle, freshly bought, on top of the locker where it fell over when I pulled out my bag. But it didn’t just fall over; it rolled, backwards, till it hit the wall. The lockers were already taller than me, and when I jumped I couldn’t get my arm far enough over to reach the bottle. I thought about stepping inside one of the lockers when I saw a big security camera on the wall right next to me. I did sort of try stepping onto one of the lockers but had nothing to hold on to when I tried to reach over. All in all I probably looked really stupid to who, or what, was watching. It goes without saying that I couldn’t get my water back, I had to buy a new one L

I caught my first bus ok; it seemed to be full of shouting teenagers. I listened to music to drown them out. The bus drove out of Onomichi and over the islands that I was meant to be cycling over. The views were stunning though, the sunshine so strong that everything looked new.

But then I was in doubt about whether my bus stop had passed. I went up to the driver at the next stop and showed him my ticket.

He explained that oh dear, my stop had been the one before that one. A familiar feeling of helplessness crept up on me, it was like I had been getting away from the place but was now discovering that it was just an illusion.

Two Japanese ladies appeared behind me claiming to have the same problem. The driver thought about our dilemma and thank god had a solution. Down the road there were some steps leading up a verge. He told us to go up those steps to a bus stop and wait there.

Getting off the bus I lead the way, partly because I wanted to get to the stop as soon as possible in case there was a bus leaving that moment.

The bus stop had a tiny shelter next to it which was a welcome bit of shade in the mid thirty degree sunshine. Studying the timetable, and listening to the two women who were going in the same direction, the next bus was not for an hour and a half. I sat down and started reading my book. One of the ladies did strike up conversation with me but it didn’t last very long.

The day was feeling like a huge struggle, the worst part of my whole trip by far, the worst part of my year and a half in Japan.

Eventually the bus did come, accepted my ticket and my destination was also the bus’s final one so I could relax. It took over an hour and I tried to get some sleep. The two women got off before me and nodded a courteous goodbye.

At Imabari Station I got a train to Matsuyama, somewhere near enough to where I was but also on the way to the ferry port where I could get to the final island of my trip, Kyushu, in a few days time. The train was slow and it was about 7PM when I arrived in Matsushima. I had nowhere to stay but asked at the tourist information, I was hoping that the guy would call hostels for me – I had heard that people did that for you in Japan. Instead he just gave me some leaflets and wished me luck.

I browsed through some of the leaflet and one place caught my eye. It sounded like a hippie hostel, where you could learn about astrology, aromatherapy, spoon bending and pay extra to talk to the owner about UFOs (in Japanese only alas). It had also been voted in the top ten youth hostels in the whole of Japan.

I called them and a friendly woman informed me in English that there was a bed if I did not mind sharing and no problem to come in the next hour. Things were looking up; I even had the directions to the place in the leaflet, by tram no less.

A large three story traditional bath house was next to the tram’s final stop. Looking at my map I followed the map up a steep road. Tennis courts and what looked like doctors surgeries passed me on both sides. The street lighting was sparse on this road but out of the darkness I walked into the light of some large hotels and the hostel right next to them.

Inside I took some slippers and met the owner of the kindly voice. She told me the rules of the place, there was a sort of curfew at 12, food at certain times and showers on the second floor. She gave me my linen and then up I went to my room.

There were three beds, two were made and the other was covered in things but nothing alive. I was trying to work out where this person came from, they seemed to have some documents with Japanese on them, but then I saw that they had a bottle of shampoo from superdrug which clinched it for me.

The showers in the hostel were odd. The shower heads all contained small green balls that the water ran through, I guess to invest it with minerals or some such. You could buy this special shower head and some green balls from the shop. I didn’t feel much difference but it was great to be in a hostel that cared to provide it.

I went out for some food and a look around. Everything seemed very traditional around the bath house, there were even people walking around in bath robes and sandals. A long enclosed pavilion of shops led on for quite some way selling souvenirs.

And there was a Lawson, I got my convenience food.

On the way back to the hostel I noticed a shadow. It was of a traditionally designed street lamp, but the shadow was caused by a bright flood light from the side of a tennis court.

I went up some steps to get another picture of the shadow but ended up with a blurry image of the bath house.

Then I noticed another shadow, of me this time, going down the steps between a stone torii.

Back at the hostel I ate my food in the now deserted dining room. Up in my room the other bed’s occupant was still absent. I got changed and went to brush my teeth. In the communal bathroom I got talking to a friendly Irish guy.

Back in my room it transpired that he was the one sleeping in the other bed. But this took several hours of darkness and both being unable to sleep to establish.

Miyajima

2009-08-24T13:55:00.001-07:00

The Nihon Sankei are the top three most beautiful sites in Japan. I had been to one already, Matsushima (the place with lots of islands), and today I was going to another, Miyajima – a large torii gate standing in the sea around a small island.

Trains run from Hiroshima to the small harbour where you can catch a boat to the island. This did not take a huge amount of timetable detective work on my behalf, or even asking any questions. Instead I was able to simply obey the golden rule of going to major tourist destinations: follow everyone else. It wasn't just the foreign tourists either, that day was a national holiday so the train was full of Japanese families and school trips.

The first time that day when I didn’t follow everyone else was on the boat to the island. It was a beautiful day, I mean too hot but that’s a given in a Japanese Summer. As the boat neared the island the torii gate was in clear view at the front of the boat. However, no one could work out whether the boat was going to the left or right side of the gate and people kept swapping sides to try and get the best view. I stood resolutely on my side of the boat, which turned out to be the wrong side and explains why the following pictures have lots of people in the way.

The island itself is full of touristy shops selling the usual tacky souvenirs and overpriced ice creams. But the shops are in nice wooden buildings, there are stone lanterns and other decorative things that make the island quite beautiful.

Including a huge number of deer.

I don’t know how they got over there, maybe they got blown off course thousands of years ago like in Madagascar. One thing is for certain though, not many are leaving the island – I didn’t see any on the ferry. So the population is just going to grow and grow until they take over the whole island and form their own metropolis.

At first they seem very passive and idyllic making a deer city seem quite a pleasant concept.

But as soon as you sit down with an ice cream you realise you’re surrounded. Tongues abound.

Anyway, this is what the gate looks like up close.

This is perhaps not the best view, the best is to be looking directly through the gate but that exact vantage point is the most crowded on the whole island. And anyway, why do we bother taking pictures of things for which there already exists a million and one photographs. In this world of Google Image Search it would be so easy to pretend that you had been all around the world. You just download the images into your camera and say about everywhere, "it was nice," buffered by comments about the weather and someone getting ill.

Once you are there the next thing to do is to get the cable car up mount Misen. A bus runs from near the torii gate to the cable car station some way up the mountain road.

I found the bus stop just as the bus was leaving but feeling Zen, and full of ice cream, I didn’t chase after it. I sat down in the sunshine and waited patiently for the next one. After some time I realised that I was cooking and went into the shop next to the bus stop and pretended to look at things.

It was really nice in the shop, there were several fans blowing cool air in the direction of the sale items.

I was looking at puzzle boxes; I had bought one previously for myself in Tokyo. They are small boxes decorated with tessellated patterns. By sliding different parts of the edges in a certain sequence you can eventually open the box. The one I have takes seven steps to open but there were larger, more intricate, versions in the shop. A woman came over to me to ask if I wanted any help. She told me more about the boxes, one of the more expensive ones, it was about £300, took 60 steps to open. “60!” I said in shock.
“60,” she repeated impassively.

It was so nice in the shop that I ended up buying something – a puzzle version of the Miyajima torii gate. It’s a nice souvenir even without being a puzzle, and the shade was worth something too.

I returned to my bus stop, I was the only one there. Not having anything else to do I took out my puzzle and started finding the one loose bit by which the rest of the puzzle comes away. I kept at it for about 25 minutes until I had taken the whole thing apart and spread the pieces onto the bus seat. For the next 5 minutes I was trying to put it back together again. I felt genuinely Japanese, sitting at a bus stop working my way through a wooden puzzle with infinite calm. I probably looked like a genuine tourist as only tourists buy and use these things.

While I was puzzling I was faintly aware of other people coming up to the bus stop, looking at the timetable and then walking away. A small family had come and sat next to me for a while but they too had eventually looked at the sign and walked off.

After I emerged back into reality from the puzzle I took a closer look at the sign. It turned out that even though I had been waiting for nearly an hour, the bus would not come for another two.

I started walking up the hill and not far along was a sign pointing to the cable car station and stating, "10 minute walk, but 8 if you run a little."

I soon came to a Japanese garden that led to a small bridge.

Posing happily on the bridge was a young Japanese couple. They were both smiling towards their respective cameras which were balanced precariously on a rock. Considering my photographic skills comparable to that of a rock I offered to take their picture. Barely hearing my question they both replied in unison that no thank you, this was what they wanted.

It sounded like they had been asked this question a thousand times before, which is quite probable really: People readily offer to take your picture for you in Japan, and many other countries.

This couple preferred to get a more idiosyncratic set of holiday snaps with the same pose taken from slightly different parts of a rock at slightly different times. But can you imagine how dull it would be to look through their holiday snaps:
"This is us on a bridge in Miyajima. And this is the same but one inch to the left. Which do you think is best? See Honey, Mum thinks one inch to the left is better too."
"Well I can't make my mind up, let's go back."

Over the bridge and up some steps began the cable car.

The view was amazing and increased proportionally with the altitude. Looking forward you could see the long cable car system disappearing over the mountain.

Looking back and you could see how built up the mainland has become.

At the top there was another cable car, a larger one this time which led to an even higher peak. The young Japanese couple happened to be in the same cable car as me and we smiled at each other.

On the main peak there were many views.

But still this was not the top. The official peak of the mountain was another half an hour walk and scores 530 in altitude points (metres).

There were quite a lot of monkeys up in the mountains, and some deer too – building their empire I presume.

The walk up to the top was a little crowded and I kept overtaking people. There were some English speaking people there and they suddenly stopped in front of me to point out a snake in the shrubs at the edge of the path. Everyone who understood stopped to look at it, except for me, I just slid by like an opportunist.

Up and up, the path got narrower and rockier. Every now and then a small stall selling drinks would appear as if randomly around the bend. I think the price increased the further up you went – would make sense, market forces and all that.

At the top was a sort of restaurant with an open air flat roof – definitely the highest point on the island.

The top of the mountain looked like this.

And the ground looked like this.

I became slightly obsessed with an ashtray that I thought probably had one of the best views of all the ashtrays on the planet. Very hard to get the right thing in focus though.

On the way back down a deer was sniffing around two Caucasian men sitting on a rock. They had beer which they poured into their hand and were feeding to the deer. The men were laughing sadistically while the deer seemed to become instantly hooked and, ingeniously, tried to cut out the middle men and go for the beer can itself.

It can’t be good to feed animals alcohol; it’s just going to make them sick and ruin their football career. Having said that I’m not much of a prude because I can imagine that a TV show about drunk animals could be quite funny. Owls flying into trees, cats not landing on all fours, hamsters tripping up in their hamster wheels, octopi getting into tangled and dolphins just being dolphins.

Here is the deer before it met the ne’er-do-wells.

What an odd phrase ne’er-do-wells is.

I was pleased with this picture: a tiny yacht sailing toward a tiny island.

On the way down I decided to walk rather than take the cable car. One of the main walking routes down the mountain starts near the cable car and follows a stream flowing down the mountain.

The whole walk was shaded under the trees and was idyllic in the extreme. I was feeling really happy again and stopped to sit on a bench and admire the scene.

A large fly landed on my leg. In my happy state I didn’t brush it off but did become suspicious when it settled. “Do you mean me harm?” I asked it. It turned to face me and I got a painful sting in my leg.

It was a horse fly, or some other bastard of nature.

I shook it off and started walking again when I heard a buzzing. The buzzing stopped and I felt something on my arm. The fly had settled on my wrist ready to strike again. I did one of those tantrum movements people do when there’s a bug flying around. But the fly came back, landed on my arm again entirely unperturbed.

I started to pick up my pace to shake off the thing. I was listening intently for its sound, I couldn’t hear it but then I felt something on my back. It wasn’t paranoia either, the damn thing was there, I felt it fly away as I brushed my hand over my Tshirt.

There was no shaking it off and I resorted to running down the mountain as fast as I could to shake it off. My face turned red and I was in danger of tripping over. I slowed down but buzzzzz, the horse fly was back, apparently able to fly as fast as I could run – which is rather depressing.

I ran and ran and ran and ran along the path. Leaping from soil to stone to tree branch, half falling half sprinting down the mountain. I was determined to get away from the horse fly. I slowed again and STILL it was there. I was swearing at it by now, there was no one else around so I gave it the full force of my vocabulary.

When I emerged through the trees at the foot of the mountain my face was bright red and my Tshirt was drenched in sweat. On the flat again, walking through nicely kept Japanese gardens the fly eventually let me go and I was safe.

I stopped to buy myself a drink and try to cool down before I went anywhere with people.

The tide had gone out by this time and the torii gate now looked like this.

You can safely walk on the mud and go right up to the gate to take pictures.

I bought a hat from a shop to protect myself for the sun during my epic cycle ride the next day. Although I liked the hat I suspected it was for elderly women and was always a bit reluctant to wear it in public.

Later on when I was back in my hotel and telling Yoko the horrors of the fly saga she said, “I’m not surprised; you use too much gel in your hair, it attracts them.” This was not what I wanted to hear. I wanted sympathy not advice, especially not advice that makes it out to be my own fault.

Bastard fly.

Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park

2009-08-16T07:44:00.001-07:00

When in Hiroshima it’s not easy to forget about what the city is most famous for. There are plaques on many streets displaying how many people died, or some other fact relating to that day: August 6th 1945.

In fact the location the atomic bomb actually exploded has its own bus and tram stop called the A-Bomb Dome.

Here stands the old Industrial Promotional Hall which, remarkably, survived the blast and remains today. The roof of the building has a dome shape and, though just a skeleton of its former self, its stark appearance amongst the gleaming modernity makes for a powerful reminder.

One of the walls where a window used to be.

Just next to the A-Bomb dome is a memorial featuring doves roosting on different levels.

Further on is the Children’s Peace Memorial featuring inspired by Sadako Saski, a girl who developed leukaemia as result of the bombing.

There is a belief in Japan that if you make 1000 origami paper cranes then you will get one wish. Sadako set about making the cranes but died before she had finished 1000. Her classmates made the rest in her honour and a memorial shows her holding a huge crane above her head. Long colourful strings of paper cranes hang around the memorial, donated by people all over the country.

The A-Bomb Museum is the largest building on the site and charges only 50 yen for admission, such a small amount that it may as well be free. When you first enter the museum you come to a large round room that explains the events leading up to the dropping of the bomb.

In the middle of the room is a model of what Hiroshima looked like after the explosion.

This particular sign really puts things into perspective.

In a way this is the only part of Hiroshima that stills looks the same. There is great debate as to whether the A-Bomb dome should be left standing as a morbid monument, or whether it should be taken down so that the city can move on entirely.

A large video screen showed black and white newsreel of the Enola Gay taking off, the bomb falling and the vast mushroom cloud bursting into the sky.

Later in the museum is a system of rooms featuring actual artefacts from the explosion. Melted coins and twisted metal signs give an indication of how monstrously powerful the force of the explosion was. People were turned to ashes instantly; one photograph showed a wall with a black smudge across it, a smudge that used to be a person.

Every turn gave another story of someone who had been lost; another artefact that had belonged to them and another reminder that it wasn’t just a country that was bombed, it was the people.

Further still into the museum and the displays talked of atomic bombs themselves, how weapons have been developed now that are far more powerful than the atomic bomb that fell on Hiroshima. Einstein and Bertrand Russell are presented with their Russell-Einstein manifesto on Nuclear disarmament. There are tables showing how huge numbers of nuclear tests are still carried out every year, especially by America and Russia.

There is one important document and one fact that the museum does like to remind you of. Japan was so weak by the end of the war that one official (I forget who) wrote that he was concerned the country was in such a state already that the bomb would not be allowed to show off its full power. Other documents claimed that so much money had gone into developing atomic weapons that really they had to be demonstrated in order to justify their expense. I’ve heard some foreigners complain that this point is overemphasised, but in balance I think the museum is focused on education into the horrors of atomic weapons rather than historical blame.

The most moving part of the museum for me was the survivors’ testimonies. A corridor with video screens and wooden benches allows you to sit and choose from about 20 different videos. There is a similar display at the Holocaust Museum in Washington and both really excellent in getting over the reality of what happened.

One man described how he was in school when they heard the plane fly over, then there was the most intense flash of light like lightning. A huge explosion was heard and the roof caved in. Although he was very close to the blast point he survived, coming to around his dead and dying classmates.

What many of the survivors mention are the dying people they came across, people who were severely burnt and unable to walk. These people all asked for water, but the advice everyone had been given was not to give burn victims water because it would kill them. Some survivors had tears in their eyes when they thought back to the agony they had witnessed and how they had not been able to help these people in their dying torment. Some of the survivors had given water, and then carried the guilt of seeing those who drank fading away before them.

Next to the museum is the Peace Memorial Hall which catalogues the names, photographs and memoirs of all the atomic bomb victims. Computer screens allow you to look through a massive library of information. The building itself has a unique design and feels very sombre. A fountain stands in the centre to symbolically answer the needs of all the dying who’d begged for water those 60 years ago.

The walls of the Peace Memorial Hall display a vast mural of Hiroshima with one tile for each of the victims of the bomb.

Step outside Peace Memorial Park and you find yourself on a busy main road that could belong to any city in Japan. Further down the road you’ll find passages leading into an underground shopping complex, perfect for sheltering from the heat. Young families try to control their tearaway children, teenagers yell into their phones, babies cry in prams, the elderly walk so slowly they get in everybody’s way, mobiles ring, music blares, people shout…

and you appreciate it all just one little bit more.

To Hiroshima

2009-07-22T15:03:00.000-07:00

I love trams.

I never expected to find trams in Japan, they always seem to me like the kind of transport system that doesn’t exist outside of Northern England.

But there’s something simple about them, something harmless where you know you won’t end up in the middle of nowhere with a fine for sitting in first class. Instead it seems more likely that you might inadvertently get off in the 1920s and be stuck for something to do in the interim.

So when I got off my coach from Tottori to Hiroshima and found myself far away from my hotel I just leapt onto the nearest tram and it took me where I needed to be. Ok it wasn’t quite that easy, I did have to wait for it to stop.

I was staying in Hotel Yamato near JR Hiroshima station. I recommend it for the two men in reception who both seemed to be in their sixties and were always very polite and welcoming.

My room wasn’t anything spectacular but the view was. It looked out onto the back of the surrounding buildings; it was bare walls, air conditioning vents and pigeons. There were lots of ramshackle nests built on tiny ledges. It was a real no man’s land between high rise constructions; there were no doors, no access from the street. My window seemed to be the only opening into this secret place and the pigeons looked at me with such settled content that I realised that I was the one on the outside, they were looking through a window at me.

I was badly in need of somewhere to do my laundry. The men at the hotel desk nodded to each other that no, there were no washing machines in the hotel. But there was a laundrette nearby, but quite far away.

I got a more specific answer from the tourist information office in JR Hiroshima Station. It was great to be living so close to them, I could have gone every 30 minutes with a different query: “Why was there a manga about the son of Hitler in my hotel room? Why did the woman in Timely laugh at me? Was it really an act of God to sit me next to a British Missionary on the Shinkansen, or is there a ticketing conspiracy?

I filled my rucksack with dirty washing, got an ample supply of 100 yen coins and made my way to the laundrette. It was down a main street which ran parallel to one of the many rivers which cross Hiroshima.

When guidebooks talk about going off the beaten track and really exploring a country I think they could include this laundrette. Japan is a civilised and clean country but this laundrette was a metal shack with dirt on the floor, rows of rusting machines, a beaten old laundry powder dispenser and an old man in an ancient hat leaning against one of the machines and staring into space.

I tried not to look at the old man. I had a premonition of his starting a conversation with me in colloquial Japanese through missing teeth. I wouldn’t be able to understand him, but knowing me I’d just nod politely through a 40 minute spin cycle and an uncomfortable hour in the drier.

My clothes spinning and my rucksack stowed on a shelf I went back outside. Opposite the laundrette was a large 6 floor Bic Camera selling everything from food processors to radio toilet seats. Outside the entrance a pretty girl was giving out fans – this is a common marketing ploy in Japan, you can fit a lot of information on a plastic fan and in Summer you can be certain people will take them. And employing a pretty girl to give out advertising, well, that’s a marketing ploy everywhere.

I wasted time for two hours and then returned to my laundry. A very similar but different man was standing in a very similar but different pose to the earlier version. I took my laundry and left the laundrette for time to continue to consume: men and machines aging together in a dirty shack built to make things clean, a plastic fan lying on a dusty shelf that was once in the hands of a pretty girl across the street.

I Love You was the name of the Internet Café nearest my hotel. It was on the sixth floor of a bookshop and game store but after going up various flights of stairs and in lifts I discovered that the only means to get to this Internet Café was via special lifts at street level. Once inside I asked in Japanese about the different rates, the guy at the desk replied in English, but bad English.

We continued this language ping pong for some time, neither of us wanting to back down to our own language – for that would make him the loser.

Well anyway, I never was quite sure what the price was but the more times you went the more stickers you acquired – which I could only assume led to some sort of incredible prize like a knighthood.

I wonder if dentists these days still give out stickers. I wonder why orthodontists don’t do it - they should be legally required to. The experience of getting a brace is so traumatic that a sticker is the least they could do to provide some compensation. Ideally, the sticker should look like a beautiful set of teeth, and be the right size to stick over your brace and hide the Frankensteinian mesh.

With these thoughts in mind I returned to my hotel, said goodnight to the pigeons and retired.

That Evening

2009-06-27T11:11:00.000-07:00

Back in my hotel room something on my bookcase caught my eye. The corner of a magazine was poking out from under some larger books, there was a picture of a high school girl but she looked strangely… not like a high school girl. I pulled the magazine out. The cover had six high school girls all looking rather sheepish.

“OK,” I thought, “this is either a brochure for school uniforms or…” I opened it up. Naked girls filled pages. Explicit but censored in that way Japan insists on – no pubic hair ever: the result of people sitting in warehouses spending their unhappy lives airbrushing it out.

I looked at the cover again, it was called Mekiru, and then in English it said, “Make it love.” I checked the date, it was August 2008, that was next month! As in this was the newest edition, not some mangy old magazine a previous guest had left years ago, this was up to the minute cutting edge pornography.

And the strangest thing was that I was pretty sure it hadn’t been there the day before. It was lying under the hotel information booklet – which I had looked through when I arrived.

This was very odd. Had the kindly old cleaner from this morning left me a present? Had she thought, “Oh he’s a young man all alone, I’ll get him something to keep him going.” Or maybe it was all part of the service - perhaps there is a rule among Japanese hoteliers: If you cannot provide Pay For View pornography on the television then you must provide it in literature.

I looked through the stack of magazines and comics on the shelf wondering if there were any more surprises. A comic called, SON OF HITLER, provided a resounding YES to that query.

“What?” I said to Japan.

Yes, it was really SON OF HITLER. See.

I had a flick through, well you would wouldn’t you. It was not pro Nazi stuff, but seemed to be about a young Nazi who was either metaphorically, or really, the son of Hitler. He was getting up to some unpleasant stuff, branding swastikas on captive women chained to his wall, that kind of thing.

The copy I was holding was printed in 1962, it was old, maybe even an antique.

I put it back in its place, next to the pornmag.

And not a Gideon Bible in sight.

Day in Tottori

2009-06-25T15:30:00.001-07:00

I came to Tottori to see the only desert in Japan, but that is an exaggeration by the tourist board. The desert is really just some big sand dunes on a beach with some imported camels to star in people’s holiday snaps.

However, before setting out I wanted to do some laundry. On the map of the hotel was a little space marked “Coin Laundry” and it’s not for washing coins. The confusingly divided each floor in two without explaining where they joined up.

I followed the map but seemed to cross an invisible threshold from hotel into house. There were ornaments and trinkets, piles of laundry on the floor. I found a washer, and a drier, but neither had any kind of coin slot, just towels and men’s shirts. I crept out again feeling like an accidental intruder.

It was baking outside at around 33 degrees and there I was making my way to a desert.

The bus from Tottori station to the sand dunes is 20 minutes of glorious air-conditioning before you get out, climb some steps and the view opens up to this

Sand and the bluest sea I had seen for a long a time. This might sound like just a beach but the difference is the sand dunes: they are enormous, like hills.

Everyone was climbing the largest dune and I followed suit.

The view was stunning. The sea was calm like an enormous mirror lying flat across the earth and. A small island poked out from the sea to make the view even more idyllic.

A man was sitting under a blue and white striped parasol. He was alone among sea and sand, the rest of us were just passing through.

I thought he would be meditating or composing Haiku but no, he was listening to horse racing on a radio.

The sand dunes feature strange horizontal lines made by the wind.

On the way back to the road a Japanese woman walking in the opposite direction called me over. “Sumimasen,” I forget what she said next because I didn’t understand a word. She pointed at the sand. Ahh, I twigged. “This pattern?” I asked pointing to the lines in the sand. She nodded. “Over there, there are lots,” I tried to say. She bowed and dutifully walked in the direction I had pointed.

I was pretty surprised that she would even think I could understand such a specific question, I mean I was expecting her to ask about toilets, not something that I’d find hard to describe in my own language. Maybe I looked Japanese to her from a distance; I must have got the walk right.

There was a sand museum, and doesn’t that sound boring. They should have called it, “The Giant Sand Reconstructions of Famous Places Museum” but I guess the sign would have been too expensive.

The ticket was just 300 yen (£1.50) which is pretty cheap, even though it is just sand.

It was a collection of about 13 sand recreations of ancient world heritage sights, mostly from Asia and the Middle East. It was pretty good and I only partly wanted to jump over the rope and destroy the Great Wall of China like a giant in shorts.

After the museum I got the bus back to Tottori and had a shower at my hotel. This was my usual habit, then I would fall asleep and wake up too late to do anything else. This happened today too. By the time I got out again at 4:50PM the gardens and French Villa were shut and they were all I wanted to see.

There is a 100yen loop bus which drives around Tottori, a red line one and a blue. I got on a red one for no particular reason. I was looking through the Tottori information booklet, which reads more like a Geography textbook: “Tottori is the 10th biggest agricultural centre in the whole San’in region and eighth biggest industrial…” yawn. But it did mention a park near a forest with no closing time so I got off at that stop.

It was a beautiful spot with lakes of gaping carp and well trodden paths endlessly curving into the forest where herds of joggers run wild and free. Herd is the wrong word for joggers; they are naturally solitary creatures. Sure they all get together for a marathon but after 10 minutes they’re trying to get away from each other. The joggers in the park were from a school sports team with their coach.

So there was me, joggers and then retired people. This latter group kept walking in the opposite direction and saying hello, which is something I’m not used to. In the small village I live in back home people do the same, and it freaks me out there too. I know people are just being friendly but sometimes they sound like they’re trying to prove something, like “I’ve got a dog and you haven’t, that’s why I’m so much better than you.”

On my walk I took time to think about my trip so far: 18 days old. I had to admit that I was getting lonely and exhausted by moving around so much. Thoughts of home made me excited to be returning so soon, but at the same time miserable that it was all ending. After all the reunions are over, my rucksack empty and the pictures shown I can imagine myself sitting, looking sadly at the walls I left for adventure a year and a half earlier.

Travelling, I decided, is just an invitation for things to miss. It may be places or people, or the things you lost on the way.

Yet hey, this is life and it is not without effort. It took effort to get here and find those things to miss. It will take a lot of effort to restart my old life and make it seem fresh again. But in the interim between Japan and the rest I will squeeze all of the names of the places and people I have met into one breath – a sigh.

This was what I thought whilst walking through the forests of Tottori on the 18th day of my journey. Only lost men do not look ahead.

To Tottori

2009-06-18T01:30:00.000-07:00

After checking out of my hotel I boarded the bus bound for Nagoya. It was a return trip for me, I’d come from Nagoya to get to Hida Takayama and now I was going through Nagoya again to go West to Tottori and continue my journey through Japan.

After three hours on the bus I got the Shinkansen from Nagoya to a place called Himeji and then a rapid train to Tottori. I discovered later that Himeji itself is well worth seeing outside of train station platform 7. It has one of the best castles in Japan. Oh well.

At Himeji when I got off the Shinkansen and changed to a normal train something strange happened. I had been given three tickets for my complete journey but I couldn’t make head nor tail of what each one was actually for. The Shinkansen ticket gates are pretty sophisticated though, so you can bung in all your tickets and let the machine sort it out for you.

However, when I put in the first of my tickets the normally open barrier made a noise and then shut – a sign that it was not happy. My ticket came out again, but at the other side. I was about to reach over and reclaimed it when one of the station workers snatched it and ran away.

He ran with Shankensen like speed, to a suited man who had gone through the ticket gate just before me.

“Sumimasen,” as in excuse me, I called out, “it’s my ticket.”

The suited man shook his head at the ticket he was being returned, and that he had never seen before. I called out again in the loudest voice I could muster but the station man seemed to be deaf to my cries. He was now asking all the other people coming through if my ticket was theirs, which didn’t even make sense. As more people shook their heads at him he became more earnest to find the ticket its home but still stupid enough not to hear my calling for his attention.

Getting desperate I was about to put my two remaining tickets into the machine when another station person came over. He seemed to exist in a plain of being more similar to my own, i.e. he could hear me.

I showed him my tickets but his brow suggested that there was something a miss. “Oh sod this,” I thought and since the barrier had now gone back up I ran through and caught the man still trying to give away my ticket. “It’s mine,” I said and took it from him. He seemed disappointed by this solution, like a knight who arrives to find that the princess has rescued herself.

They kept one of my tickets and finally let me go.

The train to Totorri had a TV at the front of each carriage tuned to a camera on the front of the train. It seemed a bit pointless since you can just look out the windows but I bet it keeps kids happy. The only time the TV showed anything particularly different was when we came out from long tunnels. The sunshine was so bright that the camera couldn’t adjust quickly enough to the change. From the tunnel’s darkness the screen lit up a blazing white like we had driven off the edge of the page and into

Soon rain clouds gathered to filter the sunshine and I took a picture of this cloud, it seemed like a good idea at the time.

In Tottori the tourist info booth gave me a map, a leaflet and a bus timetable. It was raining torrentially outside, but at least it was warm rain with that distinctive smell.

I took out my travel umbrella; it’s ridiculously small so good for fitting in bags but not good for much else. For instance I have to decide whether I want to protect myself or my backpack: it can’t cover both. But still it has protected me longer than any other umbrella in Japan; even my fish umbrella eventually swam away :(

There was a hotel where there should be my hotel, but I couldn’t read the kanji on its sign. I went in and was about to ask what the name of the hotel was when the woman behind the counter said:
“Heavy rain isn’t it.”
“Yes…”
“Two nights, is that right?”
“Yes”
“8000 yen please”

It was so smooth and simple that asking any questions would have broken a perfect moment. It was the right number of nights at the right price, who cared if it was the wrong hotel.

Where the other hotel had been full of plants and aphids this one was full of manga: Japanese comics. It was piled up on all possible shelves and horizontal spaces, even going up alongside the stairs.

I turned the key in the lock of room 307, the door was now locked. I turned it the other way and the door opened for me. It was the biggest room yet, two beds, bath, shower, TV. It was at least 3 times bigger than my Nagoya room, maybe 4. I was happy.

I showered, changed and set out for food. The rain had stopped falling but was now hanging humidly in the air making me feel sticky. Tottori seemed like a small town but its shopping streets were long and disjointed. I found 3 Lawson convenience stores and a bank: I was settled, that was all I needed.

I was waiting to cross a road when I heard a quiet voice say, “Hey man.” I looked around not sure if I had really heard it or not.

An American guy on a bike waiting to cross in the other direction turned out to exist and be the owner of the voice.
“Hello,” I said. We shook hands, his name was Jay, mine was Nick.
“What brings you here?” he asked me.
Annoyingly and facetiously I answered him with, “A train,” then quickly continued, “I’m here to see the sand dunes. How about you?”
“I live here,” he paused, “it’s always interesting to see a foreign face.”

He pointed out that our lights had turned green but we both hesitated. I was lonely; I wanted someone to talk to. He was friendly and clearly interested in meeting other foreigners. But I crossed my road and he crossed his – we were both too shy to make the first move toward continuing the conversation.

I was annoyed with myself, I was just looking around, any direction would have done. I guess I will never know more about Jay of Tottori, well, unless I ask Google. He probably has a blog where he recounts his tales at length and overuses words like probably, pretty, maybe, as etc.

As I walked away, I thought it was probably pretty likely we could meet again maybe.

Shokugawa Go

2009-06-13T07:31:00.000-07:00

A man was yelling to the hotel.

He was speaking over a tannoy system that I hadn’t heard before. He didn’t sound like the sleepy man from the day before, he sounded like a drill sergeant. “506 has gone, 208 has gone,” he called out. He didn’t call my number but he nearly did, “402, no, 403.” I was safe.

It sounded a bit like a TV show. Perhaps this hotel was so cheap because there was a ravenous monster capable of jumping through walls and devouring guests at whim. The room numbers being read out were the ones whose occupants hadn’t made it through the night. Well anyway, I felt bullied by the voice and the cleaners who barge in. I got dressed and left.

I was planning to finish the walk I started yesterday, but before that go to see Shokugawa Go, a rural village further into the mountains with a Unesco World Heritage collection of old farmhouses.

It cost £20 to get there and I was immediately disappointed. The place was not that scenic, I was hoping it would be high up in the mountains but no, it was in a valley like Takayama. I guess that’s not surprising when you see how steep the mountains are in Japan.

There was a long bridge leading into the village.

The whole place was jam packed with tourists. I crossed the bridge and bought an ice cream, I wandered to the back of the village where a narrow road led into the mountain.

Licking my ice cream I walked slowly up the road and into the welcome shade of tall cedar trees. Within seconds there were no tourists in sight, barely any sound too besides the birds and insects.

I turned back to look at the World Heritage site I had walked straight through.

Apart from the threat of speedy cars coming around the tree lined bends and killing me, it was a peaceful walk. It was still not what I wanted; I wanted to walk up, amongst the trees, rather than along roads. I found a path into the forest, or as near as I was going to get - it was just tyre tracks. They rose steeply up the slope and I rose wearily with them.

As I got deeper into the trees the screeching of insects seemed more insidious. The heat was getting to me and I could feel my checks turning a fiery red, the kind that takes at least an hour in an air-conditioned room to bring back to my natural pale.

I sat on the grass to rest. My romantic notions about a walk in the forest were fading into shadows: this was not like a Ghibli film, or the forests of Rashomon. This was more like a forest that wanted you to get out, owned by the invisible with their screeches and clicks as loud as cars but all around.

Still, it was a unique atmosphere for me. I considered taking a photograph but it wouldn’t have expressed the place. I made a recording instead and here it is.

I headed back to the road.

It got even narrower, still a road rather than a footpath but if a car came I would have a hard time giving it right of way.

The road/path began to slope upwards and bend around the edge of the mountain. The view through the trees was improving and I was surprised to see how far I had come.

A few abandoned tractors sat amongst the trees and every now and then a driveway to a house would bud off from my road, but I didn’t see anyone at all. I did see lots of mosquitoes though; one in particular seemed to catch up with me whenever I stopped walking. Invisible spider webs broke around my arms but they may have just been paranoia and my arm hairs tickling each other

Another path led prettily up into a grassy area of the mountain and I started treading that way. Then I remember that Japan has snakes and suddenly the tarmac road seemed again more inviting.

The road ended, literally, next to some paddy fields.

It was a pretty idyllic setting and made a good end to the walk.

I headed back to the Unesco World Heritage site that I had ignored and caught the bus back to Takayama.

Some time later I was back in my hotel room, and asleep. Some time after that and I was waking up and looking at my watch in surprise. Again I had slept longer than intended, again I set out to finish the Hida Takayama walk in the fading light.

The dog that had barked at me so ravenously was sitting quietly this time as if it were not on duty yet.

With a fast pace I entered the trees and was immediately confronted by another confusing two directional sign.

I went one way, which felt wrong and so turned back and found the right way. The path went up through a temple where there was no one about. It pointed up some steps and then pow, a vague sign if ever there was one. The arrow pointed downwards but it made sense to be either backwards or forwards. I tried backwards but that seemed to be wrong so I went forwards, that seemed to be wrong too. I went backwards and little further and found a signpost. The next destination of my map seemed to be an Amusement Park and thankfully the signpost mentioned this place too.

The walked seemed even more Zen now, like a lesson being whispered in my ear by the wind and the trees, “you can only know the right way once you walked the wrong.”

The “amusement park” was a run down kids’ play area. Amusement park was a bad translation, amusing park would have been better as you could laugh at its lameness. Still I played on the climbing frame to vent my frustration with who ever designed this walk.

I found some steps that I will never know if they were the right way or not. It seemed that the people who so eagerly filled the first part of the walk with signs could not be bothered to walk up the hill and continue there.

A choice of left or right confronted me, both seemed wrong. I chose right and ran along the forest path, racing the fading sunlight.

It soon came to a clearing with a big map. Every single one of the place names on the map was different to those on my tourist map, it was aggravating. But, one patch of green on my map looked a lot like a patch of green on the other. “Honmaru,” it said and there were signs pointing the way.

There was also a public toilet, which according to its sign was either unisex or for some man-woman half creature. Anyway, the toilet had everything: air conditioning, a sink, mirrors, a light but no light switch. I looked around trying to find it, I even tried clapping and something scuttled in response.

Perhaps there was a reason not to use the light.

I ran towards Honmaru, stopping every hundred metres or so to check the next sign, it felt like the Crystal Maze.

Eventually I was there, the end of the walk. The lights of Takayama were below me and finally I saw another friendly two arrowed walk sign. “Where were you when I needed you,” I shouted.

Feeling at ease now I looked around the area a bit. I found a place called Ohte Mon. Mon means gateway and there were two huge stone walls with a grassy patch between them where a gate used to be.

It was eerie in the near dark, the walls looked like the clenched fists of some dead giant. It was stone quiet now but I felt as though I should be able to hear the clinks of past swords and the murmurs of the people who once travelled through this place. I didn’t stay long.

Back in the city I was in a different part of Takayama, a more pretty part with old houses and the main temple. A full moon shone over the river and stone lanterns stood at the side of the road.

At that moment I realised that I really wanted to get out of Takayama. Sure the stone lanterns were nice but they somehow reminded me of how much I disliked the place. It was hot, full of tourists, the walks were confusing, the restaurants unfriendly and the hotel people mean.

I was leaving the next day, and looking forward to it.

Hida no Sato

2009-06-11T13:00:00.000-07:00

My day started at 10am when a cleaner burst into my room. She didn’t even knock, her philosophy must be, “Why knock when you have the key?” I was half sleeping at the time, the kind of sleep where you keep looking at the clock to see that what felt like hours of drifting of sleep were just minutes in real time.

I wasn’t in any state of undress so I just looked at her confused. She said, “Oh, what about cleaning?”
“It’s ok not to clean today,” I said and she left.

This hotel is a little odd, they demand that you leave your key at the desk when you go out but they get annoyed when you actually do that. Sometimes they hide the keys under boards with Japanese kanji scrawled over them. The first time this happened I had no idea what the board said or even what it might say so I rang the bell for assistance. It’s a classic bash it on the top silver bell but it seems to be muffled by something so just makes an emasculating clunk noise.

A sleepy guy came out from around the corner and grunted so I took the key, “I can’t read kanji,” I explained pointing to the boards half apologetically but he was already plodding back to his sofa.

Hida no Sato is a collection of old houses rescued from different parts of Hida. Why would you rescue a house you may wonder. Because of a dam is my guidebook’s reply. They rescued about 30 houses, shrines etc, took them apart and built them again to make a village museum called Hida no Sato.

As soon as you walk in through the ticket gate you know it was worth coming. A large pond lies at the front of the village with the houses doting the grassy slopes behind. A solitary swan floats in the water, its reflection floating beneath just as vividly. A stream flowing down the mountain powers a water wheel that makes oddly familiar creaking noises.

I was taking pictures of all this when a woman wearing a name badge said to me, “Free photo service for your camera.” She had spoken to me in English but I still thought, “What?” Then I realised she was offering to take a picture of me using my camera, for free. “No it’s ok,” I said.

This might sound like a terrible stereotype but Asian people love taking pictures of themselves, their friends and family in famous places. It seems strange to me because I know what I look like and I go to places to see them, not what I look like with them behind me. On the other hand you may well ask what is the point of just taking generic pictures of places, when there are already so many in existence. I guess the answer is the hope that you can take a picture that is different to all the rest and reflects your individual journey, without you actually needing to appear in it. Or something.

The leaflet I was given detailed a strict route around the houses. Though no one else seemed to be following it.

The first house had a great smokey smell from a small fire burning inside. The descriptions were very detailed on this: the fire not only added atmosphere but kept the house dry and the ropes holding up the roof tight.

There were big houses, small houses, houses with two or even three floors, large tatami rooms, enormous family shrines and one with a bored looking woman sewing things for the gift shop. She kept sighing and I wanted to sit down in front of her and say, “Tell me your life story,” but I didn’t as that phrase isn’t in my phrasebook.

One house had this in.

I didn't

So it was beautiful and interesting. The view of the mountains was good too. It looked like snow in the distance but it might just be rock.

In summary it was like Heidi.

After returning to the hotel, eating and sleeping I ventured out into the heat again to do the Hida Takayama walking tour. My town map from the tourist information office included this walk and its many places to start from.

The nearest starting point was at the cemetery I visited the day before. I walked up the steep steps to the shrine, already sweating. I was looking for any sign of the walk but there were none. I walked down two wrong paths and then surveyed my map again.

Retracing my steps, quite a lot of them, I found the official beginning of the walk. In a Zen like way it was also the end of the walk and as such all of the signs pointing the way showed two directions.

The first part of the walk took me through about eight shrines. One after another they came as the walk kept turning left and right through Japanese gardens, over little bridges, down steps, along the street to the next shrine. It was so random that I thought it might end up going into someone’s house, up the stairs, out the bathroom window and over the roof of the next house.

After shrine land the walk went along streets that gradually became narrower and narrower. They were the kind of streets where, if it wasn’t for the walk, residents would wonder why on earth I was there.

In the heat most of the houses had open doors where, walking passed, you got tiny glimpses into people’s lives. The smell of food, the clattering of plates, women talking outside the back door, dogs barking, children watching anime.

I got lost in the atmosphere of the walk and eventually realised that I was actually lost too. The light was fading.

I found a shop selling remote control helicopters and planes. I nervously slid open the door and asked for directions. The man behind the counter puzzled over my map and then took me outside to explain the way – which was backwards.

He spoke good English and told me that he used to be a pilot. There were lots of countries he had planned on visiting like America, England, Australia and Russia. We both agreed that Russia would be pretty hard to visit and stared at the floor for a moment. He asked me where I was going next and I struggled to remember Shokugawa Go, but we got there in the end. He mentioned a local scandal: someone had sold some bad meat in town.

We were conversing pretty well and I wondered whether he would ask me if I wanted to eat dinner. “Have you tried the ramen yet?” he asked me.
“Actually, no. I’m a vegetarian.”
“Ahhh,” his face fell, but he did say that it was a healthy way to live.

I thanked him and headed back. I wondered if it was the normal occupation of ex-pilots to open model shops, or maybe it was just his way of keeping his tie with the skies. He didn’t seem that old, he had a youthfulness about him so I think he’ll make it to his dream destinations. Perhaps my visit to him will have reminded him of the joy of travelling or encouraged him that foreigners are not so foreign. Or maybe he will devoutly stay in Japan, “Vegetarians,” he will whimper at night hugging his blanket. “They’re real.”

The light was fading fast as I hurriedly retraced my steps. I didn’t know how many to retrace though. A woman was stopping traffic to let high school students cross the road. It was about 7:30PM but many students stay late for sports training.

I showed her my map and asked her where I was but with the lack of light and the vague directions of the map she really wasn’t sure where I should go. The next point on the map was an obscure bridge somewhere or other. Two high school girls came along and joined in the map staring. Together they managed to figure out which route I should take.

“Go straight,” said one of the girls in English, much to the admiration of the others. She explained the way and drew a map too.

I set off again waving my thanks to them. I found the little bridge and then another sign pointing in two directions.

The direction it led me went up a steep hill and into some dark trees at the edge of a forest. I made my way up the hill to get a better look. A dog on a leash attached to a washing line ran at me barking viciously until it ran out of washing line to pull.

The path into the trees was just as dark up close as it looked from far away, I guess that’s how Physics works. The sensible part of my mind said I should head back to the hotel and try again tomorrow. The reckless part said I should go for it; I could use the light of my phone as a torch until the battery ran out. The sensible part retorted with two words, “Blair Witch,” and won the argument.

I found my way back into town and decided I should eat in a restaurant tonight. “Stop being such a coward,” I told myself.

I was looking for Tempura or Soba restaurants. I found one that advertised Soba but had pictures of ramen on the tiny menu outside. I stared, at the menu; it seemed to have only four choices: “Noodle Soba” big or small and “Beef soba” big or small. Thinking that there must be more choices inside I entered the restaurant.

It was horribly quiet, I was the only customer; I was either too early or too late.

There were actually only four choices. I chose noodle soba big but it turned out to be ramen with a big slab of meat on top.

I ate the vegetables beneath the meat while the husband and wife owners of the restaurant went back to watching TV and waiting for me to leave.

I finished quickly and got an ice cream from a convenience store. “Ahh convenience store food, I love you,” I said to the shelves of pre-packaged goodness. And as ramen and Ice Cream danced the diminishing dance of digestion in my stomach, I slept.

Heading to Hida Takayama

2009-06-06T02:12:00.000-07:00

I woke up dreaming.

Since I’m travelling through Japan you might expect me dream about the Buddha beckoning me down lonely roads, or giant Japanese cranes crossing mountains in single footsteps. Instead I dreamt about video games.

I was talking to a Japanese person, in my dream, who was telling me the ending to a scary survival horror game. As he described it I saw it vividly in my mind. He said that in game the last enemy had been a huge spider. On being defeated it disappeared into the floor and it was the end of the game.

The final boss of the second game in the series was a man of some sort and he also sank into the ground on defeat. But this time you got a closer look and actually he was falling into an enormous black pit. There, in the pit was also the spider from the first game but ten times larger than it used to be. In the dream I said, “Wow what a cool idea,” and as the image of the giant spider waiting in the pit re-emerged in my conscious mind I thought exactly the same thing.

Another dream I had that night took place on a big fairground ride. It was slowing down at the start of the dream but the man in control asked if we wanted to ride again at a new seeing that they were trying out. Everyone cried, “yeah,” in that overly enthusiastic way groups of people do. The ride started again and was notably faster. Gradually it became too fast and since I had no seatbelt on I felt myself being sucked out and was holding on for dear life.

When it stopped we got off breathless. Someone yelled and pointed to the floor. There were people who had nearly fallen out gripping onto the edge of the carriage, which was high above the ground. Susan from Neighbours was one of those people; she was trying to save herself from falling off the edge. Someone went to help her but she said something like, “I can’t be bothered with this anymore,” and promptly fell out of my dream. Perhaps I wasn’t paying her enough for a cameo.

Anyway, Hida Takayama is a smallish city about 3 hours by bus North of Nagoya. It is near a large area of mountains known as the Japanese Alps. I had decided to go there because I wanted to get out of the cities.

It’s always frustrating when from a bus or train window you see a place you’d really like to visit but have no idea where it is. For example, we passed this intriguing tower which I don’t think I will ever get to visit.

The scenery for the rest of the journey didn’t disappoint. There were whole ranges of tree covered mountains rising up around the road, which determinedly tunnelled through them. Wide shallow rivers flowed between the mountains, the water white with the chaos of rapids and rocks. A few fishermen stood equidistant from each other with optimistic baskets hanging from their arms.

Later the ground dropped far below the road and I realised we were on a huge bridge supported by pillars as high as office blocks.

Takayama city seemed to suddenly appear after the last tunnel. I looked at it from the bus window trying to gage hot it worked. Was it large? Did it have tramlines on the road and lots of convenience stores on the streets?

At the bus centre I rescued my rucksack from the bowels of the coach only to stuff it into a coin locker a moment later. I had an hour and a half to kill before I could check into my ultra cheap hotel: £15 a night ensuite! I was expecting it to be run by roaches, literally a large cockroach would be at the desk to greet me, wearing an apron and speaking such polite English that I would feel unable to mention that anything seemed strange. Then in the lift they would get me. “3500 yen a night,” they would chant in scratchy voices as the lift walls and doors broke apart to reveal themselves to be an army of camouflaged roaches, “you brought it upon yourself.”
“It’s true,” I would sob as everything became green.

Jeez, you can tell I don’t have an editor can’t you.

The tourist information centre was a wooden hut in front of the station but as institutions inside huts go it was really amazing. The woman behind the window filled my map with crosses for the places I wanted to go to, she even knew where my hotel was.

I took to the streets but after 10 minutes I realised I had no money in my wallet and there were no 7/11 convenience stores to get any. I went back to the tourist information hut. “You’re back,” she said in surprise.

She confirmed my finding, no 7/11s at all. This was the first place I had been in Japan where this was true and it was a shock. Japan has more 7/11s than America; it would be like a town in the UK with no pubs.

She offered me a good solution, there was a place that did money exchanging and had lots of ATMS, another cross appeared on my map. Life proved her right, it was exactly what I needed, I felt like I should get her a card or something.

To waste more time I followed my map to a walk mentioned in my guidebook, the start appeared to be a cemetery with this toori gate marking a path to a shrine. It was a beautiful spot but I was too tired to start the walk so headed for my hotel.

I thought it was a flower shop at first, there were so many flowers and plants outside the entrance, and it didn’t help that it was next to a real flower shop.

The woman behind the counter was reassuringly human and gave me my key, 402. The lift was reassuringly lift like and stutteringly took me to the fourth floor. My usual hotel room hide and seek excitement couldn’t help but ignite as I found the door and put in my key.

The door opened to a room so large that it had two beds. It was clean, spacious, the bathroom was where you’d expect it and everything. “Wow,” I kept saying to no one in particular. I surveyed my new domain, and it was good.

Sleep, shower, sun cream, explore. Takayama features old streets, more shrines than it seems you really need, shops and lots of bridges. Ugly statues live on one bridge.

This one appeared to be insistently pointing at something but all I could make out from following its finger was a dead crow on a TV ariel.

It got dark pretty early and I sat in the cemetery at 8pm waiting for my nightly call from Yoko and wondering why I was sitting in a cemetery. I had wanted to find somewhere off the main street but this was ridiculous. Up the dark dark steps and through the dark dark trees the shrine was lit up. I tried to relax, not imagine ghosts floating above me or psychotic killers creeping behind me with the urge to bludgeon.

A cold wind broke my nerve; I headed back into town and took the call there.

There is a convenience store here called Timely, I have never seen it anywhere else. I ate Timely sushi alone in my room, as is my usual eating habit these days. Being unable to read Japanese, being a vegetarian and being alone I don’t really want to go to restaurants but I feel like I am missing out on something.

Whenever you ask a Japanese person whether visiting a particular city or area of Japan is worth it they say, “Oh yes it is famous for its ramen,” or some other kind of food I can’t eat. This just doesn’t happen in the UK, people don’t say, “Oh yes, you must eat the steak and kidney pie in Blackpool.” It’s like Japanese people learn the geography of their country not by famous sights or history but by food. Still I can recommend Timely sushi.

Nagoya Jo and Kengo

2009-05-30T10:45:00.001-07:00

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

2009-05-17T06:33:00.001-07:00

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

2009-05-09T09:21:00.000-07:00

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

2009-05-03T05:54:00.001-07:00

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.

From Sendai to Tokyo

2009-04-27T03:39:00.001-07:00

I got up early to catch my coach from Sendai to Tokyo. I was happy to be getting out of the hostel but it felt strange to just walk out the door with no one behind the desk, no key to return, no linen to put in a bin, no goodbyes or come again. Not that I would, I was leaving forever when I stepped out that door with my life on my back again.

I made it to my coach. Sat on board feeling excited to be going back to familiar territory. Travelling is tiring in subtle ways, there’s something about always moving and everything being unfamiliar that gets to you after a while.

When Tokyo loomed out the windows I kept looking for places I knew, sights I recognised, but there were none. Tokyo was still full of things I hadn’t seen before. I got off in Ikebukuro and went down into the subway. There were police everywhere, and just like in Hokkaido the coin lockers were all sealed off from public use. Bloody G8.

A tough looking looking policeman was standing next to the ticket barrier and I went to ask him whether the lockers were unusable at all the stations or just the larger ones. His face turned into a smile and although he didn’t know the answer to my question he was extremely friendly. It’s nice to know that in this paranoid age when a policeman is given the responsibility to prevent major terrorist attacks while G8 world leaders discuss our impending environmental doom, he can still be friendly to wayward tourists.

I called my hostel in Asakusabashi, which rolls off the tongue after a few practices, to ask if I could leave my bag their early. The woman on the phone had a cheerful voice and said it was absolutely fine.

A few hours later I was back in Minami Gyotoku and walking to my old home, where I would see my old room as someone else’s for the first time. Walking the streets my mind was full of comparisons, I had seen more of the country and somehow things made more sense to me having seen their different incarnations. Like phone boxes, convenience stores, signs, people’s accents - they weren’t just Japanese anymore, they were this region of Japan.

The door code hadn’t changed to the guesthouse and Yoko had left me her key in her shoebox. I was a guest for the first time. Although she was at work she was their to welcome me in spirit. She had left her air conditioning on for me, left a plate of pumpkin rolls, homemade cookies and a bag Chocolate Pillow cereal for my breakfast, lunch and snacks.

I sent her an email called, “I’m in your room, is that scary?” and she quickly replied from her desk saying “no.”

The compressed mountain of my belongings under Yoko’s bed had not subsided over time and I hacked away at it again, filling another box to send back to the UK. Sweating I took my load down to the post office and waved it goodbye.

It was already feeling like a long day, but the main event had not happened yet. As well as seeing Yoko, Kizuna, Kosuke and Il Heung from the guest house I was also going to see Yang who I had not seen since Australia. The last time we saw each other was on the bus to Sydney International Airport when we were too rushed for a proper goodbye, both because we had different planes to catch and because we were living one hour ahead of everyone else (we got Sydney time wrong).

But for a few days he was returning to Japan to see Kizuna, his now girlfriend, a few other people and
me. I was meeting him that day, just waiting for his call.

And waiting

And waiting

Then Yoko came home. I welcomed her back to her own room like a polite squatter. We sat around her kotatsu (small heated table you kneel at with knees under cloth which hangs down) and talked the tales we had to tell. Though it had only been a week.

Around 7PM there was a knock on the door. It was Yang. He beckoned me out and we spoke in whispered hellos outside her door. Yoko opened the door and suddenly his performance began.

He was different. His Japanese accent had changed, he sat with a straightened back at the table, spoke very politely and I sat between them watching the whole thing. When they had nothing else to say to each other they would look to me to fill the void. Yoko was as surprised as I was, but she punctured his demeanour by embarrassing him in her cheeky way.

We went downstairs to have food with the others and it was like old times. I had my story to tell and myself, Yang and Kizuna had tomorrow to plan. We were going to go to Fuji Safari, a large safari park next to Mount Fuji. For various reasons I was not planning on visiting Mount Fuji on my trip but I wanted to get a better view of it and the Safari park would do the job. It was also roughly half way between Tokyo and Nakano, my next destination.

Amid beer, sushi and three languages it was time for me to get to my hostel. Yang wanted to walk me to the station so I bid Yoko a, “see you in Nagasaki” - the final destination of my trip which seemed an impossible distance and amount of time away.

Yang and I worked out where to meet the next day and then I made my way across town to Asakusabashi. It was already 11:30 or so but Tokyo rarely feels dangerous.

In the hostel they gave me a pile of linen to fit around futon number 3 in the room 4. Again there were no keys, just a piece of plastic to prove that I had rights to futon 3 of the room 4.

The room was dark when I got there but I could see bodies lying around the edges, some more asleep than others but there was a civilised silence. Each futon was divided from its neighbours by free standing wooden screens that could be folded up or opened out depending on how sociable you were feeling.

By the light of my phone I found futon number 3, took off the sign and fumbled around in the dark trying to put the sheet on, then the duvet and pillow case. I changed and went to brush my teeth.

Being the last one to go to sleep I closed the paper door and the rest of the light was extinguished. In the darkness I arranged my things, set my alarm and lay my head down to sleep.

I hadn’t quite fallen asleep when something landed on me. It had a distinctive feeling of being large, flat and not very heavy and I knew immediately that it was the wooden screen of the person sleeping next to me. He sprang up instantly and picked it back up saying, “Sorry” in a Japanese accent with a hint of panic.

Had he been able to see my face he would have seen that I was laughing. “It’s OK,” I said. New experiences, new experiences.