Ants Blog

I knew of its existence but not having lived in the area for five years plus, it was sheer chance that we came across the organic markets.

We saw it from the road & took a detour to park in the grounds to walk past stalls & marquees selling organic meat, jams, vegetables, a flower stall, some spices & one young new start with exotic dips to try. There was also an essential oil seller who would rub lavender on your skin should you look his way. There were dozens of other sellers selling their thing. We didn’t really want to buy anything. It was just one of a day’s little detours. I bumped into an old business partner with whom I set up a web site selling hemp clothing. We met some Japanese mothers now living in Killarney Hts & I tested my rusting Japanese on their poor pitying brows. Naami found a chain merry go round & on she went for a grand $4. Strolling out of the place we met a nice couple, a woman married to a Kashmerie selling wonderful sticks of fragrant incense. I exchanged some coins for a small clutch & we headed home as rain began spitting softly in the warm air.

Since we’ve been back in oz there’s been no less than three shark attacks in Sydney & the worst Bushfires Australian has ever seen! Victoria has practically been reduced to ashes by fires that have been burning there since late January! Around 170 people have been killed. 170! Holy crap! Give me Tokyo earthquakes any day!

or so it would seem…

Wow! I would never have imagined it but I guess it makes sense in the context of scraping cultural paint off the wall. I’ve become a full on unabashed, take no prisoners, make no excuses consumer. I love cruising the seabed of culture, that being Coles. It’s fascinating – no - satisfying. They’ve now got their own brand of everything. But what really got me was the way things are being marketed now. Day glow shampoo bottles, Six, let me repeat, Six bladed razors & Toothbrushes that have a footprint that looks like the sole of a Reebok shoe. It’s bizarre. The toothbrushes even have rubber scourers on the other side of the bristles to clean the insides of your cheeks. Wattltheythinkuvnext? It’s like marketing has hit the wall & pushed on through ramped up on steroids. The shop isles are so damned bright with packaging!

But hey, who am I to complain. Adjust those sunnies, sharpen the credit card &  throttle that trolley. Here I come!

of Australian sky…

Now that we’re back in the Great Southern land, I want to absorb every ounce of essence that it exudes. I want to submerge myself in the shallow topsoil of Australian culture before it blows away in gusts of American globalism. But politics aside, I want to embrace Australian culture as I did Japanese culture five years ago.

So I went out & bought a pair of blue rubber thongs. They set me back $2. I then acquired a copy of the classic 10,9,8,7,6,5,4,3,2,1 album by Midnight Oil. I began playing Primitive man by Ice house (You know – ‘Great Southern Land’  et al). I bought some Coopers Ultra light so I could dive my upper lip into a head beer in the summer evenings in spite of my newly devised alcohol abstinence. We scoured the supermarkets for Australian icons. Vegemite, Sunlight soap, Cottee's Cordial, Arnotts biscuits. Who says Australia has no culture. Despite vegemite being now owned by the US company Kraft, I began eating it religiously for breakfast every morning. Ayako loves it. This stuff spans nations! After shopping we’d go down the beach in the hot afternoon air & watch the seagulls glide down to vinegary chips.

Culture shock? I think I can cope with the move back…

A typical Sydney backyard…

We got onto the plane. It was a Qantas. We were served Australian Beer, Australian wine & by the time the first ozi meal came round we were plugged into watching the all Australian cast of ‘Australia’ replete with drovers, cattle men & kangaroos. We were greeted by big Australian smiles of the air hosts & hostesses as the planes four or so jets whisked us above the read earth of one of the oldest continents in the world. All around us the broad Australian accents, so much broader it seemed than when we left five years ago, loudly chatted about the footy, the beach, the wine, real estate & weather. I could understand everything. Reluctantly, though with excitement, we were on our way home.

to Japan

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