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Sick during midterms

After around 11 months of being able to avoid getting sick, a flu snuck up on me at the best possible time, during the midterm exams. It’s not like I would want to miss classes, especially Japanese classes, but sometimes it’s unavoidable. However, even with lost voice and a slight fever there was no way to avoid the numerous trials foreign students face at Kansai Gaidai. It was made very clear to us that the only valid reason to miss midterms was by attending your own funeral. On Monday evening I could feel my health slowly shifting from healthy to not-so-healthy, but in the end it didn’t really hinder my performances except for the speaking test in which I probably sounded like I had been up all night drinking whiskey and screaming my lungs out. Contrary to expectations, being in Japan did not make being sick a positive experience, having a cold was just as annoying as always.

Nth time in Kyoto

It took me around five days to recover so Saturday was still relatively calm. On the other hand, the ambitious plan for Sunday was to go to Nara with a bunch of other people. We were supposed to meet at the Starbucks near the Hirakata station at 10:30, but an hour later there was only one other person besides me on the premises. We ended up being only four people, and due to weather-related as well as demographic issues we decided to skip Nara this time and head to Kyoto. There’s always something to do in Kyoto. And once again, It turned out to be a great trip.

Upon arriving in Kyoto, we first visited a renowned dessert restaurant, the Tsujiri. It was so renowned, in fact, that the green tea ice cream connoisseurs eager to enter the restaurant formed a 20-meter-long queue that blocked the whole sidewalk. The queue kept moving quickly though, so it didn’t take us long to get inside and eat the most expensive matcha ice cream parfaits I’ve ever seen (à ¥1000+). It tasted delicious, but with the current euro-yen rate (1 euro for 0 yen) I can’t afford that kind of luxury too often.

As the whole decision to go to Kyoto had been made up ex tempore, we had no real plan on where to go. However, like all roads lead to Rome, all roads in Kyoto lead to someplace worth seeing. One such place we encountered was the Ryozen Kannon. Besides from the fact that the place was inhabitated by a huge Daibutsu, it also served as a memorial for the unknown soldier who perished in World War 11. I’m always amazed by the Japanese. Not only do they know in advance that a World War 11 will happen, they can accurately predict the amount of casualties (1) and build a memorial spot beforehand. I didn’t make this up, here’s the proof:

Distasteful and macabre jokes aside, we received some remembrance candles upon entering the shrine and paid tribute to the deceased, following which we had a quick promenade around the shrine to examine the Daibutsu from every possible perspective. As I’ve come to expect from all historical sites in Kyoto, it was impressive:

Afternoon Repose

The others had not been to Kiyomizu-dera yet, so our next goal was to find the way there. By following random directions we had the opportunity to visit many other places on the way. Surprisingly, I was able to locate the Ryozen Museum of History, a place that is relevant to my interests and which I will definitely have to visit during the winter break at the very latest. Near the museum was an old graveyard that sheltered the graves of several famous Japanese revolutionaries and politicians, again something for which the others did not share the same excitement as I did. The graveyard was old and had most likely seen better days, as the paths were very narrow and the stones that formed them wet and incredibly slippery. I couldn’t help but wonder how many people buried in there had actually been killed by the graveyard itself.

After visiting a few graves we continued our city tour and finally made it to the Kiyomizu temple. This time we actually paid to go inside and see the whole beauty of it. Among other minor things, the view from the temple was magnificent. Down from the actual temple was a mountain spring from which superstitious people and impressionable tourists (us) could drink in order to become smarter, better-looking or richer. This was the point in time where things took a turn towards the mundane and uninteresting. We went to see a movie. And not just any movie. Within the very lame genre of spy parodies it was probably the worst I’ve seen: Get Smart. Indeed, if only I had gotten smart earlier I wouldn’t have paid to see it. It sparked a few laughs here and there but, as a whole, on a scale from 1 to boring I would grade it as yawnfest. In order to end this entry on a more positive note, please look at this temple.

-Antti

Dilemma: not writing about interesting things right at the end of the same day they happen creates a vicious circle that prevents me from posting new entries that I’ve finished writing because I have yet to publish older ones that I could not care less about at this point in time. I am now neck deep in that shit. Here’s the synopsis of a random weekend.

Strike!

As usual I hadn’t planned anything special for Friday evening but Visa called me saying he’s going bowling with some Japanese students and asked if I wanted to join. Considering the previous sentence where I stated I hadn’t planned anything, I naturally agreed to go with them. We met at Makino station around 9 and went bowling for a few hours. Now that I think about it, there is nothing specifically interesting to write about bowling, but since I decided to finish the post about this weekend long ago, I’ll follow through with the plan. I’ll be brief: We bowled. Sometimes the ball hit the pins, some other times it did not. End of captivating story. The only Japanese thing I could find was that even the renting of bowling shoes was done by a machine. That, and instead of having a bar counter next to the bowling lanes as you would be bound to find back home, there was an arcade and purikura booths.

After a few hours of bowling we moved to Jankara at Hirakata-station for some karaoke. By some karaoke I mean that we actually sang until five in the morning, and no alcohol was involved. This is not a joke, it’s something we actually did. I won’t comment much on my own singing, but I didn’t notice anyone’s ears starting to bleed so I guess I’m improving. On the other side of the singing spectrum were a few of our Japanese acquaintances. I was really surprised by the sheer skill and enthusiasm some of them singing with. You had to be there, though.

Nani ga nandemo, yakiniku!

The Japanese love the idea of all you can eat and all you can drink. A 90 to 120 minute time limit for going on a binge is usually heavily in the favor of the restaurant, when no gaijins are involved. However, I am here to eat such places into bankruptcy. On Saturday evening, we went to have dinner at a Korean tabehodai barbecue with Visa, my speaking partner Satomi, and her best friend Yukari. In order to avoid filling our stomachs too fast, we didn’t touch the highly abundant white rice they probably would have wanted to provide us. Instead, we just kept ordering more delicious strips of meat at an increasing pace until we ran out of time.

It must be specified that Japanese tabehodai offers are very different from standard western buffet meals where you can eat anything you find on the buffet table and be happy forever. In a Japanese tabehodai, a) there is a strict time limit and b) you order stuff as you go depending on what you want, and nothing is as lousily prepared as something you might find at a cheap buffet. As a bonus I personally liked a lot, if you order more than you can manage to eat, you have to pay extra for the leftovers. A personal pet peeve of mine, but I think anyone who leaves food on their plate should pay their monthly salary for being a fucking idiot and not being able to know how much their stomach can contain. Enough with the venting, we ate our share during the 90 minute lapse of time the restaurant accorded us, after which we walked to a nearby bar to have a drink. I guess walking home in a T-shirt on a relatively chilly night is what made me catch the cold I had during the exam week.

-Antti

Roaming Sheep

Most of the other people we had done the journey with had already left the premises or stayed at the hostel to sleep so, as I had planned, I was able to drift around Tokyo alone. I had very specific plans for the few hours I had left to waste in the western capital, and the first step was to take three different metros to the Omote-Sando station. Once there, I had two goals: the Oakley store in Harajuku and the Kinokuniya supermarket in Omote-Sando. I had done a bit of research on where to find rye bread in Japan and apparently the best option was the large foreigner-oriented Kinokuniya. On the other hand, the Oakley store was just a good excuse for me to switch to consumer whore mode.

The Man, the Idol, the Legend

Before getting anywhere meaningful, though, I was stopped in the middle of the Omote-Sando avenue by a girl who had run after me I didn’t dare ask how long. She was knackered. After a moment of confusion she was able to explain that they wanted to interview me for a girl’s magazine (An An) because I was a “gaijin” and, this is authentic, “good-looking”. Yea I didn’t buy that part either. It looked like they were just trying to find the nerdiest guy to ever cross the avenue I would define as the Champs-Elysées of Tokyo. There I am, minding my own business, wearing a horrendous vocational school stubble and a world class mullet, and someone has a brain lapse and wants to take pictures of me for a girl’s magazine. Exquisite. The operation was quick and painless and I got a ¥1000 bookstore coupon for my efforts. It’s like selling your soul for one volume of Slam Dunk.

Happamaton Reikareipa to Hapanrimpu

After I was dismissed, I had some vein-clogging breakfast and roamed a while through the narrow clothing store-filled streets of Harajuku before finding the coveted O Store. Long story short, before I went in, I had a broken wallet with some money inside, and after 15 minutes I came out with a new wallet with Matti inside. The next target was Kinokuniya. Weirdly enough, while in Tokyo, my sense of direction or lack thereof not once interfered with my search for any of the places I wanted to go to; it must have been a miracle of sorts. Once there, the supermarket offered everything I had been dreaming of for one and a half months. At outrageous prices. Therefore, I contented myself with only admiring the package of imported goat cheese and drooling over the rest of the available cheesy comestibles. Fortunately enough, the Finnish bread wasn’t that expensive, so I bought their whole supply (two loaves, woo) and left for new adventures.

A Road Home

I met up with Henrik a few hours later to have the biggest goddamn burger lunch I’ve ever had (Wendy’s SUUPAA MEGA FAKKINGU BAAGAA, IIRC) and to prepare for the trip back to Kyoto. This time we were deprived of the cheaper Kodama plan tickets because they were already sold out, so we had to settle for the next best option, unreserved seats on any Shinkansen going west.

The whole train system in Japan is incredible. There are bullet trains leaving from Tokyo to the Kansai area every five minutes or so, and the unreserved seats are always full. You have to wait in line at the platform for twenty minutes in order to actually get in. Mite goran:

With our cursed luck, we made the line to the fucking smoking car (JR Tobacco Line), something we had no way of knowing beforehand. This time we were also surrounded by chain-smokers, a breed of people I’ve come to despise. I Couldn’t blame them much for smoking in a smoking car though, so I engulfed myself in the smoke and cried myself to sleep. Before I even realized, we were in Kyoto.

Väliaika, kahvia ja pullaa.

The story continues in Seminar House III, Hirakata, Osaka. After buying those delicious loaves of bread from Tokyo, I got the brilliant idea of holding a Finnish bread party for the Finns of Kansai Gaidai. The plan involved one problem of significant magnitude. Visitors are not allowed to eat in seminar houses. Ever. And the punishment for breaking the rule is death, although this isn’t commonly known. Those are the absolute rules here, and our Okaasan and Otoosan are increasingly anal about them. While my standard first reaction concerning any regulations I perceive as unfair or absolute bullshit is to get angry as hell, this time I chose the path of peaceful co-existence. This meant explaining the situation in Japanese to Otoosan and begging to get an official permission to eat bread. I eventually got it. “Because Antti-kun had brought the Finrando-pan from as far as Tokyo, it was ok for visitors to eat”. Just this once. And only bread. Daiseikou! The following day I brought the Otoosan and Okaasan some Finnish rye bread and hapankorppu as a token of gratitude but also to get on their good side. I wonder if they actually liked it…

Thus end the Tokyo Tales, I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I struggled while writing it.

-Antti

Filed Under Newspost

Allright, allright, I’m fucking late with these entries and they’re still not even close to looking the way I’d like them to look, but in order to move on with my life and be able to write on more recent topics I’ll publish all the rest of the Tokyo bullshit as soon as possible. Here goes.

1st Contact

The original plan for day two was to wake up early in the morning and be at the Makuhari Messe exhibition hall when the doors open. The ambitious plan failed miserably. I was too tired to wake up early enough myself, and I didn’t have the heart to wake Lasse up after he had only had a few hours of sleep. Eventually, we got up around 11 and begun making our way to Chiba to the Kaihinmakuhari station next to which the Tokyo Game Show was held. After about an hour of hectic train switching we finally got off at the station in question. It was time for some very late breakfast. Unfortunately, the collective of small restaurants near the station was in heavy use due to an exceptional concentration of avid gamers in the area, so we bought bowls of katsudon from the only shop without a queue, disposed of them swiftly and continued with our holy mission. Finding the right way wasn’t hard, the trick was to follow the constant stream of people heading in a specific direction from the station while dodging the oh-so-kawaii cosplayers who were trying to give out useless flyers to anyone passing through.

The game show itself was awesome, albeit very crowded. It was made out of people, and stuff. Because the people variable was considerably more important in size than the stuff variable, there was a long queue to try out almost any game. I’ll write a more specific report of the game show and put it up as an independent page on the blog in order not to fill the front page with gaming-related topics. Hopefully. Meanwhile in Shinjuku, Christian had also woken up earlier than the rest of the clubbing team and he eventually became bored enough to find his way to the TGS and join us.

We got out of the hall around 5 pm, right after the day was officially over, and met up with some other Kansai Gaidai exchange students by coincidence at the exit. Everyone was wondering what to do and the situation didn’t really seem to be moving anywhere until a passer-by overheard Lasse and me having a conversation in Finnish. The girl, Tuuli, was in Tokyo as an exchange student since March and agreed to show us a bit around Akihabara, a district that thus became our next destination. After a second round of katsudon, our Finno-Swedish party jumped on the Keio Line and rid to the legendary Aki(ha)ba(ra), Mecca of nerds everywhere.

Don’t be tricked by the above photo, Akiba is not a place you would want to go to on a family trip. For a standard tourist, it seems to have no redeeming factor whatsoever. In short, it consists of electronics, sexual deviancy (it’s Japan after all), and the people who these two things keep attracting. It is a tough definition, but a relatively accurate one. Of course, there is more to Akiba than just that but for the sake of saving time I won’t bother depicting every single otaku shop there is. Enjoy drowning in oversimplified stereotypes.

Again-again! Again-again!

Essentially, Sunday was a replica of  Saturday. There was no way to get enough of the Game show in 4 hours so we unanimously decided to come back on Sunday, this time a bit earlier. Once at Kaihinmakuhari, we ate breakfast at Yoshinoya and attempted to start moving towards the Makuhari messe, when a young Japanese pop band who was playing in the street caught our attention. The band, named nano.RIPE, was apparently relatively new because established bands hardly perform in the middle of the street for no monetary compensation. Nevertheless, they sounded professional, played with good attitude and the singer was really cute. Reason enough to buy one of their albums I guess, because that’s what both Lasse and I did.

The next four or so hours were well spent at the game show again. And in order not to deviate from the nerd way the evening meant a return to Akiba. Not much worth mentioning there. What I realized, though, while venturing a bit deeper into the dark alleys of the otaku-district is that besides hi-tech electronics and anime girls with oversized boobs, Akiba is also made out of kebab. I do not see the connection, but it is indeed the only place I have seen in Japan to have actual kebab shops held by foreigners. And they are in every corner of the street too, with enthusiastic employees trying to hand you coupons of no value. In other news, I have almost no interest at all in continuying this post so I will end it here without any further stalling.

-Antti

Oretachi mo ikou!

Our Tokyo team consisted of two factions: The people who had bought tickets early on and chosen the slower and less comfortable although significantly cheaper night bus ride (Ashley, Erica, Eric, Mike, Pat and Christian) and the Finno-German alliance, Lasse, Henrik and me.

We had bought Puratto Kodama Plan tickets on the day before to enjoy the cheapest possible train ride to Tokyo. The total price amounted to ¥9800 for a ride with a train that we dubbed the “JR Slow Line With Fast Acceleration”. In all honesty, compared to the train velocity I’m used to, it was definitely fast enough as it still meant that Tokyo was only a 3h 40 min train ride away. Having reserved seats in a comfortable train with actual leg space as opposed to a night spent in a Japanese-sized bus was definitely the right choice. The only negative thing about the train was that it was fully booked so the only tickets we were able to get our hands on were for a smoking car. That and we forgot to use our free drink coupons that were included in the ticket price; only soft drinks, though, so nothing of value was lost.

Metropolis

We made it to Tokyo main station, took the Yamanote line to Shinjuku (about half an hour) and switched to the Toei Shinjuku line to go to Akebonobashi where our hostel was located. Henrik left us at Shibuya because he chose the cheaper option of staying at a friend’s house instead of paying for accommodation, something I would’ve gladly done as well if only I had had friends. Boohoo. We met up with the bus crew on the 10^th floor of the Ace Inn at around 3 pm and immediately headed to downtown Shinjuku to do something relevant to our interests.

Lasse and I hadn’t eaten anything since morning so we entered to closest Yoshinoya for some quick gyuudon while the others were involved in banking matters. The following hour was spent walking around Shinjuku trying to find some nice place to have a few beers. As expected, options as cheap as one would be bound to find in Hirakata were not available so we chose the next best alternative, expensive beer. After a few hours of joyful banter we eventually got out of the restaurant to find out that Shinjuku is actually brighter during the night than during the day due to the outrageous amount of city lights.

We gathered at Shinjuku station to meet up with Eric’s friend who was living in Tokyo as well as a bunch of Japanese guys who kindly proceeded to take us drinking to a nearby Izakaya.
¥2500 for a nomihôdai and some food was acceptable, but as the rest of the party decided to move on to look for clubbing options, my day-long headache and I started wandering back to the hostel.

As I realized I was trying to find my way home alone trapped in the Tokyo metro system while in a semi-intoxicated state a huge grin took over my face. Luckily, my sense of direction was highly enhanced, so I found my way back easily, climbed to the 10^th floor of the hostel, picked up a guitar and started playing random notes. I was drunk, so don’t expect any rational decision-making. Besides, I’m really pining for a guitar here. After I came to my senses I went to bed and was actually able to sleep around five hours before the drunken crew got back from clubbing and started filling the airspace with shitty jokes.

-Antti

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