Jazz becomes a salaryman

Yes, the dolphins of financial content have beached themselves on the rocky shores of disappointment leaving yours truly with absolutely no cash. I can't use my English pounds because they wither away when exchanged into Japanese yen. On top of that my Eikaiwa (conversation-based) language school is paying me about 4 years in arrears, meaning I'm not going to see a significant amount of money any time soon. Therefore I have now joined the thousands of salarymen who cram themselves onto the trains early in the morning with almost asphyxiating dedication and perseverence in order to earn the bread... or at least the crusts... well mouldy crusts. I say mouldy crusts, it's actually just the mould in itself; the bread has long gone.

I have no idea how some of these guys do it. At a time far too early to be considered civilised, these smartly-dressed sardines physically force themselves onto the train, turning toward the door as they get on, and then push backwards, compressing the people behind them into a fine commuter-based paste. There is no rush hour on earth like Tokyo rush hour. I don't care where you've been, or how many thousands of people you've seen trying to crawl into a space half the appropriate capacity, Tokyo simply beats everywhere hands down. No one complains, tuts, or sighs. They just accept the fact that they are about to be made into one giant, homogenous salaryman pancake.

It seems a lot of salarymen do things to extremes, the majority of them getting up before sunrise, travelling in unhealthily-sized crowds, and returning home close to midnight after putting in a minimum of 12 hours, though usually closer to 15 or 16. Of course they return home only after drinking whisky to the extent that, when getting on the same train, one is immediately hit in the face by an almost tangible whiff of booze so strong that it practically gives you a face lift.

I've only been on this regime (minus the booze) for two weeks and I'm already nearly dead. I've been nodding off in my lessons while desperately trying to pass it off as philosophical whimsy. I've been subsisting entirely on Calorie Mate which, while good enough for the fictional gaming super-CIA-Marine Solid Snake, probably lacks the nutritional value required to keep people who exist in the real world alive. I'll be honest; it's like eating a block of solid anti-matter that's been sprayed with chocolate. If you're a real masochist you can go for the cheese flavour but you'd be better off asking someone to punch you in the face with boxing gloves made with reeking, fusty milk. Calorie Mate: it kept a virtual character alive because it only has virtual nutrition.

With the economic situation the way it is, it looks like I'm going to have to keep this up for another month perhaps. But as soon as I get out of this patch of 14 hour days, I will hopefully have some cash to see more of Tokyo, and some free time to actually write what I've seen other than the back of a very tired Japanese man's head pressed into my face on the underground.

Worse than Neighbours?

The cultural legacy of Japan, so far, includes the intricate code of the Samurai, countless martial arts full of ritual and levels of respect, ikebana, calligraphy, not to mention the linguistic honorific idiosyncracies that permeate every sentence of the country's beautiful language. How then, from this cultural primordial soup, the current state of Japanese television has emerged is a mystery. Imagine stumbling across an alien world populated by some kind of barely sentient, motionless jelly, only to discover an ancient fossil that proves the land was once inhabited by two-legged book readers. What went wrong?

There's no better way to say this: Japanese television is fucking terrible. That's not the same as saying it's unwatchable. I can watch hours of it in a sado-masochistic trance, aghast yet somehow intrigued by the intellectual black hole swirling before me in a vortex of neon signs, bright flashing slogans, bizarre costumes and various kinds of fake hair. "But every country has some bad television." Yes I know... but what I'm trying to tell you, is that in Japan all of it is bad, and I was brought up on Neighbours and Home and Away. Now that's saying something.

Japanese television seems to consist of two main kinds of program: strange, not to mention woefully tacky, chat-show/game-show hybrids; and dramas acted so poorly it makes George Bush reading off an auto-cue look like Laurence Olivier. The first kind of show usually involves a group of about 20 guests (yes, that's right... TWENTY) reacting to the host's jokes and stories, or to various unstimulating activities. The host's job seems to be to elicit various funny comments from the guests and then add his own, often punctuated by him hitting a table with a novelty object, or saying something normal but REALLY LOUDLY SO IT MUST BE FUNNY! Sufficed to say, these shows are complete chaos and appear to be little more than a massive and overacted conversation with occasional advertisements. The focal points vary of course. Sometimes it's animals doing funny things, people proposing in overblown yet romantic ways (cue all 20 guests crying), or guests competing (who can make 20 pizza bases the quickest, or eat a glass full of ice). Usually the guests are people off the street, yet even when it's someone famous, they get dragged into performing trivial tasks and competitions.

The dramas all seem to be about late 20-somethings working in Tokyo, all of whom are involved in some kind of love-quadrangle. Cue many close ups of weeping, cute women/girls, and men with immaculate hair looking off screen at an angle that makes them look all pensive and moody. The only downside is that the acting has about as much severity as a U.S. election. Perhaps they don't want to make the aforementioned chat shows look bad, so they have to keep the quality fairly low to blend in. It's either that or period dramas always involving feuding Samurai, which in itself might be interesting, especially to foreigners wanting to learn a bit about Japan's fascinating past. However, this potential is quickly put aside in order to explore a love-quadrangle between late 20-somethings, all decked out in cheap costumes and very bad wigs/bald caps.

These two main staples are, of course, occasionally punctuated by such trivial matters as the news. However, even some news broadcasts are often blended into a chat show format, making it very difficult to know where one ends and the other begins. Often one will hear of a recent political crisis, only for the camera to pan back to the host of the previous chat show who will, with unfailing loyalty to comedic standards worldwide, hit a table or some other inanimate object with his fists... or another inanimate object.

Speaking of comedy, being a budding stand-up (I say budding; try budded, disgruntled, wilted and now lying like compost on the soil of disappointment) I can only sit back, slack-jawed as comedy's newest arch-nemesis (can you have a new arch-nemesis...? Pah, nevermind!) is proudly paraded for all to see. Worn down by the overcrowded and trivial game-chat shows, forlornificated (you can have that for free G.W.B.) by the dramas, I almost openly wept at the comedy, and they were not tears of joy.

Comedy in Japan usually goes by the name of Manzai, which always involves a double act talking very quickly, essentially exchanging quickfire gags and puns while pretending to misunderstand each other. Sufficed to say, having being brought up in a country that's given us Monty Python, Billy Connolly, and Eddie Izzard, Japan's offerings are about as funny as a list of illnesses. Manzai, coincidentally, when translated from it's Kanji characters, can take on the meaning "involuntary talent," which is quite apt for a form of entertainment that induces involuntary manslaughter.

One, two... THREE-YAAAY-EEEE

The demon cherry on this hellish cake has to be Sekai no Nabeatsu ( 世界のなべあつ）whose gift to us all is the ability to count in a funny way... and that's it. Before starting, he announces which numbers are going to be funny. So he might say "Multiples of three are going to be hilarious this time!!" Then off this moustachioed underling of the dark lord goes, counting away until he hits a multiple of three at which point he says it in a mildly eccentric fashion.

To think I spent so long in Manchester and London, gradually working my way up in the stand-up comedy world with cutting material about current affairs, when I could have been getting paid to be on television in Japan... COUNTING!! I mean this guy's been doing the same act for years! I appreciate that, potentially, the amount of numbers he could count is infinite, but surely there's a limit to this guy's shelf life?

I'm sorry I left you Neighbours. All is forgiven.

誕生日おめでとう！Happy Birthday, and Japan's night time, seedy underbelly.

Yes, the time to celebrate my Nativity has been and gone. I'm now 26 which, I feel, is better than being 25. 26 has a feeling of authentic, newly acquired life experience to it whilst still retaining all the advantages of remaining a young 'un. 25 was a bit of a no man's land; too young to know better, but not young enough to warrant being naive and wide-eyed all the time. So now I can look down on early 20s types and their puppy-like innocence, whilst still being able to pass myself off as one of them from time to time.

My birthday party was my first big night out in Tokyo, and what a night it was. We started by going to a very exclusive bar called Fereira, in Roppongi. So exclusive, in fact, that we were the only customers! I suppose the 3000￥ cover charge should have been a give away, but I didn't know any better and was just following the advice of my Japanese guides (very easy to do when you're not paying!). Since we wanted to go clubbing, the big sign hanging ominously over the entrance to the bar saying "NO DANCING" was not a good start. The fact that the bar staff outnumbered the customers (i.e. me and my friends) was also a little unnerving, as well as the undivided attention they gave us.

PANIC ATTACK

After drinking our two free cocktails with the entire place to ourselves, we decided to head to a different environ, and ended up in GasPanic, Fereira's nemesis. Waitresses dancing on the bar surface, a thick fog of smoke, funky music; the party had finally started. We spent a couple of hours there, dancing a lot and mainly drinking "Banana fucks", whatever they may be. The atmosphere was great, although Roppongi's reputation as a bit of a seedy hangout was beginning to manifest itself. In Roppongi, the 「外人・がいじん・gai-jin・foreigners」 definitely came close to outnumbering the Japanese; all of them totally plastered and most of them chasing after the locals. Apparently if you want to pick up a girl without all the hassle of having to get to know them first, Roppongi's the place to go, hence the gaggles of Japanese girls dressed in little more than a sentiment and the equal number of American/British lads closely following, usually singing something about football.

As well as the mating calls of the nocturnal, migratory inhabitants of Roppongi, an equal amount of chatter is generated by the door staff working the night clubs and the more than abundant strip joints that run down the main road. Along with these are those running the massage parlours, which I'm pretty sure don't actually offer massages. Fortunately we were in a good-sized group, but I can well imagine that if you were by yourself or just with your girlfriend, that this place would be quite hellish. The door staff (all of whom are, without exception, Nigerian, for reasons I don't understand at all) can be very persistent to the point where you can feel very uncomfortable, even threatened.

Whilst we're opening up the underbelly of Japan's clubbing centre, I would suggest if you want to go to Roppongi that you go as a group. If you want to go somewhere with your lady friend, then find somewhere else. Clubbing with my flatmates, the sheer number of times I had to step in to separate them from a be-suited Japanese salary-man quite excessively groping them in rather inappropriate places... well it was a lot. Observing the crowd around me, it was quite clear that these guys would pay no attention to the fact that two people were obviously a couple. In they would go and grope nonetheless. So for clubbing, yes, I'm sure Roppongi might tick your boxes a couple of times, though even with a group I can imagine having to run the aggressive door man hurdles, and shield the female members of your group from the hands of rich businessmen might grow a little tiresome very quickly.

Ahem... anyway. MY night out was great. We finished dancing our socks off in GasPanic, and, with many Banana Fucks down our gullet, made our way to Karaoke. This wasn't so much out of choice (although it did end up being the perfect way to the end the evening) as it was due to the fact that the last trains in Tokyo are around 12am. Add to this the facts that Roppongi isn't particularly close to anywhere and taxis are very expensive, if you're out clubbing past 11:45pm, you're pretty much stranded until the trains start again at 5am. So off we went to Karaoke.

The karaoke place was great. Moody lighting, a very comfortable room all to yourself, and an amazing selection of songs. They even had a decent selection of Motorhead songs, resulting in me giving an amazing rendition of Ace of Spades. I didn't know I could sound that much like Lemmy if I wanted to. Maybe it was my moustache that helped me. We all had an amazing time unwinding from the packed mayhem of GasPanic and the streets of Roppongi.

After it hit 5am most of the flatmates went back, but I stayed out to eat some ramen in a noodle bar so that I could sit and watch Roppongi recover from itself and peer at some of the Japanese clubbers around me, dressed like true fashionistas (how some of them manage to look so cool I'll never know!). Then it was off home.

Exclusive bar, clubs, karaoke, noodles. A perfect night out :)

じゃ、またね！See you later!

Common Sense and Sensibility

Kids loose... everywhere

It's great to see children just walking around without their parents, crossing the street, going to the shops by themselves. In London, or England generally, kids aren't even allowed to play conkers without a safety harness for fear that some 'nut dust' might lodge in their larynx, causing them to trip and headbutt an old woman. As a capital city, it is refreshing to see that Tokyo hasn't descended into an almost masochistic cycle of risk-prevention.

Here in Tokyo, people hop off their bikes, leaving them where they stand, without fear of them being lifted. When they're on their bikes, people seem happy to ride anywhere that gets them to their destination, relying on common sense to prevent crashes with people. As such, the pavement is almost as busy as the road. "Surely not!" I hear you say. "There must be hundreds of people injured every day in such anarchy." Not at all. Thank goodness Tokyo allows people the freedom to use their own nouse.

Here you can drink in the streets, tubes, and trains. Despite thousands of people throwing themselves in front of trains every year (Tokyo does, after all, have one of the highest suicide rates in the world), no attempts have been made to make stations safer. In fact level crossings often have nothing but a gestural barrier that uselessly flops down when a train is passing, and most people I've seen are happy to start crossing the tracks even after the barriers have begun to lower. In my area of Tokyo there's a sword shop just down the road, yet there aren't hoardes of rampaging youths going round slashing each other to bits. How about the pedestrian crossings here, which all zig zag through each other in a manner that would give most risk-eliminators a heart attack?


Removing risk isn't the only way to prevent danger. More often than not, trusting in people not to do daft things like walk into the middle of a train track or cycle into your legs is enough. This is one of the qualities that Tokyo has immediately revealed in my two weeks here. More of the same please!

Beware the Anpan Man!!

Ok... so here in Japan they have the Anpanman. There are so many cultural oddities over here, all of which are utterly fascinating, some of which are quite surreal, but this was one of the first I encountered so I thought I'd quickly share it with you.

The Anpanman is made of bread. His face is very big and also made of bread. Whenever this big, smiling bread man meets an upset child, what does he do? He peels off a chunk of his face and gives it to him.

How great is that? Imagine if Ronald McDonald ripped out chunks of his hair to lightly toss into your salad, or if Captain Birdseye's beard were actually made of finely shredded cod which he then gave to those kids that always hung around his submarine.

The Anpanman... I love him already.

Touch down!

Getting there

Ouch! What a journey. Definitely some good Deep Vein Thrombosis (always thought that sounded like a kind of cheese) potential there. The flight was cheap (Sri Lankan Airlines) but I understood why when the plane landed, took off again, and started taking me back in the direction I'd come from. We landed in Male, then went to Colombo, then from Colombo back to Male again, before finally heading to Tokyo. Worse still, the movie of choice was Indiana Jones IV. I had held out so long desperately trying not to see that movie, but give anyone 24 hours in a plane and they'd even watch National Treasure 2.

Arrived at the airport and got through the security bits fine. Then got the express train from Narita airport all the way to Ikebukuro. That was a great experience, watching the rice paddies slowly transform into the sprawling hive that is Tokyo, decked out in rainbow streaks of electronic signs that are so brilliant, you'd think you walked into a scene from Blade Runner while on an acid trip.

Then my luggage broke, and I had to navigate from Ikebukuro (north west chunky part of the city) to Oyama. Unfortunately this happened just as rush hour was kicking in, so I felt a bit of pressure to get a move on. I ought not to have worried though, because the thousands of Japanese who were coming back from work or university did not push or shove, or 'tut' when I accidentally got in their way. The whole thing was a smooth, albeit overcrowded, experience to the extent that you could believe it was orchestrated. If the London underground had to deal with this many people, I imagine the "Capital of the World" would collapse in less than a day, not to mention the murder rate would hit the roof.

Where I live

Amazing! Oyama (大山・おおやま/"or-yama") was some absolute nowhere, boring, non-happening place when I asked my students in London. I was convinced I was moving to some sort of hamlet, populated by a couple of Japanese outcasts; the Hull of Japan. Many of my students hadn't even heard of it. Yet Oyama, as I suspect most places in Tokyo are, is brilliant. Lots of bars/restaurants/Izakayas, and at night the place is lit up like a disco dream. There's a massive arcade which generates quite an impressive sonic wall when you walk past it, full as it is of youngsters playing a variety of crazy, garishly-coloured slot machines.

It's also very convenient (とても便利/べんり/benriですよ) as it's only a 4 minute ride into Ikebukuro, which I tried to explore but I was so jetlagged I fled, not wanting to exlore somewhere that overwhelmingly impressive when not totally compus mentis.But beware the perils of getting to Oyama. If anything teaches you the intricacies of the Japanese language, it's where I live now. Why? Because there is Oyama (pronounced "Or-yama") and there is also... Oyama. The difference being that in Japanese the first Oyama is written おおやま and the second is written with just one お、so it's おやま。

"or-yama" おおやま・大山Big mountain
"o-yama" おやま・小山Little Mountain

So beware!! Fortunately I got to the correct Oyama, but one of my flatmates, who's pretty savvy, went to the wrong Oyama which is some two hours outside of central Japan. Poor dude!

Anyway, I got here, it's great, and I'm alive. My flatmates are also an amazingly cool bunch. There're Japanese, Koreans and two American dudes living here. Great stuff!

Now I shall have to get exploring!

sayounara
さようなら＾ｖ＾