Tokyo Notes

Raining heavily all day, in contrast to yesterday's clemency. Annoyingly, I was unable to launder. For reasons that had best remain obscure, my bicycle was at Enoshima, and had to be collected today, and, annoyingly, I got very wet doing it. Annoyingly, I bought some plates, and for reasons indirectly connected to the rain, dropped them on the way home. Please refer to the quote to the left before reading the above paragraph. Whoops, sorry.

Enoshima has an antique shop selling English furniture for vast amounts of money. The stuff is real but not the best - the kind of stuff that I assume is still sold on Causewayside to students for a few quid. Here are some sample price labels - 1930s bureaux, ¥150,000 each; small wooden chair, some water damage, ¥36,000. If I had an ounce of entrepreneurialism in my soul, and knew the first thing about how to ship a table 5000 miles, I would be a wealthier man than I am at present.

Barbecue on Chigasaki beach - a semi-compulsory work thing. Usual suspects present - the same students who came to the Christmas party, school staff doing the actual cooking and organising, and rationing the beer, new teachers trying to widen their social circle, and old lags, such as myself, who find it politically expedient to show their faces. Despite my cycnicism, it was quite a fun afternoon. Very sunny day too - I turned pink and lobster-like.

Then to Yokohama to find a new laptop for Takako - can't decide between a tiny ThinkPad and a tiny Viao. There's also a tiny Panasonic, with aluminium styling like those solid, strong, silver attache cases one sees from time to time, although in what context I can't recall. It claims to be able to survive having 100kg dropped on it; I don't need to point out to you, dear reader, the meaninglessness of this claim.

Pictures from last weekend.

Today met with my meeting the chap who's moved into my old flat. He's not pleased with it, and has been heard referring to it as damp, dark, noisy, poorly equipped, inconveniently located and overpriced. All these things are, in fact, true, as those happy few of my readership who have visited it will attest. The new occupant is going to move out as soon as possible, and wonders why I stayed there so long. I have no satisfactory answer to this.

In some ways, things are environmentally friendly. Japan is a big supporter of the Kyoto agreement, so we recycle lots. I, a good eco-warrior, sort my rubbish into metal, glass, paper, thin cardboard, thick cardboard, clothes, PET bottles, plastic, and everything else (divided into unburnable stuff and burnable stuff). I was particularly impressed by the plastics being recycled, although couldn't figure out how a bag containing 7 or 8 different kinds of plastic could be processed. I imagined an army of people trained to recognise each one on sight, or a clever machine able to do the same thing. So I was a disappointed to discover that the plastics are in fact burned along with everything else, but at a different temperature. Ho.

AM: New season of Japanese lessons at Fujisawa International Youth Centre. As always, a really good multicultural mix of people; very few English speaking gaijin. My classmates are a Chinese girl and a Brazilian housewife. Immigrant groups in order of prevalence: Korean, Brazilian, Chinese, Anglophone countries, Indian.

PM: Footy! Went to watch the local J-League team, Yokohama F. Marinos play Urawa Reds. F. Marinos (not sure what the F's for) play at the stadium where the World Cup final was, and it's Big. We were home fans for the day, and we lost 1-0. Not a great match, although Ahn was playing for Marinos. He was the man who scored the golden goal for S. Korea to beat Italy in 2002, as you will recall. But the atmosphere was great - our fans were pretty noisy and well equipped: blue shirts, scarves held above the heads, big flags being waved. But the visiting support was awesome: there were a good 10-15000 of them, keeping up a wall of noise from their end of the ground for the whole match. It turns out that they're famous, and on today's performance their fame is well deserved. They seem to take inspiration from Italian fans, with banners reading 'Forza Urawa', 'Urawa Ultras' and the like. But no flares, or even a hint of trouble - one bored looking policeman patrolled each end.

Late PM: To re-enforce gender stereotypes, whilst I had been at the football with the lads, Takako had gone shopping in Minato Mirai, the super-modern consumer paradise on Yokohama bay side. So, after a quick browse round a bookshop with a big English section, we met for an Asian fusion snack.

Interview for web admin job at Nellie's ELT bookshop in Asakusa. Some difficulty finding it, and so I was late, which wasn't a good start; and we had to cut it short so I could get to work on time. Despite this they seemed happy with my technical and personal experience, but the level of Japanese required was much higher than I'd hoped it would be: I'm not yet up to taking part in proper work meetings with Japanese people. I'd been counting on the required level being pleasantries and explaining which button to press to get the printer to work, with the more complicated stuff being done with the non-Japanese staff. So, an email a few moments ago explaining that I hadn't got the job was not unexpected.

Back to work. Very hard to get back into the swing - I felt at several points that I'd forgotton how to do it during my couple of weeks of idleness.

Yet more pictures, all a bit old this time. Most overdue, those from Lin and Alasdair's visit last summer. Also, a few loose ends, tied together by nothing more than being taken at about the same time last Autumn. And some additions to the Ed and Kate collection, and various corrections and clarifications.

New pictures. A few from yesterday and the day before's trip. There are only four of them, and none are particularly good, but, since many people took many pictures, I should be able to add to them soon. Also, excitingly, pictures from Kate and Ed's visit last autumn.

"The Japanese and Their Crazy Language", Part 1 of an occasional series.

"Niwa niwa niwa niwatori ga iru." "There are two chickens in the garden."

So there we have it - four "niwa"s in a row, each with a different meaning from all the others. This illustrates the need to use the Sino-Japanese characters, the ones which are like pictures, to make the written language comprehensible. Each of the "niwa"s above is written differently - 庭には二羽鶏がいる - if you have the appropriate fonts, a horrible mess if you don't have them* - sorry.

*If you're running Debian, then apt-get install ttf-kochi-gothic should do it.