Just a Little Country Boy

The neons are brighter, the subways busier, the high-school girls' miniskirts shorter, and the giant buddha bar restaurants more giant than anywhere in the world. Tokyo is certainly an amazing place. Everywhere and everyone is so young and fashionable that Derek Zoolander would look like a bum, and the whole city is so wired that I felt like prescribing it Ritalin.



It was like a giant candy store for this little rice-paddy country boy from Kochi. In my three days in the capital, I climbed a skyscraper in Roppongi, caught up with friends in Takadanobaba, ate shabushabu in Harajuku, saw some live rock in Shibuya, hung out with a band in Shinjuku, Christmas shopped in Ikebukuro, and got lost in Tokyo Station. It was hard to whipe that bucolic awe-struck look off my face. In Kitagawa the most happening place is the Retirement Centre and dressing up means wearing something other than slippers. Tokyo was all a bit overwhelming. My supervisor had warned me. He was kind enough to drive me to the airport for my 'business trip,' and he told me he thought I was brave going to Tokyo alone. He'd been there once - about 16 years ago, got lost and never wants to go back.



It is an easy city to feel lost in! Estimates put the population of greater Tokyo at around 34 million. That's about 1.6 times the population of the whole of Australia, and 22,065 times that of Kitagawa! And that mass of humanity is not idle. Central Tokyo is said to have about 80,000 restaurants (compared to London's 6,000 and Kitagwa's one), and no one's ever even tried to count the bars. Single train stations in Tokyo are bigger than whole cities in some countries. It took me more than half an hour to just walk between lines at Tokyo Station (and that's when I didn't get lost), and Tokyo Station is by no means to biggest. Shinjuku Station is the busiest in the world, with about 3 million passengers passing through its gates each day.



Back home in the rice-paddies again now. Kitagawa doesn't have a train station. It does have a bus. The bus comes twice a day. It's empty most of the time.

Phew... It's good to be back...



click to Tokyo photo gallery

Curry Toothpaste and Oyster Ice-cream

If you thought corn, potatoes and mayonnaise on pizza was a little too strange to stomach, read no further!



In the West the line between sweet and savoury is a clearly delineated one. Dessert is one thing; eel, eggplant and raw horse meat is most certainly another. But in the East, this age-old sweet/savoury divide is regularly flaunted, and often with the most ghastly of results.

This cultural gap was never more apparent than when I took some students of mine to a Ben and Jerry's in Seoul for some Chunky Monkey, New York Fudge Brownie and Cookie Dough ice-cream (if you're unlucky enough to live in a country without one, Ben and Jerry's is surely up there with the best ice-cream in the world). One of the students pulled out a pack of prawn-crackers, and with squeals of delight, all the students began scooping up the ice-cream with their crackers! I'd never felt so far from home...

But prawn-crackers and Chunky Monkey is only the beginning, and it is surely in Japan that this blurring of divisions has been taken to its most alarming extremes.

Mint. Spearmint. Peppermint. Until now, the range of toothpaste flavours has been monotonously minty. But this minty monopoly is finally over. How about spicing up your brushing with some Indian Curry Toothpaste? Or sweetening your breath with the White Peach? Japanese brand Margaret Josephin has released a range of 31 alternative toothpaste flavours, one for each day of the month:

Sweet Salt, Tropical Pineapple, Peppermint, Fresh Yogurt, First Crop Green Tea, Rose, Monkey Banana, Honey, Kiwifruit, Cafe au Lait, Plum, Tsugaru Apple, Vanilla, Indian Curry, Strawberry, California Orange, Kyoto Green Tea, White Peach, Kisshu Ume, Lavender, Darjeeling Tea, Cinnamon, Budou (grape), Lemon Tea, Bitter Chocolate, Blueberry, Caramel, Espresso, Grapefruit, Pumpkin Pudding, Cola*



Cakes are another of these fusion food hot spots. Last night I watched a show on TV all about "Fushigi-na Keki" - Strange Cakes. Featured cakes included Abalone Cake, Eel Cake and Natto Cake (natto is rotten soy beans, and must surely beat durian for the title of worst-smelling-food-in-the-world), and none of them were savoury (I believe the Eel Cake was chocolate!)

But the king of weird food must certainly be Japanese ice-cream. Brace yourself for what is surely the vilest ice-cream ever made: "Raw Horse-Flesh Ice-Cream".



There's also Goat (and no, that's not just the milk!), Wasabi, Cactus, Octopus, Prawn, Oyster, Eggplant and Whale Meat flavours, to name a few. If you've got a strong stomach, you can check out all the awful flavours by clicking here.

In all fairness, many of these things are almost as repulsive to an average Japanese person as they are to me. But then again, there's must be a market for these sins against sweetness here somewhere.

*I don't think these toothpastes are available outside of Japan, but if you just have to try the Bitter Chocolate or the First Crop Green Tea, let me know and I can try to ship some out to you (210 yen each).

Need a lap?

A little lonely this Christmas? Need a shoulder to cry on? A lap to rest your head? Japanese ingenuity to the rescue again!

Introducing the "Lap Pillow". Made of foam and selling for about 10,000 yen (US$85), this life-like woman's lap is just the thing to relieve the lonely Christmas blues.



As Mitsuo Takahashi of the manufacturer Trane KK, points out, the Hizamakura, or lap pillow, fulfills a primal need. "From the time people were kids, people have laid their heads on their mothers' laps to get their ears cleaned," he said.(!!)

But single ladies needing a snuggle needn't feel left out either. Introducing the "Boyfriend Arm Pillow". Guaranteed not to snore, drool or run of with a younger woman this friendly pillow with a price tag of 8000 yen (about US$76) consists of a stuffed headless torso and an arm to curl around the user.

The Serbian Ambassador's Daughter

Chaired the international conference on sustainable global development. Met with the minister of education to give him – and in no uncertain terms – my views on reforming the Japanese education system. Negotiated the release of 12 foreign nationals caught up in a week-long hostage crisis. Translated an international trade agreement that promises to bring Japan's slumbering economy out of the doldrums. And still found time enough to accept the advances of the visiting Serbian ambassador's rather foxy daughter. A fairly routine day in the life of a CIR at Kitagawa village. And all this before I even woke up...

It's a flash sounding title, but truth be told, a delightful but vanishing little rural village of 1550 in a far flung corner of the least developed of Japan's four big islands seldom has need for a 'Coordinator of International Relations.' The rice paddies outnumber the people about 4 to 1 and other than my predecessors and a couple of Filipino 'hostesses' there's scarcely been a foreign visitor in living memory. There just isn't much need for someone with my job description. Alternative, and altogether more accurate job titles would be 'Token White Villager,' 'Entertainer of Children,' or my personal favourite, 'Show Pony.'


thats me with the pretty mane

But I can't complain really. I'm well groomed, the stable hands are gentle (if the reigns a little short at times), and the hay is good.

-- Signing off for today, a well-fed pony, secretly pining for open pastures.

Silent kono Yoru

Attempts at "internationalisation" this week extended to passing around different versions of Silent Night written out in 10 different languages and having the kids to try and pick the country. Arabic and Zulu were my favourites, but there are even Klingon and Tolkien Elvish translations out there (link)! Some people have even more time on their hands than me...

Click here to listen to the first verse of the Japanese version (Kiyoshi kono Yoru) in mp3 - sung by 1st grade kids.

きよしこのよる
Kiyoshi kono Yoru

きよしこの夜　星は光り
Kiyoshi kono yoru hoshi wa hikari
救いの御子は　まぶねの中に
sukui nomiko wa mabune no naka ni
眠りたもう　いとやすく
nemuri tamo-o. itoyasuku.