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Retrospective

My Other Life











Monday March 19th
Today was the day that I used up that last of my Japanese orange-menthol toothpaste. It was also the day that I missed my return flight back to Tokyo. As far as my life in Japan was concerned, it really was goodbye.

Upon returning home the first thing people tended to ask me was "So did you have a good time?" Now this is actually a rather difficult question to answer, the first reason being that one needs to answer it it no more than twenty seconds . Which is the average attention span of a mate down the pub. The second reason is that it is impossible to answer honestly. I mean what nine months of anyone's life is all good? So of course I said that I had a great time - which I did. Mostly. Though some of it was difficult.

If people were interested enough, they may then have followed on with a second question....

"How long are you back for?"
- Who knows? But I am not going back to Japan if that is what you mean. I quit my job.

"So what will you miss the most now you are home?"
- I don't know. 'Stonecutters' on a Thursday night - drinking parties at izakayas. Being able to get on a train and go to Shibuya or Shinjuku and just wandering about. Seeing new places. I mean there was still so much left for me to discover.

Actually, I will miss everything. My friends, the weird use of English on packaging, the efficiency of the trains, the local internet cafe, my students, neon, earthquakes, the crowds and the constant surpises that one comes across daily in a culture that never ceases to fascinate.

"What was the food like?"
- Like Japanese food. Being vegetarian, this limited my choice of things to eat in Japanese restaurants, but I got by. You can buy most things you want in the supermarket and in Tachikawa there was an excellent international food store (but it was very expensive). Tokyo is not as cosmopolitan as London, so apart from McDonalds and Subway, western food can be fairly tricky to seek out.


"What was the weirdest thing you ate?"
- Natto. It is made from fermented soya beans. This is a picture of me eating some deep fried natto in seaweed. It smells like old feet. The Japanese eat it for breakfast. I was tempted to try fugu (a.k.a blow fish or puffer fish) most of my students had tried it and assured me that it is not at all dangerous. The poison is just in the liver. Nevertheless, I know for a fact that a few people die every year after eating fugu that has not been prepared properly.















"What was your best experience?"

- That is tough, but probably watching the sunrise from the top of Mount Fuji. I had so many fantastic experiences though that I will never forget. Oh, and freakspotting.

"What was your worst experience?"
- Getting a taxi back home from a club in Shibuya at 4am. It was my first weekend in Tokyo and I hadn't quite got my head around the distances between places. It cost me £90.







"Did you meet lots of nice people?"
- Yes.

"Did you do karaoke?"
- I am afraid to say that yes, I did indeed do karaoke - at my welcome party and my leaving party. I seem to recall singing 'Barbie Girl'. Ouch.

"So is your Japanese really good?"
- No. To be honest, it is almost non-existent. I got away with the bare minimum. Although I can read and write Katakana. Slowly.







"What was your apartment like?"
- It was a cross between a high security fridge and a shoebox.




"How did you feel as a foreigner out there?"
- Conspicuous but tolerated and on a good day very welcomed.





"How was the teaching?"
- Great. Just over a year ago I would not have thought I could teach. I truly believed that I would not be able to stand infront of a class of people and teach them but once I got over the initial nerves in the first week or two, I loved it. I was also incredibly lucky to have such wonderful students, they were all such nice people. Teaching the kids was the biggest challenge. I only had a couple of hours training before I was presented with a class of five four year olds who were running around throwing things at me. Anyway, I eventually won them over.


"Was Tokyo really expensive?"
- I would say that most things were either the same or slightly less expensive than in England. which was a surprise because I heard that Tokyo was the second most expensive city in the world, next to Oslo. However, you can pay up to £15 for one single peach.

"What's big in Japan?"
Baseball, Converse trainers, clothes for pets, cell phones, Twenty Four (the TV series), keitai tags, sleeping on trains, suicide, Mega Macs, anime comics, superstition, power drinks, cram school, a sense of duty, overtime, dying your hair ginger, saying 'yes' when you mean 'no'....




....public drunkeness, Cup Noodles, green tea flavour Haagen Dazs, vending machines, karaoke, bento boxes, bowing, iced-coffee, cycling, Luis Vuitton, Hello Kitty, white gloves, 100 yen stores, Mickey Mouse and dressing up like Elvis on a Sunday afternon.





Beyond that, my life in Japan will remain an unknown to most people back home. Just as my life back home was an unknown to everyone I met in Japan. The only thing these two lives had in common - was me.