Let's Go!

No time for blog updates recently. That’s because I’ve been frantically busy as I prepare to leave Japan. On Saturday I will be taking the shinkansen up to Tokyo. There, I have 4 days to wallow in nostalgia and stuff myself senseless before boarding my British Airways flight back to London.

There have been many, many leaving ceremonies, presentations and parties. I have received a mountain of beautiful and thoughtful gifts. I have visited Korakuen, Kurashiki, my favourite ramen restaurant, my favourite yakitori restaurant and all the cutest cafes in town. I’ve got wasted with the other JETs and done karaoke for a mammoth 5 hours without any problems. Approximately 1 million photos have been taken of rice fields.

I’m ready to go.

Ikimasho….Let’s go!

Forever Delayed

What a few weeks it has been. Too busy to update but filled with a mixture of stress, fun stuff and seriously awesome stuff.

To start with, I have been cleaning like a maniac, packing stuff away and generally doing dull tasks. None of that has been fun, but I have been reasonably well organized which has made stuff less irritating. Also, my supervisor has been excellent at helping me to make leaving arrangements. Once again, I feel guilty at how much other people do for me here. But I also feel relieved that I will soon be able to take responsibility for my personal arrangements once more.

My Junior High English Club did a leaving presentation for me and I felt quite emotional really. They have the tear jerking mixture of being both overly-earnest and very cute indeed. I’ve also started to receive a range of beautiful gifts. My favourite so far has been a set of two lacquered cups. I like them because they will definitely be used and look identifiably Japanese in design. Also, the person who gave them to me wrote  a very sweet card.

One strange aspect of Japanese gift-giving protocols is that receiving gifts can sometimes be slightly depressing. That’s because the routine of gift-giving is so ingrained that many gifts are based on a societal obligation rather than an individual act of kindness. A lot of the time people exchange rather thoughtless gifts that involved the minimum of effort in purchase. This can sometimes be a little upsetting if you have given a thoughtful gift in the opposite direction. Also, a premium is placed on the financial value of the gift and I generally feel that shouldn’t be too important.

Remember this place? Well we returned last weekend. This time we decided to stay for 2 nights so that we could relax and take it easy. I could easily have stayed for a week without getting bored. The surrounding area is so lush and encapsulates so many of the things that I love about Okayama. I had a great time talking about Japanese pop music with East Asia’s drunkest man. We walked up a mountain in a slightly blissful mood. On the way back we stopped off at what might be rural Japan’s only Iranian pizza restaurant. And a fine place it was too.

So now that we're back from this very romantic stay in the mountains where it was just the two of us, idyllic and romantic. I thought I should post the following song, for no obvious reason...

A Final Visit To Hiroshima

Last weekend, I visited Hiroshima with some friends to spend some time together before our departure and to see that great city for the second time.

I’d already been to the Peace Museum, which is extraordinary, but I decided to give it a miss this time. We did sit by the dome at night and I was again struck by its emotional impact and the horrible jagged edges.

I prefer Hiroshima-style okonomiyaki to the type that you get in Osaka. I like it because you get a fried egg and because it’s a big mess, rather than a pancake. On this occasion, we went to a pretty average restaurant to have it, but I still enjoyed it. I still think it’s one of the least healthy foods that I’ve ever eaten. Everything about it is bad for you, but maybe that’s a good thing.

In fact, this was not a healthy weekend. For a start, I slipped up on the smoking and felt guilty about it as I puffed my way through the two days. Secondly, we really did drink an awful lot, eat unhealthily and get very little sleep. I don’t regret any of the above, but it did take its toll as the weekend rolled on.

The first epic night out was spent drinking ridiculous “Skytree cocktails”, stuffing our faces with izakaya fare and then heading to the nightlife centre nearby for 2 hours of karaoke silliness. You can’t beat a bit of karaoke silliness. I measure any karaoke session by whether or not I start climbing on the furniture and on this occasion I did not. But I did discover that I enjoy singing Ceremony by New Order which wasn’t something I knew beforehand.

The following day, we went for a full English breakfast at Hiroshima’s cheesiest “English Pub”. I don’t usually go to themed English stuff but I did enjoy it as a novelty and it was great to have proper streaky bacon. I guess that if you’re on holiday in Greece or whatever, then UK/Irish themed places are pretty much the crappiest thing you can do and should be avoided. But now I live here, there’s definitely something to be said for it, provided it’s rare. It can actually be fun to have a break from Japanese culture sometimes, whether that’s a pub, a decent hamburger or whatever.

The Hiroshima Museum of Contemporary Art had a great exhibition of Art Brut on, backed up by a 90 minute documentary on different artists from the movement. I’ve been interested in art brut ever since seeing a Jarvis Cocker documentary on it back in the late ‘90s (even then, Jarvis was always doing “worthy” stuff outside the band, which used to annoy me because the gap between Pulp albums was so long, but which I now realize was just part of a slow descent into Radio 4 dull-ery where he doesn’t actually need to create anything decent artistically at all but can instead just bask in Guardian adulation for Being Jarvis Cocker…) and I enjoyed the exhibition. There was also a cool Henry Moore sculpture outside and a little park area that overlooked the city and had a map of what it had looked like immediately after the bombing.

Saturday night was even more epic than the Friday. In Japan, you often get nightlife areas which consist of 7 or 8 floor buildings. Outside the buildings there is a sign that just gives the name of the bar. You can’t see into the bar from outside or get any impression of what it’s like, other than from the location and the name. I find these bars quite forbidding because you never know what you’re gonna get. A lot of them are Hostess Bars, which doesn’t really apply to me as a) I don’t speak Japanese and b) I don’t want to pay someone to make small-talk with me. Some of them are basically strip-joints, some are a mix between the two and some are just ordinary bars.

So on this night, we decided to each choose bars from the street and then visit them, as a way of breaking through this barrier. The only condition was that it couldn’t be anything too seedy. This led to us discovering a range of odd places. There was the darts bar, The Beatles-themed bar, the bar with misogynistic posters about beer being better than women plus many bars where we poked our heads round the door only to quickly reverse at first sight of a freaked out barmaid.

I felt sad to leave Hiroshima. It’s definitely one of my favourite cities in Japan and would certainly be a place I’d consider living if I ever relocated here. When I tell Japanese friends that I’m visiting Hiroshima, they immediately ask me whether I’m going to visit the shrine at Miyajima, as if the city itself is something not to be talked about. But this is a shame because whilst Miyajima is pretty enough, Hiroshima represents so much that is great about Japan and whilst the history can be saddening, the redevelopment of the city is one of the great Japanese achievements. Hiroshima-I shall miss you and your strange ways. It’s all about the jagged edges.