Japan Ease
May 05, 2008
Homecoming
It’s strange how different your home looks when you’ve been away. I just stepped through the door and witnessed the clutter and the faint smell of old coffee and it’s like stepping back into my life again. It was raining and cold when I set off to Japan a couple of weeks ago but now Britain is in bloom- the drug dealers below my window are wearing their summer plumage, the tang of newly cut grass is in the air and everybody’s car stereo is turned up to sunny volume.
Japan was a fantastic experience. The two Japanese lessons I had before leaving got me frustratingly close to constructing a sentence without the aid of mime. I suppose I speak caveman Japanese- ‘where live?’ ‘What name’? ‘me ugg, me fly here in big silver bird’.
The shows were great, especially Okayama where we played one of our songs so fast the whole band was in danger of collapsing from giggles and the audience danced like they were being electrocuted. We also played a few acoustic HMV and Tower Records instores which were good fun if not slightly surreal. It was a pretty busy tour- travel, instore, soundcheck, check into hotel, gig, eat, drink, collapse, repeat.
This was my 5th visit to Japan. These are a few of the myriad of things that interest me about this amazing country
The trains don’t run to the minute, they run to the second.
Whoever designed the Japanese schoolgirl uniform was not a woman
Talking on the metro in the morning rush hour is frowned upon. Me and Dana ( Farrah’s drummer) were told off on the train (for arguing about prog rock) by a ‘salaryman’ in halting but angry English. “Not Japanese system” he seethed. We spent the rest of the journey in scolded schoolboy silence. Probably not a big Emerson Lake and Palmer fan.
People in Tokyo cycle on the pavement and no one ever seems to get entangled.
Japanese people are on the whole, very, very polite.
The Japanese (like the British!) like to drink and seem to lose their reserve when they do.
The Japanese culture celebrates working as a team. After gigs it is not unusual for all the bands on the bill to go out and eat together with the staff from the club and toast everybody’s hard work. This is a good thing.
The Japanese language has three written forms and takes years to master. This is a bad thing.
So now I’ve blogged, I’ll spend some time in the decompression chamber of washing dirty laundry, discovering mouldy bread, buying milk, and catching up with the mail. I’ll probably be polite and bow imperceptibly for the next few days, occasionally thank someone in Japanese, be surprised the tube is late and slowly but surely slip back from surreality to reality-as surely as a suntan fades.
