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

The rolling stone gathers no Mos

We all know America as the kings of fast food; the streets of New York are filled with street vendors peddling hotdogs of dubious quality, Jamie Oliver was practically lynched when he went there and there are more burger joints than there are libraries*. Britain too has become a fast food nation, even though our first fast food restaurant chain in Britain, Wimpy, served its hamburgers on a plate and expected us to eat them with a knife and fork. For those that are interested; Wimpy itself went out of fashion in the seventies, along with flares, unionism and 25-minute rock songs about goblin kings, but the British tendency to eat burgers and pizza with silverware, lives on. Normally Japan isn't really considered a fast food-loving country, since its population aren't corpulent gastropods, but it is. Japan loves it some fast food, some imported, some indigenous, all seemingly served by a good looking young girl with immaculate manners and strong perfume (i.e. the polar opposite of British fast-food workers). So allow me dear reader to explore some of the food options for the lazy foreigner in the land of the rising sun.

American imports

Colonel Santa

KFC – The Japanese have their own version of fried chicken called Kara Age, which is widely available as pub food. That said, one should never underestimate the appeal of bread crumbs and fake colonels, as KFC holds an important place in Japanese culture. The Japanese for some reason associate KFC with Christmas (perhaps they cannot tell two bearded white people apart.)

Mr. Donut’s – A shop that sells...well...doughnuts. Coming from the land of grey skies and gloomy faces, Mr. Donuts was like taking an LSD trip whilst watching the Beatles’ Yellow Submarine film, in that the sheer range of colours blew my mind. They don’t taste half bad either. In Japan the stores occasionally give away free doughnuts, prompting queues lasting for several hours.

Mc Donald’s – Do you know what they call a quarter-pounder with cheese in Japan? They call it a “Kwohta Paunda Chiizu.” The Japanese also sell Teriyaki burgers in Mc Donalds, which are actually better than most of the other things on the menu. The burgers are suitably ‘Japanese’ in size. There are a number of imitators such as the unfortunatly named Mos(s) burger, but none of them sell cheese fondue burgers. Mc Donalds does.

Japanese fast food

Yes, that is a raw egg in the middle

Gyuu-don (牛丼) – Shredded beef (gyuu) over a big bowl of rice (don). This basic dish comes lathered in a delicious sauce not unlike a casserole sauce you might find in British cooking. The bowls come in small, medium, large and Godzilla. These dishes are normally remarkably cheap considering how much they fill you up.

Takoyaki (たこ焼き)/ Okonomiyaki (お好み焼き)– These two dishes are most commonly associated with Osaka and the Kansai region of Japan. Takoyaki are bits of octopus inside batter dumplings and topped with a vaguely sweet sauce, mayonaise and mountains of spring onion and katsuobushi  (かつおぶし), which are dried fish flakes. Okonomiyaki on the other hand is a thick pancake made of batter and diced cabbage fried and topped with essentially the same things. Co-incidentally, the best way to annoy an Osakan is to insist that these two originally come from Nagoya or worse, Tokyo.

Ramen （らーめん）- Big bowls of soup and noodles which may or may not include meat, boiled eggs, spring onion. I’ve only ever been to proper Ramen restaurants after binge drinking, and as such I always subconsciously associate them with donner kebabs. The dish is hearty and delicious, but I must confess that I’ve never been able to finish one

This sort of silliness would never be
tolerated in a good old-fashioned
Indian restaraunt

Curry （カレー）- Curry in Japan is not Indian, thicker, sweeter with more sauce and fewer vegetables. The curry is always brown. You can usually choose how spicy you want it and pick a meat cutlet that you want to deep-fried and served on top. Served with the thick risotto like Japanese rice that is ubiquitous here rather than Indian basmati rice. The rice is always white.

British fast food

Fish and Chips – Only found in ‘British’ pubs, it’s actually scampi and potato wedges.

So there we have it everything you ever need to know about Japanese fast food. You now no longer need to come over here and try it.

*This is not just idle fact, but cold hard speculation

Gaijin Smash

It’s gotten much colder here in Japan. However, I feel I must stress the relativity of Japanese conceptions of cold; in Japan, it’s cold when you have to wear a jacket, whereas in Northern England, it was cold when it became hazardous to kiss someone lest your lips get frozen together. As oddly temperate as Japanese cold weather seems, mainland Japan seems to neglect to install any radiators, insulation or even close the windows in its school classrooms or corridors. In fact the only place which has those things is the staff room, where we also have a coffee machine. This has lead to fantasies of sipping a cafe au lait, laughing, whilst the Japanese waifs and urchins outside press their noses against the window, silently sobbing wishing only for more gruel.

It was on one such brisk morning that I strode into one of my lessons, wrapped up in a sweater and feeling a little tired from another sleepless night getting eaten alive by mosquitoes. In acknowledgement of this cold weather, the teacher ordered the children to close the window. Clambering over the bookshelves and desks three of the boys prompted started to struggle to close the window, which was above the door to the classroom. Feeling every inch the symbol of masculinity and physical strength the gaijin is supposed to be, I brushed the students aside and proceeded to show the children how it’s done. Placing one hand on the window, it promptly fell out of the rail and fell, frame and all, on the floor outside the classroom.

As there was no immediate sound of broken glass, I was optimistic, but after closer inspection it was revealed to be in worse condition than the re-election prospects of the Lib Dems. Sheepishly I walked back into class, pride shattered. As a third teacher came to clean up my mess, I endeavoured through a mixture of professionalism and sheer pomposity to carry on with a normal lesson and ignore the white elephant in the room. Unfortunately I chose this moment to smack my head on the metal bracket encasing the enclosed T.V. Normally, low-flying T.V.s aren’t really a problem in Japan, but then again, there are precious few Japanese people over 6’.

After a hard day’s work self-harming and vandalising school property I arrived home only to smack my head on a door frame. I’m thankful that I’m not into the habit of leaving discarded banana peels around my apartment, because the universe would not be able to tolerate such high concentrations of clichéd slapstick, and I’m sure I would have received some form of divine retribution. Still it was good practice for when the economy falls through completely and I have to persue a career as a circus clown. Now I just need to learn how to terrify young children...

Maid in Japan

Me after having just donned
my night's attire

Halloween is a time where all the scary monsters and demons come out of the woodwork to terrify little children and make grown men cower in fear. Of the many monsters in the Halloween canon, the most terrifying is easily the 6’3 transvestite with hairy legs, a beard and a maid costume. Just for the record, I never intended to dress as a maid for Halloween, just as I never intended to get sexually molested (again), accidently expose myself and pass out on the train ride home, but I did. With your interest hopefully piqued, dear reader, I shall start my tale at the most suitable of locations, the start. Having been invited to the annual JET party, I was in a spot of bother, it was three hours before the party and I still didn’t have a costume, so I made my way to one of Japan’s most curious institutions, Don Quixote, or Don Kihote as it’s known in Japan. Besides being the fictional, farcical knight who famously tilted at windmills, Don Quixote is also the name of a Japanese chain of shops that sell almost everything under the sun and have a famously convoluted floor design. In particular they sell a number of costumes amongst other tat, and being Halloween, they had a very good choice of costume. Remembering my previous cross-dressing experience, I suddenly felt the compulsion to wear a skirt again. I was tempted by the Neon Genesis Evangelion school uniform, but it was pricy and didn’t fit me anyway. That’s when I saw the answer to my prayers; the manly schoolgirl/maid costume set, featuring a fat Japanese guy on the packaging gurning and posing in a feminine stance. Having already been a schoolgirl in Japan the choice was obvious, French maid it was.



At the restaurant

I arrived at the party venue early, and deftly slipping into my one piece outfit and matching alice-band, I went to meet the other party goers outside. Luckily the night wasn’t cold, and seeing as I had neglected to invest in any stockings, I was in luck. As more and more of my friends arrived to see me at my most beautiful, I was slightly disappointed to see that I wasn’t the only man to come in drag, some Japanese guys had the same idea too. The restaraunt itself was fantastic, the food wasn’t the most creative in the world, just the familiar Japanese izakaya fare, but the atmosphere was superb. The restaurant was decorated as a horrific prison, with the individual rooms being enclosed behind prison-bars and the staff dressed as goblins and ghouls. Half an hour in, the lights went out and the staff put on a horror show; having strategically positioned myself between two attractive Japanese girls I was in the best position to capitalise on the terror they invoked. Afterwards though, things took a turn for the surreal. As the effects of the copious amounts of alcohol on offer started to kick in, I left my seat and my new companions behind and joined in the frenzied dancing that had erupted in the middle of the restaurant. Limbs flailed, skirts flew and at least one fake samurai sword prodded me in the arse. That’s when the skirt flipping started.

Mickey makes some
new friends

As much as I’d like to say it was mostly women that were lifting up my skirt, it would be an outright lie. Although there were a substantial number of women trying to lift my skirt and even pull down my underwear, it was mostly men who were trying to get a peak at what lies beneath. So for the next few hours I wandered around the restaurant, having alcoholic beverages foisted upon me and desperately trying to fend off the advances of drunken patrons. Eventually the party finished and the attendees went their separate ways. Some went to Karaoke, some went drinking some even went home for an early night, but having not had enough of being the center of attention I decided to join some of the Japanese in going clubbing. That’s when things turned from bad to Japanese.

I wasn't the only one
to have this problem

Arriving at the club it became apparent that I was right to assume that Halloween was mostly about getting drunk and dressing like a tit, the streets outside the clubs and off-licence were teeming with drunken revellers. There was a group of wallies, sexualised Disney characters, and characters from films as diverse as Avatar, Donnie Darko and Battle Royale. What I did notice was a relative absence of traditional Halloween monsters; no ghosts, no Frankenstein’s monsters and only a handful of vampires. Having entered our first club, my companions and I proceeded to start to dance the night away, only to be shooed off-stage 15 minutes later when it was announced they were starting the transvestite show. Half a dozen men came on stage one after the other to perform erotic dances and create an atmosphere of complete moral decadence and perversion. It was fantastic. None of them were particularly convincing, but they acted in such a supremely confident manner, I couldn’t help but admire them, it was like watching a real-life version of Bara no Soiretsu, aka ‘Funeral parade of roses’.

Transvestite

Naturally the skirt flipping didn’t stop, only this time, I seemed to have forgotten to redo the flies on my boxer shorts after a toilet break, accidently giving the two girls who successfully flipped my skirt rather more than they bargained for. Having failed at my attempt to convince them to reciprocate in a “I’ve shown you mine, now show me yours” type affair, I moved on to other clubs. The rest of the evening was spent in much the same way as before, being come on to by both men and women alike watching another tranny show and spending a lot of time dancing and drinking, it eventually got to 4.00. Exhausted by my endeavours, I decided to pass the time waiting for the subway to open by eating a huge bowl of ramen and drawing the attention of every other patron, naturally all drunken revellers. Like one of the living dead I stumbled back to the station, boarded my train and promptly passed out. I tried to keep myself awake by listening to the Beatles’ White Album, but that just made things worse when I woke up to Revolution no.8, a song seemingly designed to be as disorientating as possible. Unfortunately, I’d missed my stop and woke up at the end of the line, with a group of high school students eyeing me nervously and keeping their distance from the drunken cross-dressing foreigner lying with legs akimbo (boxer-button naturally done-up) and splayed across the train seats. The walk home from my stop was horrible, it had gotten colder, I was exhausted despite my un-scheduled sleep and I was already starting to have a hangover, but it was one of the best nights of my life.