Parting is Such Sweet Soro Soro

This week I've been slowly coasting down towards my inevitable departure from Japan on Sunday, a process of gradual renunciation and reconciliation, a bit like Hindu sannyasa but with better food. Only this morning I received an email from Booking.com with a load of vouchers for things I might wish to do "during my stay in Tokyo" - several of which looked pretty fun - but I sternly deleted it. If only you'd written six weeks ago, Booking.com! I suppose it's because I used them to book an airport hotel the night before my departure, and their algorithm foolishly understood this as a prelude to adventure rather than the drawing of a curtain on (at any rate) this act.

Mostly I've been catching up with friends, some for the first time on this trip, some for the second. On Sunday I went to Kichijouji for a pizza with my old friend Tomoko, one of the very first language-learning partners I met in Japan - as early as 2016. On Facebook recently I mentioned that my greatest ever experience of culture shock was going to New York and seeing people eating pizza with their fingers (this was in 1986) - which sparked a long but essentially irrelevant debate about whether the Italians eat it that way or with a knife and fork. Having never been to Italy in 1986 my expectations would not have been affected either way, but it's surprising how heated people can get about the "right" way to eat food (whether you like it or not). Personally, I hate having sticky fingers, so can only enjoy finger food if I have immediate and constant recourse to some way of cleaning them.

Anyway, in that spirit, this is what the Naples-trained chefs of Kichijouji think about the matter.



Feel free to pitch in on whether you think they've got it right. Meanwhile, I'll be with Tomoko taking a stroll in nearby Inokashira Park, with its hidden Buddhist temples, black sesame flavoured ice cream, and of course the ever-popular swan pedaloes.



On Monday I met up with Toki, whom I had met only once before, in a cafe in Bristol three years ago, when she (then a total stranger) saw me studying kanji and we fell into conversation. She had just finished studying at a language school and was soon to go back to Tokyo, but she gave me the details of a friend - who turned out to be Moe. And it was through Moe that I go to know Ayako, and through Ayako that I got to know Rei - so the consequences of that chance encounter at Coffee #1 have been longlasting indeed. We had lunch in Daikanyama, a new part of Tokyo for me, and went to a rather splendid bookshop nearby (Tsutaya), which contained not only the usual cafe but a full-blown restaurant. and sold many a high-end good.



In the evening I got totally confused, and thought I had an evening free, so made myself some pasta and settled down to some work - only to get a message from Andy Houwen (a colleague of Miho's whom I'd first met at hers soon after arriving), asking where I'd got to. We'd originally agreed to go to an izakaya on Tuesday and somehow I'd not clocked that the date had been changed, so - rather full from lunch with Toki and the pasta I'd just made - I headed out with him to Kouenji where we met his wife Gladys and hit the local bars. Somehow I managed to tuck away quite a few more calorific snacks along with beer and sake, and eventually something that we had ordered as red wine but turned out to be a weird fruit-juice concoction stuffed with frozen strawberries. I've still no idea how the staff misunderstood us, since we not only said 'aka wain' but were pointing at it on the menu.

Weirdly, though, Andy later that evening found the following passage in the book he's reading - A Farewell to Arms:

‘If you imagine a country that makes a wine that tastes like strawberries’, he said.

‘Why shouldn’t it?’ Catherine asked. ‘It sounds splendid’.

‘It doesn’t even taste like strawberries’.

‘It might’, said Catherine. ‘It would be wonderful if it did’.

I'm here to tell you that it was not, in fact, wonderful after all.

One of the items at the final izakaya - more of an Italian wine bar, in truth - was a small cheese selection. I've been more or less off cheese for the last 6 weeks, although I love it to excess, because good cheese isn't really a thing in Japan. But a taste of piccante gorgonzola and a crumbly lump of salty parmesan brought all my cheese love racing back. It was another weird coincidence that the next day I got an unprompted WhatsApp message from Rei telling me among other things that it was possible to buy Stilton - at a price - from a high-end supermarket in Kichijouji. Of course, I had to go and sea, and sure enough...



I am ashamed to speak of the cheese debauche that followed, or the way my stomach reacted to that much creamy goodness and delicious blue mould after such a long fast. Suffice it to say that I woke several times in the night following, wondering, "Is this the long-feared Covid at last - just a few days before my flight?"

But there was more of Colston Bassett than of Corona about it, and the next morning I was in a fit state to eat a lunchtime curry with Sakae in Nishiogikubo, then look around a few souvenir shops in Mitaka.


Sakae after curry in Nishiogikubo

Thursday morning I took a stroll in Zenpukuji Park, which is just behind this campus, but (because it's the other end from the gate I have to use to leave and enter) I'd somehow not been to on this visit. The central features is a large pond, replete with cormorants and herons, and therefore also (one must suppose) at least a few fish. These kinds of spaces are never too far away in Tokyo, and neither are the quiet neighbourhoods with walkable - nay, dawdleable - streets and even the occasional farm. It's one of the reasons I love the city. I wish I'd done more walking sooner, in the gaps between the too hot and the too wet.


An arable "city farm", with honesty box for purchases, in relatively central Tokyo


Another Nishiogikubo meal followed, this time with Miho and two of her colleagues, but I didn't want to be too late to bed, as this was my final full day at TWCU, and I had received a very kind offer from yet another colleague, Naoko, to take me to Saitama Children's Zoo, the scene of my epic failure to reach the Beatrix Potter house last week.

This time, although the weather wasn't great, we made it in! I can't show you the inside of the BP house, but I think you'll agree they did a bang up job on the exterior:


The real Hill Top and the one in Saitama - can you tell which is which?

Clue: only one has this feature



We also took the opportunity to visit the children's zoo attractions, such as penguins, red pandas, prairie dogs, etc., but you've seen them before. Had we been there at the right time there would also have been a chance to do some milking - or chichi obori (literally "teat-wringing").



There was also a vending machine where you could buy the dairy products, along with a little English/Japanese pun:



The kanji says "kau" (buy) - which is pronounced the same way as "cow". I said that they'd missed an opportunity to write 飲む ("nomu") which means "drink" and sounds a bit like "no moo" - but when we used the vending machine it turned out that it did moo after all. Click on video below, if you wish, to verify this:






Complaints about Japan

I promised in an earlier entry that I would list my complaints about Japan. I do have some, but it's a pretty poor crop, in truth. Here goes:

1) Toilet paper. The toilet roll is super thin - "like gold to airy thinnness beat" as Donne said about something else. Why, Japan? What do you think people use it for? It doesn't save paper, as one just ends up using a greater length.

2) Children's playgrounds.

Japan has many fine parks, such as Inokashira, and children's zoos, such as Saitama, but when it comes to your bog-standard neighbourhood playground it's another story. The ground is usually gravel, the equipment old and sparse, and imagination entirely absent. I've no idea why. The one next to Sarah's apartment in Nishinomiya was fairly typical - just a flat expanse of nothing:



But wait, what's that pale blur in the far corner? Let's zoom in a bit...



Still not sure. A bit more...



Oh yes, it's a horse on a spring. This is the entirety of the play equipment available to the local children. To have just one is somehow more pathetic than to have none at all.

3. But We Are Speaking Japanese. This is a comedy skit, but it's also a work of documentary realism. If I'm with a Japanese person and speak to a customer service person (in a restaurant, at a reception desk), their gaze will be drawn with inexorable magnetic attraction to my Japanese companion and they will (almost) always address the reply to them. This is true whether I'm speaking Japanese badly or well, and it's kind of irritating. A good example was the day Abe was shot, and the news went round the teppanyaki restaurant I was in with my friend Yoko. I'd exchanged a few basic pleasantries with the waiter, and he was happy to reply to expected remarks about the food, but as soon as I asked about something off script he was quite lost. "Have they caught the culprit?" I asked in Japanese, and "Is their motive still unclear?" He looked at me in confusion, until Yoko repeated my question in exactly the same words, at which point they suddenly made sense. To do him credit, he did say rather sheepishly that he hadn't expected me to use words like that.

4) Noise and silence. This isn't really a complaint, as to be honest it doesn't irritate me at all, but I do find it odd. Japan is really hot on silence on trains and many other places: no conversations (certainly not loud ones) and no phone use - which is fine by me. But, to walk down a Japanese street is often to walk through a cacophony of tunes, recorded announcements, adverts, etc. Even the trains and buses themselves - particularly the latter - have a constant patter of announcements about stops coming up, stops just arrived at (always done in what I think of as a "snooker commentator" hushed voice that is actually quite loud), warnings about being silent and not disturbing other passengers, etc.

I've got those out of my system, but I feel there should be more... I suppose I didn't really have any complaints about Japan after all? Oh well, let's hope I can find something next time - because that implies that there will be a next time.

そうと祈っています。