Chicken Bandages

Since that unusual Thursday night, lots has happened, but let me home straight in on half-term when I went to Japan. This was the first trip I’d taken entirely alone. Unlike everywhere else I’ve been to in Asia over the last couple of years, hardly anyone in Japan tried to speak to me in English. This made it an odd week, because I was surrounded by people the entire time, but I was silent most of the time. I was in a state of solitude whilst surrounded by a multitude.

Let’s start with the bullet train, or the shinkansen, which, in my own little silent bubble, quickly became the ‘shin cancer’ for some reason. The bullet train is notorious for being incredibly efficient and leaving on the absolute dot. However, on the day I left Tokyo to go to Kyoto (which sounds like a song title), the bullet train was two hours late. Although all the signs at the stations are in English as well as Japanese, all the announcements, including two changes of platform, were in Japanese only, so I had the unnerving experience of watching my train disappear from the screen twice. Fortunately, a Japanese guy came and stood next to me on the platform. He asked me, in rather good English, whether they’d said what was going on. I said, very slowly and clearly, that I didn’t know what was going on because ‘all announcements in Japanese. Me not speak Japanese.’
‘I don’t speak much either,’ he replied. He revealed that he was born in Tokyo, but moved to California when he was 3.

I spoke to him very occasionally over the next two hours, and with the little Japanese he understood, he helped me get to the right platform. Imagine the luck! A quiet American! Apparently, someone had thrown themselves in front of a bullet train just outside the station, which had caused the delay. I thanked him, we got on the train, and I never saw him again.

My first three nights were in Tokyo. It was Autumn, so there was an unrelenting drizzle, but the temperature was pleasant. I spent three days under a see-through umbrella, trying to avoid being poked in the eye by considerably shorter people also holding see-through umbrellas. I stayed in Shinjuku, where Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson stayed in Lost In Translation, although my hotel was rather less swanky. I did some of the same stuff – wandering around with a surprised look on my face, stumbling into amusement arcades where people were doing very strange things, like playing some kind of vertical pinball game, which, despite a long period of observation, I still couldn’t understand.

There was a virtual horseracing game, too. This, I suppose, is an upgrade of those plastic horseracing games you can bet on at the end of a pier. This one was made by Sega and was on a huge screen. There must have been 10 punters sat at computer consoles, feverishly making notes about, and placing bets on, pixels that looked like horses. I watched a race and there was a very close finish. Somebody looked like he’d won a lot of money on it from his reaction. Another guy immediately set about making notes on form, I guess.

Hyperreal, man.

Tokyo’s also good for temples,


markets,

people-watching and skyscrapers,

but somehow the amusement arcades are much more interesting to write about. As is the food.

Ordering food was problematic. Fortunately, a lot of restaurants have pictures of the food, or incredibly realistic plastic representations of the food, displayed outside. The display of desserts above, for example, is all plastic. Sometimes I’d go into a restaurant and would have to go back outside with a waiter to point at what I wanted. Quite often I had no idea what I’d eaten, even after I’d eaten it.

Being on my own made going to restaurants awkward because, in a lot of places, the portions are for two or more people to share. I discovered this when I took the plunge on my second night and picked a restaurant at random which didn’t have any pictures outside. I went downstairs and was greeted at the door by a waitress who spoke in Japanese for a few moments, while I nodded, occasionally asking whether I should take my shoes off in English. A bloke popped his head round the door and said ‘No English… only Japanese,’ to me, which I took to mean that they only had Japanese food. By this time I was already halfway through taking off my shoes, so despite this slightly lukewarm welcome, I felt that I had already crossed the point of no return, even after I realised that he actually meant they had no English menu. Nor did they have any pictures on their menu. It crossed my mind that perhaps he had meant ‘no English people,’ too.

Eventually shoeless, I was ushered into a small pod-like booth with a door to shut me off from the rest of the restaurant. This was, if you will, a microcosm of my experience in Japan. I could hear the raucous conversations and laughter of my fellow diners, but, at the same time, I was detached. Solitude in the multitude. Together while apart. Faraway, so close.

I've finished now.

My little dining capsule had a table for two, which would have been very romantic had it not been a ‘menage a un’. Pointlessly, I turned the pages of the menu. It was as bewildering as my GCSE maths exam after I’d got past the first five easy questions, or reading Ulysses. I managed to order a beer by saying ‘beer’, which seems to be pretty much globally understood, and when the waitress returned with my drink I shrugged and pointed at the menu with a smile on my face. She spoke to me in Japanese for a bit. I took the plunge. ‘Tempura?’ I asked. I knew I was on to a winner when she repeated the word ‘tempura’. She continued to speak, pointing at things on the menu, seemingly trying to explain something to me. I wasn’t sure what it was, but I nodded a lot and she pressed a few buttons on her ordering keypad and seemed to go off happy.

Initially, I was given a small potato cake. If this was all I was going to get, I thought, I’d eat it, pay the bill, and go and get some noodles somewhere with a plastic food display outside. My tempura soon arrived, though. It was clearly a dish designed for people to share as I was almost sick by the time I’d finished. Although not the most balanced meal I’ve ever had, it was delicious. Sometimes, even the point-at-a-picture method yielded unexpected results. The following night I went to some kind of barbecue type place and pointed at some delicious looking beef. I was fortunate enough to have an English-speaking waiter, who informed me I’d pointed at beef tongue. Beef tongue isn’t my favourite dish, I have to say. I pointed at something else, which my waiter told me was ‘barbecued beef’. This was much more like the kind of non-specific dish I was after.

One of the things I particularly enjoyed doing in Japan was watching businessmen part company. Once I watched a group of 8 businessmen saying goodbye to each other in the street, oblivious to all the people trying to get past them. They stood in a kind of big circle, facing each other, and bowing, and it seemed to be some kind of contest to see who could bow the lowest, with everybody bowing at everybody else several times. What with there being 8 of them, and them all bowing to each other at least three times, there must have been at least 147 bows within 20 seconds, if my calculations are correct (unlikely).

Once the bowing finished, one of them said something to another, which meant that the last spell of saying goodbye and bowing didn’t count, so another round of bowing commenced. By this time I'd found a nice lamppost to lean on so that I could watch the spectacle unfold. Another chap made a wisecrack, which they all chuckled at, which, of course, resulted in more bowing. It reminded me of when I was a kid in assembly trying to get the last clap when someone’s being applauded. If someone else joins in, the clapping goes on until a teacher glares at you. With no glaring teacher to referee the bowing game, it amazes me that these businessmen ever part company at all.

Lots of waiters bowed at me while I was ordering stuff, and I would, of course, bow back, only clashing heads twice.

Being on my own and not saying anything enabled me to do lots of thinking and lots of staring. No one seemed to stare back. The Japanese seem to be either excessively chic or excessively bohemian. Even though you might think that wearing striped stockings above the knee or huge ‘cat in the hat’ hats is just stupid, whether weird, smart or scruffy, they seem to carry it off.

When I stopped thinking about what I was seeing and started thinking about myself, I discovered that, instead of thinking about the future, I thought about the past. I found myself going over the things I’d done in the past that I wished I hadn’t done and that make me cringe to think about them. I also found myself remembering things that I had completely forgotten about that happened at school or university. Perhaps I was giving myself some kind of non-consensual internal therapy-by-stealth.

On my last day, when I was looking at five large mushrooms in a market which were selling for about 300 quid, a woman approached me and told me that the mushrooms were expensive. I agreed. This was only the second time in a week that a Japanese person had approached me and spoken to me in English. I was conversationally rusty, so she kept the conversation going. Her last question was, ‘Are you in Japans doing sig-hut-si-ing-ger?’ It took me a while to work out that she was asking me if I was sightseeing, but was pronouncing every letter with great care. Shrooms:I had a similar experience at the airport, when a guy asking security questions asked me how many chicken bandages I’d had. Initially, I thought he was being sociable and was asking me whether I’d eaten some obscure chicken dish while I’d been in Japan. Before I answered, I fortunately worked out that he was asking me how many check-in baggages I had.

I realise I haven’t said much about what stuff looked like, but that’s what photos are for. It’s a stunning place, and I know I say this whenever I go away, but it’s the most interesting place I’ve been to yet, and I have to go back. Next time, hopefully, Ella will be able to come too. Here are some photos of Tokyo, and its anagram, Kyoto.

These wooden 'vocatives' were outside a shrine in Tokyo. People write their prayer requests on them:

One down, two to go! Get in! Come on you Spurs etc. I didn't write this one, honest:

These, too, were outside the same shrine. Loads of sake casks, for reasons unknown, I'm afraid, but they look nice:

Altogether now:

Red street by night:

Kyoto Station - an amazing place:

Looking at the view 11 floors up at Kyoto Station:

Kyoto Tower:

Reflections:

Shrine:

Raked gravel:

Emptiness:

These are fortunes (I think) which people get at shrines. They tie them to a tree so their fortune doesn't blow away (I think, again - I don't speak the language, you know):


The sky proves, once again, that it's the best thing ever:

I was really glad I went here. I walked up a hill (some would say mountain) for 4km through these toril, or shrine gates. They went all the way up. I took a million photos. Here's one:

At the top of the hill there was a great view of Kyoto and a shrine with lots of mini-toril, with prayers (or something) written on them:


Another beautiful sky with a castle or something in the way:


And finally, more great sky. I liked this one despite, or maybe because of, the coaches:

And that's quite enough for now.