runcible spoon

Japan Day Sixteen: And behold! A series of tenuously linked photographs

Yum (but strange).

Japan Day Sixteen: And is this how it all ends?

I get up in the close confines of our budget ryokan feeling oddly fine, there's really nothing else to say.

Except that my fresh-cut sandwich feelings start to sag and fall apart soon thereafter.

I feel welled-up, overwhelming, mixed-bag emotion this morning as we pack our stuff for the VERY LAST TIME overseas. I can't believe it. This fantastic, difficult, wonderful journey is coming to a close. It's strange running my bare feet over the tatami mat knowing that this time tomorrow we'll be walking the streets of Perth.

As the train pulls us away from the sprawl of Tokyo and tugs us onwards to Narita (the trip is ending ... I can't believe it ...), we run through rice paddies.  They're green and waterfilled, tended by bent figures in woven hats.

It's an apt farewell vision of this land that has turned out not to be so consistently high-tech or glamorous as I imagined.

How I say goodbye to a year of my life and hello to the new life I need to make in the remnants of what I left behind, I'm not so sure.

Japan Day Fifteen: Cookie batter statesmen

Even though I enjoyed the sprawling fish market visit yesterday, it was a somewhat guilty pleasure.  I had read that - despite being beloved by tourists - a visit to Tsujiki Market is regarded by most Tokyo locals as something akin to madness. Getting up in the pre-dawn blackness to stand around in a cold, concreted market watching dead fish is apparently not high on the average Tokyoite's list of priorities - weird, huh?

Next item on our chicken-scratch agenda, however, was something much dearer to the Japanese heart: sumo. So dear, in fact, that every time we got to the sumo stadium - no matter how early - we would fail to score the cheapest tickets to the day's match. Evidently, the locals were not at Tsujiki because they were all at the sumo stadium lining up to get the cheap tix released in limited numbers on the morning of the tournament.

Settling instead for the next cheapest seats, we purchase our tickets and only return to see the bouts held in the afternoon, which is when the big names (no pun intended) come out to compete.

Excuse the Caps Lock, but the tournament is FANTASTIC! It's perhaps the closest thing I can imagine to attending a performance of a Shakespearean play in its heyday - popular, carnivalesque, and with a crazy, happy-mingling, funfair atmosphere.

Japan Day Fourteen: Bloody as a crime scene

After a night of 'Black Russian!', we rise at 5am to catch the early subway to Tsujiki Fish Market.

You know you've arrived when you alight from the train only to see stout, solid-bodied Japanese fishermen trooping up and down the subway stairs wearing their pants tucked into giant black rubber boots.

There's every conceivable sea-creature on sale here - and a few inconceivables as well. Furry black cucumbers spew from over-sized pippi shells, and purple eggs spiny as echidnas sit in pails of water. Blood splatters styrofoam boxes, and seeps into buckets like a crime scene, or an abattoir. Which, in truth, this really is.

The splendour and screaming frenzy of the live tuna auctions have recently been put off-limits to tourists, so a large part of what made the Tsujiki visit so must-see in the minds of guidebook writers has been removed. Nonetheless, the surrounding wet market is still worth a gander.

And 'wet' it certainly is. The ashphalt floors are sloshy with blood, fishy juices, and melted ice-crush. Every which way you turn, small cartoon-looking vehicles are rattling by (full of frozen fish carcasses or disused packing boxes) at a pace that could flatten you.

H-u-u-u-ge tuna are crammed everywhere: on carts that trundle past you, lying on hessian bags in thoroughfares and hoisted up on 'operating tables' where rapidly spinning power tools cut through their rock-solid flesh. The tuna are big and torpedo-shaped: they look like massive frozen bowling pins that've fallen over onto their sides. Their skins are encrusted with the same snowy white freezer-frost that Paddle Pops have when you take them out of their wrapper. Steaming like dry-ice in the warmish spring air, they are all chalked up with blunt Japanese characters written in red crayon. It could be some avant-garde artwork, but of course it's not. It's just dawn on any unnamed day in this seafood-obsessed metropolis.

We leave Tsujiki to its oceanic gore, with the scent of blood still in our mounths and fish scales clinging to our feet.

Japan Day Thirteen: Dandruff and too many drinks

I know this much is true: there are few things more disgusting than chunks of flaky dandruff caked in greasy hair. Particularly when that hairdo is just centimetres away from you.

Oh yes, densely packed Japanese public transport definitely has its horrors.

The subway home at 10pm this particular evening is packed with red-skull suffering business men, lurching as they hang from the train's commuter straps. It's only Thursday night, kids!

Sadly, the British Glamour-Packer wheelie suitcase pushers staying in the room next to us have hit the piss even harder than the salarymen. They roll home at around 12.30am, invite two friends into their room, and then stay up carousing until 4. It's tedious in the extreme when there are literally only paperthin walls between us and them.

Our frustrated banging on the dividing partition between our rooms just incites them to be louder and more prattish. They laugh like nasty hyenas and say, 'Oh dear! Can't sleep?' in voices that tell us we can fuck off and die.

They spend three drunken hours recounting their (enormous) bar tab for the evening, and every time one of them says 'Black Russian!' it's the cue for the other three fall about laughing.

Sadly, if you're not pissed and you have to be up at 5am, three hours of 'Black Russian!' isn't that funny a joke.

We lie in our darkened cubicle waiting for morning and plotting all sorts of evil revenge.

Japan Day Twelve: Meet Pooh-san

This is what I'm thinking in Tokyo, worldly megalopolis that it is: I can't believe what a commonplace sleeping on trains is here.

Schoolgirls' heads are lolling about like those dogs-on-dashboards. Their juddering hairdos look quite comical in combo with their thick, white kneesocks and their neatly-pressed, regulation sailor suits.

Furthermore, everyone here - including the dour-suited salaryman - has a whimsical phone- or bag-dongle. I have no idea what one properly calls these things, but they are small, plasticky tokens that dangle from phones and zippers.

[Incidentally, perhaps no one leaves the Land of the Rising Sun without one of these, as I am now the owner of a dongle featuring two tiny cats stuffed into a miniaturised burger-box and presented as if they are a fast-food meal ... okay, okay, so madness overcame me! Andrew, on the other hand, was plumping for some deranged-looking 'angry bean' dongle that he saw being hawked at a railway station.]

I admire one massive Pooh Bear collection that a young woman has amassed. It is hanging from her mobile phone like so much urban spaghetti.

'Pooh Bear!' I enthuse, sounding somewhat idiotic.

She smiles radiantly like she's just heard that we're sharing a Nobel Peace Prize: 'Ah, yes, Pooh-san'.

Pooh Bear is given his own honorific, and another Tokyo day begins.

Japan Day Eleven: Tokyo afternoon

My first impressions of Tokyo are favourable, if a little confounding. Stereotype is not conformed to: this is no 'Bill Murray Lost in Translation cab ride', I can assure you.

There are no neon billboards, no fancy shops, no luxury goods. We get off the Shinkansen at Tokyo Station and take the JR Line to Ueno. From there, we transfer to a subway line and ride two stops to Tawaramachi. Our hostel's a few minutes' walk from here. Easy and painless.

It may be a smooth intro to Tokyo, but it ain't a high-tech one. This is no city of robots and gleaming surfaces, but more a city of commuters and grandparents and regular folks.

The area 'round our ryokan is intriguingly Asian, as opposed to specifically Japanese. Lots of things are patched together, make-shift style, and the streets are littered with mini improv 'gardens' - plants in a crazy assortment of pots carefully arrayed on the footpath, just as you see in other parts of Asia. One lucky-dip garden I see has even been accessorised with a 'fishpond' that's really just a white polystyrene box purloined from a green-grocer.

(My grandmother, who grows red and green capsicums and cherry tomatoes in identical boxes at home in Sydney, would chuckle.)

When we drop our bags, and venture out again to explore, the JR train is delayed for FOREVER, it seems. C'mon! I'm starving, and I want to see Japan's other faces looking back at me in Shinjuku. Let's go!

We see Shinjuku (reminiscent of the tourist-trap-y-ness of London's Oxford St, or the lower half of same in Sydney - slightly grimy, seedy, tacky). Then Shibuya - liked the famous crossroads, although Starbucks' prime position overlooking them was somehow jarring and OTT, like a crass joke told in front of 'company'. Love Hotel Hill? Well, the hotels were crappier and nastier than I expected. Glam-lux done cheaply and gone to seed. Lots of v ordinary couples going in, including late-teens in stovepipe denims.

My main impression out on the streets? Fashion! Everywhere, all at once - a riot of colours, patterns, dyed hair, spiked hair, punk spikes, tartan, fishnets, white-face, pancake, eyelash extensions, high heels, diamante-encrusted everything.

I feel bad for the po-faced guys on the main drag at Shibuya who wear sandwich boards advertising god knows what. They're older, lined in the face, and stand blank and unreadable as Easter Island Statues. I find them poignant, standing there in their homely sneakers, in amongst the crush of trendy emphemera.

We walk late at night to Harajuku Station, down Omotesando and past the designer shells that house Tod's and a host of other big-name fashion rags. Snack on some McDonald's 100¥ mini pikelets with their own tiny dispenser for squirty cream and blueberry sauce: a nice antidote to the high-end stuff, indeed ...

Japan Day Eleven: Hakata Station at 6am

There are men in cheap, thin suits sleeping in Hakata Station at 6am. They use their soft-sided briefcases as pillows.

There are teenagers, bare-footed (thongs slipped neatly off beside them), and wearing jeans, sleeping on cardboard boxes in Hakata Station at 6am.

There is a woman, big-eyed, blunt-fringed, and as beautifully made-up as an actress, who has a steel-grey dog tucked under her arm at Hakata Station at 6am.

The dog's no larger than a chihuauha, but it looks strangely like a greyhound that's been shrunk in the wash. The dog is wearing a soft, cotton t-shirt that spells out 'FBI', yellow letters on black.

We will take the 6.31am Hikari RailStar, heading to Shin-Osaka. From there, we will take another Shinkansen to Tokyo.

What is it about journeys that makes one want to eat all one's goodies at once? Almost all the items we carefully selected at Family Mart the night before disappear down my gullet before we've even begun.

I can't believe we're heading for Tokyo, that mythic-magic metropolis. City of neon, of skyscrapers, of pulsing crowds and booze and food and needs. City of animated dreams.

Japan Day Ten: A-bombs versus paper cranes

The morning light in our room at the ryokan is golden like wheat. Green leaves - shaped more delicately than a Japanese dessert - move outside the window. Overnight, restfulness has sunk into my bones. It feels good.

Spur of the moment, and late in the day, we decide to leave Fukuoka's tranquil torpor and go to Hiroshima. A bullet train awaits.

I like these train journeys. There's something soothing in the train's charge, in its pulsating forward thrust.

There's a definite rushing sound as we break through the air, and a quiet, high-pitched whine that I think is the sound made by thousands of bodies and luggage and coffee-carts all being airconditioned and then thrown forward at an inconceivable rate.

Hiroshima's A Bomb Museum is more unsettling than you can prepare yourself for. I found unbidden and unexpected tears slip down my face, at the studied casualness with which human beings choose to destroy one another.

Zen and cut-price boxer shorts

One of my most favourite books on Japan is Kyoichi Tsuzuki’s Tokyo: A Certain Style. It’s a tiny little powerhouse of a book: small in dimensions, but big on impact. Its stated purpose is to counter the pervasive myth of Japan as a nation devoted to Zen minimalism and rigidly pared-down aesthetics.

Instead, Tsuzuki thrusts the reader into a realm of chaos, clutter and over-consumption. The crammed Tokyo apartments he photographs are like shrines built to honour obscure gods of ‘stuff’. Household things are everywhere: papers and appliances and books and stuffed toys spill out to engulf bookshelves, beds, tables, and counters. Yet the book is incredibly sympathetic to its subjects, and the homes are documented with real warmth and affection. In the author’s portrayal, these spaces are about comfort, homeliness and individuality.

I couldn’t help but think of this little book quite often when we were in Japan. So many elements of this country simply didn’t square with the stereotyped views of Japan that we gobble down at home.

Far from being uniformly beautiful, Japan and its sprawling urbanness frequently reminded me of elements of the ‘new’ China. Where developed China's ugliness is stupefying and almost breathtaking, though, Japan's is stultifying, quotidian. It's tiny, cramped spaces, and unbelievably ordinary houses jammed one against the other. It's concrete until you can't breathe. It's powerlines crisscrossed like neural wiring gone mad.

I don’t say this to be disrespectful of Japan, or to imply that I dislike it. It’s more just to register that the Japan I saw was not the Japan of coffee-table books, or popular stereotype.

I think I’m on some strange crusade to mention these things, because so often Japan is mentioned in relation to a sort of cult of beauty, perfection and the natural world. As though it’s all pumpkin-coloured leaves tumbling from ancient trees onto immaculate pools of stone.

It can be these things too, I suppose, but it seems to me to be just as often about mega-malls and cut-price boxer shorts and old mixed in with new.