Who's having a birthday?

If you ask that question in Tokyo at the moment, the answer is the same; "Atomu! Atomu!" When I first heard the name I thought; "Who the hell..???" Turns out that Atomu is none other than Astroboy that kawaii little munchkin with the body of a puppet, the heart of a child and rockets for feet.

April 7th 2003 is Atomu's birthday according to the futuristic 1960's cartoon. His birthplace? A factory in Takadanobaba, a suburb of Tokyo.

Not a country to miss the opportunity for a festival, April 7 has been deemed "Atomu Day" in Tokyo - for the past couple of weeks, the Takadanobaba (try saying that really fast while you're really drunk) station has been playing the Astroboy theme music to herald the arrival of trains and Monday week there will be a birthday parade in Takadanobaba.

For a country that's in the midst of an economic and political slump, its reassuring to see that our Japanese compatriots thrive under the adage; "any excuse for a party"...

The Other Side of the Fence

I made a conscious decision two weeks ago not to expose myself to any war coverage. I haven't bought a paper, I change channels whenever the news comes on (quite easy considering most of it is in Japanese) and I deliberately don't read any internet news. When it comes to sensational reportage and an incessant front-page body count, I don't need it.

Just before the war broke out I had a teaching assignment out at the airport for two weeks. The director showed me to the training room on the first day, gave me the security code for the floor, handed me a class list and left me to it. I never heard from him again. It was bliss.

This past week I had an assignment at the same client, but for a different department. Every day, I was formally met in the lobby by this department's director, escorted to the training room, escorted from the training room at the end of class and then lead right to the front gate. I thought it a little strange at first, but decided it was probably just his manner.

Imagine my surprise (considering my naive ambivalence about world news) when one of the girls at my office informed me on Wednesday that they had become "very strict with foreigners because of Iraq". Now, this client is located in an important airport building - if it goes up, then domestic airport traffic is, ahem, fairly fucked. I can therefore appreciate the increased need for security in the building. But when I am riding in the elevator with a bunch of external Japanese contractors who are not under microscopic escort, then I take exception.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but hasn't Koizumi-chan (fairly publicly) endorsed Japan's involvement in this so-called "foreigner's" war? I'm not about to get all political about this, only to make the point that my perceived "risk" to this client is squiffy logic in the extreme.

Yesterday was my last day there, and I met the director's director at the elevator. He said to me; "Oh, you are Miss Kinki from Australia!" I replied in the affirmative, before he begins a diatribe about how he can tell the difference between an American, an Australian and a Canadian just by looking at them (huh?). You must understand, by this stage I was kinda pitching for a fight, so when he asked me if I could tell the difference between a Japanese and other Asians (a lot of Japanese hate being confused with Koreans in particular because of the whole North-Korean kidnapping thing) I told him the truth. Bluntly.

"No. I always get Koreans and Japanese mixed up. Sometimes its impossible to tell."

I left him looking bemused at the elevator whilst the doors closed on my personal escort and I for the last time...

Should I stay or should I go?

Someone asked me a while back why I stay in Japan. In recent weeks that very question has been niggling at me, transforming me into the type of nutter who debates with themselves (or worse, with an imaginary audience) on the train.

After 18 months in Tokyo, I am torn between wanting to stay and wanting to leave. Although Matt and I have made some great friends here, sooner or later we will have to leave them and return to our friendships in Australia, that, through no fault of their own have suffered the test of long-distance.

Should I stay...

1. We love our jobs. Teaching English as a foreign language is cool. Not least because I am endlessly entertained by the funny, unconscious mistakes students make with English, such as; "My husband is a cock!" (cook) and "I want to eat my wife!". What the hell we are going to do when we get back to Australia is a question neither of us is prepared to deal with right now.

2. Living in a foreign country, particularly one as quaintly alien as Japan, is an undeniably gratifying experience. I have been forced to learn a language that I may not have otherwise studied, in spite of my former insistence that I didn't have to study, rather I, "soak up information by osmosis". This was folly. I admit it.

3. Tokyo is unique. After 18 months the novelty of certain things is starting to wear off, such as pint-sized apartments with paper-thin walls, but I still manage to see something I have never seen (or have never wanted to see) before, for example, a young man on a bicycle, stopped at the end of our street, curling his eyelashes. A man would be socially crucified for less in Australia.

4. ...and convenient. I am not ready to face hour long waits at Westgarth station for a delayed train. Japan is the only country I know of where flights arrive ahead of their scheduled time.

5. I would miss Japanese TV and pop-culture (read, karoake) like a baby misses breast milk.

...or should I go?

1. The main issue is the uncompromising ethnocentricity in Japan. One of the "novelties" that wore off a long time ago was the ignorant (yet benign) insistence that if something is stolen or if a violent crime occurs in Japan, then an assumption is made that it; "must have been a foreigner". This title of 'foreigner' extends to other Asians, such as Koreans, Chinese and Taiwanese, who are tarred with the same brush as 'whites'. I have met many Koreans in particular who have changed their name to a Japanese moniker so as to avoid this discrimination. Interestingly, the discrimination is often tacit. You won't find many Japanese people comfortable with sharing a negative opinion about you as a foreigner, as ingrained as it may be. The Japanese call this approach "not losing face". I call it passive-aggression.

2. Experience is one thing, but when you have to navigate a linguistic minefield just to buy a pair of shoes, it can get pretty exhausting.

3. I miss my friends and family back home. Although we have made excellent friends here (including plenty of Japanese), they can not replace the ones we have had for years. I haven't been lucky enough to find many people in Tokyo who I would consider kindred spirits. And the very temporary nature of living in a foreign country means that those you do find, usually don't stay forever (including yourself). With respect to Japanese men and women, there is often a language or cultural barrier, even amongst those who I would classify as 'westernised'. Tokyo can be a pretty lonely place, not just for ex-pats who have had to generate new support groups in a new country, but for Japanese people too. Like any big and ostensibly soulless city, it tends to swallow its residents and forget about them.

The crux of why I stay here is simply this. Japan gets under your skin. It becomes an experiential addiction after a while. And it will be a hard habit to kick.

A big thumbs up

A big thumbs up (I would give the trusty Japanese "peesu" sign, but wouldn't want to appear to be making any political "statements") to Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi (English title, Spirited Away) for winning Best Animated Film at the Oscars last night.

It's technically anime, but more like Disney meets Japanese quirkiness with a little bit of Brothers Grimm thrown in.

If you haven't already seen it, rent it for an insight into Japanese culture. At every turn it revels in it's "Japan-ness", from the hot springs bath culture to their pantheistic shinto gods to the pigs everyone makes of themselves at the open-air yatai...

Small Screen Superstar (??!@#$!??)

Wednesday PM
While I was window shopping last Wednesday, I spotted a funky pair of shoes in Seibu, but had no idea of how to justify the expense (now I am affianced, I need to worry about what could be perceived as frivolous purchases). As if on cue, I received a call later that night from an agency I had registered with months ago. I had done a few shows for them as an extra on SMA's Bera Bera Station months back, but got over that pretty quickly, in spite of being able to perve on Katori Shingo at close range.

The agent asked me;

"Are you free tomorrow afternoon? We need beautiful ladies to speak english for Bera Bera Station."

One thing one must remember about Japanese men (and women) is that foreigners are endlessly fascinating to them. You could look like the arse-end of a bus and they would still think you were captivating. They are also astigmatic in the best sense - I was told once that I "was beautiful, just like Nicole Kidman" despite the fact that Nicole is 6 feet tall, size 0 and has bright red hair.

So I let the rhetorical compliment slide and affirmed that yes, I was free that afternoon, and yes, I could speak English.

Thursday PM
Bera Bera Station is the English segment of SMA Station 2, where Katori-kun (of the perennial fave, SMAP) faces off against his guests in translating english snippets from films, TV shows, political speeches etc. into Japanese. Every episode there is an english "Phrase of the Week", usually a colloquial expression, where foreigners are filmed doing role-plays, or dodgy "on-the-street" interviews centred around that phrase.

This was to be my job.

When I arrived at the studio and discovered that in a previous week they had been made to say, "I catched a cold" I thought I might be in trouble. Fortunately, our phrases were fairly innocuous and, more importantly, grammatically correct. Unfortunately, the shoot was outside in the courtyard, it was freezing cold and I was asked to cry on cue;

"Oh sure, no problem", I say nonchalantly ("WHAT?????").

Luckily, the (goddess) agent had some eye whitening drops which made my eyes nice and moist which at least made it look like I was crying. The downside of this was that after four takes of my Meryl Streep, my eyes took on an eerie neon sheen and passersby (and the film crew) were giving me a wide berth.

As it happened, the studio is next to the U.S Embassy, which, predictably, was host to a deluge of anti-war protests on Thursday, and camera crew helicopters were circling the area. Every time the choppers neared the Embassy, we had to stop the shoot because of the noise. In fact, every time a person walked past, either dragging a suitcase, or slurping a coffee, we had to do a re-take.

After 3 hours and a mild case of hypothermia, me and the other "beautiful people" took our money and ran. I didn't care about how I would look on TV, all I saw were those new pair of shoes I could now afford to buy...

SMA Station 2 - Saturday nights (Japan only) on TV Asahi @ 11pm.

Gadgets And Service

I must confess that I have gone a bit crazy with the electronic gadgets since living in Tokyo, we both have.

A far cry from our humble beginnings of sitting on cushions on the cold wood floor, eating 2-minute noodles off an upturned cardboard box - our apaato is now adorned with all manner of electronic gadgetry: a laptop computer, recordable MD walkman, bass guitar effects box, digital video camera, pocket-size digital camera, the colour-screen cell phone... I don't mean to brag but it is just bizarre that these little indulgences have slowly become as required an accessory as toilet paper and toothpaste.

But the one thing that I really treasure, is really my pressscious, is my Sharp eDictionary.

Kim bought this little beauty for me for Christmas and, once I worked out how to operate it, not a day has passed when I haven't used it. I can look up Japanese characters in a flash, I can find all compounds that use it (for those who haven't tried studying Japanese before, the biggest hurdle to reading the language is the kanji, an alphabet of thousands of hieroglyphics that all look like pictographs of a little man doing a karate chop).

A regular comprehensive kanji dictionary does not come pocket-sized. They are big and heavy and it takes several minutes to flick through the pages to look up a character. And even then you can't necessarily find any words that use that character (maybe a limited list), so then you have to revert to another big and heavy Japanese-English dictionary and, well, it's just a long and tedious process.

However, my eDictionary has 16 (count em) dictionaries built into one slim line ultra cool mini-laptop unit. There is the proverbs dictionary (my favourite: "as difficult as putting in eye drops from the second floor"), the medical terminology dictionary with diagrams of the human body (just in case), even an English-English dictionary for when one of my students fires one out of left field at me (Excuse me Mr Matthew, what does "obsequious" mean? Err, hang on a minute...). And for the serious student of Japanese it is also full of example sentences. And I can jump between all the different dictionaries endlessly.

Well, that is, I could until I stepped on the fucking thing.

Yep, not three weeks after I received the ultimate gadget, raved about it to my friends and set my sights firmly on passing the level 2 Japanese exam with its help, I carelessly left it under the blanket of our kotatsu (heated table). I didn't even realise I had done it at the time, our apartment sometimes has so much junk lying around that I assumed the "crack" I heard to just be an old piece of rice cracker or something.

That is until I went to use it next.

Now I have only cried twice since living in Japan. Once was in Hokkaido while we were watching a cheesy daytime TV drama about a stubborn blind girl with a guide dog named "Happy" who had to swallow her pride and ask someone for directions on the street so she could make it to her sister's wedding. It was very moving. But they were tears of joy.

When I realised that my beautiful presssscious had a 3 inch crack on its LCD screen and was basically useless I sobbed like a frickin baby. I hadn't taken the time to translate the warranty but I was guessing that "being stepped on and crushed" wasn't covered in the manufacturer's guarantee. And as you can imagine these little babies don't come cheap, there was no way we could afford to just pick up another one to replace it.

I took it into Bic Camera and pessimistically inquired about repairs, to discover that for just over a third of the price of a new unit they could maybe replace the screen. While it was still expensive I decided to go ahead with it anyway - I had had a taste of the ultimate Japanese study tool and I couldn't go back to door-stopper tomes again.

2 weeks later I showed up, half-expecting the sales assistant to hand my dictionary back to me, shake his head and apologise for not being able to mend such serious damage. But this is Japan so you always know to expect something out of the ordinary.

"Here you are, here's a new replacement dictionary."

Was "being stepped on" covered in the warranty? Were they unable to repair the screen and felt bad so gave me a replacement one instead? I didn't stop to ask.

I just said thankyou very much and got the hell out of there before he changed his mind.

Now, what's the kanji for "lucky bastard" ?

The Shopaholic's Cure

If you are an "average" sized (i.e. bigger than Aussie size 10) woman with a compulsive addiction to shopping, come to Tokyo. You will be cured once and for all.

As a size 12 back home, I try to avoid shopping in Tokyo as much as possible. More to the point, Matthew tries to avoid me shopping, having copped enough of the "I am so obese!" and the "Why have I put on 10 pounds when Japanese foods are supposed to be so healthy?" tirades. However, with my friend Roz's wedding in Australia looming, I resigned myself to the inevitable - a shopping expedition (read, ordeal) in the legendary department stores of Shinjuku and Shibuya, home to those lovely fillies staggering about in their Prada pin-heels with boyfriend's credit card in tow.

Let me say firstly that I find a lot of people in Tokyo very helpful. Sales assistants, however, are a staggeringly aloof breed. The moment I walk into a store, after the obligatory "Irrashaimassai!" there is a chasm of silence, the sales assistants busily assuming that 1) I don't speak Japanese (partly true) or 2) I cannot fit into anything in their store (also partly true, I may fit into one of their hats). Thus, I get the stare down, but little help. Those that do venture to my side of the shop, try out a tentative, "Sugoku kawaii desu ne!" (that's so cute, huh?) and I respond, before the silence descends once more.

There are actually a few stores in Tokyo catering to the euphemistically "tall" lady (Australian size 10-16 (U.S 8-14), anything larger and you are in serious trouble), among them Isetan in Shinjuku and Next in Jiyugoaka, two excellent finds. However, these stores stock mainly dressy casual or business clothes, not exactly suitable for a wedding, so I was forced to branch out into the unchartered territory of the "short" stores.

Japanese ladies love their brand names bordering on obsession and this is the second frustration. The cost. It goes without saying that Tokyo is an expensive city, but when you are expected to fork out A$175 for what amounts to little more than a T-shirt, you find yourself wandering up and down the aisles in a white noise daze, reminiscing about the days when you could buy a little black dress from Cue for that amount.

After I had picked over four department stores in Shinjuku, it occurred to me very suddenly (and belatedly) that I hated just about everything in the stores. It was all either "cutting edge" (aka bizarre experiments you would only see on a catwalk) or the kakky pastels favoured by chic Asian ladies but not favoured by moi. The aisles seem to be laden with pale orange frilly nightmares of fabric so fragile it would disintegrate on a size 12 frame. When I actually found something I liked I was so overjoyed I bought it with only a glance at the price tag. As it happened, this store was also home to Tokyo's friendliest Sales Assistant, who kept her attentive smile, even when I chucked a gaijin, and accidentally went into the fitting room-u with my shoes on (they are really funny about these things).

If you like your fashion pin-sized or have a penchant for pale pastel frillby frollby numbers, then by all means go nuts in Tokyo. Just remember to bring your credit card. With a very large limit.

Who's cookin'?

A new approach to hair design...

Crappu-chan

Yesterday I was sent by my company to substitute for a teacher to a junior high school in Bunkyo ward. Now normally when this situation arises, a Japanese sales rep will accompany me for the ride. They serve a dual purpose - to make sure that the bumbling gaijin doesn't get lost trying to find the school (see below), and also to formally introduce the substitute teacher to the school principal (read: kissing arse to maintain the relationship between the school and the company).

But for some reason yesterday I was sent alone. The company equipped me with a relatively detailed map and trusted me to find my own way, figuring that I had been in the country long enough to be able to navigate this one solo.

They were wrong.

Here's the thing: Japanese streets are so narrow, random, unnamed and similar-looking that a computer-generated map alone is often not enough to be able to orientate yourself. There are other alleyways that get left off the map. You need landmarks. And the only landmark I had to go by was a Tokyo-Mitsubishi bank near the station exit.

Unfortunately there were six different exits, and three Tokyo-Mitsubishi banks in the area, so even with my solid grounding back in Year 10 Orienteering class combined with 4 years of cub scouts, I managed to get lost. Well not lost exactly, I knew where I was. It was the location of the school that continued to elude me.

When I realised that I was running into danger of not arriving at school in time for the first class, I asked a young lady who was walking her dog for directions. She said she was heading that way and would walk with me. I was saved!

And so during the 5 minute walk to school (back in the direction I had come from) with Hiromi the hairdresser, I happened to ask the name of her little long-haired sausage dog that kept barking at me - not in an aggressive manner, but like it was talking to me.

"Oh, that's Crappu"

Huh?

"You know, Crappu, as in Eric Crappu-ton"

Her dog's name was Crap. Crap-poo in fact. The poor bugger.

I thanked Hiromi and Crap and ran off to school. I normally have a crap before class but there just wasn't enough time.

No war on Iraq!

Oh, and no foreigners in Japan!

My buddy Albert and I attended a peace rally last weekend in Hibiya park. I thought it would be a good thing to do, you know - the prospect of the US going to war with Iraq right now seems so imminent and unavoidable, and what can I do to change anything? But there is something about marching in the street with thousands of others that helps you to consolidate and affirm your beliefs and at least give you a little hope that their might be the smallest of chances that the world's leaders might all have evolved beyond them having to kill innocent people to sort out their differences.

Anyway, that was the plan. Only we didn't actually get to the marching stage.

The turnout was impressive - someone I spoke to estimated the crowd at over 40,000 people. I guess it is all relative and in a city of over 10 million maybe those numbers are a tad disappointing, but the Japanese are very much a people to avoid making a public protest about anything, so with that in mind it was still encouraging to see so many people in agreement on one fundamental issue. Lots of clever signs abounded, from more serious photos painting Iraqi children as the real victims should war break out to cartoons of sumo wrestlers tackling George Bush.

The problem was that war with Iraq wasn't the only issue being voiced in the park. And the march was running over time by an hour and a half. When were we going to move? I had already had enough of the conversation with the guy behind me bagging all Americans - when will people learn to not judge the citizens of a country by their government? I thought at a peace rally such close-minded views on things would be absent...

While Albert and I were standing in line (it had now been 3 hours, and we were cold, hungry and tired) waiting for the march to begin, an old man, probably in his 70s, approached us and quite aggressively tried to force a leaflet in Japanese into my hand.

He asked me in Japanese:

"Can you read this?"

Now I am not the type of person to take leaflets from people at the best of times, there are so many people handing out crap in front of the train stations in Tokyo that it just gets too much. I politely declined, explaining that I couldn't read it.

His reply:

"Bah! It's no good that you can only read English! Get your girlfriend to read it to you!"

I was taken aback. Assuming that my girlfriend was Japanese was pretty ballsy of him. I explained that this was not the case and that, being an Australian, she was also unable to read his important piece of paper, so no thankyou.

"Australian? Hrrmph!"

It was at this point that he broke into badly pronounced English.

"Australia, BAD, ne?"

We have been in this country for a while now, and there are some Japanese habits that I have unwittingly adopted as a result. One of them is the gradual cocking of my head to one side while saying nothing whenever I am confronted with something of which I either disapprove or confuses me. It's very Japanese body language but I can't help it. This was one of the moments when I reacted as such.

The old man's lower lip started to tremble. He raised his voice and pointed accusingly at me, an extremely rude gesture in Japan:

"I REMEMBER ZA BOMB!" he shouted at me, anguish burning in his eyes.

That was enough, I was rattled. I caught myself from engaging in a pointless debate about World War II or justifying my Australianness, we were at a peace march for chrissake. Instead Albert and I headed for home - the march could proceed without us.

The Queue-Jumper

Japan's transport system is, as I've already mentioned, very, very organised. On every platform are quaint white lines indicating the queue route that commuters follow as if it were the path of Buddha's pilgrimage (the chaos that ensues after the commuters get on the train is another matter).

On Friday, I witnessed what can happen when these strict rules of etiquette are broken...

I was waiting to get on the monorail, patiently standing between my white lines, when an eager beaver in his early 20's from the neighbouring lane decides to sneak onto the train via our doors. Cheeky bugger, thought I. The older man in front of me, however, thought a hell of a lot more than that. He stopped the queue-jumper quite forcefully and said something in Japanese that I didn't (want to) understand. It then sounded like they were laughing, so I thought maybe they knew each other.

I secured a seat on the train and next thing I knew the man was giving the queue-jumper an open-handed smackdown in the aisle. The queue-jumper didn't flinch, just carried on up the aisle and had the gall to sit at the end of the carriage. [It goes without saying that queue-jumpers who steal coveted seats are regarded in much the same way as lepers, unless they are middle-aged salary-men or obattalions.]

Five minutes passed and no sign of the older man. Suddenly he appeared from behind me and rushed down the aisle to stand over the queue-jumper and whack him several more times across his head. The queue-jumper simply sat there and continued to read his newspaper. The older man, seemingly bored by the mindless sport, sauntered off into the next carriage.

During the whole episode, no-one on the train acknowledged that anything was happening. It seems that whilst queue-jumping usually affords baffled stares, violence is sometimes ignored.

Doctor, Doctor

Within a week of arriving in Tokyo in October 2001, I was introduced to the Japanese medical "system" because of a "strange" ear infection (Japanese love words like "strange" and "difficult" to describe things they don't understand). I had no idea what to expect when I rocked up to the Police Hospital in Iidabashi; although, from what I'd heard, I knew it would be prohibitively expensive.

On that occasion, our company's resident goddess, Mayumi, came with me to translate. I had to fill out a deluge of forms (or, more accurately, Mayumi had to fill them out for me as they were all in Japanese) and we waited in three separate waiting rooms before I got to see the doctor. For a country as anally organised as Japan, the word "appointment" is strangely anathema in Tokyo's hospitals. You are simply expected to show up and wait. And people wait. And wait. And, dammit, wait patiently. Do these people not have jobs?

Finally, we were ushered into the doctor's rooms where Mayumi did her best to translate the consultation. After a barrage of tests (these docs are nothing if not thorough), he rattled off a stream of Japanese verbiage, wrote all his notes in German and was reluctant to tell me/Mayumi (after three hours, the distinctions were starting to blur) what was wrong with me. It seems Japan's doctors go into practise completely unprepared for how to deal with the question; "well, what the f!@#k is it?" Perhaps the patients never ask...

When Mayumi asked this very question, she received the enigmatic response;

"ewoiubvlasfaieourwa brain tumour woiufvdfhgoeirutfjajgnai"

which, apparently, translated as;

"You probably don't have a brain tumour".

Right. Pass me the defibrillator, please.

I came out of the hospital 20,000 yen lighter (roughly A$300) and none the wiser as to what was actually wrong with me.

Last week I had the pleasure of returning to the same hosptial armed with a larger Japanese vocabulary and my in-house translator, Matt. The doctor (a different doctor, in a different part of the hospital, requiring a different hospital card) shot all these questions and instructions at me in rapid-fire Japanese which I still couldn't understand and which Matt had to preface with; "I think he said....."

At one stage the doctor apparently asked Matt if I wanted stronger painkillers to which I responded with "hell yes, give me the f!@#$ing motherload" (Matt's translation; "yes, please"). The "stronger painkillers" turned out to be the mysteriously named "Selbex". On further investigation, I discovered that Selbex is actually prescribed for gastro, prompting me to think that the doctor had perhaps asked Matt if I had a problem with gas. I mean, I had had a pretty spicy curry the night before, but what this had to do with a sprained back is anyone's guess...

I left the hospital loaded down with Selbex and a host of other drugs with, yet again, absolutely no idea of what was actually wrong with me. One week later, the mystery of the Selbex has not been resolved, but not only has it helped my back, it has made me quite regular.

Dirty secrets

Japan, for all its boasting about being the "second biggest economy in the world" has some very dirty little secrets it likes to shove into a cupboard with all the other shoes that don't fit. And Tokyo, the capital of affluence, has its own ill-fitting wardrobe in the shape of its impoverished enclaves, be they the makeshift-boxes of Ikebukuro station or the ghettos near Tokyo Bay.