Crunky

The view from my room isn’t exactly in keeping with what I expected from the second largest city in Japan’s national university. It feels more like I’ve landed in the Sumatran jungle. The sound of crickets and the angry debate between crows in nearby tree canopies do little to suggest that I am in a country responsible for bullet trains, pokemon and heated toilet seats. I am 5 floors up in the B block of Minesawa international house, and glad that the typhoon four days ago has been and gone. Sleep was given a back seat in favour of exit strategies and a nagging fear that if my window were to smash in, I would be fully transported from my rock hard mattress to join the Jungle Book 2 auditions sixty feet below. The other Edinburgh peeps at Tokyo universities were given the day off because of the severe weather (which had cleared up by 9.30 to reveal cloudless blue skies and redundant umbrellas). We were not.

Google maps shows Yokohama National University to be right in the centre of town, a ten minute walk from anyone who’s anyone. This is an optical illusion. There are lots, and I mean lots, of cabbage patches. Despite the backwater area, the university has much the same feel as any other; it has a canteen, faculty buildings and best of all their own brand of door to door God squad oozing broken English charm, desperate to get anyone to come to bible study sessions. The layout of the dorm is similar to one of the grimier Pollock halls buildings. A dingy Japanese Grant, for those of you in the know. The shared showers require 100 yen for ten minutes, making it an impossibility to maintain a suitable level of hygiene if you don’t have the right shrapnel in your pocket. Blue tak does not translate well into Japanese, so I have had to make do with a large pin board to put up my photos from home. The typhoon made quick work of its not so secure position on my, ironically, blue tak stained wall. So now it sits, looking a little forlorn propped up against the wall on my floor.

Japanese people love bureaucracy. I have never had to sign so many sheets of paper that I cant read. I may, quite feasibly, have signed away my human rights for all I know. Luckily the university appoint every new international student with a ‘tutor’ to help wade through it all. Mine’s called Koshi. Koshi is quiet, but mercifully has a fair grasp of English thanks to a year spent in California. He is keen to learn slang, so I have been indoctrinating him with a few choice London rude boy turns of phrase to compliment his already terrifying arsenal of ‘bummer’ and ‘dude’. Despite his enthusiasm, he has a tough time grasping the concept of ‘wagwan’, let alone pronouncing it. With his help, I have enrolled with the university and have a rough timetable of grammar, kanji and culture classes. One of the latter being ‘Cool Japan’, a class involving a syllabus of sword waving, calligraphy and T-shirt painting. Last weeks calligraphy class involved public ridicule in front of the whole class because apparently my lovingly crafted kanji character looked like spongebob squarepants.

Last weekend served to take the edge off my somewhat dingy accommodation. I have a free Friday every week, and Monday was a national holiday. Cue triumphant four day weekend music. The Keio University guys live somewhere between Yokohama and Tokyo in an area called Hiyoshi, so Friday night was deemed to be a suitable time for sushi and Karaoke. Although almost too much of a cliché to be taken seriously, I totally understand the obsession with both. Forget Yo Sushi (which was set up by a rowdy Scotsman from dragon’s den), there is something undeniably weird and wonderful about ordering one more horse meat dish in broken Japanese and no-one thinking it out of the ordinary….although Black beauty was a bit stringy for my taste. I’m no singer, even in the shower, but a few drinks and a selection of songs the right side of the Pet Shop Boys meant that no tonal range was out of the question. Each karaoke booth faces onto a corridor, at the end of which were the loos and the manager’s desk. Returning from nature’s call to the booth revealed the reality of the situation. Brash English accented attempts to do any semblance of justice to ‘Man in the mirror’ drowning out any of the much more serious J-Pop renditions from our, by 5am, long suffering neighbours.

The slightly truncated time frame of all this is due to the fact that only today have I actually got internet in my room, thanks to a very efficient 10am wake up call by a Japanese IT gremlin, who sat on my floor for half an hour. We both revelled in the awkwardness of our inability to communicate until he told me that I was officially connected to the internet. Not that I understood him when he told me. So this smattering of accounts does justice to nearly two weeks of life in Japan. I have a few Japanese names in my phonebook, a few new friends on facebook and a growing addiction to a chocolate bar, amusingly called Crunky.