Who watches the watchmakers? (A: Me)

Last week my watch broke. Isn’t my life so full of drama and excitement? So after searching on Google maps for a nearby watchmaker I left work a little early and headed there. What I didn’t know, however, was that the shop of Nagano Tokeiten was actually a time machine. It took me back to a magical land where sunglasses were circular, Zippo lighters were ubiquitous and everything and I mean everything was beige. Yes, I had arrived in the 1970s.

As I walked in the door, the owner span around in his chair, burping out a greeting. “Irashaimasssurrgh.” He got halfway through his first word before falling face first into a display cabinet of vintage cigarettes. The man was drunk, very drunk. There was half a bottle of whiskey on the counter and his ashtray was piled high with a veritable mountain of ash and butts and all this before 2pm. To be honest I was starting to doubt whether this man was even capable of replacing the battery in my watch without turning it into a piece of modern art.

Nevertheless, I pressed forwards with my request in the hope that he would call upon hidden reserves of sobriety and focus on fixing my watch. Things didn’t get off to a great start however, when he started dropping his screwdrivers on the floor. I took the time to look around the shop, although museum would probably be a better word. The fading posters on the wall advertising long discontinued brands of shampoo, the bizarre frameless glasses from the 1950s steadily accumulating dust and the antique radio with its guts spilling out on the counter all added to a strong other worldly scenario. The T.V. in the corner played the same advert over and over (ever since the Earthquake many advertisers have pulled their commercials from T.V. leading to a hellish nightmare scenario where the same two or three adverts are repeated ad nauseum) and the steady ticking of the clocks started becoming mesmerising.

It was then that I realised that the room was not heavy with cigarette smoke, but with sleeping gas. Too late I realised I’d walked into a trap. Gasping for breath I collapsed on the floor, the watchmaker’s grinning, leering face looming over me was the last thing I saw before I lost consciousness. I awoke strapped to a chair in the watchmaker’s basement. Despite struggling, I couldn’t manage to loosen my bonds. The watchmaker eventually came in accompanied by two men dressed in sharp suits and proceeded to repeatedly ask me whether ‘it was safe’. Unsure of how to reply I hesitated, lost in confusion and fear. Unsatisfied by my lack of reply he started drilling through one of my teeth with a dentist drill. Anyway to cut a long story short, it all ended up with me forcing him to eat his Nazi diamonds at gunpoint.

Now unless I’m confusing the end of this story with a film starring Dustin Hoffman and Lawrence Olivier, my trip to the watchmaker turned out to be more eventful than I expected.

John Thomas' phantastic phallic phrenzy (or how I learnt to stop worrying and love the dong)

Last week I went to a very special festival near Komaki. This festival was the infamous Hounen Matsuri, or Penis festival. Taking the day off work (which, it being the end of the school year, was quite easy to do), I went with my girlfriend to get drunk and eat lots of phallic food. What better way is there to spend a cloudy Tuesday afternoon in mid-March?

I arrived at the station a little before noon looking smug as hell: not only did I not have to come into work today, but I was trying out something I'd always wanted to do since I heard about my placement in Aichi. The station was quite busy (not that you can see it here) and we were buzzing with anticipation.

The road to the shrine was covered in souvenier stands this is a picture of 'his and her's' rock candy lollipops. Unfortunatly, the vagina shaped candy was not made for sucking and broke in two at the slightest pressure. It seems like the patriarchy wins again.

The shrine itself was a fairly standard, if quite large, affair. Perhaps its most distinguishing features were the large number of phallic symbols in the shrine itself. Imagine your fairly typical Church of England church and replace the crucifix with a massive penis, the font with a wang and the organ with...well a different type of organ.

Festivals in Japan often feature bananas dipped in chocolate as a staple snack food. This being the penis festival, a couple of marshmallows were added, along with the tip of an extra banana. Contrary to popular belief the black ones were no bigger than the white ones.

Not just bananas, but hotdogs too. This particular sausage (as modeled by yours truly) was wrapped in a sort of batter and had a stick thrust in it. It was supposed to represent the portable shrine that houses the huge penis that is paraded down the street (more on this later). Naturally the sausage had been circumcised.

As we made our way towards the parade, we started encountering heavy crowds. After fighting our way through the massed revelers, we eventually found the procession at its [ahem] head was this fellow with the long nose. Supposedly the guardian of the shrine, his nose is suitably erect. The most surprising thing about him though is that no-one saw fit to add a couple of balls to the base of his long spear.

These women carried portable wooden penises. I don't really know what more I can add apart from that these would look pretty striking in the middle of your coffee table.

Next up in the parade was a flag of...well...you guessed it, another dick. This one was carried by what looked like members of the town's local council or business leaders: wealthy men in rich suits overlaid with gaudy waistcoats and carrying a huge flag with a picture of a cock on it. Somehow this says more about Japan than any guide book could.

This woman was a porn star, at least according to one of the onlookers who recognised her from her movies. All day she walked around in a pink kimono followed by a fat man with a massive camera. Occasionally she would pose with one of the sausages or bananas in a very suggestive fashion whilst her portly colleague would take pictures. Most of the time though she looked a little bored with the whole thing.

The portable shrine itself was a normal portable shrine with a massive penis rammed through the middle it took about twenty men to lift it and they could only do it for a couple of minutes before they had to lay it down and the next team took on their burden. Accompanying the shrine were men and women distributing seaweed and sake and as the procession drew on the sake got more and more generous. By the end most people were very drunk.

This man was one of many such drunks, and made it his mission to kiss me as deeply as he could. Unfortunately for him he did not succeed in kissing me at all. Eventually he stumbled away to talk to one of the police officers and we never saw him again... Other drunks just danced, like the sharply dressed man on the right who boogied on down wearing a strap-on dildo. In the gay future, when gay marriage is legal and all society will crumble leaving the earth to be roamed by nazis riding dinosaurs, this is what bus conductors will look like.

This was probably my favourite thing at the festival, not just for the very pornographic imagery, but because of the censorship. At a festival where they literally ram a giant penis through the doors of the waiting temple, it's still somewhat taboo to show actual sex acts. Even better is how they covered it up; with the cutest picture of Lilo kissing Stitch. I didn't buy it, as it was quite expensive, but I did buy a sake cup shaped like a penis with two matching cups shaped like a penis and a vagina. You have to suck the sake out of the head of the penis cup...

At the end of the day they threw rice cakes from the balcony of the shrine. As big as a fist and as hard as a rock the sky was suddenly filled with flying cakes. If you catch one, it's supposed to bring good luck, but I'm not sure if that's true, as I saw one middle-aged man catch one and almost immediately get hit by a second one, which broke his nose. Some people brought out buckets and baseball gloves which worked well. I was awful, a combination of not having played cricket in over five years (or baseball ever) and being too tall to get on my hands and knees to scramble around in the dirt for them. I did catch one, however, as I pounced on it before the old women could tear it out of my hands.

So that was that: The penis festival of Komaki. The only place you can see a higher concentration of dicks than Goldman Sachs.

Earthquake

Despite this being an ostensibly humorous blog about wacky goings on in Japan, there is something I need to talk seriously about. As I’m sure you are aware there has been a very large Earthquake in Northern Japan, in which hundreds and probably thousands of people have lost their lives and many more have been displaced from their homes. Obviously with something so tragic I could not, nor would not want to make light of it, so for one night only I’m going to do a sincere and non-snarky update.

When the Earthquake hit I was in the middle of teaching a lesson of 13 year olds, my last class of the day and we were wrapping things up. That day I’d had four classes teaching together with the English teacher for the 1^st years and, true to form, they were the dullest least interesting classes imaginable. Just as we were wrapping up the lesson I started feeling a little woozy, imagine being drunk or on a ship in choppy water, and you’ll know the feeling. It was only when one of the girls shouted out that it was an earthquake did we sprang into action (not immediately mind you, we dithered for a little bit.) Our friend the boring teacher suddenly became the hero telling everyone to duck under their desks and cover their heads with their hands like in one of those American Public Information movies about how to survive a nuclear blast. Having no desk myself I rather impotently squatted on the floor and covered my head with my hands all the while acknowledging the fact that I had absolutely no protection if the roof were to fall on my head. The woozy sensation went on for about a minute and a half which doesn’t seem very long, but it was almost a lifetime when you’re in the middle of an earthquake with absolutely no protection. After a little while most people had registered that the earthquake was harmless and despite scolding from Mr Boring, some of the kids started to emerge from under their desks.

When the earthquake had subsided all the kids were chatting excitedly and getting a bit bellicose. I ended the lesson abruptly and left the classroom. At that point the atmosphere was very jovial, kids were milling about in the corridors of the school, (the lesson having finished during the earthquake) and I was chatting excitedly about it being my first ‘proper’ earthquake – There was a very mild one back in the U.K. about three years ago. It was only when I returned to the teachers room when I realised that the earthquake was a lot more dangerous than I thought. As scenes of devastation flooded the TV screen in the teachers’ room it sunk home to me that what I had felt just now was but the very edge of the earthquake.

When I got home I stuck on the BBC and Al Jazeera coverage of the disaster and saw the images of people trying (and failing) to drive away from an incoming wave of toxic black water. I saw the images of cars being swept off bridges; of fishing trawlers floating down streets; of the roof of the local airport collapsing whilst terrified travellers cowered in alcoves. In the mean time I kept trying to phone my girlfriend to try and make sure she was alright, but the earthquake had caused all the service on the mobile phone networks to go down so I couldn’t phone or text anyone. I tried to keep my spirits up by being flippant about it, but as I saw images of people frantically trying to flag down rescue helicopters from their semi-submerged houses on the TV, I knew even that couldn’t help.

In the end though I turned off the foreign news and turned back to domestic coverage and realised something. Although the Japanese news broadcast was horrendously low budget and they used the same tone of voice for describing the 9.0 magnitude earthquake as they did with the opening of a new sushi restaurant which substitutes the fish for fruit and the rice for marshmallows, it was infinitely preferable to the foreign coverage. It seems that in the wake of the Haiti earthquake last year, journalists have started falling over themselves to portray natural disasters in the most sensationalist light possible. The above images I described were shown both on foreign and Japanese news broadcast where on the BBC they were accompanied by frantic telephone messages with correspondents whereas on NHK they were presented as background images to the communication of dry facts about the damage. The tone on NHK and all of the channels in Japan was very much one of subdued concern whereas on the BBC, CNN and everywhere else it was one hyperbolic emotion.

Perhaps it is wise for journalists back home to not confuse conveying the human angle to a story with outright fear-mongering. Case in point; after the tsunami hit the Japanese government noted that there were some problems with the nuclear reactors in Fukushima. When these were later revealed to be explosions at the plants MSNBC and everyone else went ballistic printing titles such as JAPANESE WORKERS FRANTICALLY TO CONTAIN NUCLEAR DISASTER and TENS OF THOUSANDS FLEE AS JAPAN'S NUCLEAR CRISIS INTENSIFIES. For the outside watcher it would seem as if the power plants were facing a Chernobyl-style meltdown and millions of people are to be affected by radiation poisoning. The articles themselves contain very little besides outright fear-mongering and out of context quotes from officials and anti-nuclear campaigners who have a vested interest in making nuclear power look as dangerous as possible. In reality, the worst the meltdowns are predicted to be is a level 4 meltdown, which is a partial meltdown. To put it into context; Chernobyl was a level 7 meltdown (the worst nuclear accident) and Three Mile Island was a level 5 partial meltdown. Whilst a level 4 partial meltdown is an extremely serious affair and poses a major health hazard to those in the immediate vicinity, throwing around terms like ‘apocalyptic’ is entirely disingenuous.

Misrepresenting the severity of a natural disaster in order to increase ratings and market share is very dangerous indeed, not only does it fictionalise the event but it undermines the messages of hope we find in the tragedy. To be sober about the reality of the situation isn't to be stone-hearted or stoic in the face of unprecedented human suffering, but by sensationalising the coverage of the disaster the media risks portraying the rescue efforts as exercises in futility rather than as the heroic acts of selflessness that they are.

People in Japan are going back to their daily lives after the disaster. Whilst things will probably never be quite the same again in places like Sendai, the Tohoku region is not going to turn into the Japanese ‘Fallout: New Vegas’ (although if it were it would probably feature AKB 48 endlessly repeating over the radio rather than Frank Sinatra). People are picking up the pieces of their shattered lives and I implore you to donate (if only a little) to the Japanese Red Cross, ease the suffering of those who are affected the worst. Whilst there is real tragedy, please try and keep the salient facts of the situation in mind and when a newspaper or TV report suggest that Armageddon is around the corner, try to think critically about it. The victims of the earthquake deserve better than to have their plight sensationalised and politicised to the degree that it is. The next few months will be hard for the people of Miyagi, Iwate and Fukushima prefectures but if we all keep calm and rational we can help them a lot more effectively than if we freak out.

Next time: Back to the regularly scheduled programming.

Let's make Tim Buckley funny!

In Japan the school year starts and ends in April. Since exams for the third years in my junior high school finished a few weeks ago and graduation is still a couple of weeks of there's a dead space where the teachers can relax and not have to worry about following a curriculum. Some foreign teachers show movies or T.V. shows like the Simpsons to their kids and others just play games all day. One increasingly popular option is for teachers to give the kids comics with all the words removed so that they can write their own. This gives them an opportunity to use English creatively, express themselves through a familiar medium and all that other high-minded jargon that is written in the plethora of teaching handbooks. So, I tried this with my pupils and whilst not all of them wrote in English those that did produced amazing results. I used three of my favourite comics (plus one I can't stand) for them to fill in. So I hope you read these comics and laugh at their use of non-sequiturs, puns and abstract comedy rather than at their lack of finesse in the English language.

The Manga - Yotsubato 


Original - http://koiwai.biz/eng/v9/ch59/59_28_png.htm


http://img13.imageshack.us/img13/9070/whyrl.jpg
http://img268.imageshack.us/i/notonthevocablist.jpg/
http://img69.imageshack.us/i/handmedown.jpg/
http://img189.imageshack.us/i/deathofateddy.jpg/
http://img163.imageshack.us/i/communalbathing.jpg/
http://img36.imageshack.us/i/anatomyofcute.jpg/


The webcomic - The Perry Bible fellowship

Original -  http://www.pbfcomics.com/?cid=PBF032-Todays_My_Birthday.gif

http://img808.imageshack.us/img808/5642/toolate.jpg
http://img600.imageshack.us/img600/441/sredpen.
http://img571.imageshack.us/img571/8559/salarym
http://img844.imageshack.us/i/raidenn.jpg/
http://img193.imageshack.us/i/organharvesting.jpg/
http://img577.imageshack.us/i/imperitiveform.jpg/
http://img191.imageshack.us/i/exclamation.jpg/
http://img835.imageshack.us/i/dairyworker.jpg/
http://img827.imageshack.us/i/clairvoyance.jpg/

The newspaper funny - Calvin and Hobbes

Original - http://bdcentral.files.wordpress.com/2008/10/cartoons_calvin_and_hobbes_chocolate_frosted_sugar_bombs_01_sweet1000x333x256.gif

http://img687.imageshack.us/i/heypr.jpg/
http://img141.imageshack.us/i/hellocornflakes.jpg/
http://img222.imageshack.us/i/endofapartnership.jpg/
http://img840.imageshack.us/i/dayatthebeach.jpg/
http://img135.imageshack.us/i/calvinthekiller2.jpg/
http://img30.imageshack.us/i/calvinthekiller.jpg/
http://img195.imageshack.us/i/bigmistake.jpg/

The other webcomic - Ctrl alt Del

Original -  http://www.cad-comic.com/cad/20110121 (warning: as with all Ctrl Alt Del comics it is not funny in the slightest)

http://img839.imageshack.us/i/yakuzas.jpg/
http://img600.imageshack.us/i/sevitude.jpg/
http://img34.imageshack.us/i/personalitychangingdevi.jpg/
http://img835.imageshack.us/i/oikobayashi.jpg/
http://img713.imageshack.us/i/katurameanswig.jpg/
http://img402.imageshack.us/i/illfittingclothes.jpg/
http://img819.imageshack.us/i/hardgay.jpg/
http://img840.imageshack.us/i/gottinhimmel.jpg/
http://img88.imageshack.us/i/ethantheoracle.jpg/
http://img19.imageshack.us/i/emoyj.jpg/
http://img52.imageshack.us/i/differenceintaste.jpg/
http://img810.imageshack.us/i/beards.jpg/
http://img573.imageshack.us/i/badlanguage.jpg/

Bonus

http://img827.imageshack.us/i/img0661c.jpg/

Anata Dai-ski

Ah, Skiing; the sport of kings! Well, not kings so much as middle aged professional couples called Oliver and Imogen who “just thought they’d pop down to Geneva for a mini-break with the kids.” Lacking any pistes ourselves in the UK, if we want to indulge our impulses to hurtle down a mountain wearing a couple of planks of not-wood and wear more clothes than you ever have in your life, you have to travel to Europe, or if you’re even more hoity-toity – America; spending vast amounts of money on planes, hotels, food etc. Skiing is not the sort of thing you can do if you’ve just been laid off, or you owe the mafia a lot of money or you recently became a Scientologist and really, really want to purge your body of Thetans. ‘It’s quite expensive’ I suppose is what I’m trying to say.

I’ve only ever been skiing a couple of times, both times with my school; the latter one being particularly memorable for being the first time I ever bought a beer in a bar as well as the first time I ever had to carry a friend in a drunken stupor home. Since my town is only a couple of hours away from the ski slopes I joined my friend and his daughter on a two day round trip. After arriving, and putting on my ski boots, skis and goggles coloured to look like the spectrum of light you see in a puddle of petrol, I got on the lift and proceeded to half way up the mountain, whereupon I immediately fell over, ripping a hole in the crotch of my brand new trousers.

I should probably inform you, dear reader, that I was not wearing anything underneath my ski trousers bar a single pair of boxer shorts. It was 10am on the first day of a two day trip. I was faced with the prospect of spending the best part of two days at the top of a mountain amidst quite heavy snow with nothing between the elements and those parts of a man’s body he treasures the most, but the thinnest of fabrics. I found that in general, I didn’t feel the cold going down (friction is a wonderful thing), but going up was sometimes tortuous, especially in the snow. If you want a vision of that time, imagine a man shovelling ice cubes into your underpants – forever. The worst thing is, there’s nothing you can do to stop it, you just have to sit and take it like a man, or whatever you are after the frostbite robs you of your manhood, since you can’t cross your legs. As the day wore on, (and the occasional stumbles, missteps and full-blown crashes tallied up,) the hole became bigger and bigger. The only respite was when I walked back inside the hulking, brutalist ski lodge for food and beer; the latter being especially welcome.

After a full day of subjecting my genitals to torture a Guantanamo Bay prison guard would balk at, I headed for the small Japanese style bed a breakfast to soothe my weary body in a hot bath. So, dressed in a slightly ill-fitting yukata that my pitying hostess had loaned me, I joined the middle-aged men for a drink around the small wood burner in the middle of the foyer. These must have been the only middle-aged men at the entire resort, as winter sports in Japan are primarily a young persons’ activity. Also, no-one skis; everyone snowboards. At one point in the evening one of the older men made his excuses and made to go to bed, at which point my friend suggested that he fetch his daughter since I was (at that time) a single man and his daughter was an attractive university student. To my endless surprise, he agreed, rather readily in fact, and he went upstairs to wake up his daughter, for the sole purpose of talking the night away with a complete stranger.

As the night wore on and we continued drinking, huddled around the portable wood burner, it emerged that the daughter (henceforth referred to as Mika) had had a falling-out with her father. In fact, they were on such bad terms that they refused to even sleep in the same room as one another, with a moment’s hesitation my friend offered her a spare futon in our room, to which she happily agreed. I was quite happy, as the two of us got on quite well, so after a bit more drinking, we went to bed; the four of us in one room. As Mika and my friend’s daughter chatted about ghost stories and T.V. programmes, I drifted off to sleep. It was only a few hours later that I awoke to sound of Mika vigorously masturbating in the futon beside me. I suppose on reflection she could have just been moaning in her sleep, but at 2am after a day of strenuous physical activity, the thought didn’t cross my tired mind. Needless to say, I was a little too embarrassed to make much in the way of eye-contact with Mika the next morning, and soon after breakfast we went our separate ways; she to return to Skikoku with her hated father, and I to pack more snow around my testicles.

Later that day as I sat in the outdoor onsen, snow gently falling on my head, I reflected on my experiences on the Japanese ski slopes. If there were two things I’d learnt, it was; to wear earplugs when sleeping in ski lodges and never to buy ski trousers that cost 1500 yen and are two sizes too small.

With apologies to Edward Said

Apologies to my readers (both of you) for not updating for such a long time, but a busy Christmas holiday coupled with sheer apathy and laziness stood in my way. Well, now I’m back and will resume my usual schedule of snobbish orientalism. Today, let’s talk about Christmas and, being as it’s the first day of February, we find ourselves in a position of detached analysis. Perhaps, we can look back on that most sacred of festivals and reflect on what it means in a culture that is largely agnostic, where the holiday is stripped of most of its religious and traditional connotations and reduced to merely its most commercial aspects. Most likely though, we’ll all stare and go “ooooooh isn’t Japan wierd?!?”

Christmas in Japan is not Christian; somewhat of a confusing state of affairs considering Jesus’ name is right there in the name of the holiday. I for one welcome this development, all throughout my childhood and adolescence I was subjected to many angry column inches in right wing bastions of bitterness like the Daily Mail about the so-called “War on Christmas.” The conspiracy goes that left-wing bureaucrats and petty politicians are conspiring to kill Christmas out of a mixture of spite, political correctness and wanting to be the Grinch from that Dr. Seuss book. Those columnists painted a picture of a terrifying brave new world in which there was to be no mention of anything vaguely related to Christianity or traditional Christmas activities lest it offend the sensibilities of religious minorities. I always thought this was a ludicrous fantasy, “No way would there be a Christmas entirely divorced from its original meaning” I thought smugly to myself. But I was wrong. It exists, and it’s wearing a kimono.

The Japanese Christmas curiously enough is actually dating season. If you were to walk down Central gardens, or any of Nagoya’s other romantic hotspots on Christmas Eve, the place would be packed with young couples holding hands and making hushed conversation under the glow of the ‘irumineeshon’ (Christmas lights.) I have to admit, dear reader, that I followed suit and arranged a date for Christmas day – “When in Rome...” as the saying goes. I understand that the early sunsets and the plethora of Christmas decorations help to create a romantic atmosphere, but I’m still a little confused as to why it is that the Birth of Santa (or whatever Christmas is about) acts as an aphrodisiac to Japanese women. Maybe it’s the beard...

As I mentioned in my Junk food post, Christmas is the time for KFC. I was a little sceptical about how true this claim was when someone first told me, but seeing the queue outside of the Nagoya branches of KFC stretch around the block quashed any suspicions I had. In fact, if you want to eat at KFC on Christmas Day, you have to make a reservation weeks in advance and wait for hours just to get a seat (think using British rail services). I for one didn’t go to KFC, but I did get some KFC style chicken from a cafe, (which was also crowded) where it came wrapped in two slices of bread and served with some lettuce. Yes, it was a KFC sandwich.

Now I think about it maybe Japanese Christmas isn’t all that different from Western ones - a lot of time spent with loved ones (or even people you’d rather not see again) and a tradition of consuming food that’s not very good for you. The Japanese still give and receive Christmas presents, though, like in the West, it’s mainly for the kids and I’m sure if you flicked trough enough channels on T.V. you could probably find a batty old woman, giving a dull monologue that bores you to tears, which could fit your Queen’s speech needs. So, Merry Christmas from over a month ago, perhaps in June I can get around to wishing you a happy New Year as well.

Go West: A tale of Pork bones and Mongolians (part 2)

Waking up in our well furnished, but not-quite-large-enough-for-four-people hotel room I endeavoured to have the shower that I was sorely missing having not had a chance to do so in the Net Cafe. They had showers there, but I stupidly put my phone on silent meaning I overslept by 20 minutes whilst the vibrations from the phone frantically told me to get out of bed. Being a white western man, I consider shower time to be an entirely private affair; you go in and take a shower alone. This is not the case with the Japanese; family members often wash each other’s backs before taking a shower, and as in this case, sometimes girls will barge in whilst you are standing, naked as the day you were born, desperately clinging to the shower curtain in order to provide a modicum of protection, and insist that there’s no time to wait for you to finish. With my trauma still fresh in my memory, we left to hotel and travelled to our raison de voyage; the final day of the Fukuoka Basho - the grand sumo tournament.

The outside of the venue was decorated in all manner of colourful flags, each with the name of one of the more well-known of the wrestlers emblazoned on them. My friends and I had a box seat whilst the girl who performed shower interuptus on me had splashed out for a ringside seat. A box seat at sumo largely consists of four cushions with enough space for you to sit and have a picnic/build a fort/put on a gymnastics show. Generally speaking, they are the medium priced seats, coming in at 10,000 yen per day, the ringside seats costing 15,000 yen and the seats at the back 5000 yen. We got there quite early, only a small handful of people came to watch, as tournaments are set up so the the lowest ranked and least famous fight first and the wrestlers get increasingly more prestigious until the last match in which the grand champion fights.

It took me a little while to figure out what was going on, but I eventually got the gist of it. First the name caller (so called because he calls people’s names) comes on stage and sings on the names of the wrestlers in a high pitched, nasal drone. The wrestlers then enter the ring and start their warm-up dance. First they point to the sky, put their hands on their knees and crouch down. Then keeping the knees bent at the same angle they lift one leg up in the air as high as they can and bring it down on the ground in a stomping motion, repeating the process for the other leg. The wrestlers then crouch down, touch the ground with their knuckles and promptly stand up to repeat the process again, the higher-ups also leave the ring to throw salt on it. This whole process took up most of the day I spent watching sumo, and considering most matches only last a few seconds, the result ends up being that there is a huge build-up of tension. The fact that the match takes a lot less time than the very ritualised build-up must be why the Japanese take sumo so seriously, because the actual fighting comical to the point of being farcical.

Sumo consists of two overweight men slapping each other’s jelly rolls and trying to make them either fall over or step out of the ring. Since they’re are not allowed to strike with the fist, the matches often resemble a cross between a cat-fight outside an Essex nightclub at 2.00am and the fight scene between Hugh Grant and Colin Firth in Bridget Jones’ Diary. However, as the day wore on something changed. I don’t know whether it was the alcohol, the over-exposure or the hypnotising effect of jiggling blubber, but I began to find sumo less ridiculous. It probably helped as well that by the end of the day the fighters were of a higher quality, but sumo was starting to make sense. There are no weight classes in sumo, so wresters are almost forced to be as heavy as they can to survive, and there was real skill and technique being displayed by the wrestlers.

Aran...I think

The most surprising thing, however, was that the majority of the top-ranked sumo players – the champions and grand champions, are foreigners. Yes, in a land in which the Japanese make up 99% of the population, one of their most cherished cultural items is dominated by foreign gentlemen. The foreigner sumo wrestler comes in two flavours; ex-soviet and Mongol. Two of the four current champions, Baruto and Aran, come from Estonia and Russia respectively, whilst another champion, Harumafuji (who suffered an injury early in the tournament and thus was not there) as well as the current grand champion, Baruto, and his successor, Asashoryu are all Monoglian. I must say, I was very pleased, as watching a fat white man waddling around with nothing to protect his dignity but a strip of cloth reminded me very much of home; in particular, beach season in Poole. In the end, Hakuho proved why he was the grand champion by stomping the upstart Toyonoumi into the ground with the force of 1000 Genghis Khans, which was a shame, because apparently if Toyonoumi had one everyone would jump up and throw their cushions at each other and the wrestlers.

The day ended in a hour long party with the sumo wrestlers, of which about half was taken up with a long presentation during which I drank all the wine I was suppose to save for the toast. An unfortunate miscalculation meant that by the time we arrived at the station to get the bullet train, we had only 10 minutes to find the platform, buy all the souvenirs and board the train. So I transformed into super present buying mode and managed to accomplish all my goals within 5 minutes, although many Fukuokans were no doubt entertained by the sight of me desperately grabbing things from the shelves like a forgetful parent on Christmas Eve. If you are considering coming to Japan to watch the sumo, then I highly recommend bringing alcohol with you, repetitive, ridiculous and yet highly entertaining...as long as you’re just a little bit drunk.

Go West: A tale of pork bones and mongolians (part 1)



Hakata Bijin (they don't seem to
 wear their hair in ringlets as frequently
 as the ones in Nagoya do)

 Japan is, by in large, a relatively emaciated country. There aren’t too many fat people around, besides the occasional one you run into at the gym or in the delicatessen section in the supermarket. With this in mind，I went to the one place in the world where morbidly obese people in loincloths slap each other’s man-boobs whilst a cheering crowd bays for blood. Not celebrity fat camp, but Kyushu basho, one of the six annual sumo tournaments held in Japan. I took the bullet train at stupid o’clock on a Saturday to arrive in the city of Fukuoka/Hakata, a place so cool it has two names, after almost 3 and a half hours. In case you are wondering, food-wise Hakata is known for its tonkotsu ramen - a type of cloudy ramen made with pork bones (don’t give me that face, it’s delicious), mendaiko – spicy, marinated fish roe wrapped in a sausage-like casing, and it’s good quality gyoza, which are a little smaller than average. The city is also famous for its Hakata Bijin, or Hakata beauties, who traditionally were supposed to be so dainty and delicate they made the gyoza extra small, so the poor little creatures didn’t have to open their mouths too wide.

That's not filth encrusted on the grill,
it's delicousness

Our first day of the weekend was spent stumbling around Fukuoka sightseeing and pretending that we weren’t sleep-deprived. We visited a couple of temples first, two relatively big ones in Fukuoka, where we got our fortunes told (I was slightly lucky, although my health fortune apparently suggested I would enter into a long and painful illness), drank seawater and threw 5yen coins into a big grate - standard stuff. We also went to a museum where I tried out cloth weaving with a shuttle loom, and listened to old recordings of Japanese people speaking now dead dialects very quietly. Afterwards we went to a little roadside shanty-town style restaurant/bar where we had some of the tonkotsu ramen and grilled meats. The restaurant was a smoky little shack run by an eccentric old man who insisted on giving us ‘service’ (Japanese term for freebees). You can probably get a good idea of what the place was like if I told you that the patrons that were smoking (all of them) threw their cigarette butts on the floor instead of stubbing them out in an ashtray.



"KITTY-CHAN!
KONNICHI-WA!"

After almost falling asleep on the train, I made my way to the Yahoo! Dome. The Yahoo! Dome is the stadium for the local baseball team – The Fukuoka Softbank Hawks. In Japan, many of the professional baseball teams have companies names inserted into the middle like the Tokyo Yakult Swallows, the Chiba Lotte Marines and the Hokkaido Nippon-Ham Fighters. I guess since Premier league clubs are owned by Russian oligarchs and oil tycoons rather than companies, it’s doubtful we’ll see the Manchester Glazer United or the Abramovich Chelsea. Swarming around the stadium were thousands of university students all dressed in sharp suits. Apparently there was some sort of job fair being held there; well, either that or someone was giving away free vodka and suits. Passing through the horde of identically dressed Lilliputians we eventually came to a shop called RoboSquare; a shop that sold and displayed the very latest in Japanese robot technology...well sort of. The one robot that piqued my interest in particular was a Hello Kitty robot, solely because it was featured on Jonathan Ross’ Japanorama TV show. It didn’t work then and it didn’t work now: You end up shouting “Kitty-chan, Konnichi-wa” over and over again, and she just criticises your intelligibility. There were other robots there; a dog whose name I forgot, a penguin who sort of wobbled, cooed and produced an egg from its viscera, and a seal that was genuinely adorable and apparently designed for therapy with Alzheimer’s patients. I left feeling that whilst we had come a long way from furbies, it will be a while until the commercial robot market can compare to, say, iRobot.

Vegetable mountain

We made a detour to Fukuoka tower whilst we were in the area; a tower that seemed specifically designed as a dating spot. There were secluded sofas, a romantic cafe and even a lover’s retreat – an evocative name to describe an observation deck with mood lighting. For dinner we had a dish called Champon. Essentially it’s a bowl of broth with some marinated chicken gizzards in it, covered with heaps of chopped cabbage and lashings of spring onion, positioned in the middle of a table on what can best be described as a camping stove. If it doesn’t sound very appetising, that is because you are a philistine and can’t appreciate the joys of chicken intestine and cabbage soup. When all the cabbage and spring onions have been eaten, the waitress comes over and dumps two heaps of noodles in the simmering pot. This being Japan, the meal was naturally an all-you-can-drink affair and the air hung thick with the aroma of cheap cigarettes. The restaurant itself was a run-down place with a buzzing neon sign outside and delightfully old-fashioned decor, air conditioning running non-stop and a cramped seating area where two people at opposite tables would practically sit back to back. It was perhaps the most atmospheric place I’ve visited thus far in Japan.

Afterwards, we decided to take in some of the nearby yatai, or food stands. The they amounted to little more than shacks on a half-flooded, rain-soaked promenade where patrons sat around a central counter and ate things like deep-fried cod roe. Upon seeing the menu I endeavoured to try that most exotic and dangerous of fish – the fugu or blowfish. For those of you not familiar, the blowfish is a delicious albeit somewhat expensive fish that if prepared incorrectly can be poisonous – fatally so. Throwing caution into the wind and my life into the hands of the owner of this shanty-town shack I tucked in and... well, I’m here now aren’t I? The fish was delicious, and actually relatively cheap, a delicacy I’s highly recommend, although I’m still not convinced that the best way to prepare such a fish is to deep-fry it. The remainder of the evening was spent making conversation with a couple of Koreans (who incidentally couldn’t speak Japanese) about the recent attack by the North on Yeonpyeong island. Feeling the glow of the beer kicking in, we retired to our hotel for some well earned rest.

Stranger in a familiar land



Tebasaki

Last weekend I was visited by some friends from university, or rather a friend and her boyfriend, whom I had met only once and didn’t really speak to him. It was one crisp autumn morning in late November that I received a message from her asking whether we could meet up over the weekend and guide her around Nagoya and show her and her boyfriend the sights of Nagoya. A normal request you might assume, but panic began to set in, as I began to realize two things; firstly, there

 are no real tourist attractions in Nagoya, secondly, the few that there are, I had never been to. Reaching into my bookshelf, I pulled out my trusty copy of the Lonely Planet’s guide to Japan and flipped through the book to learn about the city I’ve practically been living in for almost 4 months. There were only 8 pages in a book of about 500 that were about going to visit Japan’s fourth largest city, most of them being about which net-café to stay in or where to buy tebasaki (a type of peppery chicken wing that is almost ubiquitous in Nagoya). In other words, it was absolutely useless.

So when Saturday finally arrived, I wrapped up in my coat, scarf and jumper and headed out to Nagoya on the train. After eventually meeting up in the train station, we took the underground to the government district, Shiyakusho and that’s when I realised that my palms were getting moist, my forehead getting hot and my clothes were starting to stick to me. Not a tropical disease I can assure you dear reader, but something much rarer; warm weather. As a result, I arrived at Nagoya castle carrying most of my clothes under my arm in a desperate attempt to try and not boil to death (just how much snow are you getting in the U.K.?) Buying a ticket, I made sure to stop off at a traditional Japanese tea room, which sold green tea with gold leaf in it. I’m not sure what gold leaf adds to the flavour or how Zen the experience of drinking something so opulent is. My friends and I took a short detour through the woods, passing by a depiction of Nagoya castle as a piece of tofu with flowers in its hair on the way. After the hippie’s wet dream we went to see a bunch of actors dressed up as soldiers, accompanied by a cutesy representation of Ieyasu Tokugawa. I’m still waiting for Hampton Court to feature a cutesy Henry VIII wandering from room to room killing his cutesy wives or a doe-eyed Winston Churchill chasing an adorable Hitler around the war rooms. Eventually we made our way to the inner walls of the castle compound, only to realise when we got there it was still largely a building site. Apparently, the castle was completely burnt to the ground during World War 2; half of it was rebuilt in 1959, but didn’t start re-building the other half until 2009.

Miso Katsu

Standing in the open courtyard, being slowly roasted by my over enthusiasm for cold weather, we made our way to the donjon - twin keeps connected by a raised walkway, and looked at the exhibitions inside. One of the key features of the castle is that it has two tiger-headed dolphins on the top posed in such a way as they look like deep-fried prawns (another Nagoya speciality) from far away. After visiting the various exhibitions and sitting on various displays of traditional Aichi culture, we went to the next best place; the wretched hive of saturated fats and heart attacks known locally as Yabaton. Yabaton, for those that aren’t aware, is a local restaurant chain that serves deep-fried pork in a miso sauce. The taste can a little overpowering for a newcomer, but my friend’s boyfriend seemed to enjoy himself immensely. In fact he was so pleased by the meal that he bought a T-shirt from the restaurant, which I suppose is right up there, in terms of fashion statements, with buying a T-shirt with a haggis on it from Scotland, or a Cheesesteak on it from Philadelphia or a kangaroo on it from Australia.

Afterwards we headed to the Osu district of Nagoya, one of the few places I had been before, sometimes called the Akihabara of Nagoya (minus the maid cafes, the porn, the wall-to-wall electronics or anything that really makes Akihabara what it is). Osu itself largely consists of a large covered street with innumerable clothes shops, shoe shops, South American restaurants and trendy cafes. In short it’s more like Paris than Akihabara, well it would be if central Paris didn’t have any white people. We visited the giant Shinto temple there called Osu Kannon, got our fortunes, rang the big bell and quickly moved on. Travelling to Sakae, the city’s entertainment district and home to the so-called Sakae girls (girls who dress in short skirts and wear their in dyed ringlets that flock to the innumerable nightclubs here), I felt obliged to introduce my charges to yet another Nagoya speciality and something I’d never had before – Hitsumabushi. Hitsumabushi is charcoal-grilled eel served with rice, stock, wasabi and other accompaniments. The idea is that you divide the eel into quarters, the first quarter you eat unadulterated, the second you eat with wasabi and seaweed, the third you eat with stock and the last you have as you like it. I ruined my last quarter by putting too much stock in my bowl, turning my delicately balanced and harmonious meal into a rice gruel with bits of eel floating in it. Unfortunately my friend’s boyfriend didn’t like eel, so he had the thing on the menu with the least eel in it – dried eel spines. It was like watching Monty Python’s spam sketch. So while he sat there eating his bones, my friend and I quickly finished up so we could go to another restaurant so he could get his fill of another Nagoya speciality – Oyako-don, a name that means parent and child rice bowl. In case you haven’t figured it out, this relates to the fact that the dish consists of chicken and egg. Wikipedia calls this turn of phrase poetic; to me it’s more of a brutal reminder of harsh reality. Having torn apart a family by shovelling it into our gaping maws we said goodbye and I went back to resolutely under-exposing myself to the culture of my new home.

Apologies for the lateness of this update; you'll get two this week to make up for it