Tokyo Daytripper: Little Edo

Posted on March 27, 2007 by tokyofox

In September 2001 I was on a years working holiday visa in Australia and having not done much work, I stopped off in Bundaberg in Queensland to earn a few bob. The only reason any backpacker goes there is to do some farm work and so it was that I spent a couple of weeks working in the field (pun intended!) of snow-peas and sweet potatoes. The type of work that many say is “character building” was actually a really good laugh and it had to be as we worked terribly long days in the heat and earned very little for it!!

The saddest part was that all any of us backpackers talked about in the pub on Friday nights after a hard weeks work was blo*dy peas and potatoes!! Enough to put one off these veggies for life!!

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However, last Wednesday I was kind of re-united with my ‘old friends’ when I visited Kawagoe (30 mins north of Tokyo) which is famous for its sweet potatoes and these have been used for every possible concoction including ice cream, coffee, beer and also udon (thick noodles) which I wanted to try but that particular restaurant was too busy.

Kawagoe is nicknamed ‘Little Edo’ (Edo is the former name of Tokyo) and is also known for its old warehouse style buildings which, along with the landmark ‘toki no kane’ (Clock Tower), are the main sights in the Kurazakuri Street area.

I had been to Kawagoe before so don’t think its that interesting but due to its close proximity to Tokyo and the sunny weather, it was quite nice to walk around the city in a leisurely fashion seeing the aforementioned buildings as well as a couple of temples and a so-called castle.

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Posted in Australasia Travel, Japan Travel, Tokyo Daytripper: | Tagged , , , , , | 3 Comments

The New Face Of English Learning In Japan??!!!

Posted on March 22, 2007 by tokyofox

On Monday I was summoned to work a little earlier than usual to do an interview and photoshoot for a Japanese magazine called Keikotomanabu which is for people who want to learn a new skill and they carefully handpicked me as the man to help out their thousands of readers. Or maybe I was just in the right place at the right time in terms of being sat next to my boss when she got the call and being in Shibuya on the day that they wanted to interview a teacher or two!!

Preceedings began with a short interview which was conducted by a rather nervous looking Japanese man and all my answers were relayed to him by a very nice woman. Whether she actually translated what i said i don’t know for sure. I just hope I don’t get misquoted! Unlikely as the typically dull questions were answered by myself in a standard cliched way. The usual stuff like how long had I been in Japan, why did I come to Japan, whats the most rewarding part of the job and what advice would i give to their readers.

Next was the photoshoot. I had thought it would just be a few photos and was quite surprised when I was directed for dozens and dozens of shots which inevitably were the most unrealistic stances and poses ever. This included standing with my hands on my hips in an almost-superhero type manner as well as trying to look intellectual while looking in a dictionary, pointing a pen, waving and holding a fake cheesey smile for what seemed like an eternity. Unfortunately my moment of fame will not be on their website for you to see until late next month but fear not as I will of course send the link when its up there.

Posted in English Teaching | 2 Comments

The Irish Wannabes Just Keep Doublin’ And Dublin!

Posted on March 18, 2007 by tokyofox

St Patrick’s Day was celebrated all around the world yesterday including here in Japan. Not by me though as I’m still bemused as to why it’s so popular! Now don’t get me wrong, I am very fond of Ireland as a country not that my one visit to Dublin for New Years Eve six years ago was much of a cultural trip! I was there with some University pals for the sole reason of just getting p*ssed but I digress slightly.

For some unknown reason I do tend to follow the sporting fortunes of the Irish quite closely even though I don’t possess the slightest hint of Irish blood! It didn’t seem too  different for the footballers, particularly the Jack Charlton era (1986-1995) where a few of the players had very tentative Irish links. David O’Leary’s winning penalty in their first World Cup Finals at Italia ’90 was a great memory for me as was Ray Houghton’s winner against the Italians at USA ’94 (incidentally his winner against England in Euro ’88 was definitely not) and Robbie Keane’s last gasp equaliser against the Germans in Korea in 2002.

On top of this, I also hold a soft spot for the Irish Rugby team and wanted them to win the Six Nations Championship (in the knowledge that England’s mathematical chances of winning it were very slim) which came to a climax yesterday. I was a tad disappointed that they had the title snatched away from them by the French in such a dramatic late fashion. On the other hand, there was good news as their cricket team of underdogs defeated the might of Pakistan at the World Cup in the Caribbean.

Anyway, to finally get to the point (yes, there is one!), I don’t see any reason for celebrating St Paddy’s Day myself. I feel a little sorry for the actual Irish people who have to put up with all the Irish-wannabes, particularly those from New York, wearing a bit of green and a face painted Shamrock and talking about the “craic” and whatever else while using the occasion as a cheap excuse to get drunk. Nothing wrong with getting drunk of course but why do people need an excuse?!!

I find it a little strange that some people celebrate the patron saint of Ireland (who was actually British) but let their own national day pass without notice! For the record I don’t celebrate either St George’s Day or St Patrick’s Day so am I just a miserable git or even a hypocrite given what I earlier said about going to the Irish capital on a drinking holiday!!

Posted in Japan Life, Quirky Japan, Sport | Tagged , , , , , , | 4 Comments

Bags Of Waste

Posted on March 11, 2007 by tokyofox

Now I’m certainly no tree-hugging environmentalist but I’ve been brought up to recycle whatever we can and also to re-use things frugally. At an old company it used to break my heart to see the amount of paper that was wasted daily in producing files etc.

One of the big problems in Japan is the fact that around 30 billion plastic bags are used each year. They are given out willy-nilly to you even if you only buy one little item and they are often thrown straight in the bin by customers as soon as they get outside the convenience store. At best, the assistant may ask you if you want a bag. At worst they will put all different items in separate bags with a big bag then used to accommodate all.

When I first came to Japan I remember being immediately shocked when I saw other teachers bringing back McDonalds with a paperbag each for the fries and drink and a plastic bag for the whole lot. Even more waste than usual for a company which has a lot of wastage in terms of cartons and cups etc. Other items like biscuits are also over-packaged with them sometimes coming individually wrapped in a plastic tray inside the outer plastic sheeting.

Japanese culture doesn’t have place for eating in public which may partly explain why so many bags are given out.  Traditionally, purchases in this country have been considered part of the product and they pay for the complete package which in the present day may involve nothing more than just a plaggy bag sealed with a piece of tape.

Given their phone-book sized rulebook for waste disposal it’s a little surprising that the Japanese can’t be more eco-friendly regarding plastic bags especially as I see so many bags go straight in the bin as soon as the customer exits the convenience store with their coffee or whatever.

I mostly decline the bags but then I suffer more waste in terms of the piece of adhesive tape that the shop assistants stick on each individual item supposedly as a proof of purchase but it seems redundant to me as I’m also given a receipt!

Posted in Japan Life | Tagged , , , , | 4 Comments

Lets Get Quizical!

Posted on March 6, 2007 by tokyofox

Three hours, five teachers, fourteen students, three receptionists, six rounds, 30 questions, a joker card, unlimited alcohol and a load of cold chips! All that was part of one of my schools British Pub Quiz Night in Shibuya last Saturday. The joker card could be played at the start of a topic to double the points tally and due to my teams indecisiveness (and certainly not for tactical reasons) we ended up not using it until the last round which unbelievably resulted in us snatching victory right at the death.

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Our win was down to a mixture of good fortune, cheating and the fact that I wrote one of the questions was also a bit of a help! My contributing question was about which Japanese city is twinned with Munich in Germany. The answer is Sapporo in Hokkaido which I know as both cities played host to two great England victories over our footballing rivals from Germany (5-1) and Argentina (1-0 in the 2002 World cup finals). My memory of the other questions is very vague but they included a few more geographical questions, anagrams of famous Japanese people, history, entertainment and so on.

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Posted in English Teaching | 1 Comment

Kelly Osbourne – Turning Japanese

Posted on March 4, 2007 by tokyofox

Last month I saw the UK three part ITV2 series which saw Kelly Osbourne in Japan for five weeks trying her hand at a number of different jobs. This included a mix of the wierd and the traditional which began with her working in a maid cafe. The self confessed ‘spoiled brat’ with a potty mouth was interesting to watch going about the business of trying to serve coffee and cake to the geeks in Akihabara (was obviously filmed on a day when I wasn’t in town!) while trying to not laugh or spill the drink.

She was disgusted at the thought of giving a hand massage at one of these places and found the whole thing degrading to women who are still considered by many to be of secondary importance in Japan.

Next up was the hilarity of seeing her work for a day in a Love Hotel. These are dotted around Tokyo and provide couples with some privacy in a city which is crammed full of people living in close proximity or big families living together. They are also places for people to act out their sexual fantasies! On entering one of the rooms Kelly described the smell as if “someone came in a wet sock then put it in the microwave” and though she finds it all funny she is certainly not fond of having to take post-sex food and drink to the rooms. I did learn though that a pot noodle (called cup noodle in Japan) is the favoured choice of food after the couple have gone about their business.

Her other tasks and jobs included dressing up as a doll at a cos-play convention, working in an oxygen bar, teaching English in a school and more stiff traditions like performing a samarai dancer and training to be a maiko.

One of the more bizarre jobs was working at a dog hotel where the mutts are pampered by over-keen owners who sometimes see them as either an accessory or another human and treat them to a special shampoo or a cake or make them wear ridiculous and dignity-losing coats. In Tokyo dogs can even be rented out to people who want to play with them for an afternoon or whatever.

Overall, I enjoyed this series but that was maybe more because of my interest in what other people think about this country. I did think that Kelly got some of her observations spot on (“I learned that a lot of people are very small minded and to be unbiased and to walk into a country and say that isn’t the way I would do it, but it doesn’t mean that its wrong”) but no doubt there are many who disagree and think that she was moaning too much about the language problem and so on.

I would however say that Kelly was far from becoming Japanese but in such a homogenous country like Japan it has always been fairly impossible for any foreign person to ever be thought of as anything other than an outsider.

Posted in Japan Life, TV Shows | Tagged , , | 10 Comments

It’Snow Problem Having A Good Time In Hakuba

Posted on February 27, 2007 by tokyofox

Woke up a bit stiff on Monday morning and with a little pain in my a*se too……and that can only be because I spent a long weekend on the slopes of Hakuba 47 and Hakuba Goryu. An all night bus took myself and Ethan up into the mountains of Nagano last Thursday night/Friday morning for three days of snowboarding, drinking, repetitive conversations and cr*ppy juvenile jokes.

This was my first snowboarding adventure for the season but I picked up where I left off last year and with some peer group pressure from Ethan i was able to carve through the snow rather than just constantly continuing with my unorthodox side to side style (always facing down the slope and switching my front foot each time).

However, my carving style was more restricted to the cross country style courses which i much preferred to the more straightforward slopes where I was too chicken to carve too much as I inevitably went too fast, got scared, lost control and fell over.

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Following our first days boarding we had a much needed nap in our slopeside condominium before getting on with the more important matter of drinking which we did at a few local hotspots which were all pretty quiet despite the hyped up flyers for the places. Saturday night didn’t fare much better for us either as we ended up getting an expensive taxi and countless Genki-Go buses to areas which were supposed to be better places to go out but we didn’t think so as they too were dead so we returned to a place we went the night before and saw a live band among a few more people.

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Posted in Action & Adventure | Tagged , , | 11 Comments

A Cool Bar In Tokyo

Posted on February 15, 2007 by tokyofox

Last Wednesday night I found myself hanging out in Absolut Ice Bar Tokyo in Hiro-O which as the name suggests is completely made from ice. That includes the bar itself, the walls, floor, tables, sofas and even the glass! Obviously the place is bloody freezing (permanently minus five degrees celsius!) and one struggles to last too long in there but worthy of the experience.

Not worthy of the price though which was an extortionate 3500 yen each and included one drink and the silver cape thing you see me wearing below. The maximum time in the bar is 45 minutes but I didn’t last that long as once you’ve taken a few photos and looked around there’s not much else to do other than finish your shot and moan about how cold it is.

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Posted in Food & Drink, Quirky Japan | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Dining Out: One Fish, Two Fish, Blowfish, Bluefish

Posted on February 10, 2007 by tokyofox

Sometime during the 1990s I watched a dramatic TV show that brought me close to tears as I thought a much loved character was about to be killed off. What is surprising is that that show was the second series of ‘The Simpsons‘ (episode 11 geeks!) and the character was Homer Simpson! The reason I had a tear in my eye was because Homer ate a badly prepared type of fish consisting of some poison and was told that he had only 24 hours to live and so made a list of things he wanted to do on his last day on earth.

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I had little knowledge back then that the fish with poison was actually real and called fugu (blowfish or pufferfish in English) and that it can only be made and sold by specially licensed sushi chefs. A number of people die every year from eating this fish as they under-estimate the amount of poison in certain parts.

Despite all this, it is considered to be a delicacy in Japan and I finally got round to sampling this dish last Saturday when a 60 year old business student of mine called Masafusa very kindly treated me to a fugu course at a restaurant in Ikebukuro. This included fugu sashimi, fugu tempura, fugu soup, fugu nabe, fugu zousi and so on and very nice it was too but I don’t think my taste buds can really detect much difference between that and other types of sushi which is fortunate for me as I didn’t have to foot any of the bill which was nearly 9000 yen each (about 45 pounds)!

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However, the story doesn’t end there as when I got home I was actually rolling around in pain as yet again my stomach didn’t agree with what I had eaten or had I met my fate and contracted the highly toxic tetrodotoxin poison? Obviously not the latter as I am here now and luckily I recovered before the idea of making a list of ‘things to do before I die’ had even entered my head!!

Posted in Food & Drink, Japan Life, TV Shows | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Maid In Japan

Posted on February 9, 2007 by tokyofox

Spent last Sunday trudging round the electrical shops of Akihabara with my friend Gideon before visiting a couple of maid cafe’s as we were in need of a refreshment and thought it best not to waste the opportunity!

The first maid cafe we went to seemed a bit dull at first and the so-called ‘large’ beer was far from big. Almost as soon as Gideon commented that the place had no atmosphere things changed a little and some ‘jack in the box’ type game was played where every customer was given a plastic key to put in a number of available slots and if something popped out you won something or another. I didn’t even get the chance to do this as about the second person to try it had the winning key.

Next up was a simple ‘janken’ (“rock, scissors, paper”) game which is often used by Japanese (not just kids) to decide a matter of things but this time it was done with a load of other actions before the ‘jan-ken po’ part which I know so unable to keep up with that I inevitably failed to win the prize of having my photo taken with a maid.

Feeling a little disappointed by that place we tried another one. The popular Maid In Japan Amusement Cafe was a bit more like it in terms of wierdness. Aside from the expensive soft drinks there were many Maids on stage singing and dancing to some of the cheesiest Japanese pop music which I think was selected (at a price) by one of the other geeks in the place. These strange performances dominated the last 45 minutes or so (before the place closed at 9pm) and kept us there much longer than we had intended.

Posted in Hentai, Japan Life | Leave a comment