28 August 2011

Book shopping

Ah, if I had any poetic leanings, then Tokyo's specialised shopping districts would surely be the subject of my writings. In March we spent a happy day in Jimbocho, Tokyo's 'book town'. What surely saved us from instant bankruptcy is the fact that neither of us has enough Japanese to read even Spot The Dog in translation, and only a few of the glorious bookshops stock English books. The places we spent most time in were Kitazawa and Bondi Books.

Kitazawa was magnificent and infuriating in equal measure - it had an amazing selection of rare and interesting volumes, particularly on the history of British towns.

However, in front of every bookshelf there was a pile of books 30 high and three deep, which we weren't allowed to touch or buy. And of course this was where the REALLY good stuff was.

Speaking of a love of books, here's a not very comprehensive list of English language bookshops in Japan that have been great:

- Good Day Books, Ebisu, Tokyo - second hand novels and non-fiction. Pro - amazing selection of books. Con - the owner is a bit scary. I can't develop on that as there is a chance (admittedly quite small) that he will read this and I will be banned from his shop, which would be reason enough to pack up and return to England right now. Forever.

- Blue Parrot (second hand), Ikebukero, Tokyo

- Kinokuniya, Shinjuku, Tokyo

- Maruzen, Maranouchi, Tokyo

- Wantage Books, Kobe

- And of course an honourable mention to Amazon (UK) who deliver books pretty quickly - with the amazing discounts the postage doesn't even bring the books up to full price.

And just to think - all this from someone who claims to hate shopping.


Visit to Junko's exhibition

Two days after the big earthquake in March, Angus and I took the subway out to the east of Tokyo to see my friend Junko's exhibition. Junko's a calligrapher. The rough meaning of the characters in the pictures below are 'heaven is on earth', and Junko has used ancient Japanese script (which is why it looks a lot more curvy than usual Japanese characters).

Here we are with her wood engraving



And her ink on paper work



Junko and her teacher also discovered new levels of patience when they allowed Angus and I to carve our own seals - used in place of a signature on official documents in Japan.




Kobe

Shortly after the earthquake, Angus had a business trip to western Japan to a town that has two attractions - the plant he was visiting, and a soy sauce factory. I declined to accompany him that far, even though I love soy sauce (in moderation). The nearest city to his meetings was Kobe, so I joined him there.

I only knew two things about Kobe before I visited - that there was a horrendous earthquake there in 1995 that caused the death of over 6000 people, and featured very heavily in my A-level geography paper, and that there was a moderate to high chance that I could try Kobe beef - from cows fed beer, played classical music and massaged to new levels of bovine relaxation (and beef fat distribution).

Starting with the earthquake, there is a park next to the harbour where a section of seawall has been preserved in its post-earthquake state



By all accounts the city has recovered well since 1995 although several museums suggested that the economy of Kobe never recovered. The city seemed pretty lively to me - here's a snowy picture of the centre



Something I didn't know was that Kobe is also the site of an early foreign settlement, established during the late Meiji era (1868 - 1912). This area has been preserved and many of the foreign houses are open to tourists, including a very authentic gem



The English House is an 'exact replica' of Sherlock's pad in Baker Street, as evidenced by a claw-footed bathtub full of champagne corks, and not one but two working bars. One of the prize exhibits is a letter from the landlady of the Sherlock Holmes pub in London confirming that yes, this is all very authentic, and yes, she's very pleased to know that the curators are working hard to promote Mr Holmes. The plus side of this house is that it didn't cause the smallest amount of homesickness, as I worried it would. Quite the opposite, it brought home quite how in Japan I was.

Kobe's charms don't stop at earthquake parks and bathtubs full of corks, it is also famous for sake breweries. Bottoms up! We were there on a weekday and most of the other visitors to the museums were Kobe retirees who seemed to be regulars, who would do the walking tour and top up with the free samples at each of the c. 20 brewery museums. I discovered by observing them that it is perfectly possible to be utterly battered by lunchtime, for free, in Kobe. Worth bearing in mind.

sake breweries - lovely buildings

And the beef. Ah, again I regret my lack of poetic leanings. It's not cheap, but by gum, it's worth the money. In Japan it is not known as Kobe beef (that would REALLY upset the farmers elsewhere), it is known as Wagyu beef. It is so tender you could probably manage it with no teeth, it has the texture of cool butter, and it is the beefiest beef ever. What a treat! This isn't to say that I won't be able to return to big wobbly, marginally less tender, British beef, but it was good.

Here it is before we cooked it on a charcoal brazier set into the table

Unfortunately there wasn't enough time between the end of cooking and me eating it to record the evidence - Angus can't move that fast. This is the earliest picture he could take.

And fear not, fans of the obscure, for Kobe was a good source of silliness. Click on the pictures to enlarge them. I give you:







Cherry Blossom
Early April is traditionally the time that most of Japan packs a picnic and sits under a cherry tree, feeling terrifically Japanese, musing upon the fleeting beauty of the blossoms and the transient nature of everything, while getting very, very drunk. Nakameguro, site of Rankin HQ, is famous for the Meguro River and its riverside planting of blossoming cherries.

These trees are known (as you'd expect) as Japanese cherries, or Prunus serrulata and it's a jolly good thing that they are so pretty in spring, as they don't bear fruit. Fact fans - did you know all specimins of this species of tree in Japan have been raised as cuttings from a single specimen?

I cannot lie - I was blown away by the cherry blossom. My Anglo-Saxon brain thought that it would be a lot of flowering trees. Woo (private thought process - well it will be pretty but what's the point, I CAN'T EAT BLOSSOMS - also later proved to be untrue). But the spectacle was really something. The scent is very, very subtle, but very pretty, and the gusts of the palest pink petals drifting around when the wind blew were beautiful. I estimate 3/4 of the population of Tokyo can be found under a cherry tree at any one time while the flowers are out, and I get it now.

Here are some pictures of the trees.

This is a little further upstream than our flat

View from the balcony

Fallen blossoms turn the river pink, which is quite a change from emerald green

A good place to see the blossom

Now, this is all very elegant and refined. However, cherry blossom parties are not. I have been told that it is a matter of balance, and that the delicate fragrant cherry blossoms are supposed to work with the raucous parties and devastating drunkeness. Sounds good to me.

This year many cherry blossom parties were cancelled in sympathy with the people in Tohoku who had lost their homes. However, many went ahead.

Here are some of the riverside path picnics happening below our flat

There was an unexpected bonus which I regret I didn't capture on film - there's something rather lovely about a group of tiny women in kimono nibbling delicately on sausages on sticks.

Golden Week

The beginning May heralds Golden Week - a bunch of national holidays in succession. This is a relatively new development (1948) and ensures that salarymen actually take some holiday every year. A week and a bit of holiday in May is extremely welcome - the consequent hike in travel costs not so. So we stayed in Tokyo and saved the international gadding around for later in the year.

One day we took a good long walk on the Miura Peninsula, which is almost due south of Tokyo and only an hour on the train. We had a picnic on the beach, and walked round the bottom of the peninsula, from which you can see the Boso peninsula (in the distance)



The interior reminded me of Jersey - many little wooded valleys and farming on small patches of land on steep cliffs.



I was glad to see the Japanese dedication to neatness extends to farming too:



And it was lovely to get out into the sunshine and let the sea breeze ruffle my normally poker straight, mirror-shiny hair.




The other excellent expedition we took was 35 minutes walk from our apartment, to the Institute for Nature Study in Meguro. This is a 50 acre site that was a feudal lord's residence until 1872, before being used as a gunpowder store, and is now a designated natural monument. It's an extremely peaceful bolt hole with a very broad range of wildlife and plantlife. As you can see below we weren't the only people to recognise its potential on a warm May day:




But away from the route around the park suggested by the leaflet, it was almost deserted and extremely lovely (for those that like trees).








And Rob - because you asked nicely, here are some more turtles, presumably enjoying Golden Week as much as we were.



Learning Japanese
My Japanese is VERY BAD. This is entirely due to laziness. I have taken steps to remedy this situation though, with the result that I found myself a Japanese teacher.

It would have been too obvious to find a native Japanese speaker, so my teacher was Estonian. Sadly she has returned to Estonia (probably to deal with the frustration of teaching me and my inability to retain any vocabulary that isn't food related) and has been replaced by an equally nice, but disappointingly Japanese, lady.

Just to give you a taste of the task I have ahead of me, aside from the three different systems of writing which are all in common use, I will tell you about Japanese counting systems.

In English, when you are counting things, you use the numbering system one, two, three. For example, one roof, two insects, three chopsticks.

In Japanese, I have so far identified 28 different counting systems.

So, if you are counting long slim things, like two pencils (enbitsu), you would say nihon enbitsu. However, if you are counting two puppies (koinu), then you say nihiki koinu. Two cups of tea (kocha), are nihai kocha.

A language that has different counting systems for fish, sea tankers, visitors, and things related to two legs (for example socks, ankles, shoes).

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!

Yoyogi Park flowers
June this year was pleasantly warm, not scorching like last year. So I took the opportunity to release my artistic side onto the unsuspecting flowers in Yoyogi Park.

Here they are.













We also had a good afternoon bumbling around Oedo Antiques Market in central Tokyo. There were lots of pretty Japanese antiques, as well as a vendor of elderly perfume samples:



and a good deal of the sort of stuff that charity shops in Britain find hard to shift (those of you with garages full of stuff you don't want in Britain take note - cat plates etc sell like pricey hot cakes here, especially if they're British).



Cinema
This week I had a lovely trip to the cinema with Aiko to see a film that probably doesn't need to be dwelt upon here. Japanese audiences are very polite and quiet, and the air conditioning was lovely.

Now, The Ritzy Cinema in Brixton has a huge amount to recommend it, but my main reason for visiting aside from the lovely facilities, is their polite request before the film starts: 'No smoking or talking. Please use the bins'.

Who would have thought I would find such pleasures in Tokyo! Before the film started, we had the usual public information notice to not smoke, or use our phones. I was delighted when they then asked us not to dance (spoilsports) but I realised my ship had come in when they asked that we didn't bring swords into the cinema. Three cheers!

Not quite right alert

My quest for wrongness has been well rewarded this year - so far I have been witness to the following:

- A silk baseball jacket being sported by a particularly tough looking man. On the back was a life sized embroidered dachshund, underlined with the word 'shoddy'. Quite.

A selection of t-shirts bearing the following wisdom:

- What is crazy? We run the courts, in general!!! I am crazy!

- Competant Hawk Hides The Fingernail

- The panties are exotic sparkling

- Now the nipper is beloved by all across the world

A lady sheltering under a broderie anglaise umbrella. I say sheltering, it would be more accurate to say getting thoroughly soaked.

And at last - photographic proof of dog prams.



Hurray!

Another post to follow (at least within the next six months if all goes well - no point in rushing these things).

Ja mata!