Antony Tran

Upon hear­ing rumours of the Ger­man Beer Fes­ti­val, Okto­ber­fest, being cel­e­brated in Yoko­hama, we decided to take a day trip out and see how the Japan­ese have inter­preted this small piece of Euro­pean cul­ture [and drink beer!]. Yoko­hama is Japan’s sec­ond largest city and so we were very much expect­ing another Tokyo-style metrop­o­lis. How­ever, it seemed much more laid back and the walk along the marina had a par­tic­u­larly relaxed feel [not a phrase ever used to describe Tokyo!]. As with most towns in Japan, soft, ambi­ent music is played in the street through loud­speak­ers. The effect is extremely sub­tle and for some rea­son, I can’t help but smile as I walk past. If such a sys­tem were to be deployed in Lon­don, I would prob­a­bly be vehe­mently opposed on the grounds of encour­ag­ing an over­bear­ing, Big Brother gov­ern­ment. Per­haps I’m still look­ing at Japan through rose-tinted glasses, but it, and other quirky, ‘never-in-the-west’ ele­ments, just seems to ‘work’ here. This is a feel­ing I sus­pect will change as I tran­si­tion from a tourist to a long-term resident…

The bay area in Yokohama.

Yoko­hama is home to a China Town and so we paid it a quick visit before enter­ing the beer fes­ti­val. It is some­what larger than the one in Lon­don and it was inter­est­ing to see how they have adopted some of the Japan­ese cus­toms [shout­ing ‘irasshaimase’ every 5 sec­onds at you walk past their store], yet man­age to retain the unique Chi­nese cul­tural feel. I had a small ‘char siu bao’ type thing and was extremely dis­ap­pointed to see that the bun was mostly empty! A great shame, since this was all I would have to eat for the next 6 hours…

Gate at entrance to China Town in Yokohama.

The entrance fee to the fes­ti­val was 200 JPY, and I had naively thought that this would cover
all of the beer you could drink — how wrong I was! It turns out that every drink was about 1000 JPY (about £7.50) and you also required a 1000 JPY deposit for the glass. This is about 4x more expen­sive than usual (but the beer is of course, of the spe­cial Ger­man vari­ety) so I decided to only indulge in a sin­gle drink, and sip it very, very slowly. I talked to some of Tom’s friends who were there, who had been work­ing in an IT com­pany in Tokyo for sev­eral years. Their kind advice? ‘DON’T WORK IN JAPAN!’ [too much pres­sure and expec­ta­tion, lit­tle reward, inane cus­toms and tra­di­tions] Duly noted.

Okto­ber­fest!

We got hun­gry towards 7.30PM and so some of us headed back to China Town for a suit­able place to eat. There were a few ‘all-you-can-eat’ places for around 2,500 JPY (about £19.00) but we set­tled for a small place on a side street after being heav­ily mar­keted to by the pro­pri­etor. It was inter­est­ing that the owner kept look­ing at me whilst speak­ing [on account of the fact that I look most likely to under­stand Japan­ese]; I sim­ply nod­ded at seem­ingly appro­pri­ate times and threw in a few ‘soo desu’ for good mea­sure. They squeezed us on to a table in the mid­dle of the restau­rant and we had a set meal of about 5–6 dif­fer­ent dishes. The dishes cho­sen for the set meal were quite unusual, includ­ing one with stir-fried veg­eta­bles and chicken skins. I thought I knew what to expect from the set menu in a Chi­nese restau­rant, but appar­ently even the Chi­nese food in Japan is dif­fer­ent! There was talk of karaoke after the meal, but the long jour­ney home sucked the life out of us and so headed our sep­a­rate ways and off to bed.

Last week, we were for­tu­nate enough to wit­ness a Japan­ese pub­lic hol­i­day [no school!] cel­e­brat­ing elderly peo­ple; to com­mem­o­rate this day we decided to go and see the Fuji Five Lakes! We man­aged to recruit nine eager JLSPers and set off early on Sun­day morn­ing for the bus to Fuji from Shin­juku. We had a few ‘com­pe­tent’ Japan­ese speak­ers with us so I felt safe in know­ing that we would be able to ask for help from the locals, if required. I sat next to Phoebe who pro­claimed within the first five min­utes: ‘I’m feel­ing really ill!’ and ‘I’m going to go to sleep, so I prob­a­bly won’t talk!’; I knew I was in for a fun bus jour­ney! To her credit, she only slept for half of the jour­ney and had the decency to not sneeze in my direc­tion so I guess things could have been worse We passed the Fuji High­lands theme park on the way there, and in hind­sight that prob­a­bly would have made for a much more inter­est­ing holiday…

If only…

Due to the traf­fic, we arrived at Lake Kawaguchiko about 2 hours later than we thought we would. The lake was extremely scenic and was filled with swan boats akin to those found in Ueno park. There were also var­i­ous lux­ury boats and water sports tak­ing place. How­ever, some of us had our hearts set on swim­ming and so we set off to find more suit­able place, Lake Saiko. The map claimed that it was 12KM away and we had a seri­ous debate on whether or not it would be a good idea to walk there [I voted NO!]. We man­aged to fig­ure out the local bus sys­tem and took one along some moun­tain­ous paths towards Lake Saiko. We found an open spot near the lake and setup our camp for the day.

Kawaguchiko Crew!

We were in a rather awk­ward posi­tion on the lake, right in between some­one who was fish­ing and a pile of old wooden boats. ‘Swim­ming’ became bor­ing sur­pris­ingly quickly [cold water did not help!] and so we had to think of another way to spend our time. Although there were 3 other lakes that we had not yet seen, I doubted my level of inter­est in them and so I decided my time would be bet­ter spent lying on the shore of Lake Saiko, work­ing on my tan. I was joined by the Finns and we waved the oth­ers good­bye after sug­gest­ing a vague ren­dezvous time [’meet later, in town’]. We had sol­i­dar­ity in our dis­like of ‘doing stuff’ and we were per­fectly happy to just relax on our lit­tle ‘beach’ and watch the sun slowly set in the distance.

Beach life.

Our bliss­ful exis­tence was inter­rupted by an alarm­ing phone call from the oth­ers, who now found them­selves ‘in the mid­dle of nowhere’ and with no way to get back in time for check in at the hos­tel. It was up me and the Finns to make it to there in time and save the day! At the time, we had no idea where we were, where we wanted to go, and how we were going to get there; the odds were heav­ily stacked against us suc­ceed­ing! There was no sim­ple to way to get back to town from our cur­rent posi­tion, so we decided to take the easy [and expen­sive] option and call for a taxi. We stum­bled into a nearby hotel and I man­aged to ges­ture for them to call a taxi for us back to Lake Kawaguchiko [much harder than it sounds!]. The taxi cost the princely sum of 3,700 JPY but it was a small price to pay to ensure that we had some­where to stay that night. We then took a train from the town towards the hos­tel and used all of our com­bined cun­ning to locate it. Upon enter­ing, we had to take off our shoes and wear com­mu­nal slip­pers. We assured the hotel clerk that our friends were going to arrive later and she us into the room after sign­ing a few documents.

When the oth­ers arrived, we asked the hos­tel owner [an Amer­i­can guy by the name of ‘Michael’] to rec­om­mend some places to eat, and he walked us to his friends place for some real tra­di­tional cui­sine. He seemed like a really nice and gen­uine guy so we trusted every­thing he said. How­ever, the food and drinks at the restau­rant were rather expen­sive, and the par­tic­u­lar dish I had [fried octo­pus] did not go down well at all. The oth­ers shared my thoughts! Com­pared to other places I had been to in Japan, this did not rank highly on the list. Per­haps we just aren’t used to eat­ing ‘real’ Japan­ese food? The more likely con­clu­sion that most of us had come to was that we had been setup by the hos­tel owner! We headed to the 7/11 after­wards to sup­ple­ment our diet with ice cream and then went back home for a well-earned rest.

I will now quickly sum­marise the few days fol­low­ing the Fuji Five Lakes trip. I am mas­sively behind in terms of real time so I think it’s bet­ter for me to catch up now or else I will quickly lose enthu­si­asm for blog­ging — not good! If you want to hear about any­thing in more detail, feel free to ask.

- Sec­ond day at Five Lakes; vis­it­ing some shrines and parks; saw lots of spi­ders

Stairs, tem­ples, mountains.

- Lucy’s birth­day; karaoke and drink­ing in Shibuya; lots to live up to for my birth­day!
– Trip to Life Sav­ing Cen­ter; earth­quake and typhoon sim­u­la­tion; chance to use a fire extin­guisher

Sim­u­la­tion of a 7.0 mag­ni­tude earthquake!

- Shabu Shabu in Shin­juku with some Japan­ese vol­un­teers; dip­ping meat in raw egg; karaoke trip #3

Post shabu-shabu karaoke.

- Yoyogi Park with Kaisa-chan; some kind of Indian fes­ti­val nearby; ate a doner kebab

Yoyogi Park!

- Aki­habara, Elec­tric Town; tech heaven; sur­pris­ingly expen­sive

A wild Pikachu has appeared!

- Aikido at the uni­ver­sity club with Tom and Phoebe; really fun to try, peo­ple very friendly and patient; may con­tinue regularly!

On Sat­ur­day, we went to the Nedu Jinga Shrine Annual Fes­ti­val with a few of the JLSP vol­un­teers we had met dur­ing the week. It was held in the late after­noon and was just the thing we needed to help recover from the wel­com­ing party the night before. The setup of the fes­ti­val reminded me of a tra­di­tional county fair and it had a warm and friendly feel to it. It is inter­est­ing to be able to find things like this in the mid­dle of Tokyo, a dis­tinct con­trast from the high-tech met­ro­pol­i­tan dis­tricts of Shin­juku and Shibuya!

A stall sell­ing choco­late cov­ered bananas on a stick.

We got another chance to see Sumo wrestling at the fes­ti­val; despite only involv­ing some of the local ama­teurs (as opposed to the ‘super­stars’ we saw last week), it was still highly enter­tain­ing and I was able to get a much bet­ter view with­out pay­ing an extor­tion­ate price. The wrestlers were slim­mer and moved faster, the fights lasted longer, and best of all, I didn’t have to endure 6 hours of it in a row! I rec­om­mend see­ing ama­teur Sumo over one of the big tour­na­ments if you just want a taste of it.

Going in for the kill.

The main event of the day how­ever, was yet to come… Towards the end of the after­noon I was grow­ing tired and my inter­est in the fes­ti­val was grad­u­ally wan­ing. But then I spot­ted some­thing in the dis­tance that imme­di­ately grabbed my atten­tion and awoken my senses; I knew in my heart that I was not going home today with­out it. There was a stall that offered the chance to win a [real!] tur­tle if you could fish three of them out of the small pond using a net made of rice paper. Only in Japan!
Here is a video of my suc­cess­ful attempt [I promise to edit it and add cool music later!]:

You had to be quick to catch the tur­tles before the rice paper dis­solved. I failed my first attempt but gave it another go and was rewarded with a tur­tle of my own to take home! I named it Mat­suri, or Matsu-chan for short, and it now lives in a plas­tic con­tainer on my desk. It has been a week so far and I’m happy to report Matsu-chan is alive and well, hap­pily eat­ing the tur­tle pel­lets I bought from the super­mar­ket!

Meet Matsu-chan!

This is the rough trans­la­tion of the infa­mous Japan­ese filler-phrase, “so desu ne?”; it has the amaz­ingly abil­ity of mak­ing who­ever you are talk­ing to think you actu­ally under­stand them! As much as we like to think so, things aren’t so dif­fer­ent else­where — sim­ply agree­ing with peo­ple can get you pretty far; in many cir­cum­stances it is the best approach! I have been get­ting quite a lot of mileage out of it today with good results, in con­junc­tion with the nods. Good vari­a­tions include “so… so…” and “ah, hai!”. Per­haps Japan­ese will be eas­ier than I thought! Today we had the open­ing cer­e­mony and we were all required to give a quick intro­duc­tion of our­selves in Japan­ese, in front of about 50 [Japan­ese] peo­ple. Luck­ily, we had two hours of class before­hand to pre­pare and we all man­aged to mem­o­rise a short speech. We were even given advice on the cor­rect angle at which we should bow! I am pleased to report that my “speech” went smoothly and I was able to use what I learnt sev­eral times through­out the day as I met other Japan­ese peo­ple!

The class­room in which we are taught Japan­ese. The tables were later re-arranged into a cir­cle so we could face each other!

We were also taught the first 15 hira­gana char­ac­ters, and have a test to look for­ward to tomor­row. I already had a pass­ing famil­iar­ity with them from my own attempts at learn­ing so with this refresh, I think the test will go smoothly. The teacher for the Japan­ese class was very enthu­si­as­tic and def­i­nitely what we need when learn­ing a new sub­ject. We played a game to prac­tice the intro­duc­tions which involved clap­ping to a rhythm and mak­ing hand sig­nals — it felt like being in pri­mary school again! Attend­ing lec­tures in Cam­bridge is almost an entirely pas­sive expe­ri­ence; it has made me for­get how effec­tive class par­tic­i­pa­tion and engage­ment can be! I have also watched some lec­tures from the MIT OCW and they seem head and shoul­ders above that of Cam­bridge [supervisions/tutorials should NOT be the answer to bad lectures!].

This evening, Phoebe cooked an oishii meal for me and Kaisa. I donated my pans to her since I wasn’t plan­ning on doing sig­nif­i­cant amounts of cook­ing [I can hap­pily live off oni­giri!], while she seemed more enthu­si­as­tic about it. Most of the raw ingre­di­ents in the super­mar­ket are only labelled in Kanji and so trial-and-error is required to find things you actu­ally want. We pur­chased some mys­tery meat which later turned out to be beef, and cooked it with some fresh udon noo­dles [ridicu­lously cheap in Japan!]. In con­trast, fresh fruit such as apples cost about 3x as much as it does in the UK! I’m not sure which fruits are pop­u­lar in Japan but I am sure they would be more rea­son­ably priced.

For some rea­son, we thought it would be a good idea to go for a run after din­ner [pos­si­bly my idea] and we so donned appro­pri­ate run­ning attire and set off from our apart­ment. We ran across town and tried to take a cir­cu­lar track so that we would even­tu­ally return home. We received quite a few stares but put a good effort in and must’ve com­pleted about 2–3 miles. Not bad for a first attempt! Kaisa some­how still had energy left so she ran around some more whilst Phoebe and I just flopped on the floor in our apart­ment. I think I will sleep well tonight!

We were intro­duced to some Japan­ese vol­un­teers today and given a chance to talk to them about their lives in Tokyo. A lot of them felt that Tokyo was too over­crowded and busy, and that they would pre­fer to live in a more qui­eter town. This is not an opin­ion I share! They were all extremely nice and I look for­ward to spend­ing more time with them — I’ve been spend­ing a lot of time with Euro­peans, and whilst I very much enjoy their com­pany, I have to remind myself that I am here to learn more about Japan and about Japan­ese peo­ple. Can I have it both ways? ‘Not speak­ing Japan­ese’ is a minor set­back that I am try­ing to over­come… One of the Finns decided to wear a t-shirt with an inter­est­ing slo­gan on it [’Eng­land can go to hell’]; after a few min­utes of protests and com­plaints from the very vocal Brits he promised never to wear it again Why he had such a t-shirt in his wardrobe is still a mys­tery!

Can’t we all just get along?

One of the vol­un­teers I met plays in a band and is due to play live tomor­row — she invited us all along to sup­port! If it doesn’t clash with classes, I think I would love to come and watch. She showed me the songs on her iPod and I was sur­prised at how much west­ern music she lis­tened to — she even knew some brit­pop bands which I didn’t expect to have any expo­sure out­side of the UK! She also lives close to our accom­mo­da­tion and works part-time in a nearby con­ve­nience store, so we may see her around quite often.

Enjoy­ing dessert with the volunteers.

In the evening we decided to go for some karaoke! The first offi­cial day of classes starts tomor­row, so we didn’t want to stay out too late. We decided to go to a place in Shi­mo­takaido that we had seen ear­lier today. Since we were there for the first time, we needed to reg­is­ter and we were pre­sented with an extremely con­fus­ing appli­ca­tion form. Luck­ily, the Ger­man girl, Nina, was able to speak Japan­ese well and com­plete the process on our behalf. They decided to use my phone num­ber since it was the only phone that actu­ally worked in Japan; I look for­ward to answer­ing mar­ket­ing calls from some hyper­ac­tive Japan­ese! [moshi, moshi!]

The machines had a choice between Japan­ese, Chi­nese, or Korean lan­guage for the menu sys­tem, which is indeed like try­ing to decide between a slap in the face or a kick in the shin! We even­tu­ally fig­ured out how to use it and began to bel­low out some karaoke clas­sics [after an ini­tial tense period!]. I was happy to see every­one get involved, par­tic­u­larly since many had not been to karaoke before. The two hours went by really quickly, and we ended with a par­tic­u­larly enthu­si­as­tic ren­di­tion of ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart’. The karaoke cost us about 1200 JPY each, which also included unlim­ited soft drinks [alco­hol was extra]; amaz­ing value! I sus­pect karaoke will become our reg­u­lar enter­tain­ment Only Phoebe brought along a cam­era so check her blog for some [highly embar­rass­ing] pictures.

We were finally able to meet every­one on our course, just in time for the ori­en­ta­tion at the uni­ver­sity. We were able to expe­ri­ence first hand, the hor­rors of over­crowd­ing on the Tokyo sub­way dur­ing the morn­ing rush hour — an expe­ri­ence we will now have to endure every sin­gle day! The jour­ney from Shi­mo­takaido to Ichi­gaya takes about 45–60 min­utes. The nov­elty fac­tor meant that we were still rea­son­ably cheer­ful, but I sus­pect that the jokes about ‘get­ting close to each other’ will soon wear thin as time goes on. Like sumo wrestling, there is only so much that we can take. The sub­way trains are well air-conditioned and very clean, so it is gen­er­ally quite a pleas­ant expe­ri­ence (minus the overcrowding).

When we arrived at the uni­ver­sity, we were given a talk by one of the course coor­di­na­tors about the hous­ing con­tract and gen­eral rules and reg­u­la­tions. She alter­nated between Eng­lish and Japan­ese and I tried my best to look like I could under­stand the gist of both (with well-timed nods!). We filled in a bunch of forms and ques­tion­naires about our level of Japan­ese pro­fi­ciency and the courses that we would like to take. The dif­fer­ent classes [class A to class E] roughly fol­low the dif­fer­ent lev­els of the inter­na­tional Japan­ese Lan­guage Pro­fi­ciency Test. For­tu­nately, we were told that those who had not stud­ied Japan­ese before did not need to attempt the lis­ten­ing and writ­ing place­ment tests and were only required for an inter­view. It seems like most of Cam­bridge as well as the Finns will be in the beginner’s class (class A), which is good since we have been hang­ing out together a lot any­way. [“A is for awesome!”]

The coor­di­na­tor remarked about how the pro­gramme was quite strict, but only 60% atten­dance of the classes is required. This seems to me to be a very lax fig­ure — I could effec­tively skip class for an entire month and still pass! There are also a ridicu­lous amount of pub­lic hol­i­days [almost one day per week] where we don’t have classes, and so I don’t except there to be too much pres­sure. Since I have already grad­u­ated, the trans­fer cred­its are incon­se­quen­tial to me and I am effec­tively learn­ing Japan­ese only for the sake of learn­ing Japan­ese. This rep­re­sents a refresh­ing change to my time at Cam­bridge where I felt pres­sured to try and max­imise exam per­for­mance at the sake of learn­ing about things I was inter­ested in.

We got a first taste of the Nihon cafe­te­ria and I found the food to be very good qual­ity and gen­er­ous in por­tion size. For about 600 JPY we were able to get a set meal of miso soup, salad, rice, and fried pork cut­let. We bought the com­muter pass that allows us to travel freely between Shi­mo­takaido and Ichi­gaya, and it cost about a whop­ping 30,000 JPY (just over £230) for three months. To con­trast, a one-month ‘zone 1 only’ trav­el­card in Lon­don costs £99.10 and so the com­muter pass in Tokyo is rel­a­tively good value. How­ever, it only pro­vides free travel for one par­tic­u­lar route and so we will still need to pay for tick­ets when we go out­side it.

The Finns received a sig­nif­i­cant mon­e­tary grant from the uni­ver­sity and so we decided to go back to Hara­juku to spend some of their money and kit out in Tokyo fash­ion! The Brits were unfor­tu­nately feel­ing a bit poor after pay­ing for the com­muter pass, but I was still able to find some cool flip-flops and invest in a 100-yen umbrella. Today was the first day it rained in Tokyo since we arrived, and I per­haps even pre­fer it to the sun­shine. The air was much cooler and the streets were less busy — a touch of Lon­don nos­tal­gia per­haps? I thought I wouldn’t miss the UK at all (par­tic­u­larly the weather) but it seems there is still a soft spot for it in me somewhere…

We met out­side our accom­mo­da­tion at the scar­ily early hour of 7.30AM; Phoebe and I had looked into the ongo­ing Sumo Grand Tour­na­ment in Tokyo and man­aged to con­vince a bunch of the guys and girls to come along and watch. Some of us from Cam­bridge were joined by the ever-eager Finns and we set off towards the Sumo dis­trict of Ryo­goku. The tour­na­ment lasts for about 2 weeks and since each indi­vid­ual bout only lasts mere sec­onds, you have the oppor­tu­nity to see many, many fights in just one day. Gen­eral admis­sion [unre­served] tick­ets were the cheap­est and were only on sale on the par­tic­u­lar day of the event — first come, first served! We were wor­ried they would sell out and so we arranged it so that we would arrive just as the box office opened (8.30AM). This turned out to be a pre­ma­ture cau­tion since it didn’t seem to sell out until much later!

The junior wrestlers were given bouts early on, whilst the higher ranked wrestlers came on later. We decided to go to the nearby Edo-Tokyo Museum to kill some time so that we didn’t get burnt out by watch­ing so much sumo. The museum was fairly inter­est­ing and had many relics from the Edo-period of Japan. It also had a sec­tion on Japan dur­ing the Sec­ond World War. We spent 2–3 hours soak­ing in the cul­ture there, whilst simul­ta­ne­ously hyp­ing up the sumo that we were about to see [“OMG sumo is gonna be awesome!”].

We stopped by in a nearby con­ve­nience store to get some drinks and snacks. Phoebe and Kaisa both went for tuna-mayo Oni­giri [filled rice ball wrapped in sea­weed] and I was sur­prised to see such con­trast­ing reactions!

ewwww!

omnom­nom!

When we entered the arena at just after mid­day, we felt smug in think­ing that since we had man­aged to spend three hours else­where we would be able to endure the rest of the fights that day. Although we bought seats in the very back row of the arena [’nose­bleed sec­tion’], most of the other seats were empty and so we seized the oppor­tu­nity to move closer until some­one would come to claim their seat.

A fight between two junior wrestlers. Note the empty stadium!

We spent an hour watch­ing some junior ranked wrestlers before going off the eat in the under­ground hall. They were serv­ing chankon­abe [tra­di­tional ‘Sumo Stew’] for only 250 JPY and so we hap­pily paid the token sum to have the oppor­tu­nity to try food that real sumo wrestlers ate on a reg­u­lar basis [as a side note, we were in McDon­alds ear­lier that day and saw a wrestler wolf­ing down a Big Mac meal!]. The stew was extremely tast­ing and fill­ing, although I couldn’t imag­ine it con­tain­ing very many calo­ries in com­par­i­son to the meals avail­able in mod­ern cui­sine (i.e. junk food!).

The stew went down well with Antti!

We returned to the arena in our appro­pri­ate seats and watched the rest of the show. THIS IS WHERE TIME SLOWED DOWN. There was still over 5 hours of fights left. There were only about 30 sec­onds between each fight and so I soon grew tired of the repet­i­tive­ness and cer­e­mo­nial chant­ing. Most of the sta­dium was still empty and we can now under­stand why! Although sumo is cer­tainly very inter­est­ing to wit­ness, it loses its charm when you see over 100 bouts in a row! I even man­aged to take a quick nap on the back row whilst the ‘action’ was going on. Each match was extremely sim­i­lar to the next, and I couldn’t even tell the dif­fer­ence between the appear­ance of most of the wrestlers [“fat guy” and “fat­ter guy” were the most com­mon nick­names].

A more senior fight with a full stadium.

We impa­tiently waited for the end of the day where we would be able to wit­ness the fight of the Yokozuna [sumo cham­pion!]. The cer­e­mo­nial danc­ing and chant­ing become par­tic­u­larly more elab­o­rate and it helped to build the sus­pense. The crowd even began to cheer the names of the wrestlers and it felt like some­thing excit­ing was going to hap­pen. By this point our con­ver­sa­tion had drifted to ran­dom Finnish swear words but we main­tained our enthu­si­asm for the Yokozuna. The sta­dium at this point was almost com­pletely full and for a sec­ond, just a sec­ond, I truly believed my endur­ing efforts would be rewarded. So how did the final, epic bat­tle turn out? One of the wrestlers lost his foot­ing and fell to his knees within the first two sec­onds. Match over.

We spent most of yes­ter­day evening in a local Iza­kaya nearby our accom­mo­da­tion in Shi­mo­takaido. We met the rest of the Finns and so only the Swedes remained to be seen (rumoured to arrived on Mon­day!). One of the guys from Cam­bridge, Tom, had lived in Japan before and was able to speak Japan­ese con­fi­dently enough to order what­ever we wanted. Japan­ese peo­ple are usu­ally extremely sur­prised at his level of flu­ency and always have a mas­sive grin whilst they are talk­ing to him! We found out one of the bar staff actu­ally attended Nihon Uni­ver­sity and so she was par­tic­u­larly happy to see us. We are due to meet a few vol­un­teers from the uni­ver­sity on Tues­day, and also take our place­ment test(!) at the same time — it will cer­tainly remind me that I’m not here just for tourism!

Bor­rowed image from Kaisa’s blog!

We decided to go to Shibuya and Hara­juku today to check out the sights. The Finns hadn’t been to Japan before and so we showed them the things we liked about it when we last vis­ited [Hara­juku girls!]. We are using Suica cards to get around Tokyo, which is pretty much the same as an Oys­ter card in Lon­don but you can also use it to pay for other things such as drinks in vend­ing machines. I have no doubt that this is a pre­cur­sor to how things will be in the UK in a few years — I am liv­ing in the future! The staff at train sta­tions all speak pass­able Eng­lish and the sta­tion boards are in Romaji, so it is gen­er­ally quite easy to get around for tourists. I’m quite sur­prised at how easy it is to get by in Tokyo with­out speak­ing a sin­gle word of Japan­ese; sim­ple hand ges­tures and speak­ing Eng­lish in a Japan­ese accent usu­ally gives the desired result!

The weather was extremely hot and it made it dif­fi­cult to fully enjoy strolling in Tokyo’s fash­ion dis­trict. For­tu­nately, we were given free paper fans (in the shape of a Google Places/Maps marker) and later we were also given free wet tow­els. Usu­ally the free stuff handed out on the street in the UK is next to use­less, but in Tokyo they are a wel­come sight! We saw clothes stores to acco­mo­date every Japan­ese teen sub-culture and some to suit West­ern styles also; price-wise they are not sig­nif­i­cantly higher than London.

There weren’t many peo­ple dressed up around Hara­juku, but those that were there received plenty of attention.

Phoebe makes friends with the locals.

This was also the only place where we saw more for­eign­ers than native Japan­ese peo­ple! Indeed, we man­aged to find an English/American/European/‘White’ girl dressed up as a maid and par­tak­ing in the same cer­e­mo­nial pos­ing as a typ­i­cal Hara­juku girl. Although I enjoyed my time there last year, it was very much a super­fi­cial impres­sion and I wasn’t able gain any depth of appre­ci­a­tion at all. To get a real glimpse into Japan­ese cul­ture I would have to look far beyond just the streets of Hara­juku… We quickly made our way towards the Meiji Shrine, which I had also vis­ited last year.

Cen­tre court of the Meiji Shrine.

There are small wells/fountains on the side which allow peo­ple to wash their hands and also drink the water, if they wish. I used to feel some­what uncom­fort­able tak­ing part in this tra­di­tional Shinto hand wash­ing since I (obvi­ously) didn’t share any of the asso­ci­ated beliefs. Now I’m choos­ing to approach it with a more open per­spec­tive, do as they do [in Tokyo], and per­haps I will be able to learn some­thing from the expe­ri­ence. What do I have to lose? One of the lec­ture series as part of the JLSP course is called “The Japan­ese Mind” and this is def­i­nitely some­thing I am look­ing for­ward to! As a side note, I realise I don’t have pho­tos for a lot of the things I’m talk­ing about, so I apol­o­gise in advance and promise to get bet­ter at this in the future!

After a long sum­mer of anx­ious wait­ing, I’ve finally arrived in Tokyo and am glad to be able to begin this blog! I arrived yes­ter­day evening after a long flight from LHR via Istan­bul. I flew with one of my friends from Cam­bridge and we man­aged to pass the time by talk­ing about all the awe­some things we were going to do in Tokyo! (Karaoke, karaoke, karaoke…) My friend had sev­eral “unfor­tu­nate inci­dents” through­out but I won’t embar­rass her and will let you read about it in her own blog! She doesn’t eat fish (and by exten­sion, most types of sushi) but I think I will try to fix that by the end of the course… I’m not a fan of Turk­ish Air­ways — both of our flights were delayed by about an hour each, most of the films were not in Eng­lish, and I was only able to eat the food in the inter­est of not starv­ing. (If I ever rec­om­mend Turk­ish Air­ways to you, it means I secretly hate you.)

We were met at Narita Air­port in Tokyo by this young Japan­ese woman hold­ing a sign with our names on. In hind­sight, this would have been an amaz­ing photo oppor­tu­nity but I think I just too over­whelmed to remem­ber to take one. She helped us pur­chase tick­ets for the Narita Express to Shin­juku and even sat with us in Star­bucks for a while. We found out she just works at the air­port and didn’t know any­thing about our course — she was extremely sur­prised to hear that I couldn’t speak Japan­ese at all! Con­versely her Eng­lish was amaz­ing and appar­ently she had only been study­ing it for three years. She man­aged to have a con­ver­sa­tion about nail pol­ish and shoes with my friend and so I guess some things are just universal!

When we got to Shin­juku sta­tion, we met a woman from Nihon Uni­ver­sity and she took a cab with us to our accom­mo­da­tion in Shi­mo­tokaido. She gave us a brief tour and explained how to use the var­i­ous gadgets/machines that we were given. Most impor­tantly, she explained the air con­di­tion­ing sys­tem with­out which I’d prob­a­bly melt. There is a par­tic­u­larly com­pli­cated garbage col­lec­tion sys­tem — we have to sep­a­rate our stuff into burn­able, unburn­able, and recy­clable objects and each type is col­lected on a dif­fer­ent day each week. The ‘col­lec­tion point’ out­side our house is the same for all of them and so it will prob­a­bly be very easy to get mixed up! We are stay­ing in ensuite rooms (with an indi­vid­ual kitchen in each), and so this is much nicer than any room I stayed in/saw at Cam­bridge (or at home, for that mat­ter). I will prob­a­bly take full pho­tos of the room in a later post.

We were given a quick tour of the area around our accom­mo­da­tion and we were left to our own devices. Even though the train sta­tion is only 10 min­utes away, we man­aged to get lost on our way back and only found our way home by try­ing sev­eral ran­dom routes. (My friend is in fact a Geog­ra­phy grad­u­ate, but claims they didn’t teach any­thing about actual nav­i­ga­tion!) We ate in a nearby restaurant/cafe, which was prob­a­bly strangely serv­ing food close Chi­nese cui­sine rather than Japan­ese, but I was glad to finally have a proper meal. It only cost 650 yen (~5 GBP) for sev­eral dishes and so was rel­a­tively good value for money.

I’ve just realised it will take me a ridicu­lously long amount of time if I keep writ­ing in this much detail, so I’m going to start skim­ming! When we got home we met another girl on our course who had just arrived. We also met some Ger­man stu­dents who were liv­ing above us and who had been there a bit longer. One of them had been there since Jan­u­ary and so he offered to give us all (another) quick tour. He pointed out var­i­ous ‘essen­tials’ such as where to find cheap food and drink, and where to run to if you ever ‘get attacked or raped’ [his words!].

We got back home and met some more stu­dents. We drank tea in the room of one of the guys from Cam­bridge, and briefly intro­duced our­selves. Most of us seem have to been to Japan before, but again, can hardly speak a word of Japan­ese… There are 15 of us on the course in total, and 6 of us from Cam­bridge (dom­i­nat­ing force!). We are going to be split up into classes accord­ing to Japan­ese level, but it seems most of us will be in the begin­ners class! One of the Cam­bridge guys had lived in Japan for a year and so we will prob­a­bly be turn­ing to him for on-the-spot trans­la­tions (until he gets annoyed!).

Today we walked around Asakusa and Ueno, and I man­aged to see the Sen­soji tem­ple once again. This time it had less con­struc­tion around it and so was cer­tainly a more pleas­ant sight! When we were in the mar­ket, I caught this Japan­ese girl unabashedly star­ing at us with her mouth open whilst we were talk­ing. I say ‘caught’, but she didn’t actu­ally stop when I looked at her and gave her a sar­cas­tic smile. She came up to us and asked about where we were from, and what we were doing in Tokyo. She had ridicu­lous amounts of enthu­si­asm when talk­ing and seemed to be impressed at every word we were say­ing! We were an extremely diverse group (in terms of race) and so it was prob­a­bly a strange sight for her to see. Her boyfriend beck­oned her to leave us alone, and we gave her a bow on departing.

We rented cycle-boats and row­ing boats and went on the small lake in Ueno. This was prob­a­bly the first time I tried row­ing, and I def­i­nitely lacked the grace and skill that I usu­ally see asso­ci­ated with boat­ies in Cam­bridge. We bumped into a few other boats sev­eral times but luck­ily ‘sorry’ is one of the few words I know in Japan­ese! We walked around Tokyo Uni­ver­sity after­wards because one of the girls had attended a short course there, and the archi­tec­ture reminded me of a tra­di­tional Roman town (noth­ing like other build­ings in Tokyo!). My cam­era ran out of bat­ter­ies half-way through today and so I didn’t man­age to get as many pho­tos as I wanted. No-one else brought a cam­era and so they prob­a­bly couldn’t have had a worse ‘des­ig­nated pho­tog­ra­pher’… It’s about 9PM now and I have a quick moment to rest in my room, but I think we will prob­a­bly go out again soon. I promise to post pic­tures when I can! Stay tuned for the next post.