disturbing the wa

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i am writing from the sakura hotel (a hostelnot a hotel) in jimbocho, chiyoda-ku district in tokyo. i have been travelling for five days straight without stopping now and my internal clock is fucked! i woke up, had a shower in the extremely clean and lovely power showers, sorted all my bags out and came down to the lobby ten minutes ago ready to decide what walking tour i would do from the book of options i got in london. but now i find it is 5.15pm in tokyo so i must have slept about 14 hours because i got here about 1 am. realising how out of whack i am i decided to gravitate towards anything safe and known, so naturally i have planted myself in front of the nearest mac and internet connection while i decide what to do. kind of annoyed that i slept so late, that is a wasted day. stupid narcoleptic girl. however in my defense, me and my friend jon only got home from kyoto at midnight and had been on the shinkansen (the bullet train) for 4 hours, after walking round kyoto and having done a similar trip from hiroshima in the morning, which itself followed a lengthy journey from tokyo to hiroshima on the saturday morning. basically i was knackered but i have travelled half the country so i wasnt sitting on my arse.

where to start? jimbocho is not ultra central tokyo, it is near tokyo station which, unlike the suggestion of the name, is not very near the centre and places like harajuku or shibuya. toyko station is in the business district. as i have just woken up i cant tell you much about jimbocho as the most i have seen so far is the front door of the hostel! but you can tell we are in the business district as salarymen keep walking into the hostel and ordering drinks.

so....after a smooth and unusually quick-seeming flight to tokyo narita (in which i saw some films - the sylvia plath biopic, 6 out of ten - my super ex-girlfriend, 1 out of ten and only because the fit owen brother is in it and some guy who looks like pat wilson from weezer - and something else that hasnt made enough impact for me to recall) i was fully geared to find everything very confusing and to get a little bit scared; my friend jon who lives here and who i arranged to meet later on the friday night i flew in had sent me a long email warning me that even he finds it confusing to travel here and very kindly wrote a play-by-play list of how to find my way from the airport to where we were meeting in shibuya. but it was fine and i didnt need his instructions; obviously the airport is prepared for stupid foreigners and without too much trouble i found my way, with my massive backpack, to the narita express train which takes you to the centre of town in an hour or so, found the office to validate my japan rail pass for use, got onto the express with a minute to spare, and found myself in shibuya. first run in with a japanese; i didnt realise i had a reserved seat so sat in any seat, but a group of girls my age came in and one of them, a scarily tall (she was in stiletto heels) girl with an orange tan and sporting a cheap leopardskin catsuit and pearls, booted me out. she spoke no english but used the international language of the bitch - a sneer and a scary as fuck look - and it worked. it was fun though!
from shibuya i found a tourism kiosk who pointed me to the ticket machines for the metro (much like the london underground really, with english language options), bought a one day pass. somewhere in this itinerary i stowed my backpack in another stations lockers. after that i had about 6 hours to kill before meeting jon so i went walking round shibuya. the first thing i saw on my exit from the station was the massive crossroads and piccadilly circus/time square style lit-up skyscrapers, the same ones from that scene in lost in translation where scarlett goes for a walk on her own and it is raining, there loads of cool as fuck kids hang out looking cool as fuck. in tokyo there are no chavs and no one goes out with wet hair from the shower like i have done tonight, everyone is posing, fashion report: girls here love their cut off tights and leggings as much as in london, but the common style is shoreditchy mixed with slouchy utilitarian cool, or devil wears prada type clothing, everyones makeup is perfect and their hair is too, whether coiffed or thrown into a high bun with a long fringe. i spent a large portion of the day taking surrepticious photos of cool boys in cool suits. if gavin snowdon is reading this, you belong here! the younger version of tokyos salarymen all mince around (and i mean mince) in sharp contemporary suits, with skinny ties, cool shoes, cool socks for fuck sake! they have cool hair, geek glasses of varying sizes from sleek to big old nhs style, and they carry leather briefcases. they mostly smoke too. i have noticed too that tokyo has many more tall boys than i thought it would, i saw about 20 or so (spotted with jons help) and i can report that they too were rather beautiful.

what else....i went to shinjuku and harajuku but at the wrong time of day to see the harajuku girls (though i already met one of the girls with the name i cant remember who are famous for their orange tans, different to the harajuku girls) since they were at school. not too much culture to be had there, its more like topshop if topshop were a district not just a shop. i stopped for sushi in some random quick-serve place on shibuya and with my two japanese words, 'hai' (yes), and 'arigatao' (thanks), ordered a few bits and some things i didnt know. it is much like yo! sushi but smaller and not a chain. anyway then some bookish looking guy came in and sat next to me, and before long asked me where i was from and all that malarkey, then said that he saw a foreigner in the sushi bar as he walked past and that was why he came in. then my bullshit antennae went up just in case he was one of those crazy jap men who abduct english girls and cut them into tiny chunks and throw them in the trash, so i kept conversation to a minimum though he kept going. he said he was learning english and produced a textbook to prove it, but the textbook looked too old for someone studying now and i imagined that he used the textbook as a ploy to convince stupid girls like me and get their trust before cutting them into cheese-and-pineapple sixed chunks, so i finished my sushi and made my way. (jon told me later that he was probably just trying to practise his english and that i should try not to be too cynical with the japs as they will usually just want to practise their english with me and will just be being friendly when they talk to me. in fact i have seen no rule breaking or crime here at all yet, so perhaps i should modify my defensiveness for now...) walked around some more, ventured into pachinko places (of which there are loads) - pachinko is a sort of fruit machine game in which you buy a bunch of ball bearings, put them into the machine, and they fallthrough a series of pins, and you win or lose depending on what holes they fall into at the end. simple yet it has tokyo in a vice grip; in any pachinko parlous in tokyo you will see them packed out allday with a cross section of society, from schoolkids to salarymen to grannies to housewives. the japanese love to smoke compulsively too, and they smoke anywhere, so the pachinko parlours are not only rammed, but also smoggy. also, the machines make their crazy gambling bleeps very loudly, and the palour manager plays trance type music all day too at the level you would expect in a rave; in every parlour there are several attendants with headsets on to communicate and dressed in what look like burger king uniforms, running around like blue arsed flies serving more ball bearings to hooked gamblers. after two minutes in one i felt like i was on the cusp of an epileptic fit or perhaps that my eyes would pop out of my head like that scene in total recall. so i quickly took some pictures and got chucked out by the managers who didnt want me to take pictures. anyway that was fun. the funniest thing about the pachinko craze is that gambling is illegal in japan; but this is a land of contrasts and the way they circumnavigate this is by removing currency from the game and replacing it with the ball bearings; then when you want to pick up your winnings, you have to go to a tiny hole in the wallnext door and exchange the ball bearings for money. the hole in the wallis an entirely seperate shop and business, and that is how they claim that pachinko is not gambling. no one here minds so it goes on like that. anyway, no one would dare complain as that would disturb the 'wa' which is un-japanese and very very frowned upon. yes, disturbing the wa, wa being translated in englush as 'harmony', is done by contravening any of japans endless social mores, some strongly codified some too subtle for even japs themselves to know, ending in embarrassment of both parties. as is showcased in the japanese tea ceremony, bonsai growing, wax-on wax-off type zen happenings,wa is way, way important. the worst offenders of breaking the wa are the stinking foreigners, who stink up the place with their unwashedness and their loudness and their talking loudly and laughing loudly, the latter of which i did on the shinkansen and learned therefore about wa.

so yes, anyway i met my friend jon at the hachinko (i think it is hachinko) dog statue at shibuya, not before at least three foreign men approached me to sell drugs or rob me being as i was clearly easy meat sat there with my backpack all alone and my stash of foreign currency and we went onto one of his haunts, a small and very cool bar where we sat next to a large birthday party for which the staff shut off the music, produced a cake, and got the whole place to sing happy birthday in english!!! (me and jon were the only foreigners in there so that was way cool). we had sone odd food including strips of unchewably hard squid, several beers, a bottle of wine and i of course got quite drunk. a little bit about jon, we were at school together in camberley, in the same group of metallers (the ostracised rock music types with lanky greasy hair and army surplus store getup with names of death metal bands painted on) and he was bassist for the band for which my first love was guitarist; he came to japan on the jet english-teaching program a few years ago and moved to tokyo from the provinces to take up work in the world of the information superhighway, work that i am still unsure what it involves but sounds exciting. one of the few people from school who did something interesting with his life, and a thoroughly lovely chap.

so we woke up at the ungodly hour of 4am to make the 6am shinkansen to hiroshima via osaka, and missed it! but got the next one and were in hiroshima for about 11-12, four hours after leaving tokyo. i should mention that we crossed half the country in those 4 hours, the shinkansen is so fast it can do that. i dont know the distance in miles but it is a lot from tokyo to near the southern tip of the country, maybe about 1800km. we passed mount fuji on the way but it was so foggy that the view wasnt good enough for a viewing. we stopped at osaka to change shinkansen and bought ourselves some food - japan has endless quick serve stores where you have a large window of what looks to be plasticised plates of food to illustrate what you can buy, you pay and they give you your choice in a sealed box which contains your chopsticks, sauces and so on as well as the food. we got back on the train and eat our lovely japanese foods in a box.

hiroshima was not as cool as imagined. the weather might be bringing the side down as it was wet and grey, plus cold, but the city just had an atmosphere of depression and sadness. i would go so far as to say it felt shellshocked, no pun intended. it was a saturday but there were very very few people around - we were walking down the main street after looking at the famous a-bomb site with the creepy dome that looks like a skeleton, and noticed that a large road with about 8 lanes for traffic was barely used. it is the most quiet city i have ever been to. it was all a bit weird. then we walked to hiroshima castle, which is a restored castle (read: not old really) as hiroshima obviously was flattened in the a-bomb. they had some exhibits of some very old silk prints there, and there had been some sort of bonsai and chrysanthemum growing event in the grounds so they were lovely, but i must say hiroshima was a bit sad. interesting though.

we then got the shinkansen to kyoto where we were staying the night, dumped out stuff about 10pm and went out to find food (jon is maybe the only person i know who thinks about food more than me; i had to keep up!). we had a korean barbeque which was meat-a-licious. kyoto is a small city with loads of young peeps looking cool and hanging around. we went to the silver temple and the gold temple, which were a way out of the city but are very old and very revered temples for the japanese. the silver one had a lovely walk up to it flanked by mocchi selling stalls all the way and people drawing us in to try some of their mocchi (each region in japan has its own kind as well as its own individual 'hello kitty' mascot) with free green tea. we of course didnt want to break the wa so we took all offerings. anyone reading who comes to yo! sushi with me knows how much i already love mocchi but having tried the real thing here i now favour sesame mocchi, which is black in colour here. the silver temple was not silver at all but had some beautiful gardens attached to it, sporting an array of stunning and delicate trees, some maple, others with really dainty little leaves, and as it is autumn the colours are a spectrum crossing bright green, yellow, crimson, salmon pink.... being quite high up the ground was covered in moss (even the moss in the garden was beautiful and seemed to come in different types), and some leaves had gotten stuck in the moss making everything that bit more lovely to look at. they also had some zen gardens with the gravel that is raked into perfect patterns; one had a large gravel creation to represent mount fuji. it all ended in much photo taking (though jon has an SLR so his are definitely better than mine).

we then got a cab to the other side of town, to the gold temple. this temple is in fact gold, a huge big temple in the middle of a lake which is so shiny bright i had to look away. that also had some nice gardens and a smaller temple attached where people were praying (i think shinto is the religion right?). they had machines to buy fortunes in japanese or english; my fortune said that i would have two boys propose marriage to me and that i would have to choose! it also said that i would have an easy labour.... i am not up the duff mum. promise. jon's fortune said he would have 'fairly good' luck.

we got our shinkansen to osaka for lunchtime and osaka was my favourite part of the trip south. we stumbled across some kind of massive street festival with lots of kids doing traditional dances and music; jon knew about this district which was meant to be a mini version of america through japanese eyes so we went there and it was rammed with cool kids but in new york projects-dwelling style clothes, listening to timberlake and nelly and riding those low rider bikes. it felt a bit like camden. we then tried one of the famous pancake creations that osaka is known for in this cool and very small stall. there is basically a long bar which along a large hotplate where you sit and watch your pancake being made. jons japanese is great but he could only make out that the menu offered pancakes with 'meat' so we ordered and it was rather nice. then three american students came in and we decided to leave because we are the only foreigners allowed, we decided.

manga is obviously a massive part of culture here and jon told me that they made gay manga for girls, rather than for boys (as in, boys kissing boys but for girls). i was intrigued so we looked up a manga store which was on the 36th floor of a massive shopping centre which was thronged with more cool teenagers in stunningly cool clothes. therein we found the gay manga but it was a bit lame conpared to what jon had told me it was about , just drawings of boys who were so androdgynous you couldnt tell if they were really boys or pre op girls or what - strong jawlines but long girly eyelashes...). so naturally we moved to the manga porn for boys which really held nothing back. as expected it proves that that japs are quite strange! they have thought of things that we westerners have not thought of yet, angles on manga porn that one could only reach with days and nights of intense brainstorming. jon very kindly decided to purchase two books so that i could research and learn about this side of japanese life, not so he could perv over the rude drawings himself. after more walking round observing, and a few more food stops, we were on the shinkansen back to tokyo at 7.45. yes we did read the naughty mangas on the train like two very badly behaved children, but i fell asleep after a while because the excitement of doing such wrongness was too much. (contrary to belief, the japanese do not read porno manga openly on the train. you can buy it without problems, they even offer you free book covers to spare your blushes; but it is not ok to read it in public, only freaks do that or tourist types who cant stifle their intrigue). got to tokyo about midnight and found my way to the hostel for 1 am; crashed out and then here we are now, 7.09pm. my longest ever email?

plans are vague for the rest of my tokyo stay, there are things to see like roppongi hills, more harajuku, karaoke to sing, sushi to eat. i am meeting jon and some of his friends for drinks at the park hyatt hotel (yep the one in lost in translation) on wednesday night and have been told to dress up as my current attire is the usual. i fly to cairns on friday evening.

oh by the way i havent don't my photos yet, i will add some to my flickr and here when i am in oz.
oh one more thing, for the =w= fans out there, jon has weezer connections!!!! he not only knows personally rivers cuomos wife as he worked with her, and reports that she is lovely, but also he went to see them play and went backstage and met rivers as he went with rivers then-fiancee, and he showed me a photo on his cameraphone of them together. he got invited to their wedding but couldnt make it! jesus, thats some cool rock connections even if he isnt into rock now....

i am really getting into bowing and saying hai and arigatao, i especially love bowing to old people as thats a deeper bow and its all very elegant and polite. some other observations; people say yes all the time here at any opportunity, it is a yes culture, thats keeping the wa going. when they say hai it is always said in a very authoritarian confident and alert way, i guess to show respect for oneself and the others. a second observation; when people wait for metro trains they do not just crowd the platform and elbow each other in the ribs to get on, japanese take it upon themselves to form a series or orderly queues where each of the train doors is going to be when the train stops, and they just file on quietly and quickly. trains are quiet because they are told to switch their phones to silent on all trains, and it is considered very rude to talk on the phone on the train, though lots of peeps play games or text. when jon and i were on the shinkansen we were making each other laugh with our conversation and i kept laughing loudly as i tend to do, and after a few times jon told me about the wa thing so i had to put a sock in it. it is bad wa to make noise. oh yeah and also, the toilets have 'flushing sound' buttons to disguise any untowards noises. oh and no one on the trains gives up seats for anyone, even heavily pregnant ladies or old people or people carrying three babies. tokyo is run for and by the yoof.

hope everybody is well, drop me a line. by the way please remember that all my blogs will feature bad grammar and a lack of capital letters. technically i am on holiday so i am relaxing my grip on perfect execution of our hallowed language.

x

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Photos

Pachinko
Smoke and gamble simultaneously

Manga for Girls
Jon reading some lame porn manga in osaka

Comments

[Kurisu Makumiran]

a comment
We're in the Sakura Hotel in Jimbocho at the mo. This is a top entry and has persuaded us to get up early for Tsukiji tomorrow. Sterling. Kurisu Makumiran

[Onehorsetown Loaferville]

cheers
hey a new friend! thanks for your comment, have fun disturbing your wa - let me know how you go x