A Fine and Happy New Year!

It's New Year's Eve and Tokyo is quiet as people have returned to their home towns to be with family. Tonight the country will be sitting in front of the TV watching Kohaku, the annual "Boys vs Girls" (boys in white, girls in red) sing off that has been running for, it would seem, ever. All the favourite singers and talento of the day join in an multi-hour extravaganza of a competition, wrapping up just before midnight as everyone switches over to watch the countdown on Jonny's Pop Show.

But there's an interesting aside for the name of Kohaku. The reason why the girls are in red and the boys are in white is that Kohaku is actually a stylised koi carp which is also red and white. Bred in the 1800's it's now featured in garden ponds the world over and each and everyone can be traced back to a gentleman by the name of Kunizo Hiroi who successfully mated the first pairing to an ornamental fish. But more impressively, single handedly invented the concept of an ornamental fish in its own right.

But as Kohaku closes, the camera will switch to a tolling bell, ringing in the New Year. And that's when everyone changes channel to the Jonny's party. A neighbour of mine, the lead guitar of a band  known as "New Dawn" used to hangout here and we'd have beers on the balcony. He was a really nice guy and I never really knew what he did or who the band were. Until I saw him closing the show as the countdown sounded. I asked him later about why a famous guy like himself would sit and drink a glass with me (of all people) and he said that as I didn't know who he was he just felt like a regular guy. And he liked that. Happy New Year.

   

Smile, it's a beautiful day

This happens to be my 500th post on TenguLife, and as such please indulge me a little. Allow me to recount a story from the closing days of December 1991, in the depths of downtown Tokyo, I was in a bar, long since fading into history, when the girl of my dreams walked through the door. And here I am today, all these years later, walking the sights of Tokyo, the two of us still holding hands. And it's a sunny day.

When we met she spoke no English and my Japanese was remarkably close to useless. Luckily her friend who was with her that evening had spent a couple of years in LA and helped us out at the beginning but after that, it was just her, me and a dictionary. Conversations were confusing, slow and difficult but we persevered, sometimes with hilarious consequences as we tripped over each others language and culture.

This was in the days before Google and the mobile phone, the two great facilitators of the modern era. Arranging a date via answer machine was almost always a hit and miss affair, you just had to repeat the time and place three times, hang up and hope. But slowly we figured it out, developing a language the two of us could understand but others, may be not. And now our son is leaving for university. You really can do anything you want to do in life. You just have to try and give it a go. Have a wonderful day.

Winter is Coming

Winter is coming to Japan. Soon the daytime temperature in Tokyo will be hitting low single digits and already snow has fallen in the capital; though admittedly that was the earliest winter wonderland has arrived in nearly sixty years. And this means it's onsen season. Yey! It may sound a little strange to the uninitiated but one of the greatest pleasures in life is to laze in a tub of hot water with friends as the snowflakes falls around you. And Japan is very good at this.

These days there are four essential styles of onsen (hot spring) that are popular with the populace. The international tourist focussed ones tend to require swimsuits but the traditional pools are almost universally au natural as it were though modesty maintained with a handy modesty towel. The classical onsen are segregated allowing your time or relaxation, neck deep in piping hot water, with the guys or girls. Though it has to be said the chatter from the ladie's side tends to be a little (lot) louder than the men's. 

Konyoku, mixed bathing, is actually the traditional variety (it's not inappropriate to bathe, however it is inappropriate to look) but these largely disappeared following western influences over the last century though if you really search around they can still be found, hidden away. And the final version is known as kazokuburo, or family bath. Usually unfrequented by teenagers but younger families or the slightly older will enjoy time together chatting the night away. Japan is more relaxed about spending family time together, a little freaky for a westerner, but just wait for the snowflakes to fall. Winter is coming.

How easy is life in Japan?

It's a perennially interesting question, "how hard is life in a country where you're not an element of the culture, can't speak the language, and haven't a clue how to read those little squiggles known as kanji?". Strangely the first part of the question rarely arises. Without knowing how different the culture of Japan is from the baseline of a home country born and raised, it is actually quite hard to realise this is a valid vertex of the triangle. And yet it is.

The answer is "no, it's not hard, but it's not quite exactly what you'd expect". And the internet has made a world of difference. The pre-digital age search system was to ask a friend. Or trawl through something like the Kansai Flea Market, the free rags available around every corner, keeping the wheels of the non-native community turning with fun facts and information. But it's not quite the same as Google.

So yes, twenty five years ago it was a bit tricky and you had to accept the gaijin abyss as part of daily life; though the phone boxes used to have ISDN ports (remember those?), but I've yet to meet anyone who had ever used one. But the world is a simpler place these days with instant communication and Amazon-on-Demand. Hard work in an unknown language, yes; hard life? No. A well kept secret though. Oh, and earthquakes and typhoons. But you can't have everything.

The cure to the global loneliness of Japan

Japan couldn't exactly be said to be on the way to anywhere. Sitting at the top left-hand corner of The Pacific, traffic to China is direct these days, Europe to Australia is via Singapore or Hong Kong and Dubai is now a hub for almost anywhere. If you land in Japan it's because you wanted to be there. So the chances of an old friend just passing through and stopping off to say hello are slim to nothing at best. 

And so one of the greatest pleasures of life is when an old friend is in town, for whatever reason, and takes the time to look you up. I once made a life changing mistake of not taking the chance to meet a friend from Tokyo as I passed through London on business. A few weeks later we lost him to a small piece of cholesterol that lodged in his heart and I'll never forget those missed moments we could have spent, beers in hand, laughing about our lives in Japan. I'll never make that mistake again; but I can't take it back.

And so when your phone rings, and there's a country code on display, you know it's something special. Rain, shine, bubonic plague, you move heaven and earth to be able to meet, even if it's just for a twenty minute coffee that has taken you an hour or more of trains and taxis to make. Friends are important and in the transient life of a global metropolis they are rarely just around the corner. But when you do sit down together, it feels like only yesterday. And that's important in a sometimes lonely country with no passing traffic.

Seeing the skies again

Coney Island may have a little more fame as an out-of-city resort destination but Atami, located on the north-eastern shores of the Izu Peninsula beats it by a little something over a thousand years. A short hop from Tokyo (these days, less than an hour's sojourn by shinkansen), its popularity has waxed and waned with the rise and fall of the capital's economy, earthquakes, tsunami and the success of the hot springs and their attendant onsen geisha.

Sitting reasonably close to the intersection of three tectonic plates, in 1923 it took a direct hit from the Great Kanto Earthquake as the temblor first flattened the mountain side town and then sent in a 10m tsunami to make good on the job. Today there are helpful signs all along the shore line, where exists a popular boardwalk, letting you know the height above sea-level and which is the direction of the closest evacuation point. And remember, run, run uphill, don't look back, just run.  

It has to be said though that the Soapland car park was astonishingly good value as pointed out by a friend of my wife when she suggested we leave the car there, but during our weekend away in this urban escape all I could wonder at were the stars. They're still there. I occasionally see planets in the Tokyo skies trying to extend their presence through the light pollution of the metropolis but from Atami I could see the Milky Way. And now I know why it became a resort town over a thousand years ago. It's simply a beautiful place to visit. Thank you Kato-san.

Tales of days gone by

In the nearly 500 articles I've written for this blog (an enjoyable hobby and everyone should have one...) there is only one where I have used someone else's words, and that's because they created the story I'd always wanted to but did it so much better than I could have penned. And my thanks are still there to Yuri Kageyama. The following though are my words but inspired by someone writing recently online about their experiences in Japan twenty five years ago. And was the world a different planet in those days:

I landed in Japan in October 1991, twenty five years ago this week. No phone (it cost $700 just for a number and another $100 to have the line installed; and then I had to buy the phone), it would be nearly another half decade until mobile phones came into existence and then they only worked in Japan; so no worries about roaming charges. No internet, no Skype, and it cost $4 a minute to call home. Which at that point I missed. Postcards were the only viable communication platform.

A date (with the wonderful lady who eventually became my wife) always included a dictionary. If it happened at all. Calling her home number I would usually experience the answer machine (these were popular before mobiles) and repeat time and location several times in my awful Japanese. And then pray to the telecommunication gods she would be there. Train signs were only in kanji, children would run up and touch me and run away laughing they'd touched a foreigner and red wine was chilled and white warmed. And it cost $100 a bottle. But I still fell in love with the country. And I'm still here. What a wonderful world I live in. TV's still the same though...