Freedom

Hard to believe it's 3 weeks since I became gainfully unemployed (even though I haven't worked for 6). This morning I had my last day of school, and I walked out of class with my laptop and a daypack and headed straight to the train station. Goodbye Okazaki. Not that I'm sad to leave this fine example of bland Japanese urbanity.


I took the slow trains to Nara, ensuring plenty of train hopping and amazing views of rice paddies and mountains once I got safely through Nagoya. The shinkansen is great for getting places efficiently, but there's something pleasant about sitting on local trains and watching the passing show of life hopping on and off before you. After two years of intense busyness it's nice to be entering a period where I have an abundance of time, and it makes not having an income totally worth it.

As if on cue, autumn arrived today. I may have mentioned before that seasons change in Japan with the flick of a switch, one day you just know that you're in a different season, just as ants know when it's going to rain. I could feel the countryside taking a fulfilled sigh of accomplishment and begin to relax, much like that moment at the end of a busy but productive day when you sit down after accomplishing everything you wanted to and feel a great wave a contented tiredness roll over you. That was today, and the sense of autumn nostalgia in the late afternoon sunlight was only added to by watching a fat, round sun gently ease itself behind the mountains as the courtesy bus took me from Nara station to the hotel.

I checked in, and crashed on the bed drinking green tea before heading down to the bar where they have huge windows fronting onto a traditional Japanese garden with a waterfall pouring into its midst.
After finishing my self-congratulatory beer and gloating over the hordes of suited Japanese businessmen finishing up the day's deals, I headed down to check out the onsen, where I have just spent a pleasant hour lolling from hot bath to sauna to cold bath to hot bath whilst amusedly watching the little old ladies vigorously striding around and around the cool walking bath.

There's nothing like the ritual of an onsen or a swim in the sea or a river to formalise a change of circumstances. Am going to miss the silky feel of my skin after an onsen very much.

Tremendously Tumultuous Tripping in Tokyo

Imagine a place the geographical size of downtown Sydney or Melbourne. Now multiply the number of skyscrapers within that space by about 10 or 20, and the number of flashing neon lights by about 100.

Okay, before you get seriously unimpressed - that's not Tokyo - that could be Shibuya, or Shinjuku, or Akihabara or Harajuku or one of the 23 special "wards" that make up the city of Tokyo. The place is absolutely ENORMOUS.

Now imagine trying to explore a place like that in a little over 24 hours.
Wanna go tripping?

I caught the Shinkansen up early on a Saturday morning a couple of weeks ago and found myself deposited in the middle of Tokyo a little over two hours after riding my bike out the door. Wow! What a difference. Going up, the view was pretty typical of urban Japan, until we got to Atami: beautiful soaring mountains next to the sea with quaint little towns nestled in the gullies. After that we went through a series of long tunnels and were presently in Yokohama, a city in its own right on Tokyo's doorstop.

After taking obligatory shots of bullet trains in the smoking gun of Japan it was time for Tokyo Orientation 101. I failed miserably and got caught in my usual trick of wandering around and around in circles, not quite sure where I was or where I wanted to be or how the hell to navigate the vomited coloured spaghetti otherwise known as Tokyo's train system. They have about 100 different companies running about 50 different lines and none of them sync together especially well. And you all thought the privatisation of the Melbourne public transport system was a mess.

I met up with my travel buddy Charlotte outside Shinjuku and we wandered and wandered some more, just taking in the size and craziness of it all. I was becoming more flighty by the minute as the pace and stimuli bombardment honed in on my central nervous system. Soon Kevin was jumping up and down as if he'd just swallowed a kilo of jellybeans washed down with a couple of litres of red cordial.

We found ourselves in the midst of the red light district, where the walls were plastered with photos of young boys and the streets were filled with their friends and their bosses, otherwise known as the Yakuza. There was no mistaking these guys and definately no messing with them either. I kept my camera securely in my pack. One big guy in an outlandish suit and matching glasses was blocking the way of all traffic in one of the back streets, and it was strange to see people clearly uninvolved with him giving him a supremely wide berth. Tokyo is a city where everyone pushes everyone else out of the way all the time and I started walking around in a defensive upper body karate pose for protection, but no one laid a finger on this guy. The aura around him alone was terrifying. On a lighter note, see if you can identify the guy who doesn't fit in on the Hot Men's Box wall?


We went and booked into our hotel and then headed off to Akihabara, the electronics centre of Tokyo and home of the new "maid cafe" phenomenon. A classmate had come back from Tokyo the weekend before, espousing how this cute little Japanese girl had spoon fed him, written "Master" on his food in ketchup, and talked to him in a bunch of very high level polite Japanese of which he didn't understand the subtleties. Charlotte was keen to check out this phenomenon, or even better, an even newer "butler cafe". I just wanted to scratch away as much of the surface as possible of this mad city, and stay well away from Roppongi, Gaijin Central. We came out of the back exit of the station, and managed to miss completely most of central Akihabara. However, we did come across what appeared to be well dressed buskers, mostly young Japanese women, singing cheesy pop songs and surrounded by hoards of geeky looking older men with crazy truck off lenses on crazy truck off state of the art digital cameras, all incidentally singing and dancing along in a humorously geeky fashion.

Off to one side were a bunch of kids practising dance moves which my travel buddy, an anime fan, identified as the dance to some animé series or other. One of the kids had "otaku" written on his baseball cap which was a refreshing reclamation of a term that has always been used derogatively in the past.


Not sure if the singers were famous and the guys with cameras, professional photographers, Charlotte, whose Japanese is infinitely better than mine, asked the kids what was going on. It turned out that they were wannabe animation session singers hoping to be picked up by a recording studio or production company. The geeks with cameras were just that, . . . tech geeks who hung around Akihabara and had become groupies of the various wannabes, testing out their expensive equipment on these hopeful pretty young things.
Only in Japan!

Charlotte had to go off to meet her brother at the airport who was flying in from the States. Feeling trapped between wanting to gorge on as much of this menagerie as possible and badly needing a chill out space, I wandered around in circles some more, found the rest of Akihabara, including an Atom (astroboy) shirt I had been looking for for several months, and then stumbled over to Shibuya, supposedly one of the cooler hangouts spots and away from the tech geeks.

I managed to come out of the wrong subway exit yet again, and missed the heart of Shibuya, which was probably a good thing at the time> What I did find though was a labyrinth of back streets with small quiet bars and restaurants dotted around, that looked like they were setting up for the evening. Attracted by the interior décor of one, I checked out the (English) menu, found the prices affordable and wandered in, to be deposited on a cute little table next to a window overlooking the train platform. Perfect. Indulged in a Thai curry and a glass of acceptable house wine and watched the world go by from a position of safety and comfort.


Later on in the evening I met up with Charlotte again and we plotted ways in which to paint the town red. We headed back over to Shinjuku, which I had heard had some really cool clubs, but after wandering around for a while looking for signs of something cool and asking various bouncers who only laughed at us, we ran for the last train and squished over to Shibuya. The cool factor was much higher and we asked a guy giving out "free hugs" if he could tell us a place to find a boogie. He directed us over to the police box. I was flummoxed and somewhat insulted. Coming from a wannabe police state I've yet to meet a cop who might actually not want to harass me, beat me up or just spoil anything approaching fun. Cops are the guys who viciously laugh at you for having anything approaching ideals. The most conservative, prejudiced, dishonest, people on the planet. But these cops actually told us where to go, pulled out a map and gave us directions to a huge rave.

We stopped off at a couple of clubs along the way: one was filled with way too many gaigin and bad hip hop and the other was a gorgeous little roof garden bar playing some chilled tunes. But it was an establishment for drinking and Charlotte doesn't, so we kept going. Turning up a couple of back streets we found a huge line to get into a three story club that had an all night party going on. Alright, now we're talking.

Determined to have a good time we stuck it out for several hours, but the music was either saccharine house, bad mainstream hip hop or hardcore acid trance, and the bouncers were big imported A**H***S with too much testosterone who had a nasty habit of too much physical contact and kind of freaked me out. One guy kept pushing me in the direction he wanted to steer the crowd and when I told him not too, he looked like he wanted to hit me or throw me out. We hung out on the middle floor for a while; they had platforms you could dance on and the local kids kept urging Charlotte to take her crazy dancing up on one, but when she did the bouncers came and dragged her off, as they did to any of the guys. It seemed they only wanted petite beautiful chicks with hardly any clothing up there.

Around 3:30am we both admitted that we'd had enough and were tired after a long day. Charlotte hadn't really eaten and we ended up inside Makudonaraudos with half of Shibuya who were using it as a cheap hotel. We found out why when the taxi fare turned out to be $70. Ouch!

The next morning we got up not so bright and early and headed back over to Akihabara cause I wanted to get some RAM to replace one of the karked chips in my laptop. We ended up at one of the big discount shops but the guy kept telling me I had to put Mac RAM inside my Mac, which I'm sure isn't true, but I really didn't want to make a mistake when it would be unreturnable. The Mac section quoted me $180 for a GB and still weren't sure what they were talking about and I figured I'd rather spend a lot of money somewhere I could understand the sales assistant. We still didn't find the maid cafes, but did see lots of "maids" handing out flyers for various budget electronics stores.

We ended up having breakfast in a Linux Cafe which was nice.


In Harajuku I found myself most out of place and most at home. The long straight tree lined street dipped sharply downhill and then careered as sharply uphill again and would have had a village atmosphere if it wasn't so BIG. Huge buildings lining the street, becoming progressively more chic and expensive the further away from the station you got. With some seriously nice design work. To enlarge the images, click on the thumbnail above the central bigger image.




We walked all the way down and up one side and then down and up the other side until we ended up between the station and Yoyogi Park where all the Cosplay kids come out to play on Sundays. Or more accurately, come out to be photographed by the tourists. It was probably the only human zoo in the world where you don't have to pay money for photos.



We hung around for a while, just watching, and then grabbed some lunch at cool little cafe that didn't have a huge queue out the front, possibly because the cuisine was more to a western than a Japanese taste, in fact I could have been eating in Sydney or Melbourne. Tired and exhausted we went back to central Tokyo Station and bought some necessary omiage before falling into the next shinkansen home.

To see a larger version of the cosplay slide show click here. To check out all my photos click here.

Okazaki

Japanese suburbs. There are mountains in the distance I can't seem to quite reach on my bike and a nice enough river with a semi decent bike path. The only pool I've found, that you don't need a lifetime membership for, never seems to be open. I keep longingly riding down to this delightful open air pool (a rarity in Japan) in the middle of a pretty park. Unfortunately the pool has a big high fence around it and I wish I was still in uni and had some friends with whom I could climb the fence with in the middle of the night.

Other than that the place is intrinsically bland. A good place to hunker down and study.

My apartment is about a third the size of my place in Marugame, but is functional and does have the luxury air conditioning, which has actually been really nice during the record breaking heatwave that has engulfed most of Japan this summer. This week the temperature has finally dropped below thirty for the first time in a couple of months, which means I have been able to enjoy the other bonus of my apartment: a nice deep bath with room to stretch out your legs. My last bath was cube shaped and I could just about squat inside it! This evening I went for a decently long ride, which quickly turned into a ride through the rain, and when I got back I filled the bath, turned on the rice cooker and soaked whilst waiting for my dinner. I think I could get used to the Japanese habit of night time baths. Unfortunately I'm leaving soon. However I'm past regrets and really looking forward to going home.

Study has been equally rewarding and frustrating. As a result of living in the country without a formal study regime, I have learnt to survive well using a mixture of verbs and nouns. Thus my language comprehension is much better than my production. In fact my grammar is incredibly confused and confusing.

The school I am studying at works on two-week modules that run from friday to thurday (even though weekends are still holidays). Before you start, and at the end of each module, you are given a placement test. If, at the end of a module, you don't get 70% in the test, you can't move on the the next module.

When I first came I got placed into a class, looked through the book and realised I kind of knew everything we were going to be studying for the next two weeks. I spent my first couple of days staring out the window and begging to be moved up to the next class. I had to study really hard for another test to go up, in which I messed up all the simple stuff: bad verb conjugation and illiterate use of particles (the Japanese equivalent of prepositions). But I was convinced I could do it and cause I was probably something of a brat, they let me move up. What I didn't know was how strict the teachers are. Thus I spent the next two weeks after school had finished studying a minimum of an extra six hours a day, trying to catch up with everyone else. Naturally when the end of module test happened, I bombed.

I went home and had a good hard look at my ego and my expectations. Me have unrealistic expectations of myself? Never. Me make life too hard for myself so that when I f*&k up I have a good reason to hate myself? Course not.

I had two choices: repeat the module I had just done or swallow a chokingly large piece of humble pie. I grudgingly admitted to myself and my teachers that I had messed up the test, not because I didn't get the stuff we had just covered, but because even though I knew about the principles of verb conjugation, it wasn't something I was comfortable with, and could in all honesty do with some more practice. And about particles I'm still confused, but maybe getting there slowly.....

So I went back to where they wanted to put me in the first place and have just aced my test. I'm feeling much more confident about my communication abilities even though I'm not yet on the verge on intermediate, which is where my ego wanted to be, but its given me some time to focus on other important things, like looking after myself, getting photos photoshopped, slideshows created and blogs up to date.

I have a week more of school, and in the meantime am starting to muse about what to send home, what to bribe the airline officials to let me bring and what sort of presents to get people.

Space is a premium so get your orders in fast.