Ants Blog

The day had come. The one we always knew would & had planned on years ago but had always put it off. Always another winter, always another spring. But fate had forced the wheel from us & rightly so, for we’d’ve been there forever otherwise.

What can you say though? Leaving is always the same. Sitting on bags, tightening straps, no time for anything but practical considerations. Ayako’s brother drove us kindly to the station where we caught tears in his eyes in leaving Naami. Hearts rent & tear along the winding path of life.

We bustled ourselves to the airport & joined the hefty Australian snowboarders returning from Hokaido. We checked in our luggage, got on the plane & left Japan. Five and a half years. What can you say?

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in another time living in Higashimurayama…

I had got my first job in Japan on advice from a guy I’d never met. He was a friends friend who had been living in Japan for many years working as an English teacher. I was moving over there to begin as an English teacher & needed only a job to realize this. He had worked for NOVA & knew pretty much what I needed to know to be prepared for for the interview. In exchange for advice I was bringing over some hair wax for him which apparently was not available in Japan. Well, that was five years ago & we’d never got our act together to meet each other & exchange the wax. The tins were a little rusty now, but the wax was as good as ever. And besides, meeting him after all this time really had very little to do with the delivery of hair pomade. It had been over five years after all & I was leaving in two days. It had to be done.

The plan to meet in Shibuya five years ago hadn’t changed. Only the appointment date. Even the time remained the same. It was a joke.  11:00 at Hachiko. And there he was.

We weaved our way through the young crowd to an all you can eat Pizza bar. He generously paid my way in & when the staff realized I was only eating the vegetarian pizzas, they began making all kinds of different pizzas without meat. Awesome. We chatted a bit then I laughingly handed over the wax. The ritual was complete. We talked non stop for four hours, chomping on the stream of crispy pizzas coming out on trays, talking about our lives in Japan & our lives back in oz.

After hours of chatting we pulled ourselves out of our chairs & said farewell. We walked to Hachiko & I watched as he disappeared into Tokyo's train system. I wandered around aimlessly, absorbing the atmosphere I would soon be leaving. The shops, the hoards of people, the huge video screens hanging above them. The orderly chaos of Tokyo. I couldn’t believe that this would no longer be easily accessible to me. To get here would mean planning a trip, purchasing flight tickets, packing suitcases & spending the time walking around in clothes that don’t quite fit the environment. Holiday clothes out of a suitcase. I will never feel quite this comfortable right here ever again. But what can you do? Welcome to life. I turned to the ticket machines, looked up at the train line map & slipped some coins into the metal chute. Letting the turnstile suck my ticket in & then snatching it between my fingers on the other side I headed home. 

if this old abandoned house in Higashimurayama was the inspiration for the house in the Miyazaki animation also set in Higashimurayama, My Neighbor Totoro? 

Just a thought.

Remember that Indian Restaurant that I was looking for & got to after lunch hour so as not to be able to fulfill my long time dream? The entry on the 31st Jan? Well, I thought, screw that! I haven’t waited five years just to give up after being turned away simply because I was late for the lunch time special. So on the pretense of doing some very important errand for the wife, I found my way up to that orange shop front on time for lunch & ordered myself a nice, hot, bright orange vegetable special. ‘Extra hot please’ I asked the nice Nepalese man in the shop. When I got it it wasn’t spicy enough so I asked him to add more chilly. He didn’t just mix a few more flakes into it, oh no, he mixed up another half pint of his special secret red sauce which included amongst other things, mayonnaise & lots of fresh spices, & poured this into a bowl for me to add to my already bulging meal. It increased the size by 130% (the photo is a before shot). I was absolutely stuffed to the eyeballs & almost wretching after finishing it. It was bloody good but I really overdid it. I should have stopped but I spooned up the last drop. After that I vowed never to go back. I just couldn’t face it again. I felt ill. But I loved it. And I did it! I found & ate that damned curry again! Follow your dreams!

Even its own Disneyland! Tokyo Disneyland, & it’s coooooool! perhaps not quite the size of its American mother ship & not identical in rides & layout either but not a bad placebo. It made me feel happy. Look!  :)

Our days living with Ayako’s family & Japan were fast coming to an end. We had booked our ticket back to Australia & had completed all the necessary paperwork. All that was left to do was await the day of departure. Ichi had kindly offered  to take us to visit the grave of Ayako’s father for one last time before leaving for our new life in Australia. So we left in the morning to visit the grave site.

Visiting a Japanese grave is not a solemn, sad occasion, at least not in this case. It’s an opportunity to clean the grave with toothbrushes & buckets of water & rags, to replace the dried flowers with fresh ones, to step back & spend a moment of silence. What happens in that silence I can only know of my own.

When we left, we were hungry. We needed somewhere to eat & fast. We had left the house early with only a sniff of breakfast so we were scanning the roadsides for any descent place. Our fortune found our eyes pointing to an Okonomi yaki restaurant, the kind that gives you a bowl of mush which you pour over a hot plate to make something delicious. It’s kind of like a thick Cabbage pancake. Better still, it was ‘all you can eat’ for an hour for a mere Y1500. It was a no brainer. We screeched to a stop & all hopped out like rustlers riding into a town in need of a drink.

On the cook top edge was a large wooden box filled with pink fish flakes, a bottle of Mayonnaise & the special brown sauce that crisscrosses the savory round shape of a hot Okonomi yaki. We ordered our first two & went to work. They were huge; the largest I’d ever seen. And it was only the beginning. We tossed the light fish flakes over the hot cakes & watched them gently twist like possessed wood shavings. We ordered a few more. And more still. We abused the whole idea behind ‘all you can eat’ and in the end, we were sitting there, rubbing our stomachs feeling proud in our foolishness.

We paid & left for our next destination, a large park were we let Naami run wild. The park had interesting small rides for her & it was a good place to run off the excesses of lunch. The day was cold but the soft clouds above kept whatever warmth the cities beneath were making around us. We snapped away with Ichi’s camera.

From there we drove to the local Onsen where we all had a great soak. Naami went in with me, Ayako going in on her own into the women's section. It may be the last onsen we experience for a long time so I enjoyed every moment. Before we knew it, it was time to leave.

The day offered us up a night one could only sleep deeply through. We received the night blissfully.

We had found it years ago. Like Lasseter’s reef, we found this amazing Indian restaurant then lost it forever. Actually the truth is we simply never bothered to go back there but it sounds more dramatic to describe it that way. It was really that good. Cheap, hot, bright, vegetarian curry. It cost around Y500 for the lunchtime special & I vowed to go back there again. It was a ride on the last existing streetcar in Tokyo that led us to it. When we got off the trolley, we found a small street leading to Waseda University, the kind that is frequented by young rich students pretending to be poor.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, I wanted to go there before we left Japan. Another tick for me to consolidate before heading back to Australia. Ayako wasn’t interested in the least, so I stuffed some coins into my pocket & hit the silver rails to Takadanobaba.

It had been at least three years since we’d found it & I had created this map in my mind as to where it would be. For some strange reason I had imagined it was next to the Seibu line & always thought I could view it from there when on the train. My stomach used to rumble at nothing as it turned out. It was nowhere near the Seibu line. This little excursion to the point in the memory of my imagination consumed most of the day. Lunchtime came & went. My sugar level dropped. I was running around like a hungry rat in a maze. I decided on another tact; to find Waseda Campus & from there hope my memory would server me well enough to find the damned place. Finding the uni was easy enough. Just ask a couple of young people who point you up a straight road & you’re there. It took about thirty minutes but it was a pretty straight line. Then once at the uni I had to find the statue I remembered. That found I had to find the exit in the vicinity of the statue. Found it! Then the small street around the entrance. Got it! I found the street! I think… OK. Now down this street, if it’s still around, there should beeeee---, There it is! Found it. The restaurant in all its orange glory! I walk in, rolling up my sleeves readying for my big order of ‘the usual’ when the guy comes out & in his broad Nepalese accent says to me. “Sorry, lunchtime is over, come back at five”. HE!? I pleaded with my eyes & tried to look as hungry as I felt but no go.

I looked towards the empty Moss Burger shop across the road. My stomach groaned.

I cried. Not really, but you know…

as we prepare to leave the winter

One thing I just had to do in Japan was to sleep in a Capsule Hotel. This was something I’d wanted to do before I had even realized I would ever have the privilege of living here. These things were always on TV in Australia as a point of weirdness. So coming down to the last month of our stay in Japan, and having not checked into one of these residential oddities in the five years of living here, I kicked into high gear, got my shit together & took a train down to Ueno.

Now the weird thing is that it’s an all male thing. There are no women, so I guess it’s got a bit of a YMCA feel without the gym & the Village people. Instead you have travelling salesmen from Osaka & Salary men who have recently lost their job & are too ashamed to go home to their family.

There was, to my delight, a bath area (Sento ) with hot, cold, aromatic & spa baths. I did the rounds hopping from bath to bath, from piping hot to icy cold, sitting there like some monk deep in meditation as my heart slowed to a throb     bwom       bwom. Then out to the main TV area where people were smoking & watching the News, all relaxed after their soaks. I got talking to, you guessed it, an Osaka Salesman, about his wife & children. We swapped pictures of kiddies, he bought me a beer & we talked till midnight while one cup sake was dropping from a vending machine behind us into the hands of down & out Salary men.

We eventually retired into our designated hospital yellow plastic cubicles. Mine was #3057. I swung into its sound insulated shell, a smell of stale cigarette smoke following me in from the harrowed halls of this establishment.  I had a built in lamp with dimmer, clock & TV molded into the side wall. All quite neat & clinical. The strangest thing about the entire experience was how un strange it felt when I finally tucked myself under the thin sheets of my rectangular box. It was like a big loose hard sleeping bag with 12 channels. So what? Naturally I couldn’t fall asleep & miss the experience so I flicked around the channels, trying to sleep every couple of hours, waking up & going through the unintelligible channels again back to the point of switching off & sleeping again. Snoring was everywhere. I got zero quality sleep. By the time the sun was rising over the silent dust of Tokyo I was a wreck. But I did sleep in a capsule & I did experience it as well, just not the entire night on either count.

The morning gave me one last chance to have a good soak in the sentos’ downstairs, then to my locker to change my toga for real clothes. Then out into the cold morning of Ueno.

Did it!

Welp, This is where it all began, my life in Japan. When I got to Tokyo my English school company which was to be my first job here posted me out to a medium sized school on the Chuo line, at the station of Ogi Kubo. It wasn’t love at first sight, what with all the electrical wires hanging over the small streets & the dark drab colours, not at all what I expected to find in this ultra modern city, but here I was, dragging my new suit to this little area just west of central Tokyo.

I worked there for a year and a half, through all the seasons, monsoons & my first earthquake. Through the days I learnt to really love the place & got to understand the true appeal of Tokyo. This was the first glimpse of shitamachi, of downtown, & although it wasn’t strictly downtown & in fact was quite an up market little joint, it still had a certain grittiness about it which I came to love.

After work I’d wander down the side streets which contained Okonomi yaki restaurants & Ramen shops. Ogi Kubo was famous throughout Tokyo for its Ramen, & while I couldn’t really tell a good one from a bad, I stopped off at each & every one just to try them out. I went to the famous Haru kia, the locals favorite Ju hachi ban & my favorite, which serves spicy tonkotsu style with cloves of garlic on the side to crush into. Wow, when I think of those days, a good five years back, yearning then for what I have now, but now remembering the magic of those first few months working in Tokyo, my heart stirs strangely.

My colleagues were from all over the world: Canada, the US, England, Ireland, New Zealand & me, the ozi. I looked up at them all when I first came to work there, at how confident they were at their job teaching while my heart was pounding in my throat & my fingers scuttling across pages trying to organize the next six lessons three hours before my first one began. Pretty soon I was as carefree as the rest of them, enjoying the lessons with the students, grabbing books as I rushed into the next lesson.

Sometimes we’d go to the Yaki tori bar next to the station, a relic of the post war occupation era, still standing, serving the same chicken skewers & beers it had done for decades. The Chuo line roaring in the background all the while. When I was transferred to work at the Head office, it was the beginning of the end for me & Ogi Kubo, for from there I landed a job in IT & never looked back.

Ayako & I returned there again today, for possibly the last time. The great apartment complex that had been threatening the very soul of the place was still wasting away on a drawing board somewhere, but the school had disappeared when NOVA collapsed. Apart from a few building replacements however, the area still had the same breeze flowing down the main street. It was the same as it had been throughout all the seasons. I led Ayako down the ally to my favorite Ramen shop, now with my daughter in arms & ordered some Ramen, crushed some garlic cloves into it & dreamt of all those days under this blue blue sky.

When the relentless cold blue skies of winter give way to snowy clouds of life & I’m up to here with Japanese Samurai period shows, I retire to the comfort of our small six tatami room in which I have most of the immediate necessities of life squeezed onto one tatami mat, & there I meditate on small things. 

there are any misunderstandings

This was something that has been on my tick list of things to do in Japan ever since I moved here some five odd years ago. So much for the go gettum attitude. It’s just that it’s seasonal & when you’re working it can fly right by you in the blink of an eye. But here I am, no work, holed up in a six tatami room on the edge of Tokyo in the midst of winter. What else is there to do but catch the train there?

What I was expecting was, errrr, fat men wrestling(?). But what I got was a highly ritualised experience verging on the religious, with atmosphere bristling with excitement.

Initially the stadium was almost empty. I got there early in time to see the junior ranks battle it out. This gave me the opportunity of shuffling to the front most row & watching all the interesting rituals that take place. The fan thing they do when a match is won, the careful lazy sweeping of the ring, the stretching & posturing of the wrestlers before a bout. I began to get a feel for it & it didn’t feel as strange & as comical as I’d first thought. I actually began to really enjoy it!

For lunch I went & had Chanko, traditional Sumo food, for a mere two or three hundred yen, then back down to my found cushion right at the front row, in time for entrance of the second to top Sumo’s. People were constantly dribbling in, slowly filling up the stadium. From this point on the contestants throw salt around in great plumes that people cheer to. This is where it started to get really exciting  -and, ahem, where I was told to move to my designated seat – high up in the rafters with all the other poor people.

It was fine though, and in fact gave me a different perspective of the whole tournament. By now, the crowd was really buzzing as well known rounded A grade chubby faces came out to banter their weight around the pounded mud ring. The cheers rose up like a huge balloon of roaring air into the space above as huge contestants were thrown out of the rope. When the undefeated opponent was defeated before my eyes, the crowd was moved to frenzy with pillows being thrown into the ring. I was being moved along with the general emotion of the crowd. It was quite a surreal experience. I felt like I could really get into this sport. For a moment I considered it as a career path. Then switched back to reality. Then went home.