Tokyo Blog

A new piece of work I did for one of my freelance clients is now up! Sure Languages is a language services company (i.e. translation and interpreting) based in the beautiful city of Bath, UK. They’re superb at what they do, offer great service, and are a nice bunch of people to boot. Which means, if you require language services, no matter where you are in the world right now, talk to these people. They’re extremely professional, and very efficient, and their new website isn’t bad either!

Still so busy, so very few posts have gone up recently, I know. I did manage to upload some more pictures or Kusatsu though. We all took cameras, so there are various images on flickr right now, taken from everybody’s pooled snaps.

After a period of intense hard work, the light at the end of the tunnel came in the form of a trip to a famous Onsen resort town called Kusatsu in Gunma prefecture, to relax and unwind. It was my friend Sam’s birthday, so a bunch of Japanese guys he knows organised a birthday outing. An Onsen is a bathing pool filled with naturally heated mineral water, which is made hot by the volcanic activity below the surface. The water bubbles up naturally in ponds and springs all over the area, and even flows in rivers in places, emitting a strong sulphuric odour. We got a coach from Ikebukuro in Tokyo, 4 hours’ drive up Japan’s so-called ‘Romantic Road’. We stopped off first after about 2 hours for a break at a service station and me and Trent bought some salted barbecued pork for breakfast, then we carried on until we left the highway and began to drive through small towns and villages. After about 3 hours we stopped off at a Manju factory. Manju is a small dark brown cake filled with sweet bean paste. These were free to try so we wrangled two each. Each time we stopped the Japanese guys bought loads of supplies; the first time we stopped they bought Chuppa-Chups (enough for the whole group), rice crackers, sweet tofu jellies, crisps, and literally bags of other snacks and confectionery. Second time, at the Manju factory, they crossed the car park to a grocery stall and bought two packs of oranges and a bag of tomatoes that we ate whole, like apples, rapidly as the coach was about to leave.

When we arrived at the hotel in Kusatsu, our hangovers had been removed by force feeding ourselves the fruits of the Japanese guys’ shopaholicism (this was Saturday morning, and we had to be up early - 7.00am). We checked in and then donned the traditional Japanese gear you get given at Ryokans and Ryokan Hotels. Ours was the latter, but the outfits were good. We all put on a Yukata (cotton robe), tied it with a belt off to the left side (where you wear you sword), then covered over with an overgarment for the Yukata. I forgot the name, but it is short on the body, ties in the middle of your chest and has enormously wide sleeves, with a concealed pocket in the sleeve of each side where you can store other weapons. So I put my Nike baseball boots on, Trent put on his white leather loafers, and we hit the town straight away. We stopped off at every shop on the way to try out the Japanese pickles, which were amazing, and then headed up to the main Onsen of Kusatsu where we hung out for a couple of hours. You have to take off everything, and go in stark naked, of course. The water is only just tolerable at the near end of the spring, but as you head down towards the far end, it gets even hotter and massive clouds of steam come at you over the water, carried by the wind. Actually, it felt like I was cooking alive, but afterwards I felt extremely invigorated, and the healthiest I’d felt in ages. We went to an old woman’s shop on the way back for green tea and some Konyaku, which is a vegetable or bean-based jelly covered in Miso. More health was imparted. Then it all began to unravel as we kicked off the Nomikai; Sat around a table in the hotel, we threw down lots of beer and sake and then had a second Onsen at the hotel. This was also amazing: a small but equally scalding pool in a rock garden at the top of a wooded hill, patches of snow here and there on the way down.

After that more drinking, a Japanese evening meal, more drinking, a bowl of instant Ramen from the supermarket plus dried fish and squid, more rice crackers, more crisps, miso mackerel, tinned horse (yes, tinned horse), 3 litres of red wine and more manju. The next day we had Onsen again at the hotel spa, a huge Japanese breakfast incorporating the dreaded natto, and then rehydrated from the vending machines in the hotel lobby. Kimochikatta da yo! View the meagre flickr offerings here.

At last, I’ve managed to get the last 3 weeks’ photos uploaded to flickr. The pictures I just put up are of Kasai Rinkai Park, Odaiba, and Hanami in Ueno Park and Sumida Park.

Sorry for the lack of stories recently, I’ve been mega-busy working on a couple of freelance projects. I’m aiming to get them done before the end of the week, with just the weekend to fix and amend them. It would be nice to get it all out of the way for saturday as it’s going to be sunny that day and I want to get my hanami on. I was running in Ueno park yesterday (Tuesday) actually, as a much needed break from my desk. The hanami is just starting and a few companies and groups had tried to get their cherry blossom viewing parties in early. The blossom wasn’t spectacular yet, but the park was buzzing, so slalom was the order of the day. Abunai!

I only ever thought I would travel through Tokyo on the subway, rarely by Taxi as it’s too expensive. I would never buy a car to use in Tokyo, because there’s no point for me. Now, having travelled out of, and back into, and through Tokyo in a car, I think it’s the best way to travel through the city in terms of getting a grip on the geography, and seeing some cool urban landscapes. It was a beautiful spring evening the other day, and then at sunset we were just coming back into Central Tokyo and ended up speeding through the streets as the lights were starting to come on, and the neon started to appear.

For Tokyo, I think these are the first. I came across an Ume-Matsuri the other day in Hongo. Ume is Japanese Plum, so these are the blossoms of the Japanese Plum tree. The Matsuri was taking place in Yushima Tenmangu Shrine, and as I walked past Shinto priests were getting out of a new-style VW Beetle. I walked up and took some pictures of the blossoms and played around with the settings on my camera, to ill effect. There’s not really enough to make it worth uploading them to flickr, but they might appear in a future photoset.

Now that the weather is improving (15 deg C today), and because of the Shibuya allnighters I’ve been doing, and partly due to the nature of the work I do (a lot of sitting and not much else), I’ve decided to buy some trainers and go running in Ueno Park. I really struggled to get trainers in my size (I’m only a 10, but sizes rarely go up as far as a UK 9 over here), and so I ended up buying the more expensive ones at about ¥8800. They do look pretty cool though! And also, check out the free blue trainer bag I got with them in the pic.

This is an e-commerce site I starting building freelance about a year ago, but it was put on hold for a time. It’s now up and running, so if you want, go and have a look at Kelly’s Crystal Shop. I thought I’d put a link on here because it saves me having to submit it to all the search engines (the spiders will find the site from the link on this page). It sells incense, oils, crystals, fossils and many different types of gifts. Perhaps if this is your thing, you could buy something from the shop? You can pay using PayPal or major credit cards.

The flight was great. Complementary Asahi beer and Suntory whisky, the Asahi beer coming in a can that was totally different from the ones you get in the UK. They sort of have ridges around the top of the can, and the aluminium they’re made of is so strong you’d struggle to crush it in your hand. To compliment the booze, there were bags of snacks handed out containing wasabi peas, peanuts, rice crackers, fish crackers(?) etc. I wasn’t that taken by the film choices (I gave up on Rush Hour 4 during the first few minutes, when Chris Tucker was doing Michael Jackson dance moves whilst directing traffic), so I put on the headphones and switched to the music channels. I found something to complete the picture. With Asahi beer, Japanese snacks, and the fried chicken and rice on it’s way, I was able to drift into Tokyo to the sounds of Enka music; a female Japanese singer in this case, which instantly reminded me of a song on the soundtrack to Kill Bill: Vol.1, The Flower of Carnage by Meiko Kaji. At this point I was starting to get excited.

UPDATE: Actually, I did watch a film. It was good too. It was called “The Invitation from Cinema Orion”, a Japanese film with English subs. It’s based on the short story from the best-selling collection “Poppoya” by Jiro Asada. It’s worth a look, in fact they showed it at last year’s Tokyo Film Festival.

It’s finally done. My website about me in Tokyo is complete - and this is the very first post! I had to get it churned out quickly though. I’ve been in Tokyo for 4 weeks, and I’ve got so much stuff to put up, so expect some retrospective postings over the next few days. In a way that’s a good way to work it right now, because I’m not getting to enjoy Tokyo much at the moment. I’m working from morning until night to clear the boards. Things should be back to normal by early March, when I’ll be back out there… Something to invest in at that time: a MUJI bike from the Yurakucho store!