I was in Odaiba recently for the International Tokyo Toy Show. The sky was overcast and grey, making it the perfect weather for photographing the brightly-coloured boats. The light reflects oddly at this time, enhancing greens and, at twilight, naturally bringing out the now-ubiquitous teal and orange. Since it was June, you also get the iconic ‘raindrops dripping off hydrangeas’ photo.
The International Tokyo Toy Show (Also known as “Tokyo Omocha Show”) is the one of the first major ‘fun’ event to be held in Big Sight since the earthquake. Okay, there were trade fairs devoted to sales incentives and a few doujinshi markets, but nothing with sponsors. They weren’t even sure if it would go ahead considering both the Tokyo International Anime Fair and its new rival, Anime Contents Expo, were cancelled. Although numbers for both attendees and booths owners seemed like it was down, I’m glad they went through with it.
I must admit, fewer things caught my eye this year. However, the people behind Doubutsu Shougi (“Animal Shogi” or “Catch The Lion!”) were there again to give demonstrations. If you like board games or puzzles, I totally recommend this one. It has a few basic shougi pieces, represented by simple illustrations of animals and a reduced playing area. The pieces have the potential moves (mimicking actual shogi moves, obviously) included in the illustrations too.
This year they had a treat for us — a full shogi set with the same basic concept! That is, the legal moves for each piece are clearly marked and all pieces are adorable animals. These are a perfect gift for anyone, even adults (especially adults!).
Amongst other toys that caught my eye was Yummy Dough. According to the flyer, they started making it when a little German girl asked “Why can’t you eat clay?” Instead of replying “Because we said so,” they made edible play dough and set up children for a lifetime of bad decision-making. It looked like a pretty good idea, but I didn’t try any of their many samples, simply for all the children already pawing through them. There’s a photo of the booth below though.
Amongst other things I photographed was 4D Cityscape Time Puzzle from Yanoman. The concept isn’t new, but now Tokyo has been added to the list of 3D cities you can make. There were also plenty of sentai and tokusatsu rangers on display at the Bandai booth. Like Takara Tomy, their booth took up about a quarter of an entire hall. This time they were promoting Kaizoku Sentai Gokaiger (AKA Pirate Squadron Gokaiger), which is a mash-up of a Super Sentai show and pirates. Probably my favourite photographs were of Lego’s new magic-ninja-and-dragons model line, called Ninjago.
I was very pleased by what I found in the Takara Tomy booth. I’m a big fan of ‘we made it so-so-so cute that it stopped being cute and became creepy’ — I love soulless eyes, kigurumi cosplayers and life-sized dolls with visible balljoints that they didn’t have to include but did anyway. Good work guys, and I won’t be able to sleep for some time.
Here’s a list of Japanese Toy Awards 2011 grand prize winners. There are a few changes from the previous year (See a list in English here), although Bandai are still making sentai transformation belts and Anpanman keeps educating kids. This year, Takara Tomy took more wins all round and their winning entry for the Innovation Award, Ningen Gakki, looks particularly intriguing.
| Category | Name | Company | Sale Date | Price in Yen |
| Access For All Children “Kyouyuu” Award | Tomica Yubi-Con Series | Takara Tomy | June 2011 | 5,229 |
| Educational Award | Anpanman Touch de “AIUEO” o-kyoushitsu Kids Tablet [Link to .PDF] | Agatsuma | August 2011 | 7,329 |
| Boys’ Toy Award | Henshin Belt (Kamen Rider) DX OOO Driver O Medal Series | Bandai | September 2010 | 6,825 |
| Girls’ Toy Award | Licca-chan 31 Icecream Shop | Takara Tomy in association with Baskin Robbins | April 2011 | 4,725 |
| Character Toy Award | ONE PIECE LOGBOX | Megahouse | September 2010 | 630 |
| Innovative Toy Award | Ningen Gakki | Takara Tomy | June 2011 | 3,360 |
| High Target Award | nanoblock Tokyo Skytree and LED Plate | Kawada in association with Tokyo Skytree | September 2011 | 2625 (+1050) |
I hope you enjoyed my report and photographs from the International Tokyo Toy Show 2011. If you like anime, you might enjoy my cosplay photographs from Winter Comiket 2010. If you want more photographs from other big events like this toy fair, maybe you’ll prefer my report from last year’s Tokyo Game Show. Alternatively, click on the banner to your left to see photographs from other bloggers in Japan. You can also share this on Facebook or Twitter (amongst many other sites!) if you click the button to your left below.
Dragonflies hover over water lilies and irises by a lake at Showa Kinen Park in Tokyo. As the day progresses, the shadows get longer and the light more golden, allowing for some great photographs of flowers just before sundown.
The flowers were photographed at Cosmos Hill, when the sun was low in the sky, but not setting just yet. Depending on the angle of the camera and where I positioned the sun within the frame, I could make it look like normal daylight or eerie – as in the photographs.
The flowers in question are Nymphaea water lilies, bletilla (shiran) and foxgloves. You can also read my post featuring wallpaper-sized photographs of dragonflies and other insects.
First, the wallpapers. Hover your mouse over any photograph to find out further details. To see the photograph more clearly or to take it for your desktop, please click on it.
Here are some more photos of Cosmos Hill and the park lake.
I hope you enjoyed my photos of flowers. If you want to see more nature photography from the same area, you might also like my macro photography of dragonflies and other insects. If you want more traditional buildings with your nature photography though, maybe you’ll prefer my photographs from Kita-Kamakura. Alternatively, click on the banner to your left to see photographs from other bloggers in Japan. You can also share this on Facebook or Twitter (amongst many other sites!) if you click the button to your left below.
Summer is just about here, and that means watching dragonflies bob along in the tall grass while children run around with nets trying to catch them and other insects. Okay, some people run screaming and if that describes you, you should probably skip this post.
I love photographing insects at the macro level. A dragonfly’s wings are a beautiful, seemingly-random criss-cross design and — if you look closely — almost seem to be mechanical.
These macro photographs were all taken in Tachikawa, west Tokyo at Showa Kinen Park. You can also read about my first trip in summer and another trip in late winter, early spring. I intended these photos to be used as desktop wallpaper, hence the off-centred cropping (which I prefer anyway). Even if you never use them, I hope you will click on them to have a better look at the details.
I hope you enjoyed my photos of insects on flowers. If you want to see more nature photography, you might also like my photos of cherry blossom. If you want a more modern take though, maybe you’ll prefer my photographs from Kabukicho. Alternatively, click on the banner to your left to see photographs from other bloggers in Japan.
This Gantz 2 Perfect Answer review starts off with a brief synopsis and overview of my expectations for the second half of this two-parter. After that, the spoilers come pretty fast, so watch out. I’ve even included the ending for you.
In the first part (simply titled ‘Gantz’), Kurono Kei (Ninomiya Kazunari), Katou Masaru (Matsuyama Ken’ichi) and Kishimoto Kei (Natsuna) are recruited by a big black ball named Gantz to kill aliens. If they get one hundred points, received after killing sufficient numbers of aliens, they get to choose from a special prize menu. Said menu offers one of two choices — having your memory wiped and being returned safely to the real world, or bringing another person back from the dead. Katou and Kishimoto die after getting into a fight with giant alien Buddhist statues and Kurono vows to resurrect them.
Before I watched the second half, there was just one thing I wanted to know — who the man was inside Gantz. I guessed he was probably human, captured to power it. But I did have a certain amount of faith that the revelation behind the process would be worth seeing.
Overall, I thought there were some spectacular fight scenes in Gantz: Perfect Answer. The scene on the train was superb, although the climax was not as good as the one from the previous film and the plot arc wasn’t as tight. I thought it was a stronger movie than the previous one though and, having read up a little on the anime and manga, appeals to me more than the original works.
Here come the spoilers.
The writers have taken the break between films to introduce another plotline and a few original characters. Just to start with, a model named Ayukawa Eriko (Itou Ayumi) gets a tiny black Gantz ball in the mail that tells her to kill. There’s also an investigator (Yamada Takayuki as Shigeta Masamitsu) on the trail of Gantz, briefly glimpsed in the previous film. He’s so unimportant, I don’t know why they bothered.
As for the Gantz team, they are tasked with fighting aliens from Planet Black Suit. In Japanese, ‘black suit’ tends to imply a man employed by shady businesses (cabaret clubs, etc) and is possibly associated with the yakuza. Or not, as the case may be. In comparison to onion aliens from the first movie, this change seems positively sensible.
The fight scene on the train between the Gantz team and the aliens from Planet Black Suit features wuxia (“CGxia”) and gun kata. Also everyone has Gantz-themed katana because the guns take so long to charge, making for quicker and more visually appealing attacks. This was definitely my favourite scene.
By this time, my favourite character was Suzuki Yoshikazu (Taguchi Tomorowo). As he wasn’t played by a famous actor, I had written him off somewhat as an NPC, as background to the two main actors whose images are on the posters. However, when he chose to bring back Katou instead of going home, that’s when I really started cheering for him.
After the second major fight, between Kurono, Katou and a shape-shifting alien that has taken on Katou’s form, Kojima Tae (Yoshitaka Yuriko) turns up looking for Kurono. She is awful, but I don’t think any actress could have made this scene work. She runs towards Kurono as the alien slices her several times with his katana. Dying, she makes it to Kurono after shuffling along for a good minute or so. It would work as a manga sequence (and probably did!), possibly even in anime, but as a live action piece it looks ridiculous.
The final climactic battle is not much compared to the previous fight scenes. The two opposing sides stand in front of each other and open fire. As already shown in the first film, everyone is capable of returning from the dead. This is a huge barrier to good storytelling, particularly when you only have a short amount of time (unlike with manga) to show how difficult it is to get those one hundred points that make it possible.
However, the final battle causes Kurono Kei to achieve ‘maximum points’ and he can now have pretty much anything he wants (is this just me or does this sound like the climax to Madoka Magica?). So everyone comes back. Everyone, even Katou’s younger brother. The only one who doesn’t return to the real world is Kurono Kei.
…because he’s now inside the ball, powering it.
You might want to read my other reviews of movies that were adapted from manga, such as Kamui Gaiden (also starring Matsuyama Ken’ichi) and Kaiji: Jinsei Gyakuten Game.
It’s late April and bloggers showing off their photographs of cherry blossom are as inevitable as the blossoms themselves. For my part, I tried to do something a little bit different this year, by including interesting foregrounds and backgrounds, or just by adding people.
Up until recently, I would wait until just the right moment for the foot traffic to stop before I took a picture. I even have a full length picture somewhere of the Kamakura Daibutsu with no people in view. Have a look at my sakura photographs from last year where I specifically talk about waiting for that special (and rare) moment when no one is there.
This year, it was suggested (by Ishihara Shintarou) that we shouldn’t take part in hanami parties out of respect for the victims of the tsunami, even when said victims turned up and said, “Hey, we need you to have hanami parties so our area can recover financially!” Thankfully, the people of Tokyo listened to Tohoku rather than the politicians, and I wanted to show that. So, this year, instead of waiting for all the plastic swans to return to the boatyard, I took a picture more representative of what Inokashira Park is like during cherry blossom season.
Click through to see my photographs of sakura in Shibuya, in Inokashira Park and around its lake, near Tokyo Imperial Palace, and from Tama Graveyard. The photographs are fairly large this time, so they may take a while to load.
Not a day goes by without Shintaro Ishihara saying something offensive, whether it be against immigrants, members of the LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender) community or, well, everyone. It’s notable that one of the few times he retracted any of his controversial statements is when he blamed Japan for the tsunami that left thousands dead.
He’s a disgusting, pathetic man. And he just got re-elected governor of Tokyo.
I’d heard about the LGBT rights rally against him via Time Out Japan, but I hadn’t seen a thing about it anywhere else. I was somewhat intimidated by the idea of just turning up and finding out I was one of just a handful of people, but I figured I’d give it a go as defeating this kind of discrimination is close to my heart. While I rarely mention it on this blog (unless relevant, as when I ended up with an inadvertently purchased man-dress), I’m trans and as long as I want to work in Japan I have no option but to hide who I am. I can’t even work under my chosen name.
When I arrived at the designated starting point, it looked much like I’d thought. There were a few people milling around wearing rainbow hats and badges, but that was it. I stood and waited at the side, then took an over-sized rainbow flag when it was offered. There was one foreign press photographer covering the proceedings and I guess that by standing near the front, I ruined most of his pictures. Poor guy really was trying his hardest to avoid getting me in the frame. Sorry dude.
People started to arrive. By the time the march was ready to go, there were around four hundred people. While that doesn’t sound like much, that’s huge for LGBT rights in Japan. People are rather slow to protest here, but it’s been said that Japan is responding to the ‘demo boom’ across the world. Mostly though, this new level of participation is being seen in response to the nuclear reactors in Fukushima.
There were police waiting for us at the edge of the park, but that was to provide an escort though the streets of Shinjuku. I’d had no idea! I thought this was a small-scale protest, but entire streets around the station had been sectioned off. As we walked onto the streets, a white ‘election-style’ loudspeaker van with an anti-Ishihara slogan on it pulled out in front to lead the way. Thousands of people crowded along the streets to watch, some waving and some pulling out their cameras. It seemed unreal.
As we the demonstration reached the Tokyo Government Office, the chants changed. Instead of “Ishihara, apologise! We’re against discrimination!” it became “Ishihara, get out here now!”
He didn’t.
However, the experience was positive. People were listening and, more importantly, now understand that their private feelings about Ishihara are not unique to them. If you want to read more on the people behind the protest, People United, they have a website in English here.
Inspiration has been low these past few weeks. However, I’m now recommitted to blogging and I’m going to talk about some of the issues that have affected us recently, from the food shortages to the nuclear crisis.
Food Shortages
As I mentioned in my post on the actual earthquake, one of the first things I noticed was that people were buying up bread and onigiri from the convenience store a few hours afterwards. What I didn’t really expect was for it to continue.
Very soon, all food was gone from the shelves. We’ve been told that it was partly a result of fuel shortages, partly a result of stockpiling and partly a packaging shortage. Either way, stockpiling begat more stockpiling.
Restaurants haven’t been affected much (except for yoghurt desserts), just because it’s harder to tell someone face-to-face that you’re buying up all their hamburg steaks because you’re scared.
Work Resumes
I’ll admit it. I missed two days of work since the quake. The first was the Monday directly after, when there was just no getting there. I don’t know if the trains were down or not, but the station was filled wall-to-wall with black-suited businessmen just waiting for the ticket barriers to let them through. The line (such as it was) never moved.
With the trains either down, unreliable or just plain overcrowded, bicycles were selling out fast though. See the photo showing bicycles almost sold out at Don Quijote — they don’t have many left (although I should have taken the photo further back to show that).
I also missed a Friday. On Thursday, the usually calm and rational British Embassy announced that British citizens should consider leaving Tokyo. I was perplexed and a little scared. What happened? What had changed? They had been an official voice of reason up until that moment, so the switch was worrying. I approached my direct boss and explained that the advice from the British embassy had changed and they were telling us to think carefully about leaving Tokyo. I wouldn’t be at work on Friday, but I hoped to return on the next working day once I’d figured out what was going on. She seemed surprised I was still coming to work at all and was great about the whole thing.
An aspect of my Japanese language ability had come full circle. Years ago, I had started out with “Japanese For Busy People” and my very first words had been bengoshi (lawyer) and taishikan (embassy). I had finally used one of these in a real conversation.
The Media
The mainstream media has failed us. Our 24-hour media culture has produced an unending stream of worst-case scenarios, sketchy experts and retweets across the globe. The people who have left us most informed are nuclear experts who have been consulted directly by the Japanese government and interpreted via amateur translation, along with nuclear physicists with their own blogs. Meanwhile, over in the US, they hire a anti-nuclear string theorist for their broadcasts and guest blog posts. Nuclear reactor safety ain’t rocket science… it’s nuclear reactor science.
I’ve also seen news stories that relied on a single frightened foreigner as their only source. That’s how we get front page headlines from The Sun describing Tokyo as a “CITY OF GHOSTS”. You can still get a pizza delivered in under thirty minutes in this ghost town though.
In the weeks that followed, I became addicted to Twitter. I would’ve been better off developing a crack habit. I’d check to see if there were reports of plumes from the reactors before doing anything. The answer was frequently ‘yes’, but with no follow-up tweets to say that actually it had just been a regular fire with no radioactive material and had been put out twenty minutes later. That news doesn’t travel fast, if at all.
My solution was to follow more direct sources (@bosai_tokyo, @mextjapan and @OfficialTEPCO) and those translating from direct sources or retweeting using common sense (@DailyYomiuri, @TimeOutTokyo, @YokosoNews, @makiwi, @stevenagata, @Matt_Alt, @martyn_williams, @tokyotimes and @gakuranman). I suppose I should be vaguely concerned that the same government department who created Eigo Note is the same one advising us on nuclear safety. Oh well.
I have since successfully left my apartment for activities other than going to work, such as the Tokyo Comedy Store’s Tsunami Benefit Gig and to see Ghost In The Shell S.A.C. Solid State Society 3D.
Blackouts
When I first heard about the blackouts, I was fine with them. I wouldn’t be able to use the CD player during English lessons or my computer in the evenings, but I understood it was necessary to help those up north. Bye bye to “Hello Song.”
Ironically, the blackouts have killed more people than the radiation so far. By shutting down the traffic lights, road accidents increased. I also believe that the blackouts contributed to the feeling of unease and may have promoted stockpiling. There is nothing like walking home in silence by the light of a fading sunset surrounded by traffic police officers with flashing red batons at street crossings. If there was ever a time when Tokyo lived up to the description of “apocalyptic” as applied by US media, that was it.
The blackouts have more-or-less stopped now, although they may return with the increased electricity usage that comes with summer. The reason for this is worth thinking about for all of us. Convenience stores and other major chains have dimmed their lights and stores in central Tokyo have turned off their music and advertising. In doing so, they have reduced electricity consumption by roughly the same amount as provided by a nuclear power station.
“Flyjin”
I’ve noticed a lot of hatred for foreigners leaving Tokyo who have been dubbed “flyjin” by their fellow expats. It’s understandable that they should feel that way. By denigrating others for their ‘cowardice,’ we incidentally render our actions as ‘brave’ in comparison. And, as has always been the case, no one is so publicly abusive to gaijin as other gaijin.
But one thing I have to take issue with is the description of “flyjin” as “not a real word.” This is in my field of interest as I have a joint degree in linguistics and teach English in Japan, which is a rare kind of synergy. Anyway, a word that is used and understood in conversations (both online and offline) is a perfectly valid word, regardless of source. Specifically, it’s a neologism, or ‘new word’. Doesn’t matter if only one person coined it (that’s usually how these things start); if it gets picked up and used enough to be noticed as flyjin clearly has, then it’s a real word.
Nuclear power
It may come as a surprise, but I’m not against nuclear power. What is clear, however, is that we’re doing it wrong. As workers fight to stop Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant from exploding, a whole range of TEPCO screw-ups has been revealed. Everything from not anticipating a very big tsunami in a country renowned for very big tsunami to ignoring engineers who came forward years ago to say the whole design was a mistake. Clearly humanity is too stupid for nuclear power… yet.
Pro-nuclear folks have talked about safer reactor designs (e.g. reactors with passively safe checks in place), so let’s research that. We also need more oversight, for all of us close enough to the reactor to worry and who have bet our lives on our Google-achieved understanding that the radiation won’t affect our area and who can now see how we would have handled it differently had we been in charge.
If you are looking for information in an emergency, please skip to the links at the end. Thank you.
It was an ordinary afternoon at my workplace in Saitama. I was just about to start marking my fifth graders’ classwork when the windows started rattling. Neither of the other two teachers in the staffroom had reacted, but I had stopped hunching over my desk and was bolt upright, looking around the room. As a foreigner from England, where we don’t have earthquakes, I often find myself more interested and worried about even the smallest tremors than the average Japanese person.
It continued, but I’ve been here long enough to see that too. Just the other day we had a smaller quake (7.2 magnitude, but much further away from civilisation) while I was teaching a class. The kids got under their desks for a few minutes, then we learned ‘earthquake’ in English.
This earthquake intensified. The vice principal realised something was wrong then and sprang to the PA system near her desk. The curriculum advisor threw open the staffroom doors and rushed out into the corridor. The whole building shook violently and things fell off the shelves. I braced myself against the white painted cupboards by the window and my desk.
There was a row of potted plants on the cupboards by the window. One by one, they rolled off and smashed. Mugs tumbled out of the cupboard in the hot drinks area and the photocopiers came away from the wall and smashed into the metal cases filled with English teaching material.
My life didn’t flash before my eyes. My first thought when there’s an earthquake is ‘is the epicentre close to us, or is the earthquake very far away and even worse?’ I thought about my partner, working in a tall building in Tokyo and then what a stupid, boring day I’d had. When I came in to the school that morning, the secretary exclaimed how much weight I’d lost recently. I thanked her and mentioned it was thanks to her responding to my request to give me less rice (etc) for school lunch than the other teachers (and about the same amount as the kids). But when I got to lunch, I had even fewer noodles than my usual half-portion to go with my miso ramen! So what would be a funny anecdote otherwise was going to be part of my last day alive…
After what seemed like several minutes, it stopped. A class all wearing their bousai zukin filed out into the playground. A bousai zukin is a padded and reflective silver hood worn during fire drills that — for 99% of the school year — is hidden away inside a blue or red cushion cover and used as seat padding in class. I looked around the staffroom, decided that there was nothing I could do and dashed out into the corridor and ankle-depth water.
It wasn’t a burst pipe, but the row of goldfish tanks outside had been shaken so much that they’d thrown about half their contents (sans goldfish — I checked) over the side. I ran through it and towards the shoe lockers and school entrance. The classes kept coming and I took charge of the kids in tears.
The principal brought out an envelope with registers for all the classes — but no one had any pens. By chance, I had a pink gel pen in my trouser pocket. An hour or so ago, I’d been drawing pictures of animals and signing notebooks for Class 3-X, who’d just had their final English lesson of the year with me (The school year ends in March in Japan). I handed over my pen to the nearest homeroom teacher and apologised for its pinkness. She didn’t seem to mind.
Registers completed, the teachers all gathered in a circle and were given the briefest details based on what could be figured out by cellphone – there had been a Shindo Level 3 earthquake in Iwate prefecture (Completely incorrect). By that time, a large group of mothers had arrived at the school gates and, once the signal was given, charged inside the playground to take their kids home.
In many ways, that made things worse.
Because all the kids whose parents weren’t able to make it there yet didn’t understand why and assumed the worst. Momo (8) kept sobbing and repeating her older brother’s name again and again. He was a middle school student right next door to the school, so why wasn’t he there yet? She rose up on her knees and threw her arms around me. Next to her, Ume (also 8) was crying for her mother. Sakura (12) sat with her arms around her legs, her face blotchy from crying. I sat with her for a bit and she told me she was perfectly fine and eventually started smiling when I switched to English, because she thinks it sounds funny.
Some kids were enjoying it. Sugi (10) wanted to play rock, paper, scissors with me and Kashiwa (7) didn’t understand what was going on and wanted to chat with me about cats. Another kid exclaimed that it wasn’t scary, it was FUN. Some of the kids pointed to the outside of the gymnasium with excitement, where a huge chunk of metal casing had fallen from the wall.
I approached a teacher and asked if there was any news from Tokyo, because that was where my partner worked. No news, although they speculated that while it was further from the epicentre, the ground was softer, and so it could go either way. An aftershock hit and, even though the ground was shaking, I ran back to hug Momo and Ume.
We’ve been hit with unpredictable weather lately from days as warm as in early summer to snow. Yesterday was cold and the children were freezing. My legs were still shaking, but I claimed to be cold too. A few children asked me if we had earthquakes in England, and when I said we didn’t, replied wistfully, “Wow, that would be nice…” The principal and vice-principal made the decision to move the few remaining children into the gymnasium. We were surrounded by graduation posters, including one with 1000 paper cranes. It was just like a scene out of a zombie movie, with all the survivors holed up together, and thinking about it like that made it feel a bit less real. One by one, more parents turned up and their kids ran to them, grabbing their waists. Eventually, they were all reunited with their parents and big brothers, including Momo and Ume.
At last, I was given permission to enter the main building and I went straight for my phone. Partner was safe and had texted me already. A teacher asked me if I was okay and, away from the kids, I completely lost it.
Now I had to get home. Although my workplace is in Saitama, I live in Tokyo. A teacher told me that the new teacher, Momiji-sensei, also lived in Tokyo and, although the trains were probably stopped, we could attempt the journey together. Momiji stopped off at a convenience store first, which was packed with people. You couldn’t move in there. All the ready-to-eat items (bread and onigiri, mainly) were gone. At the train station, there were barriers up and guards in place. They told us the elevated track had fallen down, but we could get a discount on the buses, if they came. Momiji and I took a step back to discuss our options and, as we did so, the guards brought down the shutters. I guess I’d thought the trains would stop for a few hours and then start right back up again.
We had no choice but to walk into Tokyo. There was a steady stream of salarymen coming at us, who were walking out of the city. We passed a large number of shops on the way that were open and doing great business — mainly restaurants and bicycle shops. One of them was a second-hand shop which prominently displayed a wide-screen TV showing footage from Shinjuku station. We all stood around it and watched. It was chaos and I knew then that I would have to walk all the way home, without trains or buses. I parted ways with Momiji-sensei and plotted a direct route to my apartment on my phone with Google Maps across the middle of nowhere. In total, I would have to walk 32km. Luckily, I’m physically fit and walk around Tokyo quite regularly, although my record up until that point was 22km in one day.
A very strange thing happened next. I was walking through said middle of nowhere, when suddenly one of my foreign coworkers (an English teacher in the same district, many kilometres away) appeared in front of me. I explained what I was doing and he took me home where I got a mug of coffee, his wife cooked a delicious Japanese meal and he charged up my phone. There was also a TV and every single terrestrial channel had earthquake and tsunami news. It was currently on an NHK affiliate which had dedicated itself to broadcasting messages from viewers to their loved ones who were missing. It was heartbreaking — and I was also starting to get a sense of the scale of the quake.
He said I could stay the night in his mother-in-law’s house. I thanked him and said I wanted to continue walking. More than anything, I wanted to get back to my partner and check on my cat, but if I hadn’t met him there, I would never have made it. The local Metro station was now open, and I took the train straight to a connecting station on the Chuo Line (the central line connecting Tokyo and its western suburbs). Unfortunately, that line was down, like all other JR lines. In total, it cut around 2km off my journey. And so I replotted my route and resumed walking. I was now walking away from Tokyo, along the main commuter route. Thousands of salarymen and university students were walking side-by-side. Along the way, I realised that while my phone wasn’t sending messages to my partner, I could reach him if I used e-mail because the data network was still working. And so we met up about 5km later.
We got back just before 2:00am, having walked just over 29km. The cat was safe (not even particularly flustered!) and a pile of papers had fallen down — suggesting nothing like what had happened in Saitama. I charged my phone and read the internet, looking up everyone I know in Japan. Everyone is safe, even one doujinshi artist who lives in Sendai.
Note: This is a completely true account of what happened… excluding the names of the people involved. Sorry if you feel it’s self-indulgent (it feels that way to me), but I had to type it all out. I will be remembering this day for a long time.
However, while Tokyo has barely been affected, Sendai and the surrounding areas are devastated. For more information on emergency procedures and how to help, try the following links:
Time Out: Emergency contact numbers and shelters Also states that Bic Camera are offering a free phone charging service at all their stores. Never underestimate the importance of a charged phone in an emergency.
Facebook: Tell your Facebook friends you’re okay, quickly
Google: Person Finder
Yahoo: Where To Donate
Here’s another personal account from a friend in Tokyo.
Those of you who read this blog for my movie and theatre reviews are probably wondering about the safety of your favourite celebrities in Japan. It’s okay, it’s only natural. Here are some lists of those who have checked in: voice actor listing, Musical Prince of Tennis listing, Jrock listing.
In Tokyo, it snowed for the first time on Foundation Day, a national holiday in Japan. We’d only just had Setsubun on February 3rd, which officially marked the start of spring. After holding back on us in Tokyo all winter, leaving the rest of the world and other parts of Japan buried under snow, it finally came through. Exactly the same as last year.
On seeing the snow, I immediately wanted to take my camera out in it, preferably with some traditional buildings. But where?
I chose to run all the way to the Edo-Tokyo Open Air Architectural Museum to photograph historical Japanese buildings in the snow. There were also plum trees (梅/ume) in bloom in the surrounding area. Enjoy the photos — there are a lot this time.
