Same Same, but Different

Faced with the odious task of filling up three weeks of interim nothingness during the easter holidays, with a little help from the usual `friend of a friend's cousin's old school mate' connection, I am now filling up my time as a bona-fide salaryman (complete with 90 minute commute from cabbage patch parkway to skyscraper central) at Nishifutsu Boeki KK. I'm not exactly gainfully employed, but they do cover my expenses and I would willingly pay good money to not spend all day everyday eating pot noodles and watching back episodes of never mind the buzzcocks.

The morning commute honestly needs to be experienced. No matter how much rambling prosaic rubbish I put down here, it wont do it justice. Fifteen minutes after stumbling out of my dormitory half asleep avoiding the incredulous gaze of considerably more japanese looking businessmen, it begins. It takes three trains to get to my office, each one more violent and cramped than the last. People on these trains cannot be counted as individuals, they are all part of a seething mass of suits obediently slammed against doors, windows and other matching white shirted office workers. There's not even enough space for the usual unspoken racial barrier; there's no room to speak let alone worry that there's a foreign invader sandwiched in amongst them all. A rising sense of panic grows inside me when I know that soon I have to get off the train, it feels like an almost herculean distance is required to get through the thousand odd people between where I am stood and the briefly open doorway(although standing is used loosely, because if I suddenly lost consciousness, quite possible considering how tired I usually feel at such an ungodly hour, I would remain in the exact same position bouyed up by the complete lack of air space between anyone). A little bit like a well shaken coke can, when the doors open people dont walk out, its not a conscious decision, they are expelled onto the platform. I imagine for most of them, they cut their losses and walk regardless of whether its the right station or not. If nothing else I am considerably more awake when I get to the office than I might otherwise have been.

Nishifutsu Boeki KK is a strange company, the name couldnt be more Japanese but in fact it is the primary importer for european luxury food and drinks. My mission is straight forward; I am to come to the office at 9 and then spend the rest of the day secretly investigating cafes and bars around Tokyo and reporting on their usage and placement of the company's products. This probably means one of two things. Firstly, that they didnt have a clue what to do with me and so have sent me out into the city to do 'research' for them, whilst they wipe their brow and get on with the actual business. Or secondly, that I am a pretty good person to use as an inoffensive industrial spy and I can always rest on my slightly crappy Japanese to say 'I'm sorry I dont understand' when my cover is blown.

I have spoken a massive ammount of Japanese, but unfortunately the western people who work here are french. This has lead to a few embarrasing situations where I have unwittingly engaged someone in the wrong language or worse still, in an incomprehensible hybrid of english french and Japanese. They're not exactly related languages either. Japanese office banter is mercifully easier to understand than the chat I was party to last weekend, when my aptly named bartender friend Hiro took me skiing for the afternoon with his family.

Hiro has the coolest lifestyle. He owns a kookly little bar littered with surf equipment and neon bar signs. He stands behind his bar in snowboarding t-shirts and oversized basketball tops in front of a floor to ceiling collection of vinyls, none of which are japanese. Immediately in the top thirty Japanese people ever. He also uses his bar as the front for a snowboard clothing shop. Since his bar is roughly big enough to fit five people in, he pretty much chooses when he is open. So when he's not, he goes off skiing. He must have reacted positivly towards my constant requests for Phil Collins because I found myself being used as a totally different kind of marketing tool, this time on the slopes as he tried to sell neon camoflage hoodies to Japanese snowboarders who quite clearly already had clothes on.

Tokyo commuting and Japanese night skiing to a Simply Red soundtrack have done more than enough to cure my recent existential funk. For good measure though, I went to the redlight district for a spot of gay clubbing. I dont know if I have the courage to write about that quite yet though.