The Kids – Update

I talked to him. I don’t think he understands. He explained: “Because…love?”

The Kids

By the look of the stats, nobody is actually reading this anymore. I can’t blame any of you; it would certainly be ore interesting for all of us if I actually did more things. But, as things stand, this is the way it has to be… so let me tell you, my nonaudience, about the students here.

I know I’ve mentioned before how lax things are out here, but it never fails to shock me. A few days ago a guy turned up at me door, asking to interview me for a project, because I was English. I’d never met him before, so how he found out where I lived purely on the basis of my nationality I don’t know, but communication was limited and I didn’t try too hard to find out. The interview was brief but I offered him tea and we got talking about the university. Apparently, APU is supposed to be good. When I asked him about easy universities, and why anybody would ever attend, he told me that really, people only ever go to university to ‘play’.

He told me that for most national Japanese universites tuition fees work out at about Y500,000 per year, but that APU is Y1,200,000. The price is obviously worth it, however, for the Japanese are able to do here what they can never do again in their professional lives:

(Do excuse the blurriness. I was trying not to look too dodgy. Don’t think I came off well.)

These folk are to be congratulated for making it to lessons. A lot of people have their friends sign the register for them and spend theuir time on more important things, like fashion.

There seem to be two paradigms of cool in modern Japanese fashion – the first is that anything written in English is cool, the second that things must strive towards intolerable cuteness. Some dare mix these ideas, though few ever make it out.

As you can see, the rush to produce anything written in English has resulted in a few casuleties. The problem is, in fact, almost epidemic:

No, that isn’t a gothic v, it’s a b. “With mysterious lobe…”

YOU WHO FELL IN LOVE ARE BAD. You Are Defeat.

Again, I tried not to look too odd taking these pictures.

Weather

As I said in my last post, things got pretty chilly when the winter arrived. I suppose that is rather to be expected, so I didn’t dwell on it too long, but I do fear that I haven’t well represented the odd climate of Japan to you all. Now no country can help the hemisphere it’s in, nor how far from the equator it rests, but even as they labour under the yoke of regional megaclimates some individual landmasses retain enough influence to produce startling idiosyncrasies. Japan is one such.

This whole string of islands follows the same pattern – endless mountains surrounded by thin strips of land against the sea, with the occasional exposed plateau. Nobody bothers trying very hard to develop anything in the mountains, but the rest of the land is so cramped that they have to wallmount their livestock.

Moisture blows in off of the ocean from every direction, and gets driven up the side of the mountains until it cools enough to form gigantic clouds. Then it mills about, trapped between the peaks, until it finds a gap to trickle out and slides down into the cities. When I got up this morning to go to class, the campus looked like this:

But the days are warming up, and at these lower climes the cuts through it pretty fast. When I left my class an hour and a half later, I took this photograph:

 

And by the time I’d walked to the end of the path and looked behind me, those last few wisps were rolling away:

You could see the cloud rising up from the whole campus over the space of about half an hour:

This happens every two days or so. I’m not sure how far the clouds drop, because I’m never down into the city early enough to find out, but I understand from my Japanese friends that it’s the same all over the country. Until June, of course, when commences fourty days of searing heat and hope-destroying typhoon.

Accelerated Update

I don’t need cheering up; that was not a sad tale. I’m lean, I’m focused and I’m feeling alright – I’m comitted to enjoying these rare moments of healthy living while they last; I don’t delude myself into thinking that they’ll continue once I’m back h0me. When I first arrived here they gave me a friendly urinalysis and bloodtest, which surprised me both with my high cholestorol and pristine liver. The latter, of course, confirms that the Lord has sanctioned my way of life, but the former caught me off guard, and has led me to fully embrace this diet of rice and tea so that my heart doesn’t give out before I manage to get back to England and start wrecking myself again.

I’m going to quickly run through what happened between the fall of the last incarnation of the glog and the rise of this one. The previous glog was hosted on one of the company computors at Rob’s old place of employment in Hove, and when the company went under so too did this journal. The old entries, as well as some photographs that I’d like to put up here, are still safe on that machine (which is now under Rob’s bed), but I don’t think I’ll be getting my hands on them in the immediate future.

I spent a lot of my time getting to know the town. It ain’t too much bigger than Brighton but it merges into a  much larger city on the Eastern edge. Cheap resteraunts are on every backstreet – people seem to be able to just open their houses up and cook for you in their living rooms. They put flags outside, covered in kanji that I can’t read, advertising what it is they do, but I just tend to wander insider and have a look. Most places only cook one kind of food, so they’ll be a dumpling resteraunt next to a ramen shop next to a yakiniku place. Korean barbeques are very popular – they’re generally very slightly more upmarket than the other cheap resteraunts because the require those grilles built into every table. I took some pictures last time I went.

Those are my friends from a gender studies module that I took. Gender studies at APU is rather an unsettling experience; there are students from such a huge number of countries that there are quite a lot of people that had never come across any of the ideas we’d been talking about, and worse, quite a few people that follow rather extreme paths of Sharia law. A lot of women were standing up and arguing against just about every feminist viewpoint, every suggestion of equality. In an university level discussion of gender, there were students that hadn’t heard of Freud.

It can be difficult to find to people to easily communucate with. Often with my friends from gender studies it took a lot of effort to converse. With the Japanese students it’s easier - they all speak a little English, I speak a little Japanese, and we can knuckle through between us – but with people from other East Asian countries broken English tends to be the primary medium and there is a definite limit on what can be communicated. Left to my own devices I don’t tend to seek people out, especially just for conversation, but if I do find myself making friends with somebody I like to be able to understand them a little deeper than I might through class-taught small talk.

Well, so it was that last semester the greater number of my companions were those that spoke better English than the majority here. That has upsides and downsides, of course. These friends were mostly American and Finnish; I think that the major difference between these guys and the Japanese was the culture of alcohol consumption. Especially the Finns. It takes maybe two beers to make most of Japanese friends lose their head, the Finns, on the other hand, just never stopped. Foul, raw vodka.

The final months of last semester were arctic. I’m further South than the rest of you here but I’m high up and the end the snow had built up pretty high. The night before I was supposed to get my coach to the airport the roads froze over on the mountain and all the buses stopped running.  We’d arranged to go out to a sushi resteraunt before we all departed, and I took everything I could with me down to the city so that I could catch the train.

Excuse the Myspace style photo. I was trying to get everybody in but I mostly photographed my shaving cut.

Paper walled rooms. You get your own in any good sushi resteraunt. Expensive though. Classy stuff, anyhow. Then: back to England for February!

Mr. Clean

I confess to you, my friends, that I’ve ever looked towards the next entry of the glog with a kind of horror. Being inclined by nature and, often enough, impelled by circumstance towards an anchoritic existence, my daily adventures are more than likely no more exciting that your own – and that does rather put me on the spot when the time comes for me to attempt to entertain you with the stories of my intrepid undertakings.  You all know me well enough – even before I moved to the mountain I was in the habit of spending my sober time reading in my room, and the rest of my time drinking in Rob’s.  The food that they serve up here is just fine, and it’s a long old walk down to town, so even before I returned for this semester I tended to spend more of my time on my own than I ever did back in England.

Well, the way it is here most people only exchange for a single semester instead of for the entire year. Upshot of that is that all my newly forged friendships are now suffering the strain of a few thousand miles – and whilst that hasn’t detracted overly from the standing alliances that I hold with any of you, I have less faith in the long-term integrity of these relationships.  That fact alone wouldn’t normally bother me too much, the loss of new friends never having had much sting in my certain knowledge that the most of my old friends remain alive, but in this instance the context of the thing has given it extra weight. As ever, I’m poor – poorer than usual, perhaps, saving up for travelling in August – and that means that I can’t be lubricating my way into companionship in the time honoured manner. So, here I am, faced with having to put real and actual effort into the construction of friendships that I know full well - thanks to my experiences of the last six months - will be scattered to the wind before I have to shave more than three times (though my own consideration of when a shave is required seems to be somewhat divergent from the standard).

I just can’t do it.

I can’t be bothered. I stay in my room and I read, and the sun, which is now angry and hot and an awful lot closer than when I first arrived, does its best to give me a tan through my window, my metal mosquito grille, my shirt and my battered black jeans (I did sew them up, but the first time I washed them a brand new hole appeared exactly below the endless stitching I did, and I’m not going to be arguing with fate). I drink tea. I drink so much tea that I sometimes have to excuse myself from a lesson two or three times. I save money. I try to eat less, and healthily. I write squint-eyed poetry and post it to Katie. Last week I was feeling so fucking clean and healthy that I decided to strap my feet to the bedpost and do Leon-style situps over the void. The pain, five days later, has only just receded.

But through the pain I have kept my eyes fixed firmly upon my goal. Through my rice-eating, tea-drinking, stomach-splitting hours reading books that I should I read ages ago I have been planning interesting things to do for your reading pleasure!

But first, due to my long absence  (for which I would apologise if I hadn’t enjoyed it so much) an update  is required. You’re dying to know, of course, what it was that dragged me away, and where I have been? I’ll tell you! But tomorrow, or the next day. It’s 9:21. Bedtime.