Top 5 "I don't believe they call that food

Japanese foods

1. Natto
The stuff they serve as appetizers in Hell. Imagine a pile of soy beans covered in snot and raw egg and left to rot for a few weeks and you got yourself natto. The Japanese swear its "very healthy" but this is simply an excuse for the country's biggest culinary fuck-up.

2. Uni
Revolting sea snail paste masquerading as a mashed-up piece of tongue.

3. Konyaku
No idea exactly what it is (Animal? Mineral? Vegetable?), but looks and tastes like a chewy purple jelly-fish with bits in it. Like flavourless jello gone horribly wrong.

4. Sea Snails
Sea snail shells encasing a raw slug. As appetizing as it sounds.

5. Salmon roe
The part of the sushi platter that always gets left behind. Big squishy salty fishy pustules. Yum.

And what's this about octopus icecream? What will our little friends think of next?

Pornilicious?

I was in a subway station in Akasaka the other day and picked up a strategically placed flyer directed at "the foreigner". The prevalence of porn advertising amuses me as much as it concerns me. It's not enough that we get these flyers in our mailbox every day. Now we get bombarded in subway stations with "happy (or in this case, sullen) little prostitute" agencies advertising 'special rates' for foreigners.

I've become immune to seeing pornographic advertising littered throughout our gas and electricity bills, but what about the young kids who often collect their household's mail? I'm not convinced that seeing muff and titties on a daily basis doesn't affect the way they view women as being merely muff and titties.

But I'm looking at this from a westerner's perspective. Who's to say that these very kids are not immune to the less-than-subliminal advertising as well? They live in a culture where strangers of both sexes bathe together butt naked (muff, titties, willies, the whole shebang) with no sexual innuendo... Does depicting a semi-clad woman with a phone number beneath her, constitute an abberation?

And why do some foreigners get their jollies by collecting these pieces of paper, scanning them and posting them on the web?

Top 5 "I've died and gone to Heaven

Japanese foods

1. Curry rice
A little bit Malaysian, a little bit Thai, mostly indescribable. Not only tasty, but cheap. 500yen will get you a large plate of curry rice practically anywhere in Japan. Top takeaway picks are CoCo Ichibanya (Spinach curry - 600yen) and Matsuya (Chicken curry a steal at 390yen).

2. Okonomiyaki (literally "cook what you like")
Japan's answer to bubble and squeak. Comes in two styles; Hiroshima style, which is a big layered savory galette with fillings of meat, fish and either soba or udon noodles, or Kansai style, which combines whatever fillings they have in the kitchen, with crepe batter, eggs, pickled ginger and cabbage which are then cooked into a big pancake. Most Kansai style places are DIY, that is they give you the bowl and you cook it yourself on your table's hotplate. After cooking your mutha-crepe, smother it in tonkatsu sauce and mayo and inhale. Heaven on a hotplate.

3. Gyoza
Not strictly Japanese (Chinese) but when the Japanese are onto a good thing they like to make it their own. These little puppies are pork and spring onion dumplings, served over rice and drowned in soya sauce, garlic and vinegar.

4. Donburi and Tonkatsu
Another cheapo meal, thus an excellent end-of-month feed. Tonkatsu is either pork or chicken fillet, crumbed, fried and dumped on a bed of rice with tonkatsu sauce; and Donburi is tonkatsu and rice, with a beaten egg poured over it and lightly grilled. Tonkatsu sauce is a Japanese hybrid of ketchup, worcestershire sauce and mysterious spices which tastes better than it sounds...

5. Tempura
Another import (from the Portugese this time). Battered and deep fried shrimp, vegetables etc. Served on either plain rice or udon noodles.The truly chic places also like to give herbs like basil and rocket the tempura treatment.

And then there's deep-fried cheese (a perennial izakaya fave) which I couldn't, in all conscience, put in my Top 5... a cholesterol-churning and yet sublime experience. But not one for the kids.

Japanese TV

The beauty about Japanese TV is that you don?ft have to speak Japanese to understand every word.

When I first arrived in Japan, I shunned any television program which wasn't a music show. Then I got addicted to The Wedding Planner, a Japanese drama centred around a wedding planning agency. Maybe it was the introductory music, I don't know, but I was hooked. To this day, I have understood maybe 4 words, and yet am able to follow it perfectly. The reason is this:

Japanese dramas are all over-exaggerated theatrics, airborne limbs and extreme facial expressions. And they illustrate the archetypal patterns of heartache, loss, betrayal and love triangles with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer splitting a pile of bricks. Think of them as an oriental Days of Our Lives on speed.

But the cream of Japanese TV undoubtedly comes in the form of game or private eye shows. One particular favourite is this gem (name unknown and inconsequential):

Every week, a team of TV investigators sets up a guy who is suspected of cheating on his girlfriend/wife. They send in a red-hot model type to convince him to go out on a dinner date. During the date, the model seduces him (of course) and after the man agrees to go home with her, the model excuses herself to go to the bathroom. At this point, the disgruntled girlfriend, dressed up in the same clothes, and with the same hair and make-up as the model, walks in from the bathroom and sits down in the model?fs place. The aftermath is standard reality TV fare.

Another strange show is set in a studio where a couple (obviously having issues) is put in a wrestling ring and spends half an hour hurling abuse at each other. There?fs not even a Rikki Lake to interject with pearls of wisdom.

Not that I'd be able to understand them if there were.

Struggling with the technology

1. The first purchase for our apartment was futon bases. We bought the bases, which are thin pieces of foam covered by sheeting. We slept on the damned things for about 5 nights, thinking hmmm, the Japanese are hardy characters, and hoping we'd get used to how hard they were, before we were informed that, in fact, the futon bases required actual futons to be put on top of them.

2. We have, in our apartment, a bath called a "furo" (strictly speaking o-furo - oh very honourable bath) Its about one metre squared and you are supposed to soak upright in it after you've scrubbed yourself to the consistency of a raw prawn outside of it. Japanese people spend up to an hour in the bath, citing it as a religious experience.

One night, Matt and I fired up the furo. We knew it would take a bit of time to heat up, so we left it and returned to our game of scrabble and sake. When we went back to it, the water was bubbling and we thought hey cool, its like a spa bath! Only then did we realize the water was boiling. We had a bath full of boiling water which took another hour of pouring cold water on it before it was remotely bearable to immerse our bodies into. I spent 5 minutes in it before God told me to get the hell out before I fainted of heat exhaustion.

Top 10 things I love about Japan

1. Karaoke bars
2. I have bigger norks than anyone
3. Our sexy colour-screen mobile phones
4. The Tokyo train system (trains every 3 minutes and very clean)
5. 24 hour alcohol vending machines (beer, sake, you name it)
6. Japanese curries and DIY Okonomiyaki
7. You can drink beer on the train and not be arrested
8. No vandalism anywhere (except for that moustache on an Ayumi Hamazaki poster, but we don't talk about that)
9. My ANA girls pink jumpsuits
10. They love Hall and Oates

One year in Japan

Wow. Kim has let me write a guest entry in her journal to commemorate the fact that we have been in Japan for exactly one year today.

It's kinda scary that it was 12 months ago we quit our jobs, packed our furniture into a big wooden storage box (or dumped it with friends) and ventured off to build a life together in Asia's bustling capital. It really seems like just a few weeks ago that we were sitting on cushions on the floor, eating 2-minute noodles off an upturned cardboard box and lamenting about the fact that our humble Aussie dollar could buy nothing in this city.

We've come a long way - the many friends who have passed through recently can testify that our apaato is now very homely and comfortable. Work has been good and we have managed to make quite a few weekend trips lately (although I do concede that when you live in a concrete jungle of neon lights and crowded trains, the mere sight of a tree or a small river makes you feel overwhelmingly at one with mother nature!).

We also have an ever-expanding network of good friends to get drunk at izakayas and sing karaoke with. They are showing us some of the crack-in-the-wall basement bars and quality hiking spots that we may not have known about otherwise. Our Japanese skills are improving with various degrees, and Kim is capturing it all here for digital prosperity.

The only problem is - what the hell are we going to do when we eventually go home? It could be another year or two before we have to face these questions, but at the moment we have no frigging idea what the future post-Japan holds. Being an English teacher is rewarding - I am a celebrity at school every day; Kim has her cabin attendants cry and tell her that they love her at the end of each last class... consistently! Where are we going to find that kind of job back home? Not in a corporate office, that's for sure.

We try not to think about it - we're too busy enjoying the Tokyo lifestyle.

Hakone

Hakone is a tourist landmine, famous for volcanic hot springs and brilliant views of Mt. Fuji. In spite of the obvious drawcards, the thing I was most looking forward to was the prospect of visiting the Gyoza Center, a renowned restaurant serving 9 (nine!) different types of gyoza (Chinese dumplings).

Of course, once my belly was full of gyoza (we gave the other menu items, such as boiled potstiskers, applitzers and flyed potstickers, a miss) I became obsessed with seeing Mt Fuji. Along with thousands of other Japanese.

There was not a cloud in the sky the day we arrived, but I was not taking any chances. Everyone knows that Mt Fuji is terminally shy, just like her fellow nationals, and will cover herself in a haze of clouds whenever she can. It is the rare individual who gets to see 'Fujers' naked. I was determined to be that rare individual.

So we joined the queue of hundreds to take the cable car and ropeway up to Soun Zan from where there are reputed sightings of the picturesque volcano. The peak hour 'all's fair in love and train seats' mentality had somehow transferred itself from Tokyo to this hot springs hamlet, and there was a mad rush for pole position on the cable car. Of particular annoyance were the 'Obattalions' (from the Japanese 'Obasan' meaning grandmother and 'Battalion' which is English and self explanatory), the bull terriers of Japanese society.

There seem to be two breeds of old Japanese ladies - the unwaveringly kind old duckies who'd give up there seat for you on the train or bow in apology if they were too old to get up, and the obattalions, the old battleaxes who'd sooner take your eye out with their umbrella than see you ahead of them in a queue.

This weekend in Hakone, the obattalions were having a battleaxe convention. During the wait for the ropeway, one lovely damsel insisted on digging her elbows into my back and stepping on the back of my shoes to get me to stand to one side. After 30 minutes of two-stepping, we finally got onto the ropeway, and as we passed over the first crest, there was Fuji, butt naked. She had her own way, though. As we'd been so late getting to the damn thing, it had looked to the afternoon sun to hide her, which it did by practically blinding us.

Upon returning to the Fuji-Hakone guest house, our hospitality mecca, we took a private late night rotenburo (outside hot springs bath), which was pure luxury. The hot springs bath supposedly has curative powers, but it didn't cure my indefatigable desire to give an obattalion the smackdown.

The next day was also cloudless, except for that annoying bank of white fluffy stuff covering Mt. Fuji. We bravely battled the tourist circle crowds, including taking a phenomenally tacky pirate ship across the Ashino Lake, and avoided all contact with obattalions should I be lacking in patience enough to nut one.

After another hot springs bath at the guest house, we said goodbye to our hosts and threw ourselves into the traffic tsunami descending on Tokyo.

The ghosts of rock-stars past...

One inevitability of being a guest at our Tokyo ranch, is being dragged out to karaoke. For Taz, this happened not once, but twice.

By the second time (last Friday night) Taz had become a confirmed karaoke junkie after a karaoke spree in Nagoya. In our local bar, with Angus Young firmly entrenched in his vocal chords, Taz belted out tunes in a surprisingly good voice considering the number of beers he put away.

In fact, many ghosts came to visit us that evening - Abba, Kenny Loggins, Starship, Survivor, Bon Jovi - you know, the Greats. Galit took Beyonce, Albert chose Bon Jovi (who wouldn't?), Matt shook hands with Stipey, while I communed with Anni-Frid. We spent two hours in rock 'n' roll heaven before the ghosts of rock-stars past departed, leaving us with sore heads.

There is nothing worse than a Karaoke Hangover. It is a deflating mixture of regurgitated beer, extinguished brain cells and the morning-after-the-rock-star-the-night-before depression. Didn't someone say the best things in life come at a price?

Ozzies in Oze

Went hiking on the long weekend at the beginning of October, in the wilds of Oze which is a marsh in the mountains about 3 hours north of Tokyo. The hike was 24kms over two days, up and down mountains and over this 6 km marsh which has a wooden pathway over it (obviously, else you'd get pretty wet).

We stayed in a mountain hut, called 'yama-goya' which are usually pretty rustic, but this one was nice. Matt and I had our own private room, tiny, with futons on tatami matting and it was a way old building which creaked and moaned all night. Just as well we were exhausted. The only way you can get to yama-goya is to walk, so if you get injured you have to flag down a helicopter.

Because there is no way to get out of the marsh besides hike, the mountain huts, have 'gomi-boys' which is Matt and my term for a rubbish-boy. They strap this load of stuff onto their backs and walk the 12 or something kms back to the road. Weird.

I had my first foray into sento bathing, which is the public bath experience. In Japan, its not unusual for locals to head down to their local public bath, strip off and hop in and bathe with strangers.

I'd heard about this strange custom, but had no experience. It was actually pretty cool. You go into the ante-room where you get your gear off and put it in little shelves then you go into the bath room where there are hot taps and small basins to clean yourself with. Then only once you're spit-spoffing clean can you go into the bath.

There were these old biddies in there, who didn't speak much English, who coaxed me into the bath (I was just gonna rinse and run). Having been brought up in a culture where you kept your nobbly and furry bits private, I was a bit reticent, but who can resist a couple of gorgeous old Japanese ducks? I actually didn't feel remotely self-conscious cos its usual for them to bathe with other women so there was no perving or "look at how big the foreigners boobies are." Well, there probably was, but I was out of earshot and hell, I'm proud of my norks. Let them look.

Box-City

Ikebukuro Station is the second largest station in Japan, if not Asia. It is also home to two of the largest department stores in the world - Seibu and Tobu.

Every day, over two million commuters stream through the station; teenage boys with designer Nike gear; teenage school girls with their uniform skirts rolled up at the waist, their hems falling just below the panty-line (ah, memories); young affluent couples with matching Louis Vuitton handbags. There is demonstrable wealth flowing through the crowds at any given second.

But beneath the station proper, along one of the corridors connecting the subway to the outside world, lives another piece of Tokyo. About 30 homeless men 'live' in this part of Tokyo. Their homes are boxes, their friends are the temporary tenants of the next box, their shoes are absent. Each camp is an intricate cardboard structure which manages to conceal them, save for their feet which stick out one side.

Every morning Tokyo commuters flood through this corridor and there is a remarkable display of ambivalence. These men rarely get beaten up (except for the occasional well-publicised assault by Nike branded teens), nor do they bother the commuters. Here, they sleep for most of the day and their feet, which stick out of their (just-there) trousers, are always covered in blisters and sores, like they?fve walked across Japan without a break.

I am continually surprised that they don?ft come up to me with their hands open and hungry asking me for money for the ?etrain fare home?f. Maybe they don?ft ask because I?fm a foreigner and they think I won?ft understand what they are saying, but the dialogue of an outstretched hand is spoken in a universal language.

Is it the pride of the Japanese that stop them from begging, and choose to forage through garbages or starve instead? In Australia they would be panhandling, pickpocketing, picking fights, or unleashing their drunken anguish on passers-by but here they are the evergreen law-abiding citizens, too stuck in the Japanese acceptance of the status quo to realize that the government is bending them over a cake-hole and shafting them.

Sachiko and Yoshimasa's Wedding

A Japanese wedding is a strange thing indeed. It doesn't even need to be traditional to be odd.

Matt and I were invited to one of Matt's students wedding on Saturday evening. The format for the wedding was as follows:

1. Ceremony. Family and close friends.
2. Reception. Family and close friends.
3. Second Party. Basically everyone invited to 1 & 2 + couple of hundred other friends. At the Hillside Banquet, Daikanyama.
4. Third Party. The unofficial after party at Kitsune, Ebisu.

The Second Party started at 6 pm, an ungodly hour to start a function and ended at 8.30 pm, an ungodly hour to finish a function.

On arrival, we were given a lucky number and collected wines at the bar and walked into a room where we knew absolutely nobody. From there the evening got surreal.

A video was shown of Yoshimasa and Sachiko's early years, very professionally done, and considering it was the early years of two people I'd never met, was actually pretty interesting. The next hour was spent drawing lucky numbers out of a hat. If your number was called out, you went out front, picked a prize from the box of prizes and then selected a ball out of another hat. If you picked the "win" ball you won the prize, if you picked out the "Jun Ken Bon" ball, you had to play Jun Ken Bon with Sachiko. (Jun Ken Bon is the Japanese equivalent of Paper Scissors Rock and is the dominant system of choosing who goes first because the Japanese are terminally indecisive about everything). If you won Jun Ken Bon, you won. If you lost, too bad. And Sachiko was good.

Matt's number was called out and he could have picked out the tickets to New York, but no, he selected a set of Muji scales (everything at Muji is beige and so were the scales). I started to wonder why they had Muji scales as a gift but my head started to hurt.

One young man, who was well on his way to turning his blood into beer, selected the MP3 portable player, a prize more coveted than even the New York tickets. He picked out the Jun Ken Bon ball and lost to Sachiko's great skill. Feeling sorry for the guy, they let him play for a second time. Loss. Third time. Loss. At this point, his attachment to the MP3 player reduced the poor guy to dropping to the ground and laying out a few push-ups. Sachiko was not swayed. Game over. MP3 was up for grabs once more...

After the prize pickings, a friend of Sachiko's brother, who just happened to be a drag queen came in to give baritone speeches and sing "Somewhere over the Rainbow", complete with microphone feedback and roars of laughter.

The best part though, was undoubtedly seeing Sachiko (who, as I've mentioned, I have never met) so happy she was close to tears.

It's a chick thing.

Izu Peninsula

Matt and I have become pioneers in the pursuit of perfection. After Okinawa shafted us, we figured we would have but one more chance at summer sun and surf before the autumn chill set in.

Our choice of destination? Shimoda. At the tip of the Izu Peninsula about 2.5 hours south of Tokyo on the coast.

The day we left Tokyo it was overcast, but ever willing to let naivety blind us, we decided it would be clear by the time we got there. It wasn?ft. The really annoying thing about Japan is that everything runs like clockwork and that includes the weather forecast. If they say its gonna rain a month down the track, then it will rain.

We stayed at a minshuku, which is like a Japanese guest-house run by a family. Our room was a small tatami room in the Minshuku Haji, overlooking a village of neighbouring minshuku near one of the popular beaches. The family who ran Minshuku Haji were a bunch of kooks. The father, in particular, had a penchant for taking over front-of-desk early in the evening after a few pints of the strong stuff. He was extremely helpful but unfortunately, we couldn?ft understand a word he was saying.

For lunch we headed to a local izakaya where we sat on cushions around a low table and dined on curry and fried chicken gristle (don't ask). The party next to us, what looked like two het couples, seemed friendly enough, smiling and laughing in between sucking cigarettes into their lungs and downing their shochu and ciders. One of the guys took rather a liking to Matthew. On leaving the izakaya, Matt was rewarded with what he swears was a 'pat on the leg' but I know was dangerously close to a 'pinch on the bum'.

We took dinner at an Italian restaurant in Perry Street (strangely monikered "Page One Coffee"), a street running along a canal that reminded me of Venice, even though I've never been there. The couple that ran it were a fount of information, informing us that a local 'aji' (barbequed fish) vendor near Minshuku Haji used to teach Osama Bin Laden at University in England. You know, before he got into terrorising large countries...

Where Day One was not much to write home about, Day Two was, on the other hand, amazing...

We took the bus out to O-hama Beach where hundreds of die-hard Japanese surfers were out in storm. We found a bit of seclusion and dodged surfers for the next two hours. It was a relief to have the "Okinawa Shaft-Curse" broken. The sun even popped out its little solar head for about half an hour.

The coastline of the Izu Peninsula is not unlike the Great Ocean Road and O-hama Beach like the Lorne of Japan. After a well-earned frolic in the ocean, we took the bus down to Irozaki, home of a supposedly famous lighthouse, which was, well, rather ordinary. As you walked further down to the edge of the cliff, however, there was a small shrine perched high on the rock and some stunning views of the coastline.

And in keeping with the Japanese penchant of touristising everything in sight, there was a little shop selling lucky charms and Izu kitsch just behind the rock. Ah, civilization.

On Day Three we left Shimoda, rainy and overcast. As forecast.