40 Days of Summer (in Japan) - Part Nana

There I was, standing on the train platform, waiting for my transfer train, when it suddenly hit me. (An epiphany, not the train.) I had always thought that to change lines, one had to leave the train and get on the next train that was going to travel on the next line. But what if I told you that you could stay on the same train, and it just continued onto the next line? Because none of the other passengers are getting off and then waiting at the same platform like you...

My stupid manual doesn't tell me anything.

I bumped into Xi Min at the entrance to the cafeteria, and we went to get lunch together, intending to speak to some university students if possible. We both ordered a decent-looking carbonara, but like Daichi-san said yesterday, it wasn't anything amazing.

But for only 300-yen, I'd happily eat two.

Today's tomodachi: Saito-san, who is 65 and retired, but is coming to Waseda to learn English literature (what a boss), and he's currently reading Shakespeare's Hamlet. He really admires Natsume Soseki, the Japanese writer who wrote Sanshiro, a book that we're reading in class; and he's studying English literature because Soseki studied it before he became a writer. I thought that was really cool; it's nice to see life-long learning in action.

He was rocking this awesome sunhat which, sadly, he took off for this photo.

Class today was interesting, but lethargic. I'm wondering if this was the style of university education that I'd be receiving if I had gone somewhere than Yale-NUS College. The professor reads from his notes most of the time, and there's barely any opportunity for discussion. Sometimes, he'll look up and ask a question, and the class will just stare blankly at him for a moment. It's a very passive type of learning, and maybe I'm too used to the awesome classes at Yale-NUS to get back into this kind of dreary information-dump.

After class the group decided to pay a visit to Akihabara, which I found highly amusing. I was supposed to go to Nakano with Xi Min and Melody, but Mel and Linus disappeared to some Ghibli museum thing in the middle of class, so the best laid schemes of mice and men happily went awry. We were a huge group barging onto the trains, squeezing in with the rest of the salarymen going home from work. At Akihabara station, I think, was one of those brilliant Japanese inventions, the hybrid travel-escalator. It's an escalator which needed to cross a horizontal space halfway through its length, and so leveled out before descending again. You need to see it to really understand it.

Because this thing is deep, man.

I was tagging along with Nia, Rachel and Liz for a while, because apparently some people wanted to go to a maid cafe, and I had already done that before. The girls were very excited at the very revealing designs of many of the anime girls, which Rachel kept calling hentai (lit. "perverse", has gained the connotation "pornographic"). I kept emphasizing that because they weren't fully naked, it wasn't pornographic. Rachel and Liz enthusiastically bounced into a doujin shop when I pointed out that there would be real hardcore stuff in there, and Nia and I were like, "Uhhh..."

We also got doughnuts at Mister Donut, this famous doughnut chain which apparently has very healthy doughnuts because they're not deep-fried like regular doughnuts are. There were a great many varieties, but I went all in and tried this delicious looking one with chocolate and a cheesy cream filling. A bite of heaven with every mouthful.

Revolutionary.

Also, we walked past this costume shop with this abyssal horror greeting customers out front:

"I'm sad because my second cousin got a role in the last Spider-Man movie."

I got separated from the girls at some point, and decided to wander the backstreets of Akihabara, since I'd walked up and down the main street a lot the last time I was here. And can you guess what I found there? In a hypersexualised environment catering to an industry whose main demographic is the subcultural single male? Was it restaurants? Electronic shops?

Posters of cute disproportionate girls doing cute yet inexplicable things?

Nope, it's porn.

There is so much porn on the backstreets of Akihabara. I thought most of the adult stuff would be hidden on the upper floors of shopping places, because that's where I had encountered it in the stores on the main street. Back here, I accidentally walked into three adult-oriented establishments; because from the front they looked like bookstores or anime shops. And it's not that the adult section is tucked away neatly somewhere at the back of the store; it's porn all the way down.

Obviously I have no photos for this, so here's a picture of an adorable kitteh.

And what surprised me most were the people who were browsing the shelves. They were all male (not surprising), but they were almost all middle-aged or old men, and mostly in business suits and office attire, like the people I see on the trains everyday. I guess what struck me most was the fact that these were just ordinary, everyday people, for whom pornography is just a casual interest, or a hobby. I also got the feeling that many of them were single, or bachelors, or divorcees. In that, I felt a strange connection with these lonely men, who were just looking for some kind of escape. (Or release, hurhurhur.)

At the same time, today's class was about Yoshiwara, the licensed quarter in early Meiji Tokyo, and about how the courtesans and tea houses were all situated with the temples along the river. I realised that in this sense, nothing much has changed; the brothels and entertainment houses of the past were condoned because the Damiyo understood that the people needed somewhere to blow off steam (hurhurhur), because of the immense rigidity of the social rules; and this would keep them in line in the day, when work needed to be done. It's pretty much the same in modern Tokyo, and I guess modern Japan, where pornography is so freely available (it's sold in every convenience store, for example).

On my way home, I was walking along the road leading to my host family's house, when I realised that there were markings on the floor. I was pleasantly surprised to find a mural of chalk drawings scrawled along the asphalt. I tried taking a photo but because it was so dark, you can't seem them very well. There was also this long string of mathematical workings where someone had been adding random numbers until he or she reached one million-ish.

Still better than modern art.

My reading tonight was forty pages of incomprehensible architectural discussion (everything was all "neo-Baroque" and "Rococo", which I zen zen shiranai). I took solace in the fact that I had a bag of seaweed-flavoured prawn crackers and an immense can of soft drink to tide me over.

That last 150ml was a godsend, let me tell you.

40 Days of Summer (in Japan) - Part Roku

Life should be more like a video game. Quest markers and signposts to tell you where to go and what to do. If you can't tackle a boss, just respec your skills and try again. And - best of all - achievement markers to tell the world when you've done something awesome.

Today's achievement: I managed to get to Waseda University completely unaided by the map handout they gave to us at the beginning of the programme. Nothing but reading Romanji train signs, counting stops, and practising my Japanese on unwitting railway guards. I would make a reference to Sleepless in Seattle here (Mapless in Shinjuku or something), but wrong demographic.

You'd think with so many boys they'd all be pushing each other onto the tracks or doing other practical jokes, but no: some societies have class.

Their class is in the afternoon.

Another achievement today: I finally found out what my two tickets are for. So when you make a transit at a station where you have to exit the turnstile and enter the other gantry (because different train lines are operated by different companies), you put in both tickets to signify that you're making a transfer. The machine will spit the ticket you need to continue back out, and you can go through the turnstile without harassing the conductor. Thank you, thank you, the one conductor who actually knows what he's doing and knows how to tell this poor lost Singaporean what to do in case of ticketing emergency.

I decided to try out the Waseda cafeteria today, as recommended by Prof Jacobowitz yesterday. After finding it (again, all by myself and without any maps - please, hold your applause), I was very excited to find that it's a build-your-own-meal system, where you can pick your appetizers and main courses and desserts, and the prices are all listed down and everything, and it's so simple but with so much variety. It's brilliant. I went to town and had a cold udon, adding a Japanese half-boiled egg (I don't know what to call it; three-quarters-boiled?), a ham katsu, and a Dr. Pepper. For like 600-yen! What a steal!

Disclaimer: I didn't really steal it.

And imagine my delight when I bite into the ham katsu and find out it has macaroni and cheese inside oh my god

I must bring this home and reverse engineer the technology for the betterment of my people.

I also saw this poster; too bad I don't drink:

What other cuisine in the world has an official drink attached to it?

The cafeteria was pretty empty when I was there; I arrived around noon, and I guess students were just getting out of their classes. I sat at a four-seater table, and realised that the trays - which were rectangles with two corners on one of the long edges lopped off to make a hexagonal shaped thing - were designed so that four of them fit nicely on a square table. I am always very impressed with their ingenious designs; it's like there are so many people constantly inventing and improving to make lives easier and better in so many small but interesting ways.

So the hall started to fill up over the course of the hour, and soon two Waseda students asked me if they could take the empty seats at my table. I was midway into reading my copy of Sanshiro, but I let them sit down, and decided that I should talk to them. I noticed they ordered some cabonara pasta, which looked really good, and thought that it would be a nice kind of icebreaker to comment that their dishes looked tasty. But they were conversing in Japanese and I felt bad interrupting their conversation, and I kept waiting for an opening, a gap in the flow of words that I could squeeze my innocuous remark in broken Japanese. This took about ten to fifteen minutes; needless to say, I was feeling very, very awkward. But eventually I managed to get a word in edgeways, and we had a really nice ten minute conversation. They were classmates studying Japanese International Relations, and their intense discussion they had while ignoring me was about the Japan/China conflict. They also had positive reception when I mentioned I watched Psycho-Pass! I had to rush off to class, but not before I managed to exchange Facebook contacts and email address. It was nice to take a leap of faith and talk to random strangers; I think I'll start doing it everyday at the university from now on.

Really cool to share a fragment of life with you, Shinji-san and Daichi-san.

Class today was pretty interesting; I'm growing very fond of Prof Jacobowitz. He's actually a pretty funny guy; he's got good material. The thing is he's got no style - it's like he's following a textbook or a guide on how to insert jokes into your lectures and he's following it religiously, but mechanically. I appreciate it though; many professors don't even try to hold your attention. He also has this thing which I noticed, which is that he'll take a sip of water from his bottle in the middle of a sentence, not at some point where there's a natural pause or a comma or anything like that, he'll stop in the middle of an independent -

"And you can do all sorts of designs; here's some I did earlier."

- clause, sip his water for three seconds, and get back to his presentation. It's not annoying or anything, but it's just something I noticed, and I guess his penchant for cliffhangers must manifest in many different ways.

I decided to get home early today, because I wanted to finish my readings for tomorrow and then maybe spend the night exploring the neighbourhood on foot. Unfortunately, Jun-kun asked me to play MarioKart 8 immediately when I got home. It was really fun though; I think I finally got the hang of drifting today, and I managed to not place last in some of the races (eleventh out of twelve is still not last).

Yuka-san made fried salmon in brown sauce, fried tofu, and also a plate of nikujaga, or beef stew. It was all delicious. I really respect Yuka-san; she comes home early from work just to make dinner for the family. I keep asking to help but she always refuses me, says it's fine. I guess playing with Jun-kun frees her up for a while.

She also asked a favour of me tonight: would I like to read an English book at Jun-kun's class next Thursday. Of course, I accepted. Apparently it's a special thing because they're hosting a foreign guest, and she's going to ask the teacher tomorrow. I hope I don't mess up; better start learning more Japanese to I can talk to the little kids.

After my reading tonight (which was very depressing), I took a walk around the neighbourhood. I walked out in the direction opposite to the one I took to get to the house, and just headed for the main road. There's like four convenience stores along that stretch of road, all within a hundred metres of the next one. There's also a ton of restaurants and cafes, and what seemed to be a Ghibli shop which I might want to check out in the daytime. It was nice just walking in the cool night, not needing to worry too much about anything or where to go (but of course, to remember where I came from).

In the city of blinding lights / The more you know / The less you feel

40 Days of Summer (in Japan) - Part Go

Why am I not a morning person? Why do I constantly sleep like I was born three time zones away?

The sun softly nuzzled me awake today at 9am. I set my alarm clock at 6.30am so I could wake up and have breakfast with my host family, as well as another alarm at 7.30am and 8.30am. I have no idea how I managed to turn off all my alarms in my sleep. I walked into the kitchen to find out that both my host parents had left for work. I feel so bad for my host family, but I hope living two floors below is adequate soundproofing against my stupidly ineffective J-Rock alarm tone.

Today I walked walked the ten minutes to Sangen-jaya station on my own, and happily didn't get lost at all. I'd like to think I'm a natural navigator, but I really just followed the road, and turned where I was supposed to.

I hate selfies, but I'm just hipster enough to take them ironically.

I also managed to take the train all the way to Waseda University all by my lonesome, thank you very much. It's really confusing because the programme managers gave us tickets, and I have two tickets but only two transfers (I'd imagine you need three tickets; you start at one place and transfer twice). I realise that my first transfer is a train on the same platform, so I don't have to spend a ticket; but that means I'm not able to get out at the transfer at the second turnstile, because it expects a different ticket (I think). So I have to approach the staff and ask for help in my confusing Japanese ("Eigo desuka?" - Do you speak English?) and they do something funky with the tickets which lets me pass through. It's all very confusing; I wish they'd just gave us a Suica card, which would be so much easier.

That celebrity endorsing that drink was really pretty. Er, I mean, IRONICALLY

I stumble out of the station to the sight of bustling Waseda University, which has a city campus located in the district of Waseda (who would have guessed). The guide yesterday told us to just follow the students; what he neglected to mention was that the students were walking every which way. Luckily I picked the right direction, managed to ask a bored-looking policeman at one of those corner police posts, and found my way to the university.

The corridors of learning are filled with the sweaty pilgrims of youth.

I arrived at the meeting point two minutes past our meeting time, but thankfully wasn't the last one so I wasn't eliminated from the competition. Our professor, Seth Jacobowitz, is this young American guy who looks like Dean Kyle Farley's brother; he's pretty cool. We were brought to our classroom which we will use for the duration of the course, and had a quick orientation, which mostly encompassed me getting the wifi to work on my laptop. Because everything else is secondary to a good Internet connection. We were also given our schedules today, which is utterly baffling as I cant see why they couldn't have given it to us earlier.

Lunch was found after roaming the streets of Waseda, and Xi Min, Linus and I ducked into this tonkatsu place and had delicious helpings of katsu-kare risu.

Even the poor college students in Japan can eat like kings.

At one o'clock, it's time for lessons. Prof Jacobowitz spent almost two hours going through his syllabus, digressing along the way with his extensive knowledge of Tokyo (a la Sarah Weiss), and he showed us this really short teaser of a show called Train Man, which is a romantic comedy about an otaku who intervenes when a drunk tries to harass this girl on a train. Prof Jacobowitz showed us the opening sequence, which plays to the tune of Styx's Mr Roboto, and he cliffhangly cut it right when a guy jumped off a roof in Akihabara. It looks like a really good show, and apparently we're going to watch it in three weeks' time, and I'm really excited, and Yale professors really know how to make sure their students stay for a course. He was also really fascinated by the way the projector screen wafted in the air-conditioning, and of course once he mentioned it, we couldn't unsee it.

Yes, this is an artistic, in-the-moment shot. No, it's not because I snuck a photo of the class while he was turned away.

We were brought on a quick tour of Waseda campus, to the libraries and the convenience stores and the important facilities we might need to use on campus. We stopped by a supermarket, and I had the salmon onigiri because I couldn't resist it. We passed by the biggest computer lab I've ever seen in my life; it looks exactly like an illegal MMO gold farm, where hundreds of people grind through an MMO to make gold to sell to other players for hard cash. We also passed this statue of Okuma Shigenobu, the guy who founded Waseda's predecessor and who also was prime minister twice. He had a super-intense frown, not like a disappointed look, but for a frown like that that you actually have to work at it. My guess is that the sculptor didn't like Okuma-sama very much.

Though the Americans were saying he looks like the "Not Bad Obama" meme.

We were invited to a welcome dinner at one of the university's cafe-slash-gift-shops. I remember that they mentioned a number of other students would be joining us: students from Waseda who had studied with exchange programmes at Yale, and Yale alumni in the area. None of them showed up. But we had amazing delicious food that was strangely very western, to cater to the American guests I guess.

I always feel so fusion when I eat wedges with chopsticks.

The Director for their Centre of International Education came to say a few words, and I was initially surprised by his very decent English; but then I realised that of course, because he deals with foreign universities, duh. He seems like a very nice man; he started his speech by talking about the World Cup qualifiers happening currently, and how we'd have to wake up early in the morning if we wanted to catch the broadcasts.

There is something about bald Japanese men that radiates wisdom. Or maybe it just reflects brilliance.

I also met Stephanie's friend, Shin-san, who studies at Waseda. He apparently does stand-up comedy, and he's part of a double-act. I told him that it's always nice to meet a fellow comedian, and we exchanged contacts. Time for a cross-cultural comedy festival~~~

People want to go somewhere and do something after dinner, but Waseda, being a student-oriented place in Japan, offered only karaoke houses and old shrines. At the nearest one, we found out it was closed, but I took the opportunity to take an artistic shot of the closed gates. Apparently, Shinto gods have off-shifts too.

"Hi! You have reached the Shinto Blessing Hotline. Our gods and goddess are all busy right now, so please leave a prayer after the thunderclap. Thank you, and have a blessed day!"

This unfortunate series of events meant that I had to take the train back to my host family's house during the dreaded Tokyo rush hour. I was crushed into a train with barely enough room to extend my hand to grab the railing to prevent myself from falling onto the pretty lady standing behind me, because hahaha life isn't a sitcom; but I did manage to somehow wrangle my phone out of my pocket and document the compressing experience.

Sardines in a can packed into a Hong Kong shoebox apartment had more space than me.

Koike-san bumped into me at Sengen-jaya Station, while I was trying to get the machine to accept my ticket. (Grahh Yale why you do this to us.) I walked home with him, making more light conversation about the rail system and the pass cards. When we got home, he went to dinner and Yuka-san was playing with Jun-kun, and so I felt like I was intruding again and retreated to my room. They went to sleep soon after, in preparation for tomorrow's early morning.

I guess this is the pace of life in modern Japan: wake up early to go to work, spend twelve hours of your day commuting and working, come home have dinner sleep rinse repeat. I'm sure the family doesn't spend time with each other very much, and that's probably why they value weekends so highly. It's a scary prospect, and I hope to high heaven that I never will have to get stuck in this samsara, this cycle of suffering.

My sleep cycle is off-sync with my host family, and so I've got hours alone in my room. I spent some of it reading tomorrow's reading, but it's still very depressing. It's like I travelled seven hours across the oceans to drop back into another home where I'm not really wanted. The neighbourhood is also very residential, and there's a college nearby, so it's very dark and quiet at night. I stood on my balcony for a long time, just staring out at the neighbouring buildings, so close yet, in a very tangible way, so far. And this is in light of recent circumstances, so I feel even more isolated than ever.

In a city of thirteen million people, why do I still feel so alone?

40 Days of Summer (in Japan) - Part Yon

It was thirty degrees Celsius today. Atusi means warm/hot. Yes.

You know how you're not supposed to expect things, because expecting things means you set a standard of disappointment, and how being pessimistic means you'll only be right, or pleasantly surprised? Yeah, I forget that sometimes. Or I can't help but make comparisons, because that's what human brains do. Unfortunately. But that's life, I guess.

Today I was supposed to wake up at 7am so I could eat the hostel's breakfast, which we paid 600-yen for. I wake up to the sounds of Linus and Xi Min packing up, and my phone happy reads 9.30am, hahaha-say-goodbye-to-your-breakfast-deposit-sucker.

We had a homestay orientation in the morning, where the people from the homestay company basically read out the booklet they sent to us two months ago. We also got our rental phones, basically emergency telephones which the homestay family can use to call us if we don't run up when they expect us to turn up. They're essentially giant in-case-of-emergency-break-glass-with-gold-bar we carry around with us, because they're also for us to contact other people in emergencies, but their prices are exorbitant.

We met our homestay families right then and there too! I'm staying with the Koike family, and the mom, Yuka-san, and their seven-year-old kid, Jun-kun, came to meet me at the prison- er, hostel. We made very light conversation as we took the subway back to their house in Sangen-jaya, which is a neighbourhood on the suburban outskirts of Tokyo, very near the district of Shibuya, actually.

I walked ten minutes to their house in the midday sun, trundling along the asphalt back-roads and alleyways. Hopefully I don't get lost trying to find my way tomorrow, because I can't read a word of Japanese and can't ask for directions to save my life. Literally.

The Koike house is really very nice, a narrow, modern little thing tucked between two other apartments, like almost all housing in Tokyo. It's centred around this tight, winding staircase and has three floors and a modest rooftop balcony. It's not tatami-mat and paper screens, but it's wonderful.

The bottom of those stairs actually connect to the top of the stairs behind the wall. As of time of writing, I'm still climbing this Escherian nightmare.

Yuka-san made a very simple lunch, cold somen noodles with soy sauce. Apparently Koike-san and Jun-kun said that the noodles weren't very good, but I was hungry and hot and I love noodles so I at up almost a whole pot by myself.

I followed Yuka-san, her mother, and Jun-kun to a shopping mall at this place whose name I have forgotten. It's this new shopping mall with a whole bunch of current fashion and stuff. I didn't want to interrupt their family time so I accepted their offer of walking around by myself. After discovering that most of it was women's clothing, I accepted that I was a woman trapped in a man's body, ripped off my shirt, and shopped to my heart's content. (What I really did was accept the fact that there was nothing for me here, and wandered over to the bookstore.)

I really like bookstores, and I really like Japanese bookstores more. Their book covers are usually so much more colourful, and they stock more of each type of book, so each shelf is a rainbow of orderly-stacked volumes, beautiful like a piece of modern art that doesn't have a pretentious caption below it.

Something peculiar I noticed about Japanese department stores: the food is usually located on the top floors. You can see this in places like Takashimaya in Singapore. But back home, the food places are usually on the ground floors and basements. I wonder why the Japanese decided to bring their eateries skywards; is it some cultural thing, or have they just discovered greater economic benefits for leading their people through multiple floors of tempting merchandise before getting to the sumptuous tasty morsels above?

I bought an Auntie Anne's pretzel for my host family, because I wanted to eat one and I thought it would be nice if they had one too. I successfully asked for a English menu, ordered in the most rudimentary Japanese I know (by pointing at the picture, saying "kore, futatsu") and charading that I wanted them in separate packets. Next step, world domination.

I spent most of the rest of the afternoon reading the material I needed to read for tomorrow, which is freaking long and quite tedious. The stuff's pretty interesting though, about the urban history of Tokyo and how it developed into the sprawling megapolis it is today.

Although it's worth it given that this is the cozy room I'm doing it in.

 
Yuka-san made hamburgers and radish soup for dinner, which was also very delicious. I also managed to hold my first actual conversation with Koike-san, who speaks decent English but heavily-accented and with a lot of pauses as he searches up the words in his mental dictionary. From what I could understand, he works in a banking firm, doing asset management for large fixed capital, like buildings. He asked what my dad does, and I told him that he works in a Japanese advertising company called Hakuhodo, and Yuka-san said she deals with them all the time, because she does marketing for Triumph. I also talked to Koike-san about the family travels, and their trip to Singapore two years ago, and how they went to Hawaii four years back but Jun-kun came down with chicken pox and they had to be quarantined.

I also spent a lot of time today playing MarioKart 8 with Jun-kun. The little guy better grow up to be a racecar driver, for all the practice he's getting now. Today I learned that "difficult" is muzakashii. Because MarioKart 8 is freaking muzakashii.

Bringing this back to my first paragraph. The Koikes are, I would guess, a very modern Japanese family. They're not so focused on the insane-level hospitality that I experienced with the Hikidas, and they seem very chill about almost everything. I have a feeling some of it can be attributed to the fact that I'm their fifth homestay tenant over the last year, and they've been to Singapore before, so I'm not the omoshiroi (interesting) novelty I expected to be. Nevertheless, they're really nice and accommodating and very liberal about what I can do around the house; but I constantly feel awkward because they converse in Japanese a lot and I don't have any idea what to do.

But I like them, and I hope they like me. We'll just have to see how this goes, over the next few weeks.

Maybe we'll be doing crazy selfies by then; but for now, this will have to do.

40 Days of Summer (in Japan) - Part San

Today was a pretty lazy day. For some reason I just could not wake up this morning, and slept in till 9 am. After hammering out a blog post, I quickly packed up my stuff before we overstayed our welcome and had to pay for another night.

Steve left early, probably to see if he can find an Xbox One.

We pushed our luggage to a nearby King of Curry and had curry rice for lunch. I love Japanese curry; it's spicy but not melt-your-tongue spicy, and they innovate by adding cheese. It was delicious. Another thing I've been waiting for for two years.

One of the five dishes you'll meet in heaven.

We get to the hostel pretty early and meet Payal there, who's really excited to see us, even though she hadn't slept for about twenty-four hours on her overnight flight. I went for a walk around the area; nothing especially exciting. I found this second-hand bookstore selling really cheap but really good quality stuff; I tried looking for cheap PC games but they didn't have any, only titles for the Nintendo platforms and the Xbox.

In another bookstore, I found this adorable book, which seemed to be a bunch of cat-related motivational posters, all squeezed into one book. (There was Japanese too, but I couldn't read it.)

Yeah, and the role of some colours is to look like other colours.

People were starting to trickle in during the rest of the day; the first non-YNC person I met was Stephanie, who's a Singaporean studying at Yale. I didn't get to talk to her much, but she seems like a nice person.

That's her in the bottom left, with Nia, Linus and the rare smiling Xi Min.

We're staying the night at Tokyo Central Youth Hostel, just a few minutes from Iidabashi Station. Our hostel rooms are huge; it's probably where most of the cost is going. Two bunk beds with a small lounge area with a couch, a small desk, and a wonderful view of the city. It's a shame that they have a curfew at 11pm and a 600-yen breakfast. We've checked into a prison camp; apparently it's like the YMCA hostels back home.

This isn't what I imagined when they said "pay-per-view".

We went out for dinner, a whole bunch of us. I had curry udon (because you can never have enough curry) and came back early to finish up blogging.

How does it taste so good?! It's just brown sauce and flour!

And bathe, too, because they close the showers at midnight. And they're public baths, the kind with a undressing area where you're supposed to disrobe and then saunter into the public bathing area with nothing but your towel and your dignity. Thank goodness for shower curtains, or I might not have been able to hold my own...

Apparently our host families are coming in tomorrow to pick us up. I wonder what they'll be like. I hope they're nice people, and not crazy murdering psychopaths. Their seven-year-old kid probably has more Japanese than I do. I hope they have neighbours or friends around my age so that I'll have someone more comfortable to talk to.

40 Days of Summer (in Japan) - Part Ni

Day two in Japan started off with - of course - a delicious, casual, onigiri breakfast. This involved waking up late, washing up in a whirlwind, messaging Evan who we were supposed to meet up with, checking out of our room because we had to move to a different suite, racing out of the hostel, getting Evan's  message that he didn't mind meeting us in Asakusa three minutes after walking out from the hostel where the free wifi is, grabbing the onigiri from the konbini and dashing to the train station to find out that we're on the wrong line, then scrambling up to the JR platform, and then waiting around at Harajuku for Even for half an hour wondering if he'll show up or not or if we were late and then finally Evan appears from the direction of a different station yaaaay!

So yeah, a very casual breakfast.

The only people waiting here were girls waiting for their girlfriends and guys waiting for their girlfriends.

Sigh.

We sped through Harajuku, which is an area more for women's fashion and has nothing much that would interest guys (except maybe the girls shopping there). This area, Takeshita Street, is full of African touts, and the first rule of Takeshita Street is that you don't talk about Takeshita Street. Also, you don't talk to the touts, because THEY LIE.

We walked up and down in the mid-morning sun, before settling down at a fusion pasta place for lunch. The great thing about western food in Japan is that any western cuisine is still Japanese enough so that you feel like you're not wasting your time eating western food in Japan. We had these really good chorizo sausage spaghetti dishes and free flow from the Drink Bar (non-alcoholic).

It's a good thing Evan wasn't wearing a tie.

And here's when Evan said the most hilarious thing I've heard in a few weeks. He was telling us about how he's couchsurfing these few days in Tokyo before going to Nagoya for his language programme. He told us that that night, he would be staying with this gay dude, and he'd be bringing Evan out to a concert, and to a public bath. So I tell him about the time Xi Min and I were staying in this capsule hotel, which are more for middle-aged businessmen and elderly gentlemen, so it was very awkward for us to sit in the public bath with a bunch of naked old men. So Evan replies, very innocently, "But they can hold their own, you know?" Xi Min and I pause for a beat, and I say, "You have terrible phrasing, Evan," before we both burst into laughter. "Yeah sure, they can hold their own; but they better not be holding anyone else's..."

After lunch, we turn down the Orchard Road-esque street of Omotesando, lined with flagship stores of expensive foreign fashion brands. The street is also known for its architectural diversity; there's this stretch mall called Omotesando Hills which is apparently one-quarter the length of the street, while we passed by this huge Hugo Boss building which looked like a giant rook.

BUT SUNTORY BOSS IS THE BOSS OF THEM ALL

Japan is famous for beautiful everything, and I thought this was a water feature until it turned out to be a drain.

Never has raw sewage looked so potable.

We sidetracked down a road because a tout was holding up a sign for Awesome Store. We broke the first rule, but I mean, c'mon, Awesome Store!

AWESOMEEEEE!

Turns out it was just a place selling bowls and kitchen knick-knacks, like an upmarket hipster Daiso-Ikea hybrid. It would have been awesome if we were middle-age Japanese housewives, but we weren't, so it wasn't.

A wall of sweet aroma stopped us in our tracks, and detoured us into this candy shop where they made that cross-sectional sweets thing; you know the type. Anyway we hung around to watch them make some of the sweets; there was this huge lump of molasses on the slab and the worker was just constantly rolling it; I'm guessing the counter-top must have been heated, to keep the molasses soft and malleable. Then he twisted one of the ends and pulled; and then the other worker just kept pulling and pulling and pulling...

"One giant squid tentacle, coming right up!"

She sliced them off with what looked to me like a paint scraper, and then set them on another section of counter-top to cool and harden. Then they line them up on metal blocks and chisel each piece off like a sweet-making machine gun.

They didn't allow video, but if you take pictures fast enough...

It's early summer now in Japan, so it's about as hot as Singapore is, but way less humid. But the Japanese are stickler for appropriate clothing. That's why we were amazed to see so many businessmen walking around in the tepid heat in full office suits and ties. Sure, Xi Min and I felt extremely under-dressed in our t-shirts and khaki shorts, but neither of us would be willing to slow-roast in a jacket in this heat, and we're from the goddam tropics.

"Pah, kids these days. In my day we wore thermals in summer, and we liked it!"

So we decided to bring Evan to Yoyogi Park, which I've been to before. We're facing Meiji Shrine, and we decided, "I think it's this way!" and turned right. We're walking down this tree-lined road, telling ourselves that "Yoyogi Park is coming up soon!" and "We must be almost there!" and "Hey Xim, I don't remember walking this far to Yoyogi Park last time..."

We met a security guard who is directing traffic at one of the entrances to Meiji Shrine, and he happily told us to keep going, it would be just ahead. Twenty minutes later, we talked to a lady outside the Treasures Museum who tells us that we've made a big round around the shrine, and if we keep walking we'll end up back at the entrance to Yoyogi Park.

I'll keep on walking / Yeah I'll keep on walking  / Till I find that old love, or that old love comes to find me

So we kept on walking, and finally found Yoyogi Park. It's emptier, this being a weekday, but it's nice and quiet and peaceful. There was a guy playing a saxophone, and a trombonist, and an African-American blasting some hip-hop, but other than that, peace and quiet. I spotted this European-looking lady in a Victorian dress and her skinny dog (from what I can tell from Google images, is a saluki) getting interviewed by a couple of reporters.

Honestly, it could just be a tall dachshund.

When we left, we headed out through the main entrance, which I remember distinctly last time because of all the buskers; and we find out that it was just exactly to the left of where we decided to turn right earlier. Taking the road less travelled might be fun, but it's also exhausting.

-spit-take- "We're HOW lost?!"

Evan had to head out to meet his couchsurfing host, so we said goodbye at Akihabara, where Xi Min and I stepped out for a bit to let him do some scouting. I also wanted to walk around a bit, see what was new, and what I still recognised. It was two years since I had been here, and wanted to see if anything had changed. Apart from the advertisements for specific anime, not much had changed, really. It was nice to see so much anime stuff again, like meeting an old friend.

An old, otaku, hikkikomori friend.

We had an early dinner and headed back to the hostel early. When we arrived we found out that our third roommate had already arrived; he introduced himself as Steve, and he told us he was British but living in Thailand. I asked him what he did, and he said he was a video game music composer. I was very intrigued, and asked him what music he did; he mentioned some old classics like Donkey Kong 64, but he also mentioned that he did the music for the X-Box avatar system. Like, wow! I mean, if you do music for a game you're famous to just the audience of the game, but this guy did music for the entire platform itself. I asked him if he felt a bit of pride every time one of his friends started up an X-Box, and he said he did. So when he left the room to make some calls, I surreptitiously went to  Google his name, and holy crap, he exists! So Steve, if you're ever reading this, hello from the guy you met for one night in a small hostel in Asakusabashi, and I hope you manage to find a place to stay for the next six months!

I also tried to take a bath tonight; the hostel had a single bath so if you wanted to use it you had to run for it. Since it was so early, I thought I'd check it out. It was this tiny thing which barely fit me even when I sat in it cross-legged. And since I couldn't be bothered to wait for the thing to fill up, I sat there in what was basically a glorified, lukewarm puddle for five minutes before deciding that it was a stupid endeavor and gave up.

I took a stroll out to the konbini that night, because I was feeling peckish. It's wonderful walking the streets at night; it's a lot more peaceful and cooler as well. There's a maze of small back alleys for every major block of streets, and I was half tempted to try finding my way though them but I was worried that I would get lost and fail to get back into the hostel (the door had a code and I think they change it everyday; I had the previous day's code). I hope my homestay family has a nice maze of streets I can get lost in, one of these nights.

Snakes on a plane, meet houses under the bridge.

No, not you, Arakawa.

40 Days of Summer (in Japan) - Part Ichi

So I'm in Japan, for the second time! I'm on a Yale Summer Session programme in Tokyo to learn about Japanese history and culture from the Meiji period, through a bunch of things like literature, architecture, film, anime and manga. It's all really thanks to Yale-NUS College for another amazing opportunity for me to go somewhere else and learn more about this awesome world of ours. And since I have my laptop with me this time, I've promised - no, vowed - to blog about my experiences everyday.

In this piece, the artist captures the fleeting ephemerality of existence framed against the backdrop of the relentless march of modernization and technology.

I turned up at the airport at an ungodly hour of the morning, and I had a pleasant feeling about seeing so many people around already. I have mentioned before that I love airports; they are wreathed in a sense of mystery and adventure and freedom. I was also very pleasantly surprised to find out that after doing my online check-in, the baggage processing was actually done in five minutes, and that was after I showed up one hour before flight instead of two. Go go gadget one more hour of sleep!


Xi Min's girlfriend was with him at the airport since 2am. (Sigh, life.) None of us turned up with our families in tow. I guess it just goes to show how old we are now, that we're able to do stuff like this without our families having to hang around at the airport fussing and nagging you while you try to fight your way through customs. That, or they're getting too old to wake up at ungodly hours of the night.

I had to spend seven-and-a-half hours in an enclosed space with this guy. Oh, and there's Xi Min too.

I'm very happy XM and I decided to take ANA this time. We picked seats right at the back of the plane, and since the flight was mostly empty, we got the chance to spread out over two seats each when we slept, a luxury on economy-class flights. I hope I get to do the same on the flight back, where I'm in the very last row by myself, correct as of the time that I booked the seat. The airline also has some pretty good in-flight entertainment, which is both a boon and a bane, since I planned to read some more of my course material on the way here but ended up playing a bit of Mahjong and watching a bunch of movies instead.

Also, this toilet has a sensor instead of a button for the flush, and the lid automatically closes before flushing. The Japanese truly are the master race.

The Mahjong game was hilarious, very old school with over-the-top animations for each of the AI players. It even had a single-player campaign with a storyline! I didn't go that far into it, because I had decided to watch The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, of which I saw half at Chinese New Year at my cousin's place, and wanted to finish it. I really liked the movie, and I felt so good at the end when they finally revealed what the missing photograph was. I was worried that they might have left it out completely, for one of those artistic ambiguous endings, but I was glad that they didn't.

I wish that I, too, dreamed in technicolor and Michael Bay explosions.

WARNING: LITERARY REVIEW IMMINENT. ACTIVATE CRITICISM SHIELD HYPERDRIVE.

I felt a lot of the feel-good of the movie was to do with escapism; we all want to escape our boring monotonous day-jobs and fly to exotic countries and jump into foreign dangerous water bodies and trek into warlord-ridden mountains with inexplicably persuasive homemade confectionery. It's escapism, and it's vicarious escapism. And then just watching the movie is enough; we don't need to go to Greenland or climb the Himalayas because Walter Mitty's already done it for us.

The other thing I found disconcerting was the reinforcement of the "geek-dream", where the shy awkward guy has to do something awesome and amazing before he gains the approval of his peers (the eHarmony guy), manages to deliver the Ironic Echo to the jerk-ass boss which makes him change his ways for the better, and "wins" the attention of the girl of his dreams. It panders too much to the story archetype we've been exposed too for too long, better explained in this article which I also read today. No, life never works that way, and working hard or doing interesting things will not guarantee you get what you want. Stories might work that way, but life doesn't.

On the plus side, David Bowie's song "Space Oddity" is really, really nice. This version's from space commander Chris Hadfield, who was the mission commander on the International Space Station. I love space, and I have massive respect for this guy.

Anyway, I also watched the first maybe 80% of The Lego Movie, and I had to stop because the plane had landed and I had to get off. I am now in a perpetual state of cliffhanger, because I don't know how the movie ended. I don't get why so many people kept praising it as a brilliant comedy; I didn't really find it that hilarious. It was good, but not gut-bustingly so. I am very, very impressed by the way that they used Lego bricks for everything, from clouds to water and fire and explosions. Also, the creativity that went into building everything that made up the world; a really brilliant Lego employee or a bunch of excited fifteen-year-olds with a Hollywood budget and a dump-truck's worth of Lego bricks.
 

The one movie poster you don't want to step on.

It's been a pretty chill day, landing in Narita Airport and then taking the rail down to Asakusabashi, which is where XM and I are bunking out for the first couple of nights. I love trains; I especially love Japanese trains, which are so clean and efficient. There's a certain romance to train rides as well; the fact that you can see the countryside change around you as you trundle along; all you see from planes are clouds, which, though beautiful in their own right, get boring after the first, say, fifty. XM and I had an interesting discussion: whether schoolgirl uniforms were a national symbol of Japan. It was an interesting foray into themes of intentionality and Fermi estimations, but in the end I think we decided that it was too binary to have just two categories: national symbolism should be measured by strength, not by a simple yes/no boolean, and something like sumo wrestling would rank higher along that scale than schoolgirl uniforms, for example.

Ladies and gentlemen: the things we talk about.

And the sights that we miss.

We're bunking in the Anne Hostel Asakusabashi, which is a cosy little place near the river at Asakusa. It's pretty strange because its reception is on the top floor, which probably drives deliverymen insane. The staff are nice and hospitable, if not very friendly (or maybe that's our fault for not being friendly to them first), and it's very comparable to some of the other hostels we've stayed at in Tokyo. We're bunking with five Americans who look like they're on some grad trip, and a very quiet Thai guy who doesn't really say much at all. It's funny, because XM and I were conversing about them on Facebook chat, and were wondering if they were talking about us on Facebook as well.

We walked twenty minutes to Asakusa to the big red lantern outside this temple whose name I cannot remember (spoiler alert: Sensoji Temple), where we met up with Mel and Linus, who had already been Japan a couple of days, and Kishin Kato, a half-Japanese, half-American guy we met at Experience Yale-NUS Weekend last year. He's a really cool dude; he's starting his own business making custom-built high-tech footwear, which sounds really amazing. We walked around Asakusa for a bit before settling down in this dodgy-looking eatery in one of the dark backstreets, where the food is flavoured by the lack of light and marinated by the solemnity of the store-owners' faces. It was this place which, according to Kishin, was a place to eat light food and snacks while drinking after a long day's work of being a salaryman. Of course, Mel ended up being the only one ordering an Asahi, while Linus and I got refreshing glasses of the Calpis yoghurt drink, which is simply divine. The food was really good, as all dodgy food places in creepy side-streets are, and I especially liked the deep-fried gyoza (dumplings).

I know my selfies leave a lot to be desired. What, do I look like a insecure teenage girl to you?

Then because we didn't have enough carbs, we walked to a nearby konbini (convenience store) and loaded up on snacks.

Let me tell you about my love affair with onigiri. For the unenlightened, onigiri is a Japanese snack food made of rice shaped into this triangular thing, usually flavoured and can come with many different types of filling. I absolutely LOVE onigiri, with a passion. It's cheap, and tasty, and its existence proves that Michelin food critics obviously have dollar bills for taste buds and have no idea of what good food really is. I had a tamago (egg) one tonight, and it was heavenly. It's everything you want from a foodstuff. It's perfect. I'm having one for breakfast tomorrow, and if possible, every breakfast from now. I waited two years to sink my teeth into scrumptious rice ball things, because you can't find good (and cheap) ones in Singapore. Nom nom nom now I feel like taking a stroll to the nearest konbini...

We sat at the river and talked. It's summer, but it feels like a rainy night in Singapore, but without the humidity. It's comfortably cool, and just wonderful. We talked about stupid things (army), and the Japan-China conflicts, and Kishin's crazy three day escapade where he literally party-hopped from one clique of friends to another, back-to-back, because they all happened to be in Tokyo around the same time. He had this huge roll of pig leather as well, and was telling us about how he's trying to make them into shoes. Such an awesome guy; pity he chose University of Chicago over YNC.

Kishin Kato then went on to win the award for "Best Host While Suffering from Sleep Deprivation".

Anyway it's late and I've got to wake up early tomorrow for breakfast and onigiri and things like that. Tomorrow looks like another chill day; let's see how it goes!