Japan: 18 months in 18 pictures – July 07

Part 1 and explanation of the series here. Read entire series via tags, here.

June was the start of summer in Japan but the full brunt of what the Japanese summer really ‘meant’ didn’t start to hit until July, with the added bonus of a delayed rainy season. The result was that the first 2 weeks of July were not only humid and sticky, they were also pretty wet. On the plus side, the freak weather patterns also meant that I got my first taste for typhoons and the warnings that come with them, when one made its way to the Tokyo area a full 2 months earlier than it was supposed to (typhoon season doesn’t normally kick in until after the summer).

I remember someone telling me that Tokyo was worse than Thailand in the summer. Words are easy to dismiss, oppressing heat and humidity much less. And it wasn’t even August yet, and June had already felt a little like hell. My first summer in Japan taught more than I ever thought I wanted to know about what humidity can do to work clothes (while you’re working), to laundry and to brain. It gets pretty humid and hot where I grew up in Italy, but Tokyo takes it to an entire new level by adding the hustle and bustle of a huge city to the mix. And then there is also the small case of the air con units, which are pretty much the only machine at hand to help you ‘cool down,’ apart from fans but anyone who sweats in a fairly abnormal fashion knows fans are rubbish. Thing is air con units also make you sick. And when literally every enclosed space in the city uses air con, you soon find yourself trapped in a loop where oppresive heat and fake refreshing cool can never be properly balanced. Still the weather meant I was discovering all about the pleasures of green tea-flavoured ice cream and cold tea.

July was also the first visit to Japan of a good friend of mine, allowing me to finally play host to someone in my recently adopted new home. The friend in question was Steve Goodman aka Kode 9, and he came with a few other people including old lecturers from my university days and Kevin Martin aka The Bug, who I had the pleasure to get to know during the ten or so days they spent in Japan. They were in the country for work and pleasure, and once the work was out of the way we spent the remaining time doing touristy things, partying and doing some serious eating. The picture above was taken from Kode’s last gig in Tokyo, where someone gave him a totally dope traditional Japanese mask. In between all this, Steve, Kevin, Jess and I also went down to Kyoto for a couple of days. Kyoto is quite possibly Japan’s most famous city after Tokyo, and being able to discover it with friends, albeit briefly, made it all the more worthwhile.

Contrasting with Tokyo’s hypercapitalism and furutistic overtones, Kyoto has a slow pace to it and an architectural and urban layout that reminded me a lot of Europe, mainly because you’re able to pretty much walk everywhere. Aside from its slower pace and strangely European elements, Kyoto is also a deeply spiritual city in a way, being home to more temples and shrines than you could think possible as well as many architectural remnants of its glorious past, in the form of traditional houses and streets. Mixed with the modern urbanisation of the center proper and its outskirts, which stretch into the hills where more temples and shrines are to be found, this creates a fairly surreal urban landscape not too dissimilar from Tokyo but with less freneticism about it. In both cases there is this typically Japanese ‘old and new co-existing side by side’ element, but whereas in Tokyo this element is most pronounced because of the overbearing presence of the new and how it contrasts against the various remnants of the old, in Kyoto the old is most dominant and the new feels like it is trying to establish itself.

The trip to Kyoto also afforded me my first Shinkansen experience. Witnessing the impressive punctuality, modernity and efficiency of Japan’s high speed train network is something that European train commuters should get to experience at least once. And while it’s good to know there are still first world countries where you can smoke on trains, I don’t recommend it even if you do smoke, as with Japan’s overly powerful tobacco lobby this means sitting in a carriage where you will literally struggle to breathe for the 2 and a bit hours the trip takes. Between the futuristic looks of the trains themselves and their speed, being carried between Tokyo and Kyoto by Shinkansen can be as surreal an experience as a visit to either city.

As I mentioned it was the first time I played guide to someone since moving to Japan, and that also made me realise just how much I’d become accustomed to the country, the culture and its people. Six months in I was still rough around the edges to say the least, and my Japanese was bad enough for us to have quite a few laughs about it, but in a way it already felt like Tokyo and Japan had adopted me, but in a very different way to how London had, or any European or Western city could. Speaking with Steve, Kevin and Jess only accentuated that feeling, as they remarked things about the city, culture and people I’d already become accustomed to, or even stopped noticing.

I’d already been thinking about this since my arrival, but the full realisation came during the visit and over the summer: the trick with Japan is that you can never be a part of the society in the same way that you can in the West. You’ll never be one of them, and you’ll never be Japanese no matter how hard you try to fit in and adapt. After ten years in London I’d become, for all intent and purposes, a Londoner, and that’s very much how I still feel to this day even though I haven’t lived there for two years. With Japan though, if you’re able to realise early on that there is a barrier and a wall to acceptance and integration than you can actually integrate and become a part of the fabric of the city and society in a way that won’t create problems later on. This is something that requires a bit more space to discuss than I want to in this series, and something I would revisit quite a few times before I left.

July bonus shot:

The streets of Kyoto’s old red light district were as fascinating as the futuristic, bright neon lights of Shinjuku or Shibuya.

Runner up pics:
Ultra fresh in the streets of Harajuku, actually Harajuku was just full of jokes, crowd goes mad for the sounds of 9, and the crow is totally not bothered by the irrelevant humans in Kyoto.

Flickr Set(s):
Ebisu, Shibuya, Harajuku
Royal Art Jam
Hyperdub nite at Heavy Sick Zero
Kyoto day trip