The Spring of my Life
“Haha, ffs” or half a day in Tokyo
“C desu ka?”
“Yes I think C”
“Or E?”
“Could be, but I think C”
“We’ll check E”.
The trip must begin with an ode to the strapping lads of the Haneda customs hall. After a 15hr flight and a 2hr slalom through immigration, I decided to extend my stay in customs by leaving my backpack safely by the side of a bench as I blithely filled in my customs declaration - no, I’m not importing any livestock, just a two-legged buffoon. I notice how light I feel as I glide towards the scrum of drivers with name boards outside arrivals and, suddenly weighed down with panic, scuttle back through the doors that mean to be labelled “no return”.
Imitating snails
Slow and forming a shell shape -
Time to salt things up.
I was able to explain what I thought had happened, guessing rightly that in Japanese it’s bakkupakku -the young chap in uniform gamely demonstrated he had understood by pointing theatrically to a bebackpacked Korean family who must have thought I was grassing them up for something.
On a first sweep (in which area E was checked but not C), no dice. I was told to leave and maybe call the central customs office in Tokyo in the morning. Oh god. I told him what was in the bag (ie, all the essentials for the trip) and he, rather informally, laughed “maji ka?” (trans: haha, ffs).
I left customs again and asked the lady on the information desk what I might do. If you’re going to lose something, the secure part of an airport is probably a decent place to do it. In a glowing recommendation for her colleagues in customs, she reassured me that “those guys are quite busy and not so good at looking for things”. Nav may say the same about me, but I have not chosen as a profession one where physically locating things is high up the syllabus.
Haneda customs -
Can the stupid English guy
See my raised eyebrows?
Anyway, a few moments after having resolved that a can or two of Yebisu Premium Malts - the best beer in Japan, of which more anon - was the best way to calm down as we waited for the bakkupakku to present itself to officials, the same guy I had spoken to a mere five minutes earlier asked if I was the person who had lost a bag or, turning to bald, Indian, wearing his own backpack Nav, “was it you?”
I was soon reunited with the bag and, after a formal bow to the lads behind the customs desk and a rather over the top “kokoro kara, arigatō gozaimasu” (from the bottom of my heart, thanks so much - it’s a line I’d heard the old diva Misora Hibari use tearily at the end of her farewell concert), I was reunited with my sense of levity.
春
We’re staying in a rather camp old hotel in Kanda, with wood panels, green carpets, and those old bedside radio sets which, this being Japan, still work. We checked in and I explained to the lady on the desk that we had booked for tomorrow a table in their (famous) tempura restaurant. There then ensued an explanation of some important-seeming piece of coupon-related protocol. Having nodded my way through it, I was too embarrassed to say I hadn’t understood, so we bowed and allowed the chatty bellboy Yamada-kun to take us upstairs. I’ve either won a coupon, or maybe some lucky coupon winners have taken our table. Perhaps it’s coupons for dinner.
Clocking the calibre of its guests, the hotel - Yama-no-Ue or “Hilltop” - requires you to hand in your key for safekeeping. We had a stroll through our quiet neighbourhood to a little tonkatsu place I had had recommended. Laughing, the owner told us it was last orders and we had just made it (trans: “haha, ffs”).
After some delicious friend pork, we shuffled off. On the walk home, peering into the ground floor of some office block, we saw Japan in a single image: there in the dark, by a thickly blossoming cherry tree, we saw a sinister-looking robot - the offspring of Wall-E and a Dalek - going about some in-the-dark robot business. Cleaning? Perhaps. World domination? Also perhaps.
It seemed to detect our presence and stopped to look. Before it had a chance to calculate whether or not to vaporise us, we scarpered back up the hill.
“Exterminate” says
The cleaning bot with big dreams -
Blossoms: “I’ll be back”.
In the tiny wood-panelled hotel bar, Nav had the house cocktail (“za hirrutoppu”) and I had a mugi shōchū (a clear spirit made from buckwheat). The tuxedo-clad barman seemed younger than his silver hair suggested, and he had developed an excellent line in ice topiary: his poor knives must need so much sharpening. The shōchū was excellent and had come out of a very gracefully designed bottle: I kept telling him it was a “very lovely bottle” and can’t help but think that might have sounded euphemistic.
In all events, we weren’t his most annoying clientele. Next to us a very drunk Japanese couple were arguing loudly. She kept slurring at him to go home, including by asking the barman to tell him to. He said nothing (trans: haha, ffs). The husband kept saying “enough, enough”, but it ended happily with a kiss - all very unJapanese this - and her staggering out of the bar backwards.
Nav wrote:
Blossoms near over,
A lover’s tiff in Tokyo -
Yama no Ue.
I wrote:
Language barrier’s
The gossip’s worst enemy -
Trying to eavesdrop.
To bed at 4pm GMT. No doubt to wake before 4 Japan time.
Sayōnara for now.