It's the little things we do, when you go out in the night

No, no, no. Never again. No nay never, no never, no more. I am never drinking again - until the next time, obviously.

A housemate's birthday is always a big occasion, and Saturday was J's 21st. A bunch of J and S's friends came up from their hometown, and with most of my housemates elsewhere, hosting duties were down to me. What with their having started drinking early on, I was very well-lubricated by the time we went out to the Elbow Room. Make that completely smashed. I was dancing like a loon amongst all the trendy types on the dancefloor, getting odd looks and the occasional thumbs-up. I knew what a fool I was making of myself, but I didn't care. Self-awareness mixed with joyous abandon - it's a good combination, and the way I'd like to live all of my life. Shame I have to get terrifically drunk to do it.

Arriving back at the house a little after everyone else, I found my room turned upside down and my safe gone. It was a practical joke by one of our guests, who kept dropping me subtle hints for the rest of the night about whose room he'd left the safe in. This made me laugh in the morning. We weren't exactly in Da Vinci Code territory - I was having trouble understanding simple sentences, let alone coded messages.

The following afternoon, we braved the outside world to go to the pub and watch the football. I don't really support any team, but I can watch a football match and appreciate it. The trouble is, I do it in a rather detached way, which coupled with my hungover state meant I was the only person in a crowd of cheering Manchester United fans sitting down, clapping my hands at the goal and drawling "Fantastic. Jolly good show. Super-duper."

I have a feeling that they somehow had me pegged as a casual fan.

Unfortunately, today classes begin again and I have my nose to the grindstone once more. Expect more adventures to the furthest edges of my sanity Japanese grammatical forms, as 2007 rumbles on.

Talking it over, Part 2: in which your hero finds his flow seriously messed wit'

I'm looking forward to it - going over the experience made me realise what a great time I had over there. Considering how apprehensive I was in the run-up to my departure, I want to convince everybody that it will be as good for them as it was for me.

Oh, I had a plan. I had a plan alright. A plan that disappeared the moment I saw Ilkka had come to the meeting as well.

Ilkka and I were at Kansai Gaidai together. He was a professional cynic, and his heart certainly was in it. We'd had some great times together, but considering that he'd spent most of the year bashing Gaidai and its large American population, I wasn't looking forward to doing the presentation with him.

We got up and stood in front of the first years. After a brief introduction, I began telling them a little bit about Kansai Gaidai. As soon as I paused, Ilkka was ready...

Ilkka: You might hear that Kansai Gaidai is a Japanese university. It's actually an American university...
Me: Well, there are a lot of Americans th-
Ilkka: ...where the foreign students are kept separated from the rest of the students!"

And on it went. I was giving a presentation on Kansai Gaidai, and Ilkka was constantly interjecting with observations from the Twilight Zone. He said that Hirakata was a hellhole, and that Japan was the only country in the world where he'd been attacked on the street. (Given that I there at the time, I think the reference was a sly dig at me, as he thinks I was responsible for it).

Every one of Ilkka's asides met with shocked laughter from the first years, and sotto voce pleas from the teachers to say "something positive". I was out there on my own trying to hold the show together, as the presentation degenerated into a back-and-forth exchange of bizarre and contradictory statements like some twisted manzai routine. In fact, I wish it was manzai - at least then I could shout at Ilkka and slap him every time I wanted to. Which was a lot.

After the talk, I had a few first years coming up to me and asking if the stuff Ilkka said was true. I replied "No" to every one and tried to give them some real gen on Kansai Gaidai, to make up for the damage done. Everyone, from the teachers on down, seemed universally stunned. If there's any kind of lesson I can draw from this, it's that you have the best plan ever, but it won't work if you're confronted with someone determined to screw it up.

KGU connections

I went out to a Japanese Society social last night. I was rather pleased to find my Japanese hadn't deserted me completely. I met a student from Kansai Gaidai, which was rather fun, and a little nostalgic.

I'm enjoying my Asia-Pacific module at the moment, as I can appear intelligent in class by simply saying things I've cribbed from Scott's Pacific Rivalry course back at Kansai Gaidai. It worked a little too well when one of my comments segued into a showing of the same documentary series we'd watched in Scott's classes.

All these coincidences ... is Kansai Gaidai in fact the Lost island? I'll have to find a picture of the time my friend Joe was in a wheelchair. Don't tell him what he can't do.

Low Crimes and Misdemeanours

As a famous aristocrat once wrote, "Never apologise, never explain". But then, sometimes it does you a world of good. Last Saturday, after the excursion to London, I went round to the hosue shared by fellow activity organisers at the school for a barbequeue, which turned into a late night party. At some point during the evening, punch was made in a plastic bucket. Thinking punch is basically fruit juice with a little more of a kick, I went straight for it, unaware of what precisely made up this punch. For the record, it was almost entirely rum. It was not so much 'punch' as 'GBH'. The last thing I remember that night was coming round and wondering why I had a redhead wig on my head.

The big question this week was whether to say sorry for getting amazingly drunk, abusing their hospitality, smashing all the slats out of the spare bed and crashing at their place. But oddly enough, the only thing I was asked about was a missing bottle of white wine that one of the girls had put in the fridge. I don't remember drinking it, and I don't think it would have been physically possible in the state I was in to open it. But still, tonight I set off for the staff house carrying a bottle of white wine that I have pinched from my family's store (in the manner of a Wehrmacht officer billeted in a French chateau). If you had to ask me why, it wouldn't be for the need to apologise somehow for my ridiculous behaviour, or the thought that it wasn't worth arguing over something I don't even know if I did or not. It was because of one of the important rules of my life: that it's never a good thing to get on the wrong side of a pretty girl for too long.

My Second-Last Day

Last night I went out with some Australian and Japanese students for a few drinks at an izakaya. Which turned into a few drinks and karaoke afterwards. Great fun, and reminds me that karaoke should also get a mention in the previous post. It's hard to believe that by tomorrow I'll be back in the U.K. Still, it's been an amazing nine months.

I will continue to keep an eye on Japan, blog on any news or issues about it that I find interesting, and of course carry on learning the language. For than anything else, the year abroad has reminded me of why I'm interested in Japan. That's definitely going to help with the remainder of my degree. And after that, I'd like to come back here. While my interest has widened to other countries in Asia over the course of this year, I'm pretty sure that Japan will always hold a special place in my heart.

UPDATE: This post from Adamu at Mutant Frog looks back at his experience in Japan. A good read, and sort of says what I was trying to say.

Fukuoka: Part the First

So, on Thursday I went down to Fukuoka on the shinkansen. It was raining in Osaka, and all across the area of western Japan we tore through in the morning. Arriving at Hakata station, though, the sun was shining. Hah! Moore - 1, weather - 0.

I dumped my stuff in the hotel, then met up with Jake and the other Leeds people studying at Fukuoka. I got a miniature guided tour of the city, wandering through the Canal City development, across the river and up to Tenjin, the big shopping/partying centre. I was struck by how small it all seemed after Osaka, but that wasn't necessarily such a bad thing. It was nice to be in a city where "the centre" was something you could cross on foot.

A rough trajectory of the evening follows:

- We see a animation show on the top floor on a bookshop, by an outfit that do short films of oddly-done jungle animals. They are giving away free badges on the way out. I grab a few for presents.

- We sit outside a conveience store where one of the girls says she's going to look for "HedgeCat". I assume this is someone she knows, as she uses nicknames for everybody (real quote from her: "I'm not worried about MaxiHat anymore, because now I have MiniHat.") Turns out HedgeCat is a real cat, who lives by the store. For a stray cat, he looks remarkably healthy. We pet him for a bit, before he takes offence to me, hisses and runs off. He must be able to tell a Kansai resident from a Fukuoka one.

- We go to an izakaya (Japanese pub-style place). When ordering drinks, I ask for a "big beer" and am brought something the aproximate size of a rain-water butt. I drink it dry and ask for another. Finally, a place that knows my tastes and does its best to accommodate them.

- We go to an amusement arcade. The girls try a game where you throw balls at a screen to zap various things threatening cute characters. The game is called "GASHaaaaan!" which makes me laugh out loud. The guys go for "House of the Dead 4". I mow down crowds of zombies in a tube station, an experience which brings back traumatic memories of rush-hour Osaka and Tokyo. We meet back up, and have all have a go at the ball-throwing game together.

- We head upstairs to go bowling. As I haven't gone bowling in over a year (and I was rubbish back then) I'm not looking forward to this. We talk about the low-rent bowling alley near Morrisons' back in Leeds, and how my old flatmate from last year stole a pair of bowling shoes from there to wear in clubs and other places with "formal" dress-codes. I am surprisingly good at bowling, even though Jake tells me I strike a "Spiderman" pose at one point. I explain that I was bitten by a radioactive bowling ball.*

*(I actually didn't. But it would have been funny as hell if I'd thought of it at the time.)

- We go to a club called Happy Cock (yes, really) to have a few drinks and watch the England-Trinidad and Tobago match. Because we get there super-early, we get wristbands which mean we can drink all we want for 1000 yen. I pronounce this the greatest thing ever, and immediately get a drink to celebrate.

- The dancefloor is filling with Japanese people in b-boy clothing. They look like the breakdancers who practice in Hirakata train station, and throw shapes at each other in a hilarious "You Got Served" style. Jake tells me that they are members of the Fukuoka University breakdancing club. I tell him that I "could do better than that." He motions to me to go ahead.

- The dancefloor has turned into a circle of breakdancers, who take turns performing jaw-dropping moves in the middle. Jake asks if I'd like to try and do better. The circle breaks up temporarily, and I step to the dancefloor and tear it up for a bit. They don't ask me to join their crew, but I think I earned their respect. Now all I have to do is beat a Japanese person at Dance Dance Revolution, and I will have something to legitimately boast about.

- Jake introduces me to two friends of his, who happen to be hot Japanese girls. I try to think of things to say to them, and realise my level of drunkenness has gone right past "Language ability magically improves" and into "Language ability goes straight to hell." I must be more drunk than I thought. This is confirmed when one of them asks me to go up and get a drink. Let's break this down a minute:

Normal thought process:
Hot girls suddenly interested in me + lack of nomihodai wristbands + request to buy drinks for them = manipulating whores using me to get alcohol
My drunken thought process at the time:
Hot girls suddenly interested in me + lack of nomihodai wristbands + request to buy drinks for them = Wow, I'm such a stud. I'd better get them a drink.

- Having got what they wanted, the girls proceed to ignore me. I am angry beyond measure. Charging up to the bar to get a drink for myself, the following conversation takes place in my head:
"Dude, you've been drinking a lot. Don't you think you should slow down, get some water in between?"
"Well, they are cocktails. They're not strong. In fact, look at the amount of vodka she put in that last one. That's a piss-weak drink by anybody's standards."
"Yeah, I guess there's not a lot of alcohol there."
"And the mixer is basically like drinking water anyway."
"Yeah. Slam a couple more, you're doing fine."

- It is later. I am not doing fine. I am sprawled on a sofa trying to watch the match, but sinking into semi-consciousness with each passing moment. I miss seeing England's last two goals, but hear the reaction and manage to cheer with everybody else as the replay unfolds.

- We leave the club. I decide to rant to Jake about how women are "manipulating whores" and that his friends are "off the list". Perhaps sensibly, he does not ask me to elaborate.

- The Leeds people point me in the direction of my hotel, and get a cab back to their dorms. Although it is literally a straight line to my hotel, I have to stop people several times and ask them for directions. I stagger into my hotel room, and glance at my watch before I pass out. I have been in Fukuoka a little over twelve hours.

To Be Continued...

My 20th Birthday

I moved out of Seminar House just the other day, and into my new digs where Internet access is not free, so updates may be sporadic. Anyway, I had to share the story of last night - one of the stranger birthdays I've had in my life. To think I had a considered post on international development in the works. I may return to it later, but this is probably more amusing.

Most people having left before yesterday, I ended up heading out to Osaka with just one close friend. We wandered around Shinsaibashi and Namba, and found an "English pub" where we had a few drinks. This place had the English pub atmosphere down pat:
Lack of natural light - it was exactly like being in a far corner of some warehouse-sized drinking establishment back in the UK, ingeniously simulated by being underground.
Thunderously loud music - not so much a jukebox as a full-blown sound system. Reminded me of a few places in Leeds.
TV screens - loses points for not having them all show different things for maximum sensory disorientation.

Yep, a real taste of home. As often happens on nights like these, the best things that happen are accidental. We came across a place that offered nomihodai (all you can drink) for a hour at a very reasonable price. We had an amazing amont of food, an even more amazing amount of drink, got the whole restaurant to shout "Kampai!" (Cheers!) at us, got chatting to some Japanese diners, and got invited out afterwards. So, we ended up walking through Namba with a bunch of very inebriated young Japanese girls. After a few wrong turns, we got to the bar they were headed for. The explanation of it they'd given (we were chatting in garbled drunken Japanese) didn't really prepare me for what was inside. The doors slid open and I saw a Japanese guy in a long evening gown, full make-up and blonde shoulder-length hair. We were in a drag bar.

Customers were sat at tables facing towards a small stage at the end of the room, as the "hostesses" moved around chatting to each table in turn. Our party was sat near the back, and we got visited by a few of them, one of whom got the whole club to sing Happy Birthday to me in Japanised English, and then poured us a bottle of something fizzy. I was sprawled on the seat, laughing out loud as I do when awesomely strange stuff like this happens to me. The girls (the real girls, the girls we came in with) were very friendly, and I shared a few stolen kisses with one who was my age before the lights went down for the main show.

Now this was very bizarre indeed. The performers were dancing topless, and some were obviously being women full-time, as they had fairly impressive breasts (implants, I guess). It wasn't really sexy - as feminine as some of them looked, the giveaway was in the face, particularly the jawline. You couldn't forget they were guys originally. Still, it was more enjoyable then a night out in a real strip club full of old men in dirty macs would have been. The crowd in this place was fun, loud, and predominantly female. Trust Japan to show you something like that.

Earlier in the night, Joe had asked "Is this where you expected to be after two decades living on this planet?" In a belated answer, not at all. But I'm grateful I ended up here anyway.

UPDATE: The nicest birthday tribute ever.

Gaijin meet river, hilarity ensues

For me, this week has been all about putting off preparations for moving house. Oh yeah, and going to various people's "goodbye" outings. Yesterday I swung by Kyoto to go to an English pub with some friends. This was a regular thing for them, but I'd just started going recently.

The place did the English-pub schtick with moderate success. The effect of sitting in a pew seat, pint glass in hand, and looking out of the window to the dreary modern skyline of Kyoto was, well, a little jarring. These outings ran on tradition. The tradition was: get in early and drink while happy hour was still going on (sure, I'd love to use the Housemartins song in the post title, but we can't always get what we want) from 5 to 8. The place was usually deserted, so we hung out there, chatted to the bar staff, and got "merry".

Extremely merry. We left a little past eight to go get some sushi, leaving behind a few people who weren't hungry. Despite having eaten at the pub, I was end-of-the-night drunk by 8pm, and needed something more to soak up the alcohol. At some point we twigged that one member of our party was missing, and we started asking each other "Where's Jay? Where's Jay, dude?" Jay had gone home - after doing four tequila shots in quick succession he had apparently thrown up, not in the urinal, but around the urinal.

Probably just as well that was the last regular outing.

In the sushi restaurant, I discovered that like most foods, sushi tastes even more delicious when you're pissed. After shouting for soy sauce at the top of my voice, I noticed the foreign couple opposite our table were giving us dirty looks. I shot one right back - there's no use acting superior. You've probably indulged in some dumb gaijin behaviour before. Don't act like you haven't.

After polishing off a few plates of sushi, I decided I wanted another drink. I got a beer from a convenience store, and went back to the river. In summer the wide banks of the Kamogawa are full of people sitting and enjoying the view. In my opinion, there is nothing finer than sitting by water (a river, the sea, whatever) on a warm summer's evening, drinking a cold beer and watching the world go by.

Fate, however, had different plans for my evening.

I'd met up with the guys who didn't get sushi, and now the others came from the restaurant and found us. Suddenly I heard "HUMAN CHAIN!" and just like when anything stupid gets suggested, I jumped right in. My friends were forming a human chain to reach down the sloping concrete bank to the river. I ended up second from the top, with the guy at the bottom dipping his foot in. Karma must have decided to step in and punish such DG behaviour, because the next thing I knew, the chain had broken and people were scrambling up the bank, leaving two guys at the bottom clinging on to the moulded concrete.

They tried climbing up, as another guy went down to help them. Bad decision. I saw, as if in slow motion, the bigger of the two lose his grip and fall on the lower guy, and both of them fell in the river with a resounding splash. Once I clocked that the river was shallow and they were in no danger, I laughed long and loud. If there's anything funnier than seeing your friends fall in a river, I don't know what it is.

Looking up from watching the guys struggling, I saw a policeman talking to someone. "They're bringing rope, dude!" a friend shouted. Rope? Why the hell do we need rope? I thought. Surely we can just reach down and pull them up. A few seconds of frantically scrabbling on the concrete, I was disabused of such notions. I noticed there were more policemen now. Quite a lot, in fact. I counted about seven, surrounding our group and taking people's details. This is OK, I can wait this out. Then I looked up towards the street, and noticed more officers running towards us, one of which was carrying some rope.

This was something else. I started counting the coppers, then started over. I was sure I'd drunkenly miscounted. No, I was right. There were FOURTEEN police officers surronding us. This was a police swarm. What could bring so many police out in such a short time in the UK? Someone ringing a bell in Parliament Square? Caling a police horse gay? I dreaded to think of anything more serious.

So there I was, drunk, underage, an open can of beer right next to my stuff, surrounded on three sides by the police and on one side by a river containing two of my friends. It was just going to be one of those nights. I gave my details to one of the policemen, while one of them threw down the rope and helped my friends up. They were very nice about it, and didn't even mind when I started taking pictures. (Note: photos are (badly) edited out of respect to the officers of the law who fished these guys out of the river.)



This last photo just you can see a small number of the policemen down there.

Speaking of photos, at one point during the rescue operation someone grabbed me and said "There's people taking pictures from the bridge! We're going to be in the news tomorrow." We later met up with some of our party, and discovered that it was them snapping our brush with the law. Funny as the whole experience was, I want to keep my contact with Japan's police to a minimum for the rest of my stay here.

Moore gets diploma, drunk (in that order)

So, the graduation ceremony. I quite like opportunities like this, to get dressed up and celebrate time well spent with people you've met along the way. We all got presented with official-looking folders - in a slight anti-climax, the actual diplomas were in our mailboxes back at the CIE. The American and Australian consuls-general, and Prof. Scott all gave excellent speeches. Actually, the American guy spent a little too long talking about the glamorous life in the consular service, but made up for it with an interesting aside about having to sit next to the repesentative from Burma at some event. I mean, what do you do in that kind of situation?

Afterwards, we wandered over to the dining hall for the lunch. On the way, I discussed the possibility of there being booze at this event. My words paraphrased: "I don't think there will be, but I want to believe in it anyway. It's the beautiful lie that sustains me in the desert." And to think I was stone cold sober at the time.

We got there, and pretty much my first act was to clear an Asahi bottle off the table and pour myself a glass of ice-cold beer. I was filled with end-of-year goodwill. People I disliked no longer seemed so bad. In fact, I couldn't even remember the reason for my misanthropy. I cleared a year's worth of bad blood in a matter of hours, overwhelmingly happy at all these people. I gave my email address out ot everyone who asked, and a few people who didn't. I carried on drinking (in case you hadn't guessed). I lost my friends, wandered around, found some more friends, made a quick run to the convenience store across the road, and said my goodbyes to Kansai Gaidai by necking a beer in front of the CIE.

I met a guy from my Japanese class out there, who told me about my "reputation": "Dude, they say you go home with a different girl every night!" Well, well. That was a pleasant surprise, although I kind of wish I'd heard about it earlier. Maybe if I'd played on that reputation a little, I'd actually be with a girl right now, instead of drunkenly typing this alone at two in the morning. But I digress.

I went home and, well, kind of passed out for a bit, hoping I'd sober up in time for the evening. It took a few seconds after I woke up to realise that this was an unrealistic hope. My friends found me, and we went out to a charming little pub-type place just outside our dorms. I did my best to carry on being the life and soul of the party - and I think I managed it. A few moments from the evening that I can remember:

- When we were playing a word association game and I came up with "buttsex" (hey, blame it on the male mind). In response to my friends' socked expressions, I asked "Oh, did you not hear me? I said... [standing on the table and shouting out loud] BUTTSEX!"
- Shouting down the phone at some girl talking to the person sat next to me: "You didn't look good in that kimono. No siree!"
(In my defence, she really didn't. As well as being a horrible dresser, she was a stumpy, fat white girl. Out of the many international students wearing kimonos, the Asian students pulled it off best. Witness:)


For a last hurrah, it was pretty awesome. Counting in the escapades of the two nights before the ceremony, I was kind of wiped out. All my best
photos are now up on Flickr. Relive my journey into inebriation, in photo-essay format. Peace out.

UPDATE: For any Caucasians who might be interested, see this pic for the way to properly wear a kimono (ie. be very attractive).

Demob happy

It's our completion ceremony today. There's a definite "end of the year" feel to everything. People are getting dressed up for it - several students have kimonos, and spent last night trying to work out how to tie them up. As there's going to be all manner of fun and games after the ceremony, I don't know when I'll be able to post again. But when I do, you bet I'll have some photos of me looking spiffy in my nice suit.

The pocket tape recorder

(...and why it will never be used)

In our last International Negotiation class, our professor told us about a job he once had in politics, where to find out how his behaviour was affecting his work, he got an intern to follow him round with a pocket cassette recorder and tape everything he said. He discovered that most of the things he said were amazingly tactless and rude. The upshot was he got out of politics, and years later gave us the advice that you should always listen to what you say, and try to change it if it doesn't fit the situation. The weekend's fun and games brought that anecdote into sharp relief.

Going to Osaka on Friday on the spur of the moment, we ended up staying out all night. While very fun, this deprives me of the beauty sleep I need so much. Because when I don't get enough sleep, I get angry. Very angry.

I vaguely remember drunkenly slurring my way through vague but ferocious denunciations of the many women who have wronged me in my life. I remember saying astoundingly rude things to the two friends I was out with. I remember shouting and banging the table in a Yoshinoya at half-five in the morning, and seeing the guy behind the counter flit past with a look of sheer terror on his face. I had done it. I had become the big, loud, scary gaijin of Japanese stereotype. I'm glad I didn't bring a tape recorder with me, and I will probably never end up doing so, even when I'm sober and well-behaved. Dredging up vague recollections of the things I said is horrifying enough. Reliving it on tape would probably finish me off.

Fortunately, my worst behaviour often gets written off by those on the recieving end, and we went out again on Saturday evening. The group of us comprised me, the pint-sized Mexican sex fiend, and another guy who I'll call "Bob", because he looks like he should be called Bob. Bob was not a good conversationalist. Anything you said, he would automatically take as a cue to start rambling on some pet topic of his, which would invariably be a) astoundingly boring, and b) completely unrelated to anything you said. In every conversation with him, you'd find yourself frantically trying to get away within the first couple of minutes.

Case in point: at another bar yesterday evening, he was in full flow. One monologue about his love of German beer would give way to one about his German heritage, then about a black beer he'd tried once that was too dark, then he switched his attention to the bottle of Thai beer that he held in his hand. Studying the red star at the centre of the label, he turned to me and said: "Oh yeah, red is an important colour. Across Asia, it means life, vitality, that kind of thing."

Suddenly, that was enough for me. I was sick of this bore, sick of his bargain-basement insights that he had probably half-remembered from something he once saw on the Discovery channel. And I was sick of all the other one-semester wonders like him that clogged up the campus, trying to paint themselves as experts, regurgitating all the mysteries-of-the-Orient cliches that I'd got equally sick of a long time ago. It wasn't so much the content of Bob's remark that got to me, but the ridiculous generalisation in "Asia", the transparent point-scoring of it ("look at me! I know soooo much more about Asia than you!"), and the fact that it followed half an hour of equally transparent point-scoring. I let him have it. I can't remember exactly what I said, but the words "You know nothing! I hope you kill yourself from shame" bob to the surface.

Seeking relief, I escaped from our table and wandered the tiny bar. I talked to everyone, Japanese, gaijin, longtime expats and visitors who were here for a week. In fact, the only person I really struck out with was the most beautiful girl in the bar (of course), to whom I addressed some standard plasantry as an opening for a conversation ... and then completely froze up. We stood there staring at each other, she gave a little embarrassed laugh, and I decided to cut my losses and move on.

Talking to people is something I like to do, and when I do it I learn things, benefit from the experience of others and make connections that weren't there before. To do so simply to ramble about your own concerns and try to get one over on other people is pointless. Pointless underlined, in italics. The upshot of all this? I insult and mock in my head far more than I do out loud. But occasionally, I let it all out. I tell that fat girl in the horrible top that "I didn't know floral prints were in for the amazingly badly-dressed girl this season". I tell people to their faces that I'm not interested in that boring anecdote. I do sparingly, though, because once I realise I can get away with it, wouldn't it be just so tempting to do it all the time? And if I did, how would I ever stop?

Maybe I am just a very unpleasant person. But I don't think of myself as one. So I have to keep the unpleasantness under wraps, because if the bad stuff is actually the real me, I'd prefer not to think about it. The tape recorder stays turned off.

The Ritz to the Rubble

So I was out in Osaka last night. Bar-hopping with a couple of guys until the trains started running again, and we rode back to Hirakata at about 6 in the morning. I'd been out with one of the guys to Umeda at the start of of Golden Week - a mild-mannered chap in my International Negotiation class, he turns into a pint-sized Mexican sex fiend when presented with alcohol and Japanese girls. We ended up meeting quite late, and trawling Namba, the main party district of Osaka centered around the Dotonbori canal. Clubs and bars being open until 5am, we had a leisurely search for somewhere to pass the time. A meat-market club seemed to fit the bill, until the guys on the door checked my ID, and discovered I was under age (20, in Japan). To my shame and discredit, I got KB'd. Took me back a few years, I can tell you.

The night improved from then on, as we found a decent rock club in Amerika-mura, a trendy district full of Osaka's young things. I, for one, was overjoyed - the Japanese club scene seemed to be all dance music, and I had no idea you could find rock clubs here. It had the classic atmosphere: dirty, sticky wooden flooring, neon signage, moshing camararderie, the oddly metro guy who kept touching my arms - wait. That's not something you'd find at the Cockpit!

I ran into an Aussie who had come out here to work for a law firm. She didn't speak Japanese, but her work didn't really require it. Although I'd heard previously that for foreigners working in law firms in Japan, language ability isn't that important, it still brought me up short. She has a job, and I'm just a bum of a student. Yet I consider myself superior to people in Japan to people who can't speak the language. There's a moral here, but I'm a little too hungover to process it.

More to come, maybe. In the meantime, see these nice posts on expats and making friends while travelling alone. As I'm going to be staying on for a full month after exams finish, it looks like I'll doing a lot of that.

Laughing, developing, evaluating

Today I was having lunch with some friends and the conversation turned to computer games. Not being much of a gamer, I carried on eating, until someone mentioned the games coming out for the new Nintendo console.
Said the guy:

"I can't wait to get Final Fantsy on my wee."

I knew about the new console's ridiculous name, but I still laughed like a small boy at actually hearing someone say "Wii" in the context of a sentence.

Later, I was rushing for my lesson on the fourth floor of the CIE when the open lift came into view. Unfortunately, it was already stuffed. Seeing the last few people drift in and assume sardine-tin formation, I mimed "WHYYYY?" at someone I knew as the doors closed. I turned and walked for the stairs. Then I started running to get to the top floor before the lift did and laugh at the passengers.

I laughed long and I laughed hard. Before doubling over at the sensation of the lactic acid pumping through my veins. Still, I laughed.

Over the past couple of days I've been developing the film I took with the photography club, using their darkroom. Since I managed to expose one of my rolls while it was in my camera, I was really trying to make sure these ones came out OK. It struck me that it was a really complex process, especially when you're doing it manually with a spool to wind the unexposed film on in the dark. Even if your only encounter with developing prints was dropping them off at Boots, digital photography really is a break with the past in terms of being able to view your work.

Although a few photos from the beginning of the film are lost, and a couple more are overexprosed, I'm pretty proud of what I got. Tomorrow I'm due to develop individual prints for the planned exhibition. I can't wait.

This semester is drawing to an end rather quicker than I realised, and we now have evaluation forms to fill out for all our subjects. I was actually told by one of my professors that these are actually taken very seriously at Gaidai, and the Dean personally reads the individual comments. Well, so much for my previous cynicism. I'm just glad I really put some effort into it this time. I guess it's because having been here for (almost) a full year, I feel more of a sense of ownership, of knowing the good and bad things about this place and wanting to change it for the better. If I'm lucky, I'll feel the same about Leeds when I get back there.

Long weekend post

Went on a trip to Kyoto on Sunday with the Kansai Gaidai Photography Club. If you know the scene in Help! where the Beatles get off the plane with cameras and snap pictures of each other non-stop, it was like that at times as we turned our cameras on each other. Most of the time though we had nice scenery around Higashiyama to shoot. We wandered through the old streets and ended up at Kiyomizu-dera temple. It was odd to think that the last time I'd been up there was in my first week here. Things seemed to have gone full-circle.

Going out with the Photography Club gave me an insight into a bit of Japanese culture that I've (sadly) not experienced much of - socialising in organised groups. In the evening we headed back to Hirakata for a big welcome party (The Japanese students' academic year started recently). After lots of organised toasts, we sat down and proceeded to eat and drink a lot. A lot. I was not the freshest person when I left Sem House 4 the following morning to join a field trip to the Osaka courthouse.

What could make my hangover worse, you could well ask. How about one of those ultra-nationalist sound trucks that scream far-right rants through their loudspeakers at amazingly loud volumes? Coming right up! This one was quite small by their usual standards (manned by one man with a microphone and a big grudge), but easily the loudest one I've encountered so far.

Court proceedings were very hard to understand - I only got a few words here and there, and probably wouldn't have done any better if I'd been running at full (non-hungover) power. Fortunately, someone with us was very good at Japanese and managed to give us a precis of the case. The Japanese court system is inquisitorial rather than adverserial as in Britain and the U.S., so the judges take a more active role in the case.

I probably would have enjoyed it if I hadn't been a) hungover, and b) trapped with some of the most annoying students ever. The "I don't care" girl was in my group, and was whining about how we couldn't get into the big murder trial downstairs, because it was full and they were issuing tickets to allow people in. Apparently it hadn't crossed her mind that you don't have consumer rights when you're watching a trial.

The trip was organised by the professor who teaches our International Negotiation class, and afterwards he took us to an underground food court in one of the big department stores. I love these places, because they have lovely-looking food, but everything's far too expensive for me. Our professor then took us to a couple of bars, fetching up in a nice establishment with a good atmosphere and a selection of beers from all over the world. By that time there was only a small group, and we got talking to two Japanese girls and a fellow Brit who was travelling around the world. We also ended up doing purikura. These are photobooths where you take photos of you and your friends, customise them and print them out on little strips, a very popular pastime for teenage girls in Japan. We look slightly the worse for wear in all our pictures, and my cheeky grin is definitely cause for concern.

It was a fun night - just like the photography club social the night before, I met some cool people, and did more chatting in Japanese than I have for a long time. It comes back to something I wrote back in September (full-circle again, see?) about language for me being worth it when I get to use it outside the classroom. I will honestly say that the Japanese conversations I've had over the past couple of days have been more useful for me than learning about the Accusative-Passive in our duller-than-dull Spoken Japanese lesson today. Having been out drinking two nights in a row, I was too tired to seem interested. From here on out, a relaxed Golden Week looks more and more appealing.

Sushi and sake, beer and burgers

As per regulations, Japan blogs are now filled with pictures of cherry blossom (or sakura). Now Moore Than This gets in on the action, following a hanami (flower-viewing trip) to Osaka castle yesterday with some friends. Before setting off from Hirakata on the train, we grabbed some sushi from a supermarket and I bought some beer and sake at a liquor store (with the splendid name "Liquor Mountain"). When we all met up in Osaka, one guy got a load of food from Wendy's as his contribution to the picnic - East met West in a delicious fashion.


Looking through the photos of our day out, it seems like the weather was horrible and overcast, when really it was very nice, milder than it has been for a long time. It only started getting overcast towards the end of the afternoon, when we decided to leave. I was slightly the worse for wear, but hey, I was engaging in Japanese culture - everyone gets plastered on sake at hanami. Not sure if that engagement extends to standing on a crowded platform on the Osaka Loop Line swigging from a bottle of sake. Oh well. You're only young and stupid once.


We took the train to Shinsaibashi, central Osaka's shopping district, and wandered down the big covered arcade there. We saw some pretty odd things, like a pick-up game in an arcade where the prize was a load of creepy pod-babies. We finished off in an izakaya in Namba, the main nightlife place of Osaka, which is dominated by huge neon displays.


From viewing cherry blossom in the grounds of a castle to this in one day. After a rough week or so, getting out with some friends and enjoying myself has really given me a boost. My first sakura season has been brilliant. Here's to spending many more of them in Japan.

Nocturnal Adventures

I've had a bit of a rough week since spring break ended. Work is mounting up, people don't seem to have time for each other, and once more I've been left feeling like I don't what this year is for. So, come the weekend, what do I do to let off steam?

Picture the scene. Midnight, at the river in Makino, on the large stepping stones set in the riverbed, a classmate and I swinging at each other with sticks trading exaggerated samurai-movie-style grunts. I gots to get my kicks somehow.

Our little group wandered along the river from our dorms to Makino, a little suburb which doesn't really have much except a train station, a karaoke place, and a bowling alley. We went to the bowling alley, but having a near-terminal indicisiveness about what we wanted to do, just hung around in the arcade at the front. I went on the taiko-drumming game, which is easily one of the best arcade games ever. Whack at a model taiko drum in time with the coloured dots that flow along the screen to the tune of various J-Pop classics, and let your wildest Keith Moon fantasies run riot.

No karaoke, no booze, no arguing over politics. It's not the kind of socialising I usually enjoy. But like I said, I needed to let off some steam, and I had a fun night.
"I got a fever. And the only prescription...is more taiko!"

Tasty moments

From our Nagano trip:

Waking up on the bus to discover a landscape covered in snow (銀世界). Haggling with the rental guy, and getting discounts which we didn't ask for. My first go on a snowboard. Going up on the ski lift, marvelling at the pure white scenery around me. Falling over for the first time. Falling over many subsequent times. Falling down badly and twisting my ankle. Stuffing our faces at the hotel buffet. Recuperating from the day's efforts at a local onsen. Falling over and twisting my ankle again. Getting evacuated down the mountain by a very pretty Rescue Patrol girl. "Don't tell me how to live my life." The three essentials: snowboarding, onsen, beer - a perfect last day.

More detailed blogging to come. But this provides a pretty good taster.
Photos now up.

Green beer

This from Of Rice and Zen, a very funny blog about an English teacher's experiences in Japan that I recently discovered:

Seeing loud drunken gaijin being inconsiderate with sound waves fills you with shame and anger. You vow never to be seen in public with such DG again. In fiction this kind of hubris usually comes before an ironic fall into a big pile of bathos.

This pretty much sums up my St. Patrick's Day yesterday. I went to Murphy's in Shinsaibashi, Osaka, allegedly the first Irish pub in Japan, to celebrate with some Australians. Yes, I became that drunken gaijin, swilling down overpriced green beer and getting my face licked by pretend Irishmen. I am not proud.

I returned to Osaka today to buy some CDs - the new Belle & Sebastian album, and Delays latest, which was an impulse buy. I saw them supporting the Manic Street Preachers in April last year, and they seemed to be going away from the winsome indie of their debut album to a more muscular, electro-pop style. B&S also take a more musically in-your-face stance on their new album. Good stuff all round.

What's Britain really like?

To anyone who has often pondered this question (whether from the UK or not), I now have the answer.

My good friends Sam and Raph from back home have come up with a UK response to the SNL "Lazy Sunday" rap. It's called "We Drink Tea" and it gives you the full lowdown on what life in Britain is really like.

Go watch - seriously, it's a lot better than anything else you could be doing right now.

You know you're living the crazy gaijin stereotype when...

You find yourself standing beside a busy motorway on a freezing March night waiting to cross to the other side to get sushi, throwing shapes at the speeding cars while your friend belts out numbers from Fiddler on the Roof. 'Nuff said.

Today is White Day, the counterpart to Valentine's Day a month ago, where boys give chocolates (traditionally white chocolates and almonds) to girls. Oddly, in contrast to the enormous hype leading up to Valentine's Day, there wasn't a single tie-in or promo display to be seen. I managed to buy some chocolates before setting out with friends on the sushi escapade, but in doing my bit for the stereotype of useless men managed to leave them back at the dorms. I'd nip back to get them, but the icy turn the weather has taken in the past few days has led to snow swirling past the CIE windows. Braving Arctic conditions to get chocolate is a bit much - if I'm going to end up dead in a ditch trying to impress girls, it had better be for something really spectacular.