Blog ブログ

Gaijin on a Push Bike - Epilogue

24/3/2016

I am pretty sure that I drove to work the next day, and everything caught up with me after lunch, when the students at my junior high school were taking part in soji-jikan. In order to set a good example, members of staff are expected to muck in with cleaning the school, but today I just couldn’t face it. I ducked into the cloakroom and hid behind a locker door, hoping that no one would find me before the bell went, and it was to be several weeks before my exhaustion subsided. While I felt extremely proud – positively self-righteous, in fact – that I had managed to complete the tour, I also realised that working from Monday to Friday was always going to be a let down compared to life on the road. The Mariposa too found it hard to settle back into everyday life, suffering three punctures in as many weeks, and I even developed a mild case of saddle sore, which was ridiculous when you consider how far we had travelled together without it. True to the old adage, however, absence really did make the heart grow fonder, and after going out for her birthday meal on the first of September, my relationship with Mrs M went from strength to strength. I was introduced to her parents and she made plans to come to England, and at the time of writing, we have just celebrated our eighth wedding anniversary (not to mention the second birthday of our second child, but that's a whole other story for a whole different blog post).

Several of the people I had met over the course of the summer kept in touch, including Mr Health Enlightenment from Kobé, Mr Sturdy Level from Osaka, Mr Kanagawa from Himeji, Mr Reach from Mount Yoshino and Miss Blessing Effective Child from Mié, although I never did hear back from Mr Fukuoka, and have often wondered if he managed to avoid encountering any ghosts on his way to Hokkaido. Having managed at least one conversation in Japanese every day, my goal of immersion had been a resounding success, and while my time in Kanto was somewhat lacking in scenery and tourist spots, by that time my interaction with the locals came more naturally than ever before. Being described as pera-pera – or fluent – was still a long way off, but from something like a five-year-old child, I could now state with some confidence that my Japanese was equivalent to that of a five-and-a-half-year-old child.

Re-reading my Top Ten List of Potential Disasters, I:

1) Had not fallen off.
2) Had not become hopelessly lost.
3) Did get a puncture, but only a very slow one, having clattered into a concrete block on Benten Island (thank goodness it was a slow puncture, as looking back, I had neither the necessary tools nor the necessary skills to repair a fast one).
4) Did get sunburned, but only mildly and only for the first couple of days.
5) Did have to put up the Snow Peak in the middle of the night, and then, somewhat bizarrely, take it back down again straight away.
6) Did not have to put up the Snow Peak in the middle of a rainstorm.
7) Did get bitten half to death by mosquitoes, although not nearly as often as I had feared.
8) Did lose a few items along the way, namely a tenugui at the sand baths in Beppu, a bottle of sun block at the campsite in Mount Aso, a toothbrush and toothpaste at the tempura restaurant near Kita-Kyushu, and my spare inner tube at Shimonoseki Youth Hostel.
9) Did leave something behind and have to return to pick it up, but it was only my sun hat, and only for a few hundred metres.
10) Did suffer from various riding-related ailments.

Over the course of forty-three days, and by my own rather unreliable calculations, I had ridden more than three thousand kilometres, staying for two nights on a ferry, two nights in ryokan, two nights in business hotels, five nights in youth hostels, five nights with friends, twenty-five nights on legitimate campsites, and one night in the grounds of a Shinto shrine. I had bathed at onsen or sento twenty-six times, eaten countless morningu setto, hotto cakey setto, choco parfait, Choco Pie and peanuts choco, and used squat toilets as little as was humanly possible. At thirty thousand yen per week for general expenses, plus twenty thousand for alterations to the Mariposa, the whole tour had cost around two hundred thousand yen, which was a little more than one month’s wages. It had also turned me into a star of sorts, because to travel as a gaijin in Japan is to be famous. People say hello, buy you drinks, cook you food, give you presents, take your photo, ask you questions, help you out and wish you luck. For those six weeks life seemed like a film or a television programme, full of interest and incident, and it felt for the first time in my life that I was doing what I was supposed to as a human being, namely to go out and experience the world at first hand.

People often say that when you travel you find yourself, but I feel as if the opposite has happened, and that a part of me is still out there, cycling along on the Mariposa with a sun hat on my head, a Mapple in my shopping basket and the Snow Peak on my luggage rack, looking for the next campsite and looking forward to the next onsen.

10 Comments

Gaijin on a Push Bike - Day 43

14/3/2016

4 Comments

Wednesday 31st August 2005 – Lake Kasumigaura to Mito (霞ヶ浦 – 水戸)

A long, straight, flat road, newly tarmacked to a smooth, shiny finish, with bright white stripes down the middle; a chain so well oiled that it makes no sound and slides smoothly from sprocket to sprocket; a lightweight bike with a comfy seat and handlebars like the soft arms of a sofa; a gentle tail wind to propel me forwards and a few fluffy clouds in a bright blue sky; no humidity, no rain, and just enough sunshine to keep me warm without straining my eyes or burning my skin. I awoke from dreams of a fantasy ride in fantasy conditions, with no hardship, no pain and not a motor vehicle in sight.

Outside the reality was more prosaic, and once dressed I set about tidying the barbecue area, which had been left in something of a mess by whoever was here before me. The Japanese are encouraged to take their rubbish home from hiking trails, picnic spots and the like, but this place was littered with cigarette ends, empty beer cans and half-burnt bits of food, which I collected in a plastic bag and disposed of at a nearby conbini. One can of coffee stood out in the hot cupboard by the cash register, being the same price as the rest but fifty per cent bigger, and as soon as I popped the ring-pull I realised why, as its ingredients included milk, sugar and water but seemingly no coffee at all. I forced it down in the car park while examining a spectacular example of the kind of souped-up truck my supposed stalker might have driven. Every available piece of bodywork and both sides of its trailer were covered with airbrushed fantasy art, the cab was adorned with a flowering cluster of air horns, wing mirrors and chrome-plated add-ons, and each alloy wheel had a kind of metal blade protruding from its hub, like the tyre slashers on James Bond’s Aston Martin. Known as dekotora – a combination of the English words ‘decoration’ and ‘truck’ – these can be even more impressive after dark, as many are fitted with multi-coloured neon lights and their exhausts rigged to sound like an approaching squadron of army helicopters, although I wasn’t quite courageous enough to ask the driver for a demonstration.

Cycling back around the lake towards Nagayama, I began to sing to myself, on this occasion The Hollies’ He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother. But I couldn't manage more than a couple of lines without crying, such was my sadness at the thought that everything I did today would be for the last time: the last time I packed up the Snow Peak; the last time I checked to make sure that I had not left anything behind at the campsite; the last time I rode off my early morning aches and pains; the last time I tied my tenugui to the panniers to dry; the last time I cycled from A to B, rather than A to B and back again; the last time a new day would bring places I had never seen before, and people I had never met.

Over the course of the summer I had put together a kind of internal compilation tape, which many an unsuspecting bystander heard me sing as I cycled past, and most of whose tracks came to me because of lyrical associations. He Ain’t Heavy…, for example, begins with the lines, ‘The road is long / With many a winding turn / That leads us to who knows where / Who knows when’, and the rest of the track listing was as follows:

1) The Long and Winding Road (The Beatles) – For even more obvious reasons than The Hollies.
2) Stoned Me (Van Morrison) – This one was given an airing whenever the skies began to look threatening, as in, ‘Half a mile from the county fair / And the rain came pouring down…Oh, the water / Hope it don’t rain on me’, or whenever I passed a ‘mountain stream’.
3) Bird of Prey (Fatboy Slim) – Ditto, whenever I saw a bird of any kind ‘flying high’ above me.
4) Mother Nature’s Son (The Beatles) – Anywhere green or rural.
5) Baba O’Riley (The Who) – Conversely, anywhere drab or grey that might conjure up the words ‘teenage wasteland’.
6) My Way (Frank Sinatra) – ‘I’ve travelled each and every highway…Each careful step along the byway’.
7) Big Spender (Shirley Bassey) – Bizarrely, this song came to mind every time I changed gears on the front cog, whose mechanism made four clicks in an identical rhythm to the first four words of the line ‘Let-me-get-right to the point’.
8) If You’re Not the One (Daniel Bedingfield) – This surfaced as my thoughts turned to seeing Mrs M again, but for the life of me I couldn't recall the transition from verse to bridge, and became increasingly annoyed at having to jump straight to the chorus every time I sang it.

In my memory the next few hours are a blur, and I remember little except that the sun came out and the roads were quiet. By early afternoon I had rejoined Route 6, and recalled practicing my Japanese as I cycled along the opposite pavement six weeks before.

I stopped to photograph the sign for Mito city limits, and for one last lunch at a family restaurant, my excuse being that the fridge would be empty when I arrived home. Across the Route 50 Bypass, under the sign that pointed a hundred and ten kilometres back towards Tokyo, and left before the Naka River into the narrow streets of Joto, the apartment was exactly as I had left it. No earthquake had struck, no pipe had burst, and no burglar had broken in to steal my computer. Barely ten minutes after arriving, with dirty clothes and camping equipment strewn across every available surface, there was a knock at the door. It was a postwoman, with the parcel I had sent to myself from Yufuin, way back on the twenty-fifth of July.

Oh, the joys of Japanese efficiency!

4 Comments

Gaijin on a Push Bike - Day 42

7/3/2016

0 Comments

Tuesday 30th August 2005 – Komaba-Todaimae to Lake Kasumigaura (駒場東大前 – 霞ヶ浦)
Presents received – four nigiri

There was one very important job to do before leaving the Middle Fields’ house, and that was to check on the result of the fourth Ashes Test, which had not finished until early that morning Japanese time. England had won, they were two-one up in the series and only needed a draw from the final Test, which somehow did not come as a surprise, and sent me on my way in a bouyant mood.

The sun was out and the rush hour already over as I rode past the Imperial Palace, Ueno Park and Tokyo Station. With a Kanto Mapple strapped to my shopping basket in place of the Crap Map, I was able to plan a more conducive route back to Mito than the one I had taken on the way to Tokyo nearly six weeks' ago, and avoided Route 6 by heading further east on more minor roads. Again I crossed river after river, and passed through forests of concrete supports beneath a tangle of expressways and interchanges. I had reached the suburbs by lunchtime, and thus traversed Tokyo from one side to the other in little more than a day’s riding. It was an act that somehow brought the city down to size, and made it clear that although its population is much greater, Tokyo covers much the same area of land as London. Upon moving to both cities for the first time, I had explored them on public transport, popping my head out from underground stations like a mole from a front lawn. Some of these stations are no more than a few hundred metres apart and some twenty times that, but without moving between them above ground you only see a series of snapshots, isolated districts that imply a huge, frantic, intimidating whole. Until you become more directly acquainted with its geography you cannot get a true sense of how a city fits together, and now that I had done this, Tokyo’s power over me seemed at last to have dissipated.

By mid-afternoon there were 747s roaring overhead as they came in to land at Narita Airport, and the surroundings were a familiar mixture of small towns and farmland. For the first time I allowed myself to visualise what it would be like to arrive home: to open the apartment door, to unpack my bags and to sleep in my own bed. I thought about imitating Mr Fukuoka by riding on through the night, but there was another day of my summer holiday still to come, and after nearly a week of staying in hotels and at friends’ houses, I was also looking forward to one last night under canvas.

As the sun dipped below the horizon the road descended onto a plain around Lake Kasumigaura, and I acquired a second wind to take me the final few kilometres through a grid of straight roads between the rice fields. A man out walking his dog showed me around the campsite, which was little more than a landscaped public park on a spit of land that stretched out into the lake. There were no other campers and no members of staff, but there was a toilet block and a covered barbecue area, with running water, mains electricity and lights to help me see as I put up the Snow Peak. With nothing on offer in the way of entertainment I headed for the nearest town, which was several kilometres away along the lakeshore, and from which I could just about pick out the lights of the campsite as I looked back across the water from a soothing second-floor rotenburo. All I needed to round off the evening was a nice little restaurant, preferably with a few amiable locals to keep me company, and not far from the onsen I found what appeared to be the ideal place, in a small wooden building with a white mini-van parked outside. Its interior was lit by a single flourescent strip light, and two men in work clothes sat talking to the chef and his wife.

‘Good evening,’ said the chef as I took my place at the bar. ‘Would you like something to drink?’
‘A beer, please.’
‘And what would you like to eat?’
‘I’m really hungry but I don’t eat meat. Do you have any fish dishes you can recommend?’
‘You’ve come to the right place – this is a sushi restaurant.’
‘How about hot food?’
‘I’m afraid not. We have miso soup, but that’s about it.’

The chef nodded towards a hand-written menu on the blackboard behind him, which contained a daunting array of kanji, and I cursed myself for not having at least recognised the characters for sushi (寿司) on the sign outside. The very word itself still cast my mind back to the Food Poisoning Incident, but to walk out now would not be very good manners, so this was to be my last supper of the trip.

‘Can you eat any kind of fish?’ asked the chef.
‘Oh yes. Fish, shellfish, whatever’s going.’
‘Then leave it to me.’
He smiled and went to work, and I was soon presented with the biggest plate of sashimi I had ever seen: twelve fat slices of shining red flesh, arranged on a bowl of rice in a flower-shaped swirl. Having doused the first piece in soy sauce and wasabi, I forced it down, stifling the urge to retch.

‘Is it good?’
‘Mmm, delicious.’ I tried to chew the fish without it touching my tongue and while still breathing through my mouth, which was quite a difficult operation.
‘That was caught in Lake Kasumigaura, you know. It’s a local speciality.'
'Do you mind me asking what the name of this town is?'
'Nagayama. Why, are you looking for somewhere in particular?'
‘Not really. I'm on my way back to Ibaraki – to Mito, in fact.’
‘But this is Ibaraki. The border with Chiba Prefecture is just down the road.’
‘I should eat some natto, then. Do you have any?’

Natto (納豆) is a dish of sticky, fermented soya beans with which even the Japanese have a love-hate relationship. It looks like lumpy diarrhea, smells of sweaty socks, and leaves flyaway strings of snot-like goo on your face and clothes, the smell of which can linger for days. Apart from, ‘What food do you miss from your home country?’ and, ‘Can I see your passport, please?’ one of the first questions the visiting westerner will be asked upon touching down at Narita is, ‘Can you eat natto?’ and so long as they know what it is, their reply will almost always be in the negative. Ibaraki, however, and Mito in particular, is the birthplace of natto, and during my time there I had become addicted to the stuff, as it regularly turned up in school meals and there was a natto factory on the way into Mito from my apartment. I had even entered the annual Mito Natto Speed Eating World Championships, where I was knocked out in the first round, partly because natto is so hard to pick up using chopsticks, and partly because the contest involved the consumption of a sizeable portion of rice at the same time. There is a bronze statue outside Mito Station that depicts a serving of natto in its traditional wrapping of dried grass, and while it now comes in individual polystyrene containers, each with its own sachets of soy sauce and mustard to temper the cheesy taste, natto is renowned for its health-giving properties. Asking for it here not only gave me the opportunity to mask the taste of raw fish, it also attracted the attention of the other customers, who were amazed that any foreigner could eat the stuff.

With a line of drool hanging from one corner of his mouth, the man at the far end of the bar was having trouble sitting upright, and as he moved to speak to the chef’s wife, she waved him away, saying, ‘You stink of booze!’ I laughed at this, which in turn provoked more laughter, and we were soon engaged in a heated debate about the distance between the restaurant and the campsite (someone insisted on twenty-five kilometres, which couldn’t possibly have been the case or it would have taken me the best part of two hours to get here), and whether or not Kasumigaura is the biggest lake in the country (it is in fact the second biggest, Lake Biwa near Nagoya being the first). The older of the two men was marginally more sober than his friend, with a lean, tanned face, close-cropped hair and a trim grey beard. For a construction worker in a small-town sushi restaurant, he was surprisingly passionate about internationalisation, and the important role that learning English has to play in modern-day Japanese society. I sensed in him something that I had found in so many others along the way, namely a desire to understand and interact with the outside world, despite the fact that the outside world only rarely encroached on his everyday life. Based on encounters like this, it seemed to me the supposed Japanese suspicion of foreigners existed on a collective rather than an individual level. Due to a declining birth rate and increased life expectancy, the country’s population is both ageing and shrinking, but there is still some resistance to solving the resultant labour shortage by increased immigration. Would there be a dilution of indigenous culture if more foreigners were allowed into the country? Of course there would, even if it might not be as drastic as many people believe. And would there be an increase in the crime rate at the same time? Yes again, although not because gaijin are inherently badly behaved, but because to disrupt the balance of a society that has remained so self-contained for such a long time would inevitably lead to conflict and inequality. Even taking all of this into account, I could no longer believe that the average Japanese had anything against me, it was just difficult sometimes to extract and to differentiate their personal feelings from the feelings of the group as a whole.

As the two restauranteurs and their two customers stepped outside to see me off, a fine drizzle had begun to fall. I could have been mistaken, but the construction worker appeared to be on the verge of tears, and shook my hand as if it were his own son about to ride off into the night. Having taken a wrong turn in the dark, I juddered along a gravel track for a couple of kilometres before finding my way back to the safety of the road. To my left were fields and the occasional farm building, to my right the lake, and beyond that the receding lights of Nagayama on the opposite shore. One or two cars passed by, but for the most part, the only sounds were the Mariposa’s tyres as they fizzed along the tarmac and the whir of the chain as the pedals turned. I was wet, tired, still hungry, and various parts of my body ached to a greater or lesser extent, but I thought to myself as I rode that I could do this forever, that I could happily go through Mito tomorrow and continue north, never to return. The trip, I now realised, had changed me. After so many weeks of encountering new and unexpected situations, rather than blind panic, I was prone to chin-stroking contemplation in a crisis, which I supposed was a typical traveller’s approach. On a more mundane level, this new-found calmness enabled me to sleep more soundly, and to ignore whatever strange noises were to be heard during a typical night’s camping. Where before I would curl up in the foetal position, pull the covers to my chin and hear every barking dog or tweeting bird, now I lay on my back, on top of the sleeping bag, with my arms splayed above my head, and soon nodded off to the sound of the wind in the trees, or, in the case of this particular site, a couple of stray cats scavenging for food. I imagined my stalker, that shadowy figure with a samurai sword, giving up and going home through the rain.

0 Comments

Gaijin on a Push Bike - Day 41

29/2/2016

2 Comments

Monday 29th August 2005 – Rest day, Tokyo (東京)
Presents received – lunch
Presents given – pint of Carlsberg

Renting an apartment can be a difficult business if you are foreign, because many landlords are under the impression that you will neglect to pay the bills, neglect to pay the rent and then disappear back to your home country without warning. So unless your employer acts as guarantor, the only other option is to live in a gaijin house. Gaijin houses are rather like student halls of residence, in that they are relatively cheap, but you only have one room to yourself and amenities are shared with the other tenants. They are convenient for landlords because even if one or two gaijin do run away, said landlord will still be earning an income from the occupied rooms, and they are convenient for gaijin because not only will they be welcomed as a tenant, but their initial cash outlay tends to be smaller than for a self-contained apartment. Compared to some I had visited, Mr Cambridge’s gaijin house was spacious and clean, with fifteen or twenty rooms on three floors, and one of the more creative residents had been commissioned to decorate the walls with an extensive mural of flowers and climbing plants, giving the place a bohemian feel. On the downside, the basement had recently flooded and there was a live electrical cable dangling from the kitchen ceiling. Despite the morning rush of teachers preparing for work, however, I managed to find a vacant shower stall, and before we left in search of breakfast, to spend some time perusing the enormous array of shoes and slippers left at the front door, which even this close to the centre of Tokyo was never locked.

For lunch I met Mr Heaven Valley, who in his own way was just as energetic as Mr Cambridge. He had recently retired from his job as a computer engineer, and I got the feeling that he didn’t quite know what to do with himself now that he had so much spare time on his hands. He would often come up with business ideas or do volunteer work, and one such brainstorm had led him to teach Japanese, which is how we had first met. The lessons were free of charge and took place in a classroom packed with tables, chairs, teachers and students: students who included in their number everyone from Indian factory workers to Brazilian hostesses. While the curriculum was a little too reliant on classic, textbook-based formality, I became good friends with Mr Heaven Valley, and together we had been on countless day trips: to the foothills of Mount Fuji, to Tsukiji fish market at four in the morning, to a flower festival in Itako and to the Senso Temple in Asakusa. In his younger days Mr Heaven Valley toured Japan by motorcycle, and he had shown me photographs of himself posing before Mount Fuji, stoic in his leather jacket and comb-over, and sitting astride a vintage bike. Thus his interest in my trip arose from the fact that I was following in his footsteps, and although I thanked him for all of his advice over the course of the summer, I also reassured him that life on the road was far less perilous than he had feared it might be.

My former employers may have been ruthless, money-grabbing gaijin, but many of their Japanese receptionists and school managers were very nice people indeed, and after lunch I went back along the Chuo Line to catch up with my favourite. Mrs Street Generation ran the school at Musashi-Sakai, which was just down the road from Mr Cambridge’s gaijin house. Off its central reception area were two small classrooms, and over the course of a typical day, around forty or fifty students would pass through its doors, from children of four or five to retirees in their seventies or eighties. The thing I found most endearing about Mrs Street Generation was her penchant for hoarding food, and many was the time that I caught her discreetly munching away on a nigiri she had hidden in her desk drawer, or that I would be sent to the conbini during my tea break to replenish her supply of snacks. We would often sit and chat between lessons, or go for a drink after work with her sister, who was a student of mine, and today was an opportunity to catch up on the latest gossip: of said sister getting engaged, and of Mrs Street Generation’s co-manager having a baby. As we talked, a group of kids was taking part in a particularly rowdy activity in one of the classrooms, and halfway through, a young lad whose face I recognised popped his head around the door. Having realised who I was, he looked as if he had seen a ghost, bid me a nervous hello and immediately ducked back inside. I could not for the life of me remember his name – was it Masayuki? Masahiro? Hirotaka? Takayuki? – but teaching children like him had been the saving grace of my time in Tokyo.

The great thing about kindergarten and elementary school students is their lack of an agenda: they have no learning targets, no long-term ambitions and no English exams to work towards. All they want to do is have fun, play games and keep their parents happy by turning up every week – parents who after all are paying good money for private tuition outside regular school hours. As a result, our lessons together were full of in-jokes and catchphrases, and liable at any moment to take a turn for the surreal or descend into complete anarchy. Over the course of nine months, I had taught:

1) A boy who liked to run around with a wastepaper basket on his head.
2) A group that began every lesson by beating me up with inflatable toys.
3) A boy who locked me out of the classroom.
4) A girl who showed her appreciation for a homework assignment by spitting on my head.
5) A boy who thought he was a dog, and would spend much of his time walking around on all fours and barking.
6) A boy who when confronted with any question to which he did not know the answer, said, ‘I don’t remember’ in a French accent, while smoking an imaginary cigar and sipping an imaginary Martini.
7) A group of girls (the tongue-twisting Manami, Miharu and Haruka) who developed a fixation with the phrase ‘knickerbocker glory’, to the exclusion of almost anything else I tried to teach them.
8) A boy whose lessons took the form of an extended penalty shoot-out.
9) A boy who cried every single week for four months, eventually confessing to his mother that he thought I was the devil because of my blue eyes.
10) And a three year old who became so distracted during summer school that she pooped her pants (mercifully, a school manager was on hand to clean up, and to go shopping for a new pair).

I became more attached to those children than to any of my grown-up students, even to colleagues and friends, and saying goodbye to them had been genuinely heart wrenching, particularly as they showered me with hand-drawn cards and gifts of origami on my final days at the schools where I worked.

There was no such commotion in the other classroom at Musashi-Sakai, from which a teacher I had not met before emerged to search the store cupboard for flashcards and toys. She was smartly dressed and spoke with an English accent, and I asked how long she had been working here.

‘Only about two or three weeks,’ she said. ‘I’m still at the panicking stage, so I spend far too much time writing lesson plans and then run out of ideas halfway through.’
‘Have you managed to make any friends?’
‘It’s pretty difficult because hardly anyone else lives near me. I’ve been to a couple of organised things, but I haven’t had the time to do much else, to be honest. It’s funny, though, there are hardly any girls working here. Almost all the teachers are blokes.’
‘Yep.’
‘Why’s that then?’
‘Why do you think?’ I raised my eyebrows and gave her a knowing smile.
‘Ah, I see. I hadn’t realised. Was that why you came?’
‘Well, I had a girlfriend at the time, so not as such. But it’s kind of an unspoken thing that everybody secretly understands and nobody mentions. I’ve heard of guys who came to Japan with the express intention of finding a wife, or if not that, then just to play the field. What brought you here, anyway?’
‘I want to be a primary school teacher, and it seemed like a good way of getting some experience and doing a bit of travelling at the same time.’
‘I’ve been thinking about doing a PGCE myself, as it happens. I enjoy teaching kids, and it would be nice to have something organised for when I go back to England.’
‘It’s funny you should say that about the men who work here, though. Now I come to think of it some of them are pretty strange.’
‘Often they’re running away from something. You know, bad debts, break-ups, family. Either that or they’re just social misfits.’
‘Whereas you’re completely sane.’
‘Exactly – that’s why I resigned! It’s not really fair, though. The women who come to Japan are the sane ones, and they’ve got it pretty tough, whereas the men are the oddballs, and they end up having a whale of a time. Well, some of them, anyway.’

We talked about working for the conversation school, and I tried to recount as many things as I could that I wished I had known when I first arrived. What I really wanted to say, though, was, ‘FOR GOD’S SAKE, GET OUT WHILE YOU STILL CAN! THIS LOT WILL WORK YOU INTO THE GROUND! THEY’LL DEPRIVE YOU OF ANY POSSIBILITY OF A POSITIVE EXPERIENCE IN JAPAN!’ But that wouldn’t have been a particularly diplomatic move with Mrs Street Generation listening in, so I just dropped a few subtle hints and hoped this fresh-faced and still enthusiastic young teacher got the message that once you are in the country and have a work visa, there are much more rewarding avenues to explore.

By now Mrs Street Generation was busy fielding phone calls and dealing with the post-work and post-school rush, so I made my excuses, telling her to say hello to my former students.
‘Have a nice life,’ she said as I left, and while she had not intended it to be so blunt, the phrase somehow felt apt, and made me realise this may be the last time I saw her, or set foot in my former workplace. Meeting so many people again after eight months away had been enjoyable and strange by turns - sometimes as if I had never left, and sometimes as if too much time had passed - and in a sense, my stop off in Tokyo served as proof that I had left the place behind, along with many of my bad experiences there.

Back in Komaba-Todaimae, Mr Field Middle had just finished work, and was far less voluble than he had been on Saturday. Apparently, the Field Middles’ new upstairs neighbour was prone to snoring very loudly, and as Mr Field Middle was a light sleeper he had been lying awake for the majority of the night. While he went to bed early and Mrs Field Middle turned the volume down on the television, I headed to Shibuya for my final social engagement of the weekend.

Besides the Scramble Crossing, Shibuya’s other main attraction is its statue of Hachiko, a famously faithful dog in the style of Greyfriars Bobby, whose story has been turned into a syrupy Hollywood film starring the syrupy Richard Gere. If you are going to meet someone in Shibuya, Hachiko’s statue is the place to do it, and tonight I was waiting for Mr Yokohama. A university student with an interest in English that stemmed mainly from his weakness for foreign women, Mr Yokohama had had his photograph printed in the Nova conversation school magazine, when he was recognised as the fastest progressing student in his home city. His gaijin ex-girlfriends had done their best to enlighten him as to the more colloquial aspects of the language, thus earning him the nickname Mr ‘Fuckin’’ Yokohama.

‘Hey, how’s it going?’ I said as he emerged from the station.
‘Ah, I’m sorry man. I am so fuckin’ late. I had a meeting with my seminar group, and it went on for a fuckin’ long time.’
‘University’s still OK, though, isn’t it?’
‘It’s fuckin’ shit. I am so fuckin’ busy with writing essays and taking exams that I have no time to study English.’
‘You sound as fluent as ever from where I’m standing. Anyway, I’ve been speaking too much Japanese lately, so you can practice on me tonight.’
‘Actually, I have a question for you. Do you know the movie American Pie?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, I was watching American Pie with my friends the other night, and I was confused. What is the difference between “I’m cool” and “It’s cool”? I thought they had the same meaning.’

Along with a few similar examples – ‘That’s cool’, ‘He / She’s cool’, ‘Stay cool’, ‘Be cool’, ‘Cool it’, ‘Not cool’, and so on – I gave as simple an explanation as I could manage, and Mr Yokohama wrote everything down in his little ring-bound English notebook, which was augmented during the course of the evening with such nuggets of wisdom as how to soften an insult using ‘a bit of a’, as in ‘He’s a bit of a pillock’ or ‘She’s a bit of a muppet.’

Once Mr Yokohama had eaten at Yoshinoya – the kind of fast-food noodle joint I normally chose to avoid – we made our way to the Hobgoblin, one of many English-style pubs to be found in the more touristy areas of Tokyo. Particularly if there are no windows, and therefore no visible neon signs advertising Japanese companies, frequenting such pubs can be uncannily similar to going for a drink with your mates back in the UK. While antipodean staff pull draught beers, pasty-faced foreigners sit on bar stools and watch big-screen Premiership football. The fixtures and fittings are wooden and olde worlde, the lampshades made from fake stained glass, and there are posters on the wall depicting chip-heavy food. The main difference is a palpable undercurrent of tension, as predatory males hover around, competing for the opportunity to chat up whichever local girls happen to have wandered in. The Hobgoblin, The Dubliners and The Hub are the first port of call for any lecherous gaijin looking to pull, and any curious Japanese girl with the same intention, but as is so often the case, the former tend to vastly outnumber the latter. Imported beer is also eye-wateringly expensive, and having offered to buy a round, I found myself with a bill for one thousand nine hundred and fifty yen (at the time nearly ten pounds) for a pint of Carlsberg and a pint of Guinness. Mr Yokohama knew his football as well as any British barfly, and we spent the rest of the evening discussing how ‘fuckin’ cool’ Didier Drogba was, and how the ‘fuckin’ shit’ Japanese team was unlikely to qualify for the next World Cup.

2 Comments

Gaijin on a Push Bike - Day 40

22/2/2016

0 Comments

Sunday 28th August 2005 – Rest day, Tokyo (東京)
Presents received – book
Presents given – several beers

Having availed myself of the Field Middles’ futon, food, drink, shower, bath, washing machine and computer, I boarded a train from Shibuya that I used to use as a commuter, and it was sheer bliss to be a tourist instead. I had travelled around Tokyo on autopilot the previous year, head down and oblivious to my surroundings, but today the Inokashira Line looked charming, its chrome-plated carriages swaying gracefully through cuttings thick with foliage, and over each level crossing to the monotonous ring of the warning bell. The best place to stand was at the front of the first carriage, where I could see through the driver’s window, and watch as his white-gloved hands pointed out every signal, sign and speed limit between stations (train drivers in Japan all seem to do this, a routine that is apparently designed to keep them alert and aware of potential danger).

I was on my way to meet Mrs Front Field, the teacher who had guided me to a pass mark in the Japanese Language Proficiency Test (Level Four, the easiest available at the time) the previous December. Through no fault of her own, my studies with Mrs Front Field had been a rather tortuous experience, because despite her intricate knowledge of what was required for the test and her ability to keep things ticking along with exercises and activities, I was invariably exhausted, and knew that as each lesson came to an end I still had a full day’s work ahead of me. As always, we had arranged to meet at the Ogikubo branch of Denny’s, where our main concern was to find a seat in the non-smoking section, and in the eight months since we last met, both my mood and my ability to hold a conversation had changed for the better. Mrs Front Field was elegant and articulate, a fluent English speaker who regularly travelled to the States with her husband to indulge their passion for baseball. Today, however, we stuck to Japanese, and the usual language lesson mantras of ‘Mr Jones is a lawyer for ABC Company. He gets up at seven a.m. He has coffee and toast for breakfast. He goes to work by train. His hobbies are jogging and ski-ing,’ were noticeable by their absence.

My next stop was Bondi Books in Kichijoji, whose tiny premises were stacked from floor to ceiling with a lovingly maintained selection of everything from plastic-wrapped first editions to well-thumbed paperbacks. The Mr Bondi of Bondi Books was one of the first people I got to know upon arriving in Tokyo, and the kind of shopkeeper who remembered the names of his customers and always made them feel at home. He seemed surprised when I told him that Ibaraki was a vast improvement on Tokyo, and said that he had always been under the impression I enjoyed living in the capital. Perhaps I had managed to conceal my disenchantment, but then again, Mr Bondi had only ever seen me browsing for literary bargains, or attending one of Bondi Books’ legendary anniversary parties [editor's note: since I wrote this - and along with one or two other notable secondhand English bookshops in Tokyo - Bondi has sadly closed its doors].

As it happened, the regional office of my former employers was also in Kichijoji, and I was reminded as I walked past of just how much I had always wanted to firebomb the place. At least once a month, I would climb the stairs to the first floor like a condemned man, first to collect my pay slip, but more importantly to discover just how arduous the coming month’s overtime schedule was to be. The management were never going to win any prizes for labour relations – they once made sure that only one of two teachers whose best friend had been killed in a car accident flew home for the funeral – but as well as a penchant for dishing out six-day weeks to their already overworked teachers, some of their business practices were in fact illegal. To give an example, any employee who called in sick not only had the relevant day’s pay docked from their wages, but also the cost of bringing in a cover teacher, who in turn was given less than half the usual amount for the privilege of giving up one of their own days off. The trouble was, because most of us had neither the money nor the language skills to hire a lawyer or join a union, the school was in little danger of being found out, and as far as I am aware, a similarly unreasonable set of working conditions is still being enforced there today. Waiting on the platform at Kichijoji Station, I half expected a phone call or a hand on my shoulder, accompanied by the order to get back to work, and being in Tokyo at the end of a six-week holiday somehow seemed like cheating.

From Kichijoji, I caught the Chuo Line to Nakano and the bus to Nogata, where I had lived for nine months in my compact and bijou apartment. Nogata may be just twenty minutes from Shinjuku by bicycle, but it could not be more different. Hardly any cars pass along its maze of narrow streets, which are crammed with shop signs, banners and billboards that advertise a twenty-four-hour internet café, a twenty-four-hour video shop, a twenty-four hour curry house, a twenty-four-hour McDonald’s, and numerous twenty-four-hour izakaya and convenience stores. I was on my way to the Ogiya yakitori restaurant, which may not have been open twenty-four hours a day but was still my favourite place in Nogata, if not the whole of Tokyo.

The previous year, Ogiya had served as a refuge from the drudgery of work, and the venue for many a diatribe against our employers, either by myself, or my colleagues Mr Cambridge and Mr Iran. As part of a new intake of teachers, the three of us had flown into Narita together on the same plane, and while Mr Iran was now back in the UK, Mr Cambridge had renewed his contract and was part way through a second year in Tokyo. Tonight happened to be his thirtieth birthday, so a table had been reserved, and several more old friends and workmates were due to make an appearance. Upon ducking through the sliding front door, I was greeted with a chorus of ‘Irasshaimasé!’s, ‘Konbanwa!’s and ‘Hisashiburi!’s (‘Welcome to our shop!’ ‘Good evening!’ and ‘Long time no see!’), which had always been particularly loud at Ogiya, and would be followed by an equally energetic conveyance of one’s food and drink order to the relevant member of staff, so that a typical exchange might be translated as follows:

WAITER
(Shouting at customer)
WELCOME TO OUR SHOP!

OTHER WAITERS, WAITRESSES AND CHEFS
(Also shouting at customer)
WELCOME TO OUR SHOP!

WAITER
Good evening! Long time no see!

CUSTOMER
Good evening! Long time no see!

WAITER
Please sit down. Would you like to order a drink?

CUSTOMER
Yes please. Can I have a medium-sized beer?

WAITER
(Shouting at barman)
ONE MEDIUM-SIZED BEER, PLEASE!
(To Customer)
And what would you like to eat?

CUSTOMER
Two yakitori, please.

WAITER
(Shouting at yakitori chef)
TWO YAKITORI, PLEASE!
(To customer)
Anything else?

CUSTOMER
I think I might have some edamamé, if that’s OK.

WAITER
(Shouting at waitress)
EDAMAMÉ, PLEASE!
(Shouting at next customer through the door)
WELCOME TO OUR SHOP!

And so on and so forth.

Ogiya covered an area of no more than forty square metres, with a smoking, barbecue-style yakitori grill at the window, a bar and a row of stools along the left-hand side as you entered, and two tables on a raised tatami platform at the rear, to the right of which was the kitchen, and beyond that a tiny bathroom. Like Surf In between Hagi and Hikimi, the fixtures, fittings and furniture all appeared to have been hand carved from the same tree trunk, although there was no such thing as an emergency exit, so if the grill at the front door were to catch fire, the whole place would probably go up within seconds, taking everyone inside with it. At any one time, as many as six or seven staff were on duty, despite a capacity of no more than fifteen customers – customers who were a mixture of blue-collar tradesmen and white-collar media types. Not that I would have recognised them, but several famous comedians were known to frequent Ogiya, and much of the restaurant’s success was down to its franchisee. Mr Bamboo Field looked more like a skateboarding slacker than a businessman, with his bleached hair, ripped jeans and white-trash baseball cap. Originally from Kansai, he had studied acting at university, and his trademark high-pitched giggle was as much a feature of Ogiya as the cries of ‘Irasshaimasé!’ Part of the reason that Mr Cambridge, Mr Iran and myself had started coming here was because Mr Bamboo Field spoke English, and he even commissioned his sister, who had been to university in Scotland, to produce an English-language menu for us, which thankfully contained a more diverse range of dishes than just char-grilled chicken cartilage and the like.

Ogiya is the closest I have ever come to being a regular, although compared to my once or twice a week, there were people here who really did turn up every night: people like a theatre stage manager who would never approach us without the security of his pocket-sized Japanese-English dictionary; a musician with a pink mohican who played in a punk band called Cannonball; an electrician who had once fooled me into thinking he was really a Japanese teacher; and a policeman who was famous in Nogata for being very tall (he was, in fact, no taller than either Mr Cambridge or Mr Iran), and confessed that his job involved little more than moving bicycles around. This lot were clearly not missing any enzymes, and could work their way through glass after glass of shochu, and while I would like to have understood more of what they said to me, it may not have made much sense if I had.

Mr Cambridge was presented with a tofu birthday cake (desserts were not a speciality at Ogiya), party poppers were popped, enough medium-sized beers were drunk to float a cruise ship, and both the atmosphere and the surroundings were comfortingly familiar, with the same kitsch Asahi posters of bikini girls holding foaming tankards of beer, the same tracing of Mr Iran’s mythically enormous hands on the wall, and the same sticker on the toilet cistern saying ‘BREAK YOUR FIST!’ It was, to coin a phrase, just like old times, except that tonight I felt more like the prodigal son than the put-upon salaryman. Knowing that I was also a lightweight, Mr Cambridge called things to a halt at closing time so that we could catch the last Chuo Line train back to Musashi-Sakai.

You may be wondering why on earth Mr Cambridge had chosen to continue working for such an appalling employer. Well, even before arriving in Japan, he had already spent several years at an English school in London, where he would quite happily teach three three-hour classes back-to-back without so much as a lesson plan or a lunch break. He was also far too busy having a good time to read the small print in his employment contract, and in my absence, nights out at Ogiya had often continued into the early hours, or to a pool hall, darts bar or city-centre club.

I had always been slightly in awe of Mr Cambridge’s ability to extract every last scrap of enjoyment from life while still managing to hold down a full-time job. He was the kind of person who would drink until last orders, take every drug on offer – legal or otherwise – stay up until daybreak (and sometimes beyond: in his university days, he had once only narrowly failed to stay awake for one hundred consecutive hours), work an eight-hour day, and then begin the process all over again. Not even hobbies were indulged in half-heartedly, and he would spend every last penny of his wages on gadgets, books, CDs, video games, collectables, cigarettes, guitars and holidays, or in bars, restaurants, rehearsal rooms, concert venues, barber-shops, onsen and internet cafes. So having made it back to his rented room in a gaijin house, I was shown photographs of his latest hike in the mountains, played a song he had just recorded on a four-track tape machine, and taught some Japanese idioms from a newly purchased reference book. One of his birthday presents had been a DVD of The League of Gentlemen, which he began to watch as I arranged a sleeping bag and inflatable mattress on the floor.

‘This is great,’ he said. ‘It’s really good to go to sleep to. Dark and surreal, but still funny.’
Almost before the opening credits had rolled, Mr Cambridge was snoring away, and I quietly leaned over to turn off the television before drifting off to sleep myself.

0 Comments

Gaijin on a Push Bike - Day 39

14/2/2016

0 Comments

Saturday 27th August 2005 – Yamato to Komaba-Todaimae (大和 – 駒場東大前)

Checkout time was ten thirty, so I set my alarm for ten-fifteen, had a very quick shower and dropped my key at reception at approximately ten twenty-nine. Having sat down in a nearby kissaten for morningu setto, I then realised that I had inadvertently thrown Mr Fukuoka’s details in the hotel room rubbish bin, so dashed back, asked for the key again, ran upstairs, and retrieved the vital scrap of paper before the cleaning ladies had time to whisk it away. Yamato had livened up considerably since the early hours, and was full of the usual hustle and bustle of a Tokyo suburb: delivery trucks manoeuvred around the narrow streets, housewives did the daily shop, and just outside the kissaten’s window, a young woman with long, curly Farrah Fawcett hair, high heels and a Louis Vuitton handbag put on a crash helmet, balanced two bags of groceries at her feet, and rode off on a fifty-cc scooter.

Out here the ratio of greenery to buildings was still favourable and the landscape unexpectedly hilly, as I wended my way between small farms, country parks and university campuses. But getting lost on the backstreets soon grew frustrating, and eventually I resigned myself to Route 45, which led more directly towards Tokyo city centre. I passed what may have been the scene of an accident, but looked more like a man collapsed on the pavement from a heart attack, and stopped to let three elementary schoolgirls parade serenely across the road on unicycles. Soon it was like riding through a cross between Spaghetti Junction and downtown Manhattan, as the high rises became higher, and the overpasses, underpasses, bridges and tunnels multiplied: I kept myself occupied by picking out individual cars to see whether or not I could keep up with them, although in such heavy traffic it was too often an easy victory for the Mariposa.

My hosts in Tokyo were to be the Field Middle’s, friends of the family who used to live in England, although I had never met them before today. I called their home number from a family restaurant in Kawasaki at four o’clock, and felt a little put out when Mr Field Middle – the father – suggested that I might not make it to Shibuya by five thirty. In the event it only took an hour, and owing to a mysterious reversal of his initial prediction, Mr Field Middle was already there to meet me, next to the so-called ‘Scramble Crossing’ outside Shibuya Station.

Quite apart from being the busiest pedestrian crossing in the world, the Scramble Crossing has appeared in every single film and television programme about Japan since the dawn of moving pictures, and of the hundreds of thousands of people who make use of it every day, a significant proportion are TV presenters, actors or actresses. You will, for example, remember the Scramble Crossing from Lost In Translation, as a place that perfectly symbolises Scarlett Johansson’s shock and disorientation at arriving in Tokyo for the first time, surrounded as it is by enough neon billboards and multi-storey video screens to make Picadilly Circus look like a couple of country lanes. Even its design has proved influential, and Oxford Circus is the latest of London’s crossroads to incorporate a phase during which traffic from every direction is halted, and pedestrians are allowed to ‘scramble’ – that is to move diagonally as well as perpendicularly – to and from all four corners of the junction.

Saturday afternoon is the busiest time of the week on the Scramble Crossing, and it was a battle just to extricate ourselves from the crowds. Within a couple of minutes, though, Mr Field Middle and I were cycling through a quiet residential neighbourhood to his family's modest company apartment near Komaba-Todaimae Station. Mr Field Middle worked for Mitsui Sumitomo Bank, and as he was transferred from office to office, the family had spent time in New York as well as Tokyo and London (or to be more precise, Staines). Mrs Field Middle worked ‘part-time’ – ie. forty hours a week – at a postal company, and having taught Japanese during their years abroad, was wonderfully patient with my conversational ineptitude. Japanese was almost a second language for their daughter, who had spent much of her childhood in the UK and the United States, and was currently on her summer vacation from studying music back in New York. Even in this supposed time off she practiced for up to six hours a day, at a grand piano that completely dominated one of the apartment’s tatami-mat rooms, and which through a typical misunderstanding on my part, I mistakenly believed had been shipped all the way from America.

More than once while I sat with Mrs Field Middle in the kitchen, she referred to the family tendency to put on weight, although as far as I could see, they were as trim as the majority of their fellow countrymen and women, and the food she prepared the usual healthy combination of rice, miso soup, fish and tsukemono. As we sat down to eat I found myself, professor-like, wielding a chopstick for a baton and indicating my route thus far, on a map of Japan that she had pinned to a cupboard door. Because Asahi Breweries is owned by Mitsui Sumitomo, the fridge was stocked with cans of beer to accompany the meal, although these were dinky little things less than half the normal size, and even after a few sips, Mr Field Middle was out for the count.

First of all his face went bright red and then he fell asleep on the floor, because like many people from the Far East, he was afflicted with the dreaded missing enzyme (as Jennifer Anniston once said, here comes the science-y part: the enzyme in question is called a ‘low-Km aldehyde dehydrogenase isoenzyme’), which renders the liver incapable of processing alcohol. Of course, being unable to drink does not do away with peer pressure, and nor does it do away with one’s basic desire to have a good time, so in bars and restaurants you will often see people just like Mr Field Middle, blushing profusely and sound asleep, as their friends continue to eat, drink and be merry all around them. Technically speaking such sufferers are not drunk – they have consumed too small an amount of alcohol for that – and Mr Field Middle was no exception, resurfacing after half an hour or so to carry on with dinner as if nothing had happened.

‘Is that a Rolex you’re wearing?’ he said.
‘It is, yes.’
‘Do you mind me asking where you got it?’
I related the story of inheriting the watch from my father, of finally having it repaired after years of neglect, and of deciding to wear it this summer.
‘But when did he buy it?’ Mr Field Middle continued. ‘Do you know?’
‘We’ve always assumed that my grandmother gave it to him as an eighteenth birthday present, so the late fifties, I suppose.’
‘I think it could be more recent than that.’
Mr Field Middle left the room, and returned bearing a carbon copy of my by now battered Rolex, still in its original box and looking as good as new.
‘This is the same model,’ he explained. ‘But they didn’t make them until the early seventies.’

A family mystery was one step closer to being solved, and when I next visited my father’s brother back in the UK, he showed me a Rolex that had not only been given to him as an eighteenth birthday present, but was of a different design from my father’s. So the latter must have been a replacement for one lost or broken, and it was perhaps fortuitous that I had not consigned it to the same fate during my travels.

0 Comments

Gaijin on a Push Bike - Day 38

1/2/2016

0 Comments

Friday 26th August 2005 – Fuji City to Yamato (富士市 – 大和)
Presents received – two tomatoes, one bottle of Aquarius, grapes
Presents given – dinner

My fear was that the Category Two Super Typhoon would linger on, thereby confining me to Fuji for another day, but when I awoke, conditions outside had changed completely. The rain was gone, the sun was out and there was hardly a breath of wind, so I packed my bags and bounded downstairs for breakfast (slipper-less, of course). My knees were rather less eager to get back on the Mariposa than the rest of me, and throbbed with pain for the first few kilometres of coast road, which ran flat and straight, in the lee of a sand dune forest of low, weather-beaten pine trees. I stopped outside a supermarket to do my stretching exercises, at a 7-11 for some canned coffee and a stodgy bun, and reached Mishima by mid-morning.

Just like the typhoon - and just as I had predicted - my déjà vu disappeared, and not overnight, but almost the moment I left Fuji City limits. With a clear head for the first time in two days, I made a list of rational explanations for why the déjà vu had manifested itself in the first place:

1) It was brought on by over-tiredness: something clicked in my brain around the time I went on the bonk, and did not repair itself until I was back in the saddle and physically rejuvenated.
2) It was brought on by the typhoon: as the atmospheric conditions changed and the air pressure dropped, something clicked in my brain and did not repair itself until the weather was back to normal.
3) It was brought on by a geunuine memory of a past experience near - but not necessarily in - Fuji City.
4) It was brought on by some sort of gas or radiation leak.
5) It was brought on by the egg ramen.

Meanwhile, the list of irrational explanations went like this:

1) I had visited Fuji City in a previous life.
2) I had simultaneously been visiting Fuji City in a parallel universe.
3) Someone else who had visited Fuji City – either in this universe, a parallel universe or a previous life – was using telekinesis to transfer their memories of the event into my mind.

Before converting to Hinduism or declaring myself to be the new Messiah, I decided to live with the mystery for now and ask a few carefully chosen friends for their opinion the next time I had access to my email account.

North-east of Mishima and a thousand metres above sea level lay Hakoné, a lakeside town famous for its onsen and views of Mount Fuji. Mr Sturdy Level had warned of how tough the ascent via Route 1 would be, but looking at the Mapple, there was an easier alternative to the south-east, on a road that climbed to five or six hundred metres and through the Takanosu Tunnel, before heading back down to the coast. With speed still my primary motivation I plumped for the latter, and beyond Mishima turned onto a minor road that pointed the way uphill.

While I may have chosen to avoid Hakoné, I nonetheless relished the thought of tackling a proper climb, and as well as being my first in a week, this would be my last of the summer. The moment was bittersweet, since I knew that I would miss the challenge, the climber’s high and the reward of a beautiful view or a fast descent. As the incline steepened, I clicked my way down through the gears, from the middle cog on the front chain ring to the smallest, then from sixth to fourth to second on the rear chain ring, and finally first. With no easier options, this was where I had to find my rhythm, to keep pedalling without straining too hard, and without slowing down so much that I lost my balance or ceased to proceed in a straight line.

Streams of water rushed along the tarmac on either side of me, and fan-shaped splashes of mud and stones spread out from gaps in the hedgerow: evidence of just how much had been washed away during the night. I stopped to pee on a leaf-strewn track, and as I walked back to the Mariposa, Mount Fuji appeared from behind the clouds to wish me well. Coming as they did either side of a typhoon, two sightings in three days were almost too good to be true, and bookended my time near the mountain in suitably providential fashion. I hastily unpacked my camera, and had just succeeded in commemorating the moment when an old man on a scooter rode up and handed me two large tomatoes.

Dressed in blue overalls and an open-faced helmet with the chin strap undone, he must have been at least seventy years old, and his smile revealed just a few remaining teeth.
‘Round here blah blah blah blah blah,’ he said, while I smiled, nodded and tried to work out what the hell he was on about. ‘Blah blah blah blah blah.’
Sometimes a few key words will enable you to keep up with a conversation, but in this case, even the non-key words were incomprehensible.
‘Blah blah blah blah blah,’ he laughed, and either wished me luck or called me crazy, before speeding off down the hill with his load of fruit and vegetables.

The climb only took about an hour, as there were no looping haripins, no food or drink emergencies, and it was agreeably cool after the storm. I stopped to savour the view, but felt less sentimental about passing through my final tunnel of the trip, and after a kilometre in the dark, the descent on the other side took me directly into the seaside resort of Atami City.

Here a small park and promenade were hemmed in by a road already busy with daytrippers, and overlooked by souvenir shops, cafés and high-rise hotels. Nestled within a small bay, the appropriately named ‘Atami Sun Beach’ was suspiciously pristine: sand near Tokyo tends to look darker, more volcanic, and I wondered if this particular stretch had been shipped in from somewhere more exotic. Just to complete the picture, and no doubt chosen by the authorities to lend that extra hint of the tropical, cod reggae music was playing through a system of speakers mounted on telegraph poles.

For lunch I found a rickety old restaurant perched on top of the next headland, whose interior was piled high with books, records and magazines, while all sorts of artefacts hung from the walls and ceiling, mostly relating to the owner’s passion for fishing. After much deliberation, I ordered hokké – a variety of mackerel that is cut open from end to end and served flat like a kipper – and once his other customers had left, the owner sat down for a chat. He was a man whose formerly muscular physique had begun the slow transformation to being merely plump, and whose beard was flecked with grey.

‘I get up at three in the morning most days,’ he told me. ‘If the weather’s good enough, that is.’
‘Do you sell what you catch?’
‘There isn’t usually enough for that. Often I just use it in the restaurant, for sushi and so on.’
‘So where’s the hokké from? Did you catch it yourself?’
‘The hokké? To tell you the truth I’m not sure. Canada perhaps, or maybe Norway.’
‘Norway? I didn’t realise fish travelled that far.’

Here I was talking to a fisherman-restauranteur, whose menu included sushi caught by his own hands that very morning, and I had managed to order something from halfway round the world, which was probably frozen in the bowels of a trawler for three months before it even arrived in Tokyo. Still, he cannot have been too offended, because I was presented with some budo for dessert – fat, red Japanese grapes with big, crunchy seeds and sour-tasting skins – and a bottle of Aquarius to keep me going through the afternoon, both of which were on the house.

Scanning the Mapple, I could see only two campsites in the whole of Greater Tokyo: one on a square of reclaimed land near Hanéda Airport, and the other in a place called Izumi-no-Mori (‘Forest Spring’), which appeared to be a park of some kind. To reach Izumi-no-Mori would require cutting inland at Hiratsuka, another fifteen or twenty kilometres along the coast, and I was halfway there when a voice called out from behind me. Turning to find out who it belonged to, I saw a young man riding a heavily laden touring bike.

‘Excuse me,’ he said.
‘Yes?’
‘Where are you from?’
‘I’m from England.’
‘Hello. My name is Mr Fukuoka. Nice to meet you.’
‘Nice to meet you, too.’
Mr Fukuoka was riding along the pavement, and continued to bump up and down the kerb at each successive side street, and to weave in and out of trees and lampposts, as I kept to the road.

‘So you’ve cycled from Kyushu?’ I said.
‘Yes. Have you been there?’
‘Yes, I’ve come from Kyushu myself, although I didn’t go to Fukuoka. Where are you going?’
‘I’m on my way to Hokkaido.’
‘How long have you taken so far?’ Ever competitive, I wondered if he had covered the same distance in a faster time.
‘Hmm, let’s see…Saturday, I think. Yes, it was Saturday.’
‘No, I mean what date did you leave Fukuoka?’
‘I don’t know. What’s the date today?’
‘About the twenty-fifth or sixth.’
‘Well, around the eighteenth or nineteenth then.’
‘Of August?’ Mr Fukuoka nodded. ‘And, er, when will you arrive in Hokkaido?’
‘I need to get there by next Saturday. I only have a short holiday, you see.’
‘So you’re cycling almost the entire length of Japan…’
‘Yes.’
‘…from south to north…’
‘South to north, yes.’
‘…in two weeks?’
‘Yes.’ He nodded again and smiled.
‘Unbelievable! How many kilometres are you doing each day?’
‘About a hundred and fifty.’
‘A hundred and fifty?’
‘I also ride at night, though.’
‘What about sleeping?’
‘I can’t afford hotels or anything. I just have a nap on a bench sometimes, or in a park. But it’s pretty scary, so I tend to keep going.’
‘You mean you’re afraid of getting mugged?’
‘No, I’m afraid of ghosts.’ I laughed at this, and then recalled my own nights spent lying awake and dreading the arrival of gangsters or madmen.

Mr Fukuoka was short and stocky with a sleeveless t-shirt and a mod-style mop of hair, and for some reason both his appearance and his energetic demeanour reminded me of Keith Moon. He was in his final year as an engineering student at university, and this was his last proper holiday before starting work the following March (the Japanese academic year runs from April to March, and many university students will already have a job lined up by the time they graduate). Having tackled the more challenging route from Mishima, he had been resting in Hakoné bus station when an old lady took pity on him. She invited him home, fed him and laid out a futon on her living room floor, but even in such a comfortable and ghost-free environment, Mr Fukuoka had managed little more than a couple of hours’ sleep. We decided to ride together as far as Izumi-no-Mori, and despite the inconvenience, he insisted on sticking to the pavement whenever the road was too narrow to accommodate the two of us side by side.

As we came closer to Hiratsuka, I noticed that drivers were honking their horns and calling out to say hello as they overtook – not for my benefit, but in response to a sign pinned to the back of Mr Fukuoka’s bike. I couldn’t read the whole thing, but it went something like this: ‘Hello. My name is Mr Fukuoka. I am cycling from Kyushu to Hokkaido in two weeks. Thank you for your support. I will try my best!’ It reminded me of the marathon runners who write their names on their vests so that even complete strangers will cheer them on, and I regretted not having come up with the same idea myself.

Mr Fukuoka’s bike was almost identical to the one that Mr Kanagawa had been riding in Himeji, and when we stopped at a conbini he suggested that I give it a test ride. It felt so strange that I could not pedal more than a couple of metres, partly because the weight distribution was so different – the bicycle had drop handlebars and panniers low down on both the front and back wheels – but also because it was so heavy.

‘This thing weighs a ton,’ I said. ‘What sort of stuff are you carrying?’
‘Oh, you know, just some souvenirs.’
He extracted a few items from the panniers, one of them being a big glass jar that contained what appeared to be pickled bees, and weighed getting on for a kilo.
‘You’re going to carry this all the way to Hokkaido?’ I asked, and Mr Fukuoka looked rather apologetic.
‘Well, I’ve been to so many interesting places, and I wanted to buy some presents for my family.’

I was having trouble operating the gear shifters on Mr Fukuoka’s bike, which were of the type that you will find on a modern-day racer, and the drop-handlebar equivalent of the Mariposa’s integral ones. To change gear required tapping the brake levers to the side rather than squeezing them – left lever for the front chain ring and right lever for the rear chain ring – although I couldn’t help noticing that when you did the latter, the brake blocks didn’t grip until the lever was practically touching the handlebars.

‘Isn’t that a bit dangerous?’ I said. ‘I thought it was best to have the cables tighter.’
‘I don’t know, I prefer it that way – it’s your brakes that are too tight.’ As he wobbled around the conbini car park, Mr Fukuoka was finding the Mariposa to be an equally challenging proposition. ‘And how do you manage with the seat so high up?’
‘If you have the seat too low it’s supposed to be bad for your knees,’ I explained. ‘Although to tell you the truth it doesn’t seem to have worked. I have to use Bantelin on them every evening.’
‘How about your backside?’
‘Ha ha! I was really worried about that, but it’s been fine.’
‘You’re so lucky. Mine really hurts, even with this.’

He showed me an extra-soft, padded seat cover, filled with a kind of gel that reminded me of nothing so much as a silicone breast implant, and we agreed that a bath at the end of the day is the best way to deal with aching knees and backsides. Mr Fukuoka was carrying a fold-out map of the whole of Japan, marked with little more than expressways and major cities, so we set out in search of an onsen that was marked on the Mapple as being in Atsugi, a small town between Hiratsuka and the campsite.

Even towards the end of a long day, the kilometres began to pass more quickly, and it was good to have some company for once. We talked of the hardships we had encountered on our respective tours, and I explained my theory of overcoming adversity through concentration and perseverance. While Mr Fukuoka did not recognise the word ‘Zen’ – which was perhaps excusable given the many different varieties of Buddhism that exist in Japan – the concept of ganbaru (頑張る) could be said to have a similar meaning. While its imperative form is used in the kind of situations where we would wish someone ‘good luck’, a more literal translation of the verb ganbaru would be ‘to try one’s best’, and the message on Mr Fukuoka’s sign concluded with the polite form, ganbarimasu. In Japan, it is looked upon as a particularly admirable quality to put one’s heart and soul into something, and as another car-full of youngsters rolled down their windows to cheer Mr Fukuoka on, it occurred to me that another reason for people’s generosity towards me had been their recognition of my own spirit of ganbaru, even if it was channelled into the essentially pointless activity of cycling from one part of the country to another.

Just before resigning from my conversation school job in Tokyo - in other words, at a point when I no longer cared about doing my job properly - I had presided over an Anglo-Japanese bad language exchange with some of my high-school-age students, and while Mr Fukuoka wasn’t too fussed about learning English, he did ask if I could teach him how to swear. My students had made a list of words on the classroom whiteboard like uzai, which means ‘You’re annoying!’ and shiné, which means ‘You die!’ and which seemed as tame to me as the aforementioned baka-yaro, but if he knew of anything more insulting or severe, Shinsuke was keeping it to himself. For my part, I listed my own top five swear words in descending order of acceptability, and explained how useful ‘stupid’, ‘fucking’ or even ‘stupid fucking’ can be when used as noun modifiers.

As the daylight faded for good, and having asked several shopkeepers and passersby, we were finally informed that the onsen in Atsugi had gone out of business (this was, incidentally, only the second time the Mapple had let me down in six weeks). There was another onsen between here and Izumi-no-Mori, but this proved almost as elusive, and even having a native speaker on my side was of little use, as we zigzagged back and forth across the Sagami River and its various tributaries. After a prolonged session of map reading at an isolated conbini, it became clear that our only option was to join Route 246, an elevated highway that would take us over the maze of industrial estates and dead-end streets.

To solve the problem of how to reach the city centre by car while still travelling at a reasonable speed, the Japanese simply raise their major roads above everything else, sometimes to double- or even triple-decker proportions, and even right in the heart of the capital, you can look out of a fourth- or fifth-floor window and still not see the the building opposite, or out of the ninth or tenth storey and directly onto an expressway. Where London has the Westway and the Limehouse Link, Tokyo has fifty times as many overpasses and underpasses (some of which were utilised to unforgettable effect in the driving sequence from Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Solaris: a real-life location otherworldly enough to pass for science fiction), and the kind of town planning that only an engineer – or perhaps J.G.Ballard – could truly appreciate.

The landscape beside Route 246 was spiked with an ever increasing concentration of tower blocks, billboards and neon signs, and I could feel myself being caught once more in the tractor beam of the big city. It was not at all the kind of road we should have been riding along - particularly with no lights - and Mr Fukuoka looked distinctly ill at ease as we hugged the barriers on the inside lane with cars roaring past us at seventy or eighty kilometres per hour.

‘Remember,’ – I had to shout to make myself heard above the traffic noise – ‘just keep going and don’t think about it!’
‘Pardon?’
‘Zen!’
‘What?’
‘You know, Zen!’

Eventually a steep slip road fed off to the left and into a quiet, leafy neighbourhood, and we were soon parking our bikes outside Yumemi-Tokoro-Kokochiyu, or to give its literal translation, ‘Have a Dream Place Sensation Onsen’. It was large, modern and busy, with all sorts of indoor and outdoor bathing gimmicks, including one in a low-ceilinged log cabin that described itself as a 'Chinese steam bath'. Having balanced out my gift-giving karma by treating Mr Fukuoka to dinner, we had set off again by about ten o’clock, and it felt odd to be cycling squeaky clean and refreshed, but without knowing how much longer it would be before I found a place to stay.

Not having attempted to phone ahead, it was wildly optimistic of me to think that I would be able to check in to the campsite at such a late hour, and sure enough, when we arrived at Izumi-no-Mori, the scene outside was not an inviting one. Beside a dimly lit side road, the entrance to a small car park was blocked with a chain, and having ducked under this, we made our way past an assortment of abandoned old cars, through the broken windows of which it was just possible to make out crumpled old duvets and discarded food wrappers. It looked very much as if the cars were being used as temporary accommodation, and the smoked glass of the less battered ones seemed to stare at us through the gloom. Even if it wasn’t possible to be a paying customer, the park seemed as good a place as any to stay, and once Mr Fukuoka had helped lift the Mariposa over the front gate, we checked an information board and headed for the camping area. At the end of a potholed track was a clearing in the woods, with the usual barbecue area and stainless steel sinks and taps. A sign warned that only groups who had booked in advance were allowed to set up camp, but having come so far, I wasn’t about to let such a trifling piece of red tape stand in my way, so left bike and baggage behind, and returned on foot to the main road to see Shinsuke off.

Izumi-no-Mori was bisected by Route 246 and directly adjacent to a large truck stop, and as we sat outside exchanging details, Mr Fukuoka noticed a sign that listed dormitory beds. Having been inside to ask about prices, he told me they only cost four thousand yen for the night.
‘Maybe I’ll stay here, then,’ I said. ‘It’s probably a little safer than camping in the forest, and I can get a proper breakfast in the morning.’
‘You’ll need your bicycle, though. Do you want me to help you bring it back?’
‘That’s OK. I’ll manage. What about you? Where will you go now?’
‘Through the centre of Tokyo. Maybe via Shibuya or Shinjuku.’
‘You should stay in a capsule hotel.’
‘No way. I want to see what it’s like, but then I’ll carry on.’
‘Where do you think you’ll be by tomorrow morning?’
‘Somewhere in Chiba, probably.’
‘So you’ll get to Ibaraki about three or four days before I do.’
‘I suppose so, yes.’

We shook hands and promised to meet again on the road one day, and with that, Mr Fukuoka disappeared into the night. I returned to the park, climbed over the fence, walked to the camping area, collected the Mariposa, and was back at the truck stop about twenty minutes later. A woman in a cleaner’s pinny and headscarf was standing behind the reception desk when I walked in.

‘Excuse me,’ I said. ‘Can I stay for one night, please?’
The woman looked up for a moment, and went back to sorting out some paperwork before giving me an answer.
‘Sorry, we’re full.’
‘There are no beds at all?’
‘No. You have to book in advance.’

This was turning into a repeat performance of my conversation with the receptionist at Shiawasé-no-Mura, and I sensed that even my lost puppy face might not succeed in changing the woman’s mind. As far as I knew, Mr Fukuoka had asked her about prices rather than vacancies, so perhaps it was my fault for not checking, although I couldn’t imagine a trucker having the presence of mind to book his sleeping venue ahead of time.

‘You see, I was going to stay at the campsite, but when I arrived it was already closed.’
She looked me in the eye once more and said, ‘Sorry, we’re full.’
‘Are you sure it isn’t possible to stay?’
‘You have to book in advance.’
‘But…my friend…I thought…’

Even if Mr Fukuoka had not asked about tonight, the implication must surely have been that he intended to stay, so the woman’s story had apparently changed merely because the prospective customer was a gaijin, and this, it dawned on me, could be my first experience of racial discrimination.

A naturalised expat called Arudou Debito (to become a Japanese citizen, foreigners are required to transpose their name to its Japanese spelling, using either kanji, hiragana or katakana, so Arudo Debito was originally christened David Aldwinckle) has been a tireless campaigner against such discrimination, which still goes on despite its illegality, and his website includes a rogues’ gallery of establishments that make life difficult for their gaijin customers, or exclude them altogether. Debito even sells a range of t-shirts copied from a sign originally seen in Gunma Prefecture, which reads ‘Japanese only – No foreigners allowed – By order of the owner’, and while the Toshin Truck Station displayed no such sign, its admissions policy was now readily apparent. It would be impossible to take the owners of a truck stop to court at eleven o’clock on a Friday night, and even if I had the linguistic ability at my disposal, I would also prefer not get into an argument. Especially this summer, the vast majority of people I had met in Japan had gone out of their way to be friendly and accommodating, so this was very much an isolated incident, and one that I decided to write off to experience.

Having done so, I cycled once more to Izumi-no-Mori, lifted the Mariposa over the fence, dodged the potholes on the path through the forest, and went about setting up camp. As vehicles came and went from the truck stop next door, their headlights shone through the trees, and wary of being reported for trespassing by an eagle-eyed driver, I switched to Stealth Mode, as I was by now so adept at erecting the Snow Peak that I could do so in total darkness. I resorted to my headlamp just once, in order to check which way round the flysheet should go, but no more than five minutes after arriving, I had cleaned my teeth, locked up the bike, stashed my panniers, and was revelling in the soothing power of Bantelin. Apart from the drone of traffic on Route 246, the forest was quiet, and it wasn’t long before I began to drift offBEEP-BEEP-BEEP-BEEP-BEEP-BEEPJesus Christ, what the fuck was that?BEEP-BEEP-BEEP-BEEP-BEEP-BEEPFuck fuck fuck fuck fuck!BEEP-BEEP-BEEP-BEEP-BEEP-BEEPThey knew where I was and they were coming to get me!BEEP-BEEP-BEEP-BEEP-BEEP-BEEPI sat up, threw on my clothes, and had taken the tent apart within seconds. My heartbeat rose to somewhere around my Adam’s apple, and I hoped that I could escape over the fence before a posse of park keepers and policemen arrived to forcibly eject me, or perhaps take me in for further questioning. By now the alarm had stopped, but as I secured my luggage to the Mariposa, it went off again, and this time I wondered if it really was connected to the local koban, or even the parkie’s pager, as it seemed more likely to be a deterrent: a motion sensor with a flashing yellow light designed to scare off opportunistic intruders just like me.

Trying to talk my way out of the front gate the next morning was always going to be difficult, and I was unlikely to sleep well with an alarm going off every few minutes, so I decided instead to search for a place with four walls, a roof, and a more liberal attitude to gaijin guests. Back at the truck stop for the fourth time tonight, and through a process of complete guesswork, I chose the road that appeared most likely to lead to civilisation, and after a couple of kilometres of closed shops and darkened streets came to a place called Tsuruma. Trains had long since stopped running for the night, but I spotted two men sitting on a bench outside the station. They were wrapped up against the night air in baseball caps and bomber jackets, and looked to be from Central or South America, with dark skin and bushy moustaches.

‘Do you know if there are any cheap hotels around here?’ I asked.
‘Around here?’ said the man on the right. ‘Hmm…’
‘You won’t find one in Tsuruma,’ said the man on the left, before being interrupted by his friend.
‘How about Yamato? I’m sure he could stay the night at the onsen. That would be pretty cheap.’
‘You mean the one on the south side of the station?’
‘No, no, no. The one with the red sign. You know, on the second floor.’

The odd thing was that while they talked to me in Japanese, they argued with each other in Spanish, and despite having studied the latter only briefly during my time at secondary school, I found that I could get the gist of what they were saying in both languages.
‘Where are you from, if you don’t mind me asking?’
‘We’re from Peru. We have lived in Japan for many years. Fifteen, sixteen years?’
‘Yes, sixteen I think. How about you?’
‘I’m from England.’
‘Do you know Solano?’
‘I’m not sure.’
‘Norberto Solano.’
‘He used to play for Newcastle. Now he has gone to Aston Villa. He is a great player.’

It was nothing if not surreal, to be talking about Aston Villa, in Japanese and Spanish, with two Peruvians, at one in the morning, next to a deserted railway station on the outskirts of Tokyo, and eventually they explained that all I needed to do was follow the railway tracks towards Yamato. Along the way I passed several cosy-looking bars whose lights were still on, and into which I was sorely tempted to go for a nightcap, but at this point, I needed a place to sleep a lot more than I needed a beer, so pressed on.

At Yamato Station the all-night onsen was nowhere to be seen, and the only person around to ask for help was touting for business on a street corner. She looked to be south-east Asian – one of many who enter the country each year on so-called ‘entertainment’ visas – and was smoking a cigarette and looking bored. I wasn’t sure how she would take to being interrupted while on duty, as it were, but she was very helpful, and didn’t seem to be offended when I declined her offer of a massage.

The receptionist at the nearby Yamato Grand Hotel quoted me a suitably grand price for a single room, so I asked if there were any cheaper hotels nearby, and was allowed to use the telephone on the front desk. The first place I called turned out to be just as expensive, but without even realising it, I had been haggling, and was suddenly offered a better deal.
‘OK,’ said the receptionist as I put the phone down. ‘You can have a single room for three thousand yen. If there are still vacancies, we charge a special rate after one thirty a.m.’

This was clearly nonsense, but I wasn’t about to complain: judging by the sort of late-night entertainment that was on offer over the road, he had simply needed to satisfy himself that my room would be used to sleep in and nothing else besides. The additional effort of escaping from Izumi-no-Mori had rekindled my appetite, so before going to bed, I ventured out to a twenty-four hour conbini for an emergency packet of peanuts-choco, noticing along the way that the girl who gave me directions had temporarily vacated her post.

0 Comments

Gaijin on a Push Bike - Day 37

26/1/2016

0 Comments

Thursday 25th August 2005 – Rest day, Fuji City (富士市)

It wasn’t exactly tempestuous when I opened the curtains, but it certainly was raining, and dull, and grey, and hardly worth getting up for. After breakfast I moved the Mariposa to a new and drier parking place, under the eaves in one of the many narrow alleyways between the ryokan’s various extensions, and did my best to give it a service. This involved oiling the chain, sprockets and gear mechanism, and inflating the tyres with something I liked to call the Crap Pump, since it was possibly even more crap than the Crap Map.

As many of the cyclists among you will know, a normal bicycle pump works like this:

1)    Unscrew plastic cover to tyre valve on front or rear wheel.
2)    Either screw or push business end of pump onto tyre valve.
3)    Inflate tyre.
4)    Either unscrew or pull business end of pump from tyre valve.
5)    Replace plastic cover on tyre valve.

But for some reason, the Crap Pump had been designed to work like this:

1)    Unscrew plastic cover to tyre valve on front or rear wheel.
2)    Unscrew plastic dooberry from metal whatsit on business end of pump.
3)    Either screw or push business end of pump onto tyre valve by locking rubber thingamajig to plastic dooberry and metal whatsit, while being careful not to let fiddly bit come loose.
4)    Attempt to inflate tyre.
5)    Realise that no air is passing from Crap Pump via tyre valve into tyre.
6)    Repeat steps 2 and 3.
7)    Inflate tyre.
8)    Unlock rubber thingumajig from plastic dooberry and metal whatsit, being careful not to send fiddly bit pinging off across the floor, never to be found again.
9)    Hear air escaping from valve as you struggle to complete step 8.
10) Repeat steps 2, 3, 7 and 8 as required.
11) Replace plastic cover on tyre valve.

Due to the unmitigated crapness of the Crap Pump, the Mariposa’s tyres had never quite been fully inflated, which had no doubt added a significant amount of time and effort to the trip. Still, there was no point in riding anywhere today, so I donned my pac-a-mac and set off on foot, in search of something a little stronger than the Nescafé instant that accompanied breakfast. Without the luxury of pedal power, distances suddenly seemed huge, as I trudged down long, straight roads from intersection to intersection. My decision to head vaguely northwest, though, proved fortuitous, as it led to a café-cum-delicatessen that specialised in imported coffee. The woman behind the counter was friendly and keen to chat to a gaijin, as they didn’t have many foreign customers, she said, apart from the occasional Brazilian with a similar craving for caffeine. She taught me the word to use when asking for a refill (お代わり / okawari), and I explained that the concept was practically unheard of in the UK, where your drink would also cost more in the first place.

At a nearby shopping mall I enrolled as a permanent member of yet another internet café, this one being as bright and spacious as a supermarket with at least a couple of hundred computers. It appeared to specialise in online role-playing games, and as I walked to my allotted PC, most of the other customers were fighting off big, hairy orcs in mythical kingdoms. With a whole day to waste, I extended my net time as far as I could manage, but ran out of obscure news stories to trawl, and was on the street again before I could tick over into a third hour of surfing.

Next door was a branch of Daiso, the most recognisable chain of hundred-yen shop, and although there was nothing I needed to buy, Daiso is a great place to browse, if only to marvel at the incredible variety of goods on offer for approximately fifty pence apiece. Such shops are another post-bubble phenomenon from the early nineties, and symbolise Japan’s ongoing economic vulnerability, not just because consumers now demand cheaper goods than ever before, but because those goods come almost exclusively from China, its new competitor and rival. When moving house, the Japanese are encouraged to take everything with them, up to and including the light fittings, and if you are the new tenant arriving in such a completely empty space, a hundred-yen shop is the ideal place to purchase supplies. Apart from large items of furniture and electrical goods, you can buy pretty much anything you need - even food, drink and clothes - and while you may not have a particularly elegant or healthy lifestyle as a result, you will end up with more change out of a ten-thousand-yen note than if you had shopped somewhere else.

By lunchtime the rain was getting heavier, and there was little in the way of cuisine to choose from in such a car-centric, suburban part of town. A lengthy search for proper food would have left me soaking wet, and I ended up negating Tuesday’s act of subversion by ordering a Filet-O-Fish and large fries at the local branch of McDonald’s (only McDonald’s, incidentally, could name a product using such an appalling linguistic bastardisation as ‘Filet-O-Fish’, which for no discernible reason utilises French, pseudo-Gaelic and English). Sitting at my spindly table on a vinyl-covered seat, and surrounded by disposable packaging and paper napkins, I was still plagued by the same feeling of déjà vu that had been with me for almost twenty-four hours. Every ten or fifteen minutes, a kind of mental hiccup would burst the same scenario into my head, although never for long enough to give me a proper look, and like a word on the tip of one’s tongue or a dream recalled upon waking up, always just beyond my grasp. In this mysterious memory, I had arranged to meet someone – possibly a Japanese couple – in a restaurant or hotel in the hills above Fuji City. We were on a veranda, or perhaps in an open-plan area with large windows, and…and that was it. Even after so many glimpses, this was as much as I could remember. I never made the vital breakthrough, was never presented with the complete picture, and never found out who else was involved or when this had all taken place.

Having squeezed as much enjoyment as I could from Fuji City, I made my way back to the ryokan, where there was nothing to do except lie on my futon, looking up at the tobacco-stained walls as the light outside began to fade. It wasn’t long before I drifted off into a siesta, and by the time I woke up the typhoon proper had arrived.

Typhoons differ from hurricanes in name only, and sweep up from the Tropics during August and September, producing three quarters of Japan’s annual rainfall in the process. Even in a city like Tokyo, when a typhoon is forecast, schools close, buses and overground trains are cancelled and the streets are all but deserted. The previous summer, a record-breaking ten typhoons had made landfall, although as with earthquakes and tsunami, the country rarely suffers as much damage as its near-neighbours in Southeast Asia. I didn’t for a minute think the Fujimi Ryokan would be blown or washed away in the night, but I did wonder how I might have coped in the countryside with only the Snow Peak for protection. Even somewhere particularly sheltered, I couldn’t see a tent lasting long, and as I subsequently found out, the storm passing over Fuji City that night was classified as no less than a Category Two Super Typhoon, with winds of up to hundred and fifty kilometres per hour, so not the kind of thing you would wish to encounter while camping.

Pairs of visitor’s slippers were neatly arranged outside several of the other rooms, and once or twice I would hear voices as they passed along the corridor, but without really intending to, I somehow contrived to avoid all human contact for the remainder of the evening, even when I emerged to eat dinner and take a bath. I would normally devour book after book if I were stuck in a hotel room, but the fact that I had brought nothing besides Morning, Noon and Night in Japanese did not seem to matter. Having written my diary, I just lay on the futon in a daze, or stared out of the window, where great gusts of wind slapped the side of the building, rattled the windows in their frames, and rocked streetlights back and forth to cast flickering shadows in the rain. Both mind and body were making the most of their rest day by simply shutting down, and my time in Fuji had been rather claustrophobic: like being given a one-day prison sentence in a jail where there is no barbed-wire fence, but no means of escape either. Listening to distant objects being flung around by the wind, I wondered before I went to sleep if the déjà vu would disappear once I had been granted parole.

0 Comments

Gaijin on a Push Bike - Day 36

18/1/2016

0 Comments

Wednesday 24th August 2005 – Shizuoka to Fuji City (静岡 – 富士市)

I had set my alarm to allow just enough time to throw on some clothes and head downstairs for breakfast, which was coffee and toast. Nothing else. No tea or orange juice; no cereal, fruit, eggs, bacon, croissants or doughnuts. Just coffee and toast, served at a few bare tables in the foyer, with sachets of sugar, individual tubs of long-life milk, butter, jam, plastic cutlery and paper plates. I stretched to two cups of coffee as I waited for a businessman to finish using the internet, only to realise when he put the laptop in his bag that the connection was available to guests, but not the computer itself.

Compared to the previous evening the conditions outside were benevolent, but as the self-appointed weatherman for my trip, Mr Heaven Valley had called to give further warning of the impending typhoon, so it seemed inevitable that I would lose at least a day’s riding. Since leaving Nagoya I had ridden the best part of two hundred kilometres and almost halfway to Tokyo, so my plan was to book into another hotel when the storm hit, and if necessary, to sacrifice all or part of the time I had set aside for catching up with friends in the capital.

Through the Shizuoka suburbs and across the Miho Peninsula, Route 1, the Tomei Expressway, the Tokaido Shinkansen and the Tokaidohon railway line all converge on the same stretch of coastline, and led me into another cathedral of concrete. I stopped to climb over the sea wall, behind which the Pacific already appeared menacing, and instead of a sandy beach found a sloping pile of concrete jacks. Tetrapods, as they are known, are ubiquitous in Japan, and resemble the six-pronged stars of the children’s game on a grand scale, being several metres in diameter and weighing up to eighty tons apiece. Their efficacy in preventing erosion has been called into question, most notably by the aforementioned Alex Kerr, and ten thousand are needed to fortify just a kilometre of coastline, which makes for many millions in the country as a whole. At a few select locations the government has begun a tetrapod removal programme, thereby restoring estuaries, harbours and beaches to their natural state, although it is not known whether the tetrapods in question are then dismantled or simply dumped somewhere different. If nothing else, they make for an enjoyably adult-sized climbing frame, and I clambered to the water’s edge and back, as wave after wave slammed against the concrete to set off fireworks of sea spray.

Cyclists and pedestrians were soon directed away from the commotion of cars, and through a village that was little more than a main street with a row of houses on either side, wedged between Route 1 and the railway line. The exertions of the past couple of days had begun to take their toll, and with my head feeling fuzzy and my limbs a dead weight, I stopped at a ramen restaurant for an early lunch. Ramen is a Chinese noodle dish that often contains strips of beef or pork and is normally made using a meat stock, but I was so desperate for food that my pescetarianism became subject to another temporary suspension.

‘Can you recommend something without meat in it?’ I asked the chef, who had a cheerful face and wore a white apron turned grey from years of use.
‘I’ve got just the thing’ he replied, and within minutes had presented me with an enormous bowl of noodles topped with what appeared to be a five-egg omlette. The stock was salty and floating with a film of oil, and after a few mouthfuls I was full again. By now, though, the chef had joined me for a chat, and anxious not to offend him, I continued to hack away at the egg with my chopsticks.
‘Where are you hoping to reach by this evening?’ he asked.
‘Mishima, I should think.’ Mishima was another thirty or so kilometres along the coast, and I ought to make it there by mid-afternoon. ‘What with the typhoon being on its way, I probably won’t get any further than that.’
‘But where will you stay?’
‘I won’t be able to camp, so a hotel, I suppose.’
‘They could be rather expensive in Mishima, and they’ll be busier too. Hang on a second.’ The chef disappeared through a door at the back of his kitchen, and returned a couple of minutes later to find me still toying with my ramen. ‘How about Fuji City? It’s a little closer than Mishima, but the hotels are cheap, and they’re more likely to have vacancies.’
‘Do you think so?’
‘Oh yes.’ He moved towards the back room again. ‘You’re not leaving yet, are you?’
‘No. This is delicious!’ I lied.

After yet more time behind the scenes he handed me two sheets of A4 paper as I paid the bill. ‘I couldn’t get through on the telephone,’ he said, ‘but if you arrive early I’m sure one of them will have some space.’

The printouts contained directions to two different hotels in Fuji City, along with their addresses and phone numbers, and once the chef had realised how little of his ramen I had managed to eat, I hoped he would feel that helping me out had been a fair swap. In actual fact, I assumed the printouts would be irrelevant, and that I would reach Mishima in time for tea, but no more than an hour or so later, hunger yet again caught up with me, and this time it wasn’t just a craving for hotto cakey setto or choco parfait.

Riding across the Fuji River, I went on what joggers like to describe as ‘the bonk’. In scientific terms, being on the bonk is a sign that your body is running out of fuel, but in symptomatic terms, it is more like smoking a joint or eating a hash cake. You feel light-headed, your body starts to tremble, and because the sensation is so unsettling as to be funny, you are also liable to get the giggles. You are hungry, of course, but not in the ‘I fancy a bit of a snack’ sense, more in the ‘GIVE ME FOOD IMMEDIATELY OR I WILL LOSE CONSCIOUSNESS’ sense. It is similar to being uncomfortably cold for an extended period of time, and as such, reminds me of the stories one hears about hypothermia: of how when death is close at hand, the sufferer is overcome with a feeling of warmth and inner peace. The next conbini couldn’t have arrived soon enough, and fearing the imminent onset of both warmth and inner peace, I ripped open a packet of peanuts-choco and devoured its contents while still laughing manically to myself. (Peanuts-choco, incidentally, is unique in its ability to combine two mediocre ingredients – peanut pieces and mass-produced milk chocolate – into one mouth-wateringly delicious snack product.) Having recovered my composure, I also fished the printouts from my rucksack and set out for the nearest of the two hotels.

On the way I passed the aftermath of an accident, although not one that had just occurred. A south-east Asian teenager, an older woman whom I could not see well and a middle-aged western man stood with two uniformed policemen, who were taking notes as they measured a set of skidmarks on the road. The parallel lines darkened to the point at which they disappeared completely, and a corresponding splash of paint dust gave the impression that a car had vanished into thin air, like Doc’s De Lorian in Back to the Future. It had probably been no more than a harmless tail-ender, but the scene had an air of mystery to it, and the fact that it was being investigated so thoroughly perhaps implied something more serious. To add to my sense of disorientation, I had begun to experience flashes of déjà vu, as every few minutes a fragment of memory skated across my mind’s eye, its significance tantalisingly beyond reach.

Then, all of a sudden, Mount Fuji appeared before me, its slopes stretching inland towards that unmistakable silhouette, which poked out perfectly from a soft ruff of cloud. Again my heart began to beat faster, but this time because I knew there could be just seconds to spare before the mountain disappeared. After dashing around for several minutes in search of a spot where no power lines would obscure the view, I rattled off two shots, one wide and one close-up, before the cloud closed in to shroud the summit once more: capturing Fuji on film was an even less regular occurrence than seeing it, and particularly as the weather forecast was so ominous, this had to be a sign.

The first hotel was a slender, ten-storey block rendered in brown tiles and grey concrete, with a huge sign hanging from the outside wall that advertised its cut-price room rate in the loudest possible terms. Situated next to a busy main road, it had two columns of small, square windows and gave off an aura of anonymity, as be-suited salarymen came and went from its glass front doors. Having stayed at business hotels both in Shizuoka and elsewhere, I knew that not only would the room be tiny, but there would be no communal space, and little chance of meeting or talking to anyone other than the receptionists, which could be pretty tedious if I was to be kept indoors by the typhoon. Admittedly, half of the windows would afford a decent view of Mount Fuji, but the other half overlooked the road, and in any case, once the weather turned there would be little to see of either.

My other printout pointed the way to a ryokan (旅館), ryokan being a more traditional kind of hotel and a step up from the business variety, not to mention a youth hostel or a minshuku (民宿), which is the Japanese equivalent of a bed and breakfast. The Fujimi Ryokan did indeed have bigger rooms and communal eating and bathing, although I needn’t have worried about the price, as it was decidedly rough around the edges, and despite the name – which means ‘Fuji look’ – was tucked away down a side street, with rooms on only two floors, and even in fine weather no hope of seeing the mountain from any of its windows.

The owner was a chubby man with features that could have passed for being European, and having greeted me at the front door, he went to sit in a tiny, cluttered office, passing pen and check-in form towards me through a sliding window.
‘Where are you from?’ he asked. ‘Are you American?’
‘No, I’m from England.’
‘Ah! I have been to England. I went there after I graduated from university, on a cycling tour.’
‘Really? Where did you go?’
‘Oh, you know, London, Brighton, Canterbury, many places. I was there for about three weeks. The English people were very kind to me. I also travelled around Europe. To France, Italy and so on.’

We discussed our respective tours as he showed me around the ryokan, whose original structure appeared to have been augmented in a somewhat random fashion, so that you often found yourself walking along a rubber mat beside the car park, or through a corridor made from nothing more than corrugated plastic, and filled with random bits of furniture and kitchen equipment. There was some wood involved in the building’s construction, but most of the outside walls were of aluminium siding, originally painted brick red and now faded from exposure to the elements.

As is invariably the case in a traditional hotel, I had been issued with a pair of visitor’s slippers. These loathsome items of footwear are to be found in any building where members of the public are required to remove their footwear upon entering and do not happen to have brought their own (believe it or not, some people carry an emergency pair of slippers with them at all times). Like other indigenous products, a single company appears to have a monopoly on the manufacture of visitor’s slippers, meaning they only ever come in two sizes (adult or child), two colours (red or green), and one universally impractical shape. Made from cheap plastic and embossed in gold lettering with the name of whichever establishment you happen to be visiting, they are merely flat soles with a pocket sewn to the front that resembles half a pitta bread, and into which the wearer inserts their foot. The trouble is, as soon as you begin to move, your visitor’s slippers will fly off and shoot several metres down the corridor or across the room, and the only way to keep them on for more than a few seconds is to curl your toes into a claw while shuffling along like an emperor penguin on incubation duty. When it comes to negotiating a flight of stairs, even this technique is ineffective, the usual outcome being an undignified tumble of feet, limbs and slippers to the floor below. Like the warm-air hand dryer, there was apparently no testing stage in the design process for visitor’s slippers, but the orders nonetheless came flooding in, and as a result, unsuspecting victims all over the country are left to curse their uselessness.

My own visitor’s slippers lay in wait outside my room, daring me to escort them to dinner, but I couldn’t face it, and resolved to feign forgetfulness should anyone ask why I was only wearing socks. As I took my seat in the dining room, two young men at the next table introduced themselves. They were already winding down after a day of meeting clients on a business trip, and I hoped they might invite me along on their search for nightlife in Fuji City. But no matter how many times they tried to explain, I couldn't even work out what it was they were selling (slippers, perhaps, or warm-air hand dryers?), so would probably have cramped their style. Instead, I rode to the nearest conbini for a can of beer and a chocolate bar, and was asleep on my futon by ten, still exhausted from the effort of escaping Nagoya. Meanwhile, the déjà vu had continued all evening, and despite my efforts to capture the image as I drifted off, even in the dark and with my eyes closed, it remained elusive.

0 Comments

Gaijin on a Push Bike - Day 35

11/1/2016

3 Comments

Tuesday 23rd August 2005 – Lake Hamana to Shizuoka (浜名湖 – 静岡市)
Presents – Mount Fuji photographs, haircut discount, fish restaurant discount, postcards, Guinness

After a couple of months of neglect, my hair had become unruly and uncomfortable in the heat (ie. it had grown to about a centimetre and a half long), but while there were scores of barbershops in the city of Hamamatsu – one on every corner, so it seemed – almost all of them were closed.

‘Barbershops have always shut on Tuesdays,’ said the proprietor of the only one I found open, a clutter of hairdressing equipment with a large tropical fish tank as its centrepiece. ‘I’m not sure why, it’s just a tradition.’
‘You were lucky to find us open,’ continued his wife. ‘We normally do the same thing, except we’re going away tomorrow and had to rearrange our days off.’

Despite a recent trend for Kwik Kut 4 A Fiver While-U-Wait-type establishments, most Japanese barbershops are like they used to be in Britain: the kind of places that still have a revolving red-and-white-striped pole above the door, and where you can be properly pampered. Here the price of a haircut included hot towels, a massage and a wet shave, although I declined the latter, as the husband’s dexterity with a set of clippers reminded me of Gene Wilder’s comedy hand in Blazing Saddles…

THE WACO KID
Holding up his right hand, which doesn’t move.
Look at that.

SHERIFF BART
Steady as a rock.

THE WACO KID
Holding up his left hand, which is shaking like a leaf.
Yeah, but I shoot with this hand.

…and I didn’t fancy him coming anywhere near me with a cutthroat razor.

‘I’ve got very, er, sensitive skin,’ I explained as he began to dab shaving cream onto my face, ‘so I’ll come out in a rash, I’m afraid.’
‘Ah, I see. That’s OK, we’ll give you a discount.’

But perhaps wet shaves were his wife’s responsibility, since she took over when it came to using scissors. Several photographs of Mount Fuji were tucked into the edges of the mirror, and I asked her about their significance.
‘Our daughter lives near there,’ she said, ‘and we take a lot of pictures when we’re visiting – if the weather’s good enough, of course. Unfortunately there’s a typhoon on the way, so you may not get to see it this week.’

I became interested in Fuji as a teenager when my mother introduced me to Hokusai’s Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji – a series of woodcuts from the early 1800s that includes the famous image of a gigantic wave about to crash down on a group of fishing boats – and since then it had become something of an obsession. Even from the centre of Tokyo, Fuji’s iconic profile would have been a regular sight in Hokusai’s time, but in nine months of living there I saw it only twice: once from the elevated section of a commuter line as I went to work, and once at sunset, from a top-floor bar in the headquarters of Asahi Breweries. Fuji is so much higher than any other mountain in Japan that in the right conditions it is visible from hundreds of kilometres away, although regular hikes in the surrounding countryside had granted me just a handful of further sightings, as quite apart from industrial smog and traffic fumes, it is a magnet for cloud cover.

The only guarantee of seeing Fuji’s summit is to go there in person, which I managed just a few months after arriving in Japan. Tradition dictates that the best time to do so is overnight, thus enabling you to watch the sunrise when you reach the top, so after catching a lunchtime bus to Kawaguchi Fifth Station – two thousand three hundred metres up and as far as you can go by road – I had several hours to wait before there was any point in setting out. A fellow conversation school teacher, Mr Newfoundland, had been sitting next to me on the bus, and we spent the time together, sitting under a tree, talking about Don DeLillo and eating barbecued squid. Having begun the climb at eight p.m., by midnight we were about three thousand four hundred metres above sea level, and rested at one of the many mountain huts – or ‘hotels’ as they call themselves. These are staffed by a hardy band of people for whom the lack of oxygen at altitude makes them seem like pot-smoking stoners, although with an icy wind now whipping across the mountainside and a similar lack of blankets, I only managed about an hour’s sleep.

Unlike Himeji Castle, the Genbaku Dome and the Itsukushima Shrine, for instance, Mount Fuji had yet to be granted the status of a UNESCO World Heritage Site [editor’s note: it has now, although as a site of cultural significance rather than one of natural beauty], and while its sunrise was indeed spectacular - Mr Newfoundland and I arrived there at about four thirty in the morning - the irony is that Fuji looks a lot better from a distance. Its huts resemble a bad case of fly-tipping, its zigzagging paths are shored up with steel and concrete, and Caterpillar-style tractors carry supplies all the way to the top, where you will find vending machines, souvenir shops and even a post office. Indeed, my most treasured photograph from the hike was taken at the highest point on the crater rim, and depicts not the summit itself but its flat-topped shadow on the plains of Yamanashi Prefecture far below.

For me, though, as for many others, the mountain has an almost mystical significance: a significance that is rendered even more poignant by its fragility, a further irony being that Fuji may one day be lost forever, since as a volcano it is not extinct but dormant.

Once they had finished cutting my hair, the barbershop couple presented me with a small selection of their own photographs, and typhoon or no typhoon, World Heritage status or no World Heritage status, I looked forward to being in its presence once more.

Route 1 was lined for its entire length with waist-high bollards painted powder blue, which counted down the distance to Tokyo in 250-metre increments, and which no matter how hard I tried, kept on creeping into my field of vision. By lunchtime there were still three-hundred kilometres to go, and I had an idea for something that might distract me from this, while at the same time subverting the power of multinational corporate capitalism: I decided to become (possibly) the first person in history to eat at a McDonald’s without buying any of its products.

Supersize that! I thought, as I wiped my mouth with a McDonald’s serviette, threw my plastic packaging from a conbini-bought lunch in a McDonald’s dustbin, and washed my face and hands in a McDonald’s bathroom, all without having placed an order at the till.

With cyclists prohibited from entering a long tunnel beneath the next headland I followed the old coast road instead, which rose spectacularly to cling to the cliff face, with a hundred-metre drop to the Pacific to my right. As the road descended towards Shizuoka, one section appeared to have collapsed or been buried by a rockfall, but rather than repair it, the powers that be had decided to go for broke, constructing a two-hundred-and-fifty-metre-long stretch that looped out over the sea in a huge arc.

I was hoping to stay the night at Miho Youth Hostel, but no one picked up the phone when I called to make a reservation, and by the time I reached Shizuoka, the typhoon appeared to have arrived early. Great waves crashed against the shore as a bank of black cloud rolled along the coast to swallow me up, and with the hostel still a good ten kilometres away, it would be no fun at all to find the place shut, particularly as there appeared to be nothing else on the Miho Peninsula besides a golf course.

Having turned round and headed back towards the city centre, I found four university students outside Shizuoka station who had cycled all the way from Fukuoka in northern Kyushu. (Like Fukuda and Fukudomé, Fukuoka is pronounced ‘foo-koo-oh-ka’, although it may not surprise you to learn that the three-letter acronym for the its airport is the satisfyingly curt FUK.) Having abandoned their plan to climb Mount Fuji, which was already closed to hikers in anticipation of the typhoon, they too had tried and failed to contact Miho Youth Hostel, and I asked where they planned on staying instead.

‘We’ll probably just sleep here,' said one. Their meagre pile of belongings and bicycles was strewn along a cold stretch of pavement, and sheltered only by the overhanging station façade. ‘We’ve got tickets for a train home in the morning.’
‘Have you been using youth hostels the whole time?’
‘No,' he said. 'We usually stay in Gusto.’ Gusto was the chain of family restaurants where Mr Ohio’s furiita girlfriend Miss Bow Child had worked night shifts. ‘They’re open twenty-four hours, and if you get a table out of sight of the waitresses you can normally get some sleep.’

Much as I would have liked to keep them company, I certainly didn’t fancy bedding down with a bunch of students in the open air, and asked if they could keep an eye on the Mariposa while I went in search of something a little less austere. The lights were off at the tourist information desk, but a member of staff from the shop next door noticed me loitering.
‘I’m afraid they shut about half an hour ago,’ she said. ‘Can I help at all?’
‘I was hoping to find a place to stay.’
‘There’s a list behind here somewhere. Hang on, I’ll see if I can find it for you.’

After a couple of minutes rifling through piles of papers and leaflets, she produced a photocopied map that was dotted with marks from a highlighter pen and listed ten or fifteen hotels. The first one I called turned out to be the cheapest, and while I hoped the students wouldn’t be offended by my decision to spend six thousand yen on a bed for the night, they seemed like the kind of people who thrived on a bit of hardship, to the extent that even if they had the cash, I fancied they wouldn’t spend it on anything so indulgent.

Apart from being slightly more compact than its foreign equivalent, my room at a nearby business hotel was comfortingly familiar, with a view from its one window of a blank wall, a flat roof and some heating ducts. The glass tumblers were wrapped in plastic, the toilet paper neatly folded to a point, and there was a pyramid of white towels on a high shelf in the bathroom. It felt as if I was betraying my principles by surrendering to such luxuries, but these were extraordinary circumstances, and there was still room in my budget for the occasional treat, particularly now that I was off the tourist trail and campsites and youth hostels were harder to come by.

With no need even to unroll my sleeping bag at the end of the evening I was in the mood for a pint of beer in a proper pub, although my first stop was a fish restaurant, whose proprietors fed me their most interesting and obscure dishes, none of whose ingredients I can remember, except to say that they were delicious. I left with a hefty discount on my bill, along with a present of some postcards depicting Japanese festivals, and the more I encountered such generosity, the more I became convinced of the reason for it. People went out of their way to help me not because I was foreign, but because I had made an honest attempt to speak their language, and while I never believed that my rudimentary grasp of Japanese merited such special treatment, I understood that it garnered respect simply for being such a rare occurrence.

That key phrase in any language, ‘Can you tell me the way to the nearest pub?’ came in handy as I stood outside the restaurant, where a young couple did some quick keitai research before escorting me to a bar in an underground shopping mall. I offered to buy them a drink by way of thanks, but they declined, confessing that they were still in high school, and therefore too young to be allowed in: being English, I still made the mistake of assuming that anyone over the age of fourteen was a hardened binge-drinker, when in fact it is illegal buy alcohol in Japan until you are twenty, a law that most youngsters seem happy to abide by.

It wasn’t exactly the gaijin hang-out I had been hoping for, as there were no foreigners, no pint glasses and no real ale, but it was full of people winding down after a hard day at the office, and the most wound down of them all was sitting right next to me. A stereotypical salaryman in a suit and tie, he had a moustache, wire-framed glasses and a parting in his salt-and-pepper hair, which became progressively more unkempt as the evening wore on. Between ordering whiskies and fielding emails from his wife, he told me about his job in computers, his love for The Beatles and The Rolling Stones, and his passion for baseball. Just as I was bracing myself for an onslaught of statistics or a discussion of the designated hitter rule, another email came through, and he made the sign of the devil’s horns: a crooked index finger sprouting from each temple.
‘She is very angry,’ he slurred, and after one final whiskey was staggering out of the door, briefcase in hand.
‘Is that guy a regular?’ I asked the next customer along the bar.
‘Of course,’ she said, ‘he’s always in here.’
‘And he’s always pissed,’ confirmed her friend.

The two women had also come straight from work, although they appeared to be pacing themselves a little more sensibly, and having been introduced, I immediately forgot their names. In the UK, such an eventuality can be disguised by the judicious use of the second-person pronoun, but in Japan, it is often considered rude to address someone as ‘you’. Instead, a new acquaintance will normally be called by their surname with the suffix ‘san’, although since many gaijin introduce themselves Christian name first, surname second, they will be referred to as Peter-san or Jane-san, rather than Smith-san or Jones-san. Add to this the abundance of first-person pronouns, the appropriate use of which can depend on status, context or politeness, and the aspiring Japanese speaker has yet another linguistic assault course to negotiate. Too embarrassed to ask the women’s names for a second time, I spent much of the evening coming up with name-avoidance strategies, which appeared to work, as they were happy to take me to Shizuoka’s real gaijin pub.

At the improbably named My Boozer, I was served with my first Guinness of the summer, although it wasn’t of the draught variety, and it wasn’t quite a pint, either. Brewed in Australia, the head-less drink was poured from a bottle into a glass, before being placed on a contraption that looked like a teleporter from the Starship Enterprise. Either through the application of some kind of electromagnetic field, or via the column of neon light that shone from beneath the glass, its bubbles were activated and the black liquid became magically frothy. While not the best I had ever tasted, the resulting Guinness was much appreciated, particularly as it had been paid for by a new member of our party, a younger, slightly less stereotypical salaryman who happened to work for Sapporo Breweries, and whose name I didn’t catch above the the sound of a pool table, a jukebox and a respectable crowd of Tuesday night drinkers.

By the time we called it a night I had forgotten where the Mariposa was chained up, and had to laboriously retrace my steps via the bar in the shopping mall. As I ambled back to the hotel, I reflected that contrary to being long on distance and short on conversation, today’s trek along Route 1 had required me to speak more Japanese, and to a greater variety of people, than at any other pint on the trip…sorry, I mean ‘point’.

3 Comments

<<Previous

Gaijin on a Push Bike - Epilogue

Gaijin on a Push Bike - Day 43

Gaijin on a Push Bike - Day 42

Gaijin on a Push Bike - Day 41

Gaijin on a Push Bike - Day 40

Gaijin on a Push Bike - Day 39

Gaijin on a Push Bike - Day 38

Gaijin on a Push Bike - Day 37

Gaijin on a Push Bike - Day 36

Gaijin on a Push Bike - Day 35

Archives

Categories

About me 私について