steepholm

That was quite a busy weekend. On Saturday morning I met my friend Yuki in Kyosumi Shirakawa, and we walked round the park there before going to a rather swanky coffee place, Blue Bottle, that looked like a factory but did serve excellent iced coffee, at a price. Apparently it's a very fashionable shop, and as Japan is as given to fads as any other country, if not more so, we were lucky to get served right away. (When a queue forms outside a restaurant, whereas many people might look for somewhere a bit less busy, the Japanese instinct is always to join the queue, on the grounds that if there are that many people queuing it must be good. The flaw in this reasoning I leave as a puzzle for the reader to solve.) The latest thing, apparently, is shoku-pan - the ordinary fluffy white loaf you can buy cheaply in any supermarket, which is now being sold for about £6 a loaf at certain artisan places.

Afterwards, we walked to Tsukishima, an area of Tokyo reclaimed from the bay, and the home of monjayaki, or monja to its friends and fans - of whom I now count myself one. People, if you like okonomiyaki, but sometimes find it just a little too floury or stodgy, you are going to love monja - which has all the good stuff but with fewer carbs, and is so delicious that I ate it before remembering to take a photograph. (There are many flavours: I went for mentaiko and cheese.) Instead, here is Yuki in a street entirely made up of monja restaurants...

and our selection - just in case I need to go back.

I did remember to photograph the iced matcha and doriyaki we had at a tea garden in Hamarikyu Gardens afterwards, though.

One thing I've found interesting for a long time is the phenomenon of incomplete or incorrect translations between Japanese and English - not because of mistakes (that's a much guiltier pleasure) but for other reasons. For example, I'm currently staying at Tokyo Woman's Christian University, but its Japanese name (toukyou joshi daigaku) translates simply to "Tokyo Woman's University". Where did the Christian bit go? It's a mystery. Likewise, the academic organisation that studies Anglophone children's literature is officially called, in English, "The Japan Society for Children’s Literature in English". The Japanese name is now similar; however, until 2020 it was "Japan British Children’s Literature Society."

On Saturday I found this sign in a Hamarikyu Gardens, which offers a still more puzzling example of the genre. It marks the site of the Enryokan, which was used as a guesthouse for foreign dignitaries in the early days of the Meiji era.

Although some of the information is the same, the Japanese makes no reference to the Enryokan being the creation of "the national government of the time" - rather, it says that it was built by a "British prince". It also mentions that Ulysses S. Grant stayed there for two months in 1879. Yet these two details, which one might expect to be of particular interest to English readers, were omitted (or lied about!) in the English translation. Why?

In the evening I went to the suburb of Kokubunji with a new friend, an interpreter called Sakae, to visit a pub where a friend of hers was playing in a band. I was a bit nervous, because I hadn't been to such a crowded and unventilated establishment in 30 months, as well as for the usual reasons (would I be able to hear myself think? Would I be bored out of my mind?). Luckily, none of the feared eventualities came to pass, and I had a good time listening to Matt and his vaguely Cajun but musically versatile band.

About half the people there were non-Japanese, and it felt very strange and slightly disorientating to hear so much English being spoken around me - mostly by North Americans, though with a few Europeans thrown in. In particular, we got chatting at one point to a tall, slim, smartly dressed (by the standards of that particular bar) Dutchman in a jacket and tie. So thick was his English accent that I had trouble following him and suggested we switch to Japanese - it turned out his was really excellent. I mention this because later, when Sakae and I returned to Kokubunji station, we met him coming the other way, tie dishevelled and suavity quite gone, surrounded by four policemen, who bundled him into a waiting police car and away. All the time he was shouting at them - in Japanese that, I had to admit, was still much better than mine despite the stress of the situation. Sakae tried to intervene or at least find out what had happened, but was of course ignored by the police. I've no idea what caused this, but it was the second time in a few days I'd seen Japanese police leap into action. How uncharacteristic!

On Sunday, I caught the last day of the Peter Rabbit exhibition in Setagaya with my friend Satomi. "What, is Peter Rabbit big in Japan?" I hear you (or possibly the voices in my head) ask. Yes, he is - since he was translated in 1971 by the redoubtable and ubiquitous Momoko Ishii - although the book's first ever translation was actually into Japanese, in 1906, where it appeared (without credit to Beatrix P) in the pages of the Japan Agricultural Journal - a discovery of recent date, but not mine alas. Anyway, we had a very good time and although most of the exhibition was off limits to cameras, there were some set pieces, much like the Winnie-the-Pooh exhibit I visited at Bunkamura in 2019. Here, for example, is Mrs Rabbit strangling her son Peter, Homer Simpson style: