Welcome To My Home

This weekend, we had friends visiting us from the UK. Some of my favourite nights out in Japan have involved visitors from abroad. I’ve really enjoyed showing visitors round the city. It’s funny how quickly you develop a sense of civic pride about a place. I was so proud of Manchester when I lived there, even though I had only actually been a resident for a couple of years. Now, I always feel that I really want to show off the best that Okayama and the surrounding region have to offer.

Sometimes in London, you see foreign tourists walking along Shaftesbury Avenue or Charing Cross Road at about dinnertime, desperately looking for somewhere decent to eat. And then, invevitably, they make their way to the Angus Steak House or Aberdeen Steak House. You want to rescue them and guide them off the main road towards Soho proper, but you can’t. Fortunately, this is not something that could ever happen in Okayama.

Okayama doesn’t really have an equivalent of Shaftesbury Avenue. Sure, it has some slightly touristy areas. The Bikantiku area of Kurashiki for example is tacky as hell, full of shops selling junk and overpriced cafes (this is not to slate that area totally as it’s quite pretty and the Ohara Art Gallery is excellent).

Okayama isn’t somewhere that you’d usually visit as a foreign tourist. It has a beautiful garden, some historical areas, a history of pottery craftsmanship and some other bits and bobs. But the Lonely Planet only devotes a couple of pages of the “you could actually spend half a day here” variety. In the end though, a karaoke booth in Okayama is much like a karaoke booth in Shibuya, Tokyo.

So there’s a Hefner song I like with the line “How can she love me if she doesn’t even love the cinema that I love?” That’s basically how I feel when it comes to visitors. If they don’t like the Korakuen Garden or aren’t impressed by the lush countryside I get doubtful about whether we have anything in common really. This shows that a) I am the most tremendous snob, b) I am a poor judge of character and c) If you want to deceive me Hustle-style, you should just, on meeting me, casually drop Pulp b-sides into the conversation until I hand over my bank details and the keys to my flat.

Highlights of the weekend: Lounging in my favourite Okayama cafes, trying blue beer, encouraging others to pay money to try blue beer, amazing yakitori (how did we survive before yakitori entered our lives?), playing an arcade game where you have to overturn a table in an onscreen bar by flipping a piece of wood on the control panel, discovering that Soundbeat karaoke has Rip It Up by Orange Juice.

The above picture of Ted Hughes has nothing to do with any of this but he does have an impressive jaw.