Tokyo: tenth day

Trainblogging again on the way home from Tokyo, heading into the sunset. For the first half-hour or so out of Tokyo, the train follows the coastline; as when travelling along the Mediterranean coast of France/Italy one gets tantalizing glimpses of the sea between the tunnels. [Written on Wednesday, but I was too tired to post it. It's funny, I am not having any of the usual jetlag symptoms, but I am tired all the time.]

I was mystified for a while by irregularly-occurring flashes of diffuse reddish light, off in the distance, well above ground level. Were they aircraft warning lights on hilltops shining through low cloud? Eventually the train changed direction and I worked out that they had been caused by the sun reflecting on pylons and posts by the trackside, which were themselves flashing past too fast to see.

I've taken many photos from the train, one or two of which might turn out. I have quite a few shots of sound-protection walls and the broad and featureless sides of huge buildings, and a surprising number of shots of the insides of tunnels. The Shinkansen goes so fast that there is no warning at all of these things as they approach. Even the tunnels come as a surprise: on the ICE one usually has time to note the ground rising before the train plunges into darkness; here the first you know of a hill is when you dive under it.

I guess I won't see the peak of Fuji-san this time either: we aren't yet in Mishima and it is already pitch-black outside. I saw the base of Fuji on the way to Tokyo: even with its shoulders lost in clouds it is unmistakeable, not just tall but broad, truly massive. It's very much bigger than any other mountain in Japan, a sumo wrestler among schoolboys.

Tokyo was … well, where to start? It was many things: "huge" is one; "new" another; "exhausting" a third. There was simply too much choice for such a short trip. I found it hard work in a way that Kyoto wasn't. I certainly had more luck in finding English-speakers in Kyoto. (That is probably statistically insignificant, btw: I guess that every foreign visitor to Japan goes to both cities; given the cities' relative sizes those N visitors encounter, and infect with the meme of English-speakingness, a far higher percentage of the population of Kyoto than of Tokyo.)

I walked around Akihabara last night, checking out the otaku/manga/animé/geek culture. At first I was taken by the stores selling electronics and gadgetry (e.g. a tiny shop selling only sixty different types of electricians' pliers) but eventually the animé/manga scene captured my attention. The stores selling manga/animé figurines were a revelation. I'd heard about them, about the collectors and their seriousness, but I wasn't prepared for the reality. There are differences of quality and purpose (for want of a word) in the figures that even an outsider like myself can see, and the prices reflect this: from around 800¥ for a simple, static, two- or three-inch figure, to 2500¥ for a six-inch articulated figure with exchangeable heads/hands/accessories (i.e. different gestures and facial expressions), to around 5000¥ for the Gundam weaponized cyborgs that we Westerners call "Transformers," and on upwards to 20000¥ for a seriously creepy foot-high too-young-even-for-Lolita figurine.

Most of the smaller stores specialized in a single animé "franchises;" in the case of larger stores these were displayed on different floors. I'd guess that there is little overlap between the fans of e.g. Evangelion and those of Gundam, or between them and the fans of Dragonball and the Sailor Moon imperium. Not to mention the Star Wars imperium, which is nowhere near as present in Japan as in the west.

When I first started walking around Kyoto, looking at the Japanese, I thought that Japan looked like Second Life; having been to Akihabara and Harajuku, I now think that SL looks like Japan. So much of the common dress and appearance in SL is rooted in Japanese styles: the thigh-high boots, the straps and buckles, the stripes of fur along the touchable edges of jackets and boots, the mini-skirts that are hardly more than wide belts worn low. The "sexy schoolgirl" is common in Japan, but then she was already an erotic archetype in England thirty years ago so that doesn't really count towards my view of SL. (There sure are a lot of them, though most seem to be in their early twenties. I admit to enjoying the six or more inches of bare skin between the tops of their over-the-knee boots and the bottom of their miniskirts.) Even the tiny heads and bulging muscles of many male SL avatars have a Japanese root: most male action-animé characters have heads far smaller than their biceps. (Bishonen and yaoi animé characters, and the male supporting-cast of animé featuring women, are improbably good-looking but do have realistic bodies.)

In sadder news, I left my kangol (flat hat) on the subway train on the way back from Ueno, so I'll have a chance to investigate a question that puzzled me all last week: Kyoto is full of hat shops, I noticed at least six of them while walking around — yet nobody wears hats. No-one. So who buys all the hats, and what do they do with them? Is there a secret indoor hat-fetishing scene? A mystery.

One more point about the JapanRail pass: I forgot to mention that you should allow at least forty minutes to have it validated before you first use it. In Tokyo there is a special office for this near the Yaesu central exit; in Kyoto it was just a desk (singular) in the ticket office, where a young woman struggled valiantly against the tide. And note this too: visitors to Japan, especially those who don't speak Japanese, should allow a good fifteen minutes extra time in each station for getting lost and misdirected (or rather correctly directed to a misunderstood goal).

Kyoto is next, I'll pack up and get ready.

[Later: An amusing thing happened during the subway journey home to Uda-san's B&B. While standing around on Kyoto subway station platform waiting for the train, I was approached by a pair of Europeans with a map and a problem: Which train should they take to get to their B&B, and how would they go about finding it when they got there? As it happened we were heading the same way, so we talked for a while in the train. I was able to tell them roughly what to do, and how to go about getting the information they'd need to get to the rest of the way. Being able to help them promoted me from "stranger" to "insider." Nice.]

Second thoughts on Second Life

I checked into SL just before midnight last night, for a quick look-around before going to bed, and was pinged by a blogger who happened to be online, and who had read my "First thoughts on SL" post some weeks back. M2 teleported me to one of her favourite places, a snowy, foggy mountainside, where we stood alone and talked until after 3am.

Second Life is like a party in that the most interesting people hang out where it's quiet, for instance in the kitchen (for certain values of "interesting;" your mileage may vary).

It's odd how effective the avatars in SL are at adding emotional resonance to conversation: I would not have stayed up until 3am if we had been doing a pure-text chat. One associates oneself very quickly with the image, I actually found myself thinking "I'm not dressed for this weather" as we stood in the snow!

She had joined SL after I did, because my post made her curious about it, but has clearly spent much more time there than I. She gave me many pointers to places, events and resources which I'll investigate in coming weeks.

Thank you, M2, for your generosity—and for your openness. It was nice meeting you.

And now it's a sunny, warmish (13°C) day so I shall walk downtown for a cappuccino, possibly under the plane trees at the Café Eberhard if there's no wind.

Sigh.

There was a scene in Dances with wolves that's stayed in my memory (many, actually, but this in particular): after the great big celebration which followed the buffalo hunt, Dunbar goes back to his station and is so damned sad and lonely that he builds a huge fire and dances around it on his own, trying to relive the feeling of being amongst his friends. Do you remember that?

Well, I bought myself a packet of Ingrid's favourite cookies this afternoon.

(No, it's not as bad as that sounds. I am settling in and am moderately content, happy even, to be home again. It just came as something of a melancholy surprise to realize why I had been moved to purchase these particular cookies, which I've never bought before.)

Autumn is approaching: the chestnuts are big and brown, the first leaves turning colours, the air crisp and cool. I slept with the window ajar last night, which I've never done before because I always expected that the traffic noise would keep me awake. Nonsense: I slept as well as ever, and enjoyed the cool night air to boot. I wonder: how many other unexamined "expecteds" are there cluttering up my life?

In other news I really really want one of these. Courtesy of the Sloth.

Epi oinopa ponton

The title is, of course, Homer's famous epithet the wine-dark sea; when applied to the Alster it would need a slight change to "the miso-soup-dark sea" in view of the lake's very dubious greenishly-tinged brown.

The rain stopped about 1pm, so I went out and walked down to the Alster and from there to the Rathaus (town hall), then the length of the pedestrian area to the train station and back, then took a cruise boat up the Alster to Winterhude, thence home with the same bus that I take to & from work. Very pleasant. I would recommend the cruise (an hour each way) to anyone with a day to spare and a relaxed spirit; there is also a two-hour cruise along the canals and riverways that I will try to take before leaving Hamburg.

Now, happily tired, drinking tea and listening to iTunes music, thinking of picking a book from the pile (literally: my absent colleague doesn't believe in shelves) and retiring early to bed.

But first: a public service announcement. Anyone who wears in-ear headphones with their iPod-type personal-music-player device should try these new earphones from Bose. The sound quality is just amazingly good, no other word for it. Changing from Apple's bundled iPod earphones (good as they are) to these is like moving from a car radio to a well-chosen home stereo system. The bass doesn't shake your guts, obviously, but it's vastly louder and more present than in normal earphones. The whole tonal balance is different to the Apple earphones, the simple description would be that it's shifted an octave down the scale: the highs are less shrill and there is more and deeper bass. The sound is very detailed, listening to Glenn Gould playing Liszt's transcriptions of Beethoven's Sixth (thanks again, Antonia!) I can hear the pedalwork and him humming along.

Highly recommended, worth every penny of 99 Euros. Two caveats, though: first, the Apple earphones were very transparent, one could clearly hear environmental noise while wearing them, e.g. the honking horn of that oncoming bus. The Bose earphones are not at all transparent, do be especially careful if/while wearing them on the street. Second, having had these on for an hour or two now, I noticed that I'd tended to set the volume on the Apple earphones by the level of distortion I was hearing rather than the volume of music per se. There is no distortion in the Bose earphones, you may find yourself putting the volume up much higher than you would otherwise, waiting for it to kick in.

My coming to purchase them was proof that advertising works. I'd seen a review of them in a magazine quite some time ago and had been impressed enough that it registered vaguely; when I saw a Bose store (sign of the times) in an arcade here I remembered that they'd recently launched something quite amazing, though I couldn't think what it had been. So I went in and looked around and these caught my eye.