Big in Japan

You've barely touched your beef and mash cone

Firstly I’m aware that this is a bit “what I did in my holidays”. OK quite a lot that. But I’m going to try to write on here a bit more often. (Are Sunday mornings a good time?) And this is what I’ve been doing for the last two weeks. So in no particular order, and accepting that this is not a deep assessment of a nation but merely a round-up of lightweight observations, some things that struck me about Japan and the Japanese people.

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The toilets

Yes everyone jokes about the toilets being delightfully heated and the button you press to delightfully squirt a jet of water up your bum and the other delightful button for ladies and the other button to delightfully blow dry everything like it’s at the salon and the other button you press to play birdsong so people can’t hear you and before you’ve even had time to stand up it’s all flushed and gone. All the jokes. And yet within a day you’re obsessed. And if you nip into a public toilet which doesn’t automatically pop the lid open, you feel like screaming “hello! I am literally right here!” One of the many sayings we use in our house (which may be from a TV show but I can’t remember which one). After a long, even short holiday, we say it’s nice to be back to your own toilet. Except this time it isn’t.

Election posters

They had an election in Japan last year, prompted by Shigeru Ishiba becoming prime minister and going to the country early. (I was surprised to see Japan has had four prime ministers in the last five years: another one for the file proving British politics is neither unique nor unprecedented). Anyway some of the posters with large LinkedIn-style photos of candidates are still up. Not loads, but dotted around the suburban streets. And there are others for upcoming political meetings, like the one above which is in August. And they’re just there. Not ripped down. Not defaced. Nobody’s drawn a moustache. Or a cock and balls. Nothing.

On a Diet

A nice new tradition for the whole family to enjoy: me dragging them to look at foreign parliament buildings. (I rounded up some of my favourites last year.) The National Diet Building is a pretty brutal art deco pile. Built in 1936 (having spent 50 years arguing about what it should look like) the House of Representatives meet in in the south wing and House of Councillors in the north. Hard to get a decent photo through the railings. And the whole political area was incredibly quiet. Near-empty streets around the parliament, prime minister’s residence and various government buildings. There were a couple of small protests, mostly silent, with a group of about a dozen pensioners taking it in turns to give polite speeches across the road from some indifferent guards on the Parliament gates. Nobody played the Benny Hill theme or shouted “stop Brexit”.

Ping-pong

It’s very noisy in Japan. Well not up a mountain or in a park or near a shrine. But get within an inch of concrete and there is a constant, low level, chirruping of pings and bongs and doo-dongs. The crossings pew-pew at you, while over there the escalators are ding-donging. I assume it’s to help blind people but it’s hard to imagine navigating the surround sound constant cacophony.

Duck off

The Japanese love Donald Duck. LOVE HIM. We went to Disneyland Tokyo for a day. (Despite in no way being a “Disney family” we now seem to have visited four of their six parks. I’m not taking questions). Anyway right now now it’s all about Donald. Not Mickey. Not Minnie. Not Goofy, nor Pluto nor any of the princesses. Every lamp-post, every bench, every gift shop, decked out in blue and white. The entire parade was deviated to him, with a song declaring “woah-woah, we love Donald Duck!”. Dancers dressed in sailors outfits which were watched by toddlers waddling around in duck costumes. Grown adults wearing a sailor’s hat with orange duck feet stitched on, which made a crowd like a sea of fried eggs. For lunch a bizarre meal of rice and scrambled egg, with a burger on top, then a poached egg on top. And on top of that? Two duck feet cut out of sheets of orange plastic burger cheese. Maybe someone mentioned in a Disney meeting that they need to suck up to the Donald, and it’s got out of hand

Suits you sir

The suit is not dead. There is one uniform for Japanese men going to work: black suit, black shoes, white shirt, black tie. And some sort of briefcase/leather hand bag. Some of the younger ones daringly wear blue. A few might team a light grey jacket with a dark chino but these are mavericks. Businessmen marching about doing their business.

Level 42+

I’m going to level with you: you’re never on the right level. Shopping centres. Train stations. Hotel lobbies. So many lifts. Up here, down there. Change on this floor for more floors. In the more… shall we say touristy parts of Osaka and Tokyo you are never quite sure if the doors will open on a restaurant or a brothel.

Butter

I finally got round to reading Butter by Asako Yuzuki, the bright yellow smash hit which glowed in bookshops last year. Inspired by a real case, it’s about a journalist who gets close to a woman who is in prison for killing three men. The murderer is a big foodie. And the journalists gets sucked into cooking like a killer. It’s a fascinating insight into Japanese culture, including attitudes towards women, work, authority, obesity, parenting, sexuality, provinciality, and yes food. I could have read the descriptions of butter melting for the rest of time. Delicious. (I actually took four books and managed to read one, plus the introduction of Helen Lewis’s The Genius Myth, which I need to finish before she comes on my radio show).

Money talks

Take two noughts off and halve it. Easy. ¥8,000? Take off two noughts, halve it = roughly £40. Every country should be so easy to shop. Oh and they are still very big on cash. Even in a futuristic, neon city like Tokyo.

Photo etiquette

Obviously we aren’t tourists, it’s all the other people marching about with their Google Maps and rucksacks full of breakfast buffet bread rolls. No, we are different, we tell ourselves. Which is why we spend so much time desperately trying to crop all those tourists out of photos (“just crop it to the top of the shrine and a lot of sky”). Why? So we can pretend to people back home that we were the only people there? “Quick get a selfie to prove we were really here and didn’t just stay at home downloading photos off the internet.” And yet we surely can all agree that we must draw a line at the (non-Japanese) people taking selfies in front of the Atomic Bomb Dome – the haunting shell of a building which survived the bombing of Hiroshima in 1945. Nobody who’d been around the Peace Museum, which managed to be deeply moving despite being over-crowded, would have done such a thing. Although there is a special place reserved for the American man who went round the displays of the mutilated city and its people taking photos on his phone with the camera shutter sound turned on, which no normal person has used since 2011.

Got baggage

Now this is genius. Our itinerary was pretty crazy, only a night or three in each place, including an excursion to a ryokan (supposedly traditional Japanese bed and breakfast but turned out to be quite a high end spa vibe – shoes off at the door, incense everywhere, hot spring onsen bath outside the room) for one night. It required no fewer than two bullet trains, two local trains and a taxi. So we sent our four massive bags on to Tokyo from Hiroshima on Monday morning, and they were waiting for us at the hotel on Tuesday evening. About a tenner a bag. Best tenner I’ve ever spent.

Mount Fuji

Awesome, in the original sense of the word. Vast. Majestic. Somehow both peaceful and intimidating. All that just from a glimpse through the window of a bullet train. At least AI on your phone means you can remove the power lines and buildings.

Blossom

Ooh you’re going for the blossom, people said. Actually we were just going during the school holidays and Easter recess. We’ve got a tree in our garden which blossoms, so no that’s not why we’re travelling halfway round the world. And yet. Oof. It’s bloody lovely seeing rows and rows of cherry trees, pale pink florets against a bright blue sky. There is no building or human not made better by being photographed through a curved branch dotted with nature’s confetti.

Record shops

I got into my head that I wanted to by a record in Japan. I’ve got a decent, if eclectic, vinyl collection which includes family handmedowns, nujazzbreakbeats from my DJing days in Taunton (don’t) and heaps of the sort of funk, soul, disco and dance tracks that are still crowd pleasers at parties. I can tell you that the Japanese take their record shops very seriously. I’d read online about the staff being rude, and I was thrilled to be given the brush off by a surly chap whose job seemed to be moodily standing near a till while taking records out of their sleeve and holding them up to the light to identify imperfections, while being furious that anyone might expect him to operate the till. Frustratingly my plan to buy an Elton John album with Japanese sleeve notes was scuppered by the fact that they were all English pressings with just a strip of Japanese notes wrapped around. So I picked up a couple of 7” singles – Crocodile Rock and I’m Still Standing – with good Japanese covers, and an album recording of Elton with John Lennon in New York (Lennon’s last show before his assassination), mainly because it includes a brilliant version of Whatever Gets Your Through The Night.

Cone but not forgotten

Obviously we were on holiday so we ate a lot of icecream. You need a sugar hit mid-afternoon. Although the rule that you don’t walk and eat means no wandering about with a cornetto dripping everywhere. We decided against getting a chocolate Whippy from the icecream shop called “Colon”. And I will regret to my dying day that I didn’t not eat try this beauty: beef and mashed potato in a cone.

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Right OK that’s probably enough Japan. Although I could go on and on. If you have thoughts, questions or demands that I don’t go on and on, do pop them in the comments.

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This week: it’s back to work on 5 Live from Tuesday, listen live from Westminster weekdays from 2pm. We kick off on Tuesday with the Poll Position pollsters picking through the latest polling numbers, and I’ve got Jeremy Vine on the show on Friday talking about his new novel, Murder On Line One, which is an excellent yarn about a local radio talk show host who turns sleuth when someone starts bumping off his listeners.

I’m also recording a special series of Americast to mark Trump’s first 100 days which will be out next week. There are some other exciting work things in the pipeline which I can’t tell you about. Yet.

Oh and I lugged an iPad and keyboard around Japan under the impression I was going to finish writing jokes for my upcoming tour. This did not happen. But don’t let that put you off: tickets for Making A Meal Of It are on sale now.