This picture may appear late, but it was actually taken at about six in the morning on Saturday.
徹夜する, or “tetsuyasuru”, is the Japanese verb for “to do an all-nighter”. I’ve already written about two all-nighters we’ve done in Sakae in the past, but this Friday was something else because we were with our friends who are also in Japan with GAP, although in different parts of the country. Rhys and I are living in Nagoya, very central Japan in the Aichi prefecture. Tom, Lee and David are also in Aichi but a couple hours train ride away in a much smaller city called Nishio. Lucy and Lee-Anna came all the way from Kumamoto in Kyushu, which was more like a couple hours plane ride. For some basic Japanese geography, the country is split into three main islands. Hokkaido to the north, well known for Sapporo and the blue-eyed Ainu Japanese; Honshu, the largest of the three and containing Nagoya, Tokyo and Osaka; and Kyushu in the south west. Kyushu is a long way from Nagoya, so it was great to have the opportunity to meet up with Lee-Anna and Lucy.
Not that they only came to see us of course. Whilst we had our nights out in Sakae and Yagoto, and Lucy and Lee-Anna spent their days shopping in Parco, the original reason for the trip was a gig at Club Quattro. I’ve been lucky enough to see The Shins twice in the past in England, but seeing them in my Japanese hometown of Nagoya is something I will never be able to forget. Although the Kumamoto girls took three days holiday from work to visit us here, Rhys and myself still worked full days Wednesday to Friday – which is probably a good part of the reason for me feeling so drained today. That said, it was all so worth it.
I managed to get off work a bit early on Wednesday thanks to all of the clocks in the surgery ward being 5 to 10 minutes fast. This is so they’re never late, one of the nurses was explaining to me, but I’ve already been inconvenienced by it like when I go down to the pharmacy for the medicine at 9:30 and… hey wait! It’s not ready yet. I got changed and ran to Yagoto Nisseki station as the train doors were closing, but very kindly they opened them back up for me. I was pretty surprised as they keep to a very tight schedule, as were the girls sat opposite me exclaiming “yasashii, yasashii!” (friendly). After a quick change at Motoyama, I met up with Lucy and Lee-Anna at my favourite meeting place, Oasis 21. It was a long time since we’d seen each other, so we had a bit of a chat before me and Lee-Anna took off to Club Quattro to see The Shins.
I mentioned Club Quattro, or “kurabu kuratoro” in Nihonglish, a couple of posts ago as it’s where Rhys and I went to see The Cribs last month, but I don’t think I spoke of it in much detail. It’s situated in a slightly unusual place, on the top floor of a huge department store called Parco. Inside there’s a bar, merchandise kiosk and a small locker room to stash bags and that kind of thing. The room is tiny though! I’ve been to several gigs at one of the Manchester Academies back in England and I would say Quattro is a little smaller, making it a fantastic intimate venue. Also, because The Shins aren’t that massive over here, the room didn’t fill up early like it would have in England or America. This meant Lee-Anna and me were able to hang out around the bar and talk to an American exhange student we met there until 10 minutes before the band appeared, yet still be mere metres away from them when they started.
Although I’ve seen the Shins twice in the past, I wasn’t so familiar with their music. In the last couple of months I’ve gotten a hold of all three of their albums and listened the hell out of them, so I knew all but one (new) song that they played. Lee-Anna managed to get a setlist after the gig but I can’t remember the exact order, however I got to hear all of my favourites like Know Your Onion!, Caring is Creepy and So Says I. Additionally, whilst there were far more westerners at this particular gig than the other two I’ve been to so far, me and Lee-Anna were able to talk directly with the band during the show, something I’ve never experienced before. Most of the talk just revolved around Lee-Anna having their babies after the gig but still! Another very memorable moment was that during one of the songs, loads of people threw the balloons we’d been given as we entered the venue into the air and hit them around for the entirety of the song. This reminded me of the Flaming Lips gigs where there are hundreds of huge red and yellow balloons floating in the arena, but this was special because it was totally spontaneous.
After the music was all finished with, we talked to a few english teachers who were also at the gig, and then went to meet up with Lucy and Rhys to get a couple of drinks at a bar we know in Sakae called Heaven’s Door, which is a pretty small place with a huge record collection full of classics. It’s a nice place but can be a little too quiet, sometimes we can meet people there but sometimes we have no luck. We both had work the next day and thus had to get the last train home, so after a beer and some tequila, Rhys and I said our goodbyes to the girls and went back home. We’d have plenty of time to socialise on the following two nights, anyway.
We wanted to show Lee-Anna and Lucy our local bar, so on Thursday after work we met them outside Yagoto Nisseki station and walked to Soda Pop. As it is from time to time midweek, the place was pretty dead, but we sat around with a few drinks and some food and shared some of the stories we’d all accumulated in the last two months. We played a bit of pool too, the games were quite fair since we were both equally unskillful and equally unsober. Drinking in a bar is expensive though, and the girls wanted to see how our apartments were so we ambled back home, stopping at Lawson on the way to get some ice for the shochu. Shochu is a Japanese spirit I’ve grown quite fond of very recently as Lee-Anna was recommending it. It’s mixed 50/50 with water and it must be with ice. It has a nice flavour which doesn’t taste too much like alcohol as vodka does, and as it is made from things like potatoes it’s comparatively good for you. I had a hangover on Friday morning but it was much more pleasant than the kind I’m used to from beer.
We went back to my apartment and had quite a bit of it. Although Lee-Anna told us our apartments were without a doubt smaller than the ones she and Lucy had down in Kyushu, it was nice to hear that it wasn’t significantly so. She thought they were pretty cosy, which I guess they are. The kitchen is way too small but other than that I can live here with no complaints. This time it was Lucy and Lee-Anna that had to get the last train home – taxis are as extortionate in Japan as they are back home - so at eleven something they took some of the excess booze and went back home. Work the next day was a little hard going after two busy nights, but we pulled through and got ready for one more.
The red cross hospital Lucy and Lee-Anna are working for in Kyushu treats them very nicely. After they told their coordinator at the hospital that they were planning a trip to Nagoya to see a band, they gave them an itinerary, organised and paid for the flights and the hotel. As a result, I’m not sure whether it was them or the hospital that picked the hotel in Sakae, but either way it was amusingly in the middle of the red light district. We met up with the girls in Sakae near the station and they took us back to the hotel to chat, wait for the Nishio guys to come up, and do a bit of predrinking.
After an hour or so with the four of us, Lucy got a call from one of the Nishio guys and went to find them. Even though they live very close to them, this is the first time we’d seen them since the couple of days we had in Tokyo way back in September, so obviously we had loads to talk about with them. Lee brought his girlfriend also, a girl called Yurika who spoke perfect English with a southern British accent. As it turned out, she was also a huge Shins fan so was green with envy as soon as she found out where we’d been two nights earlier. Lucy and Lee-Anna had already heard of a bar in Sakae that Rhys and I weren’t familiar with, called Underground. We wandered around for a good long while trying to find it, on the way walking past a man handing out flyers. This is a common annoyance in many parts of Nagoya, but this time I couldn’t refuse as he was wearing a pink bunny suit.
Anyway, we somehow found it and went up to the bar. Despite being called Underground, it was on the third floor of a pretty big building. To get to the entrance we walked past a lot of Japanese people who looked far rougher than anyone we’d came across before. We quickly abandoned ship on the idea of going there however when it turned out it’d cost us a couple extra thousand to get in because we were gaijin, and they were IDing us. All was not lost however! A couple of floors below, we found a nice bar called Soulground where we settled for the next few hours. We hadn’t really made concrete plans for Saturday, but after hearing a recommendation for the aquarium in Nagoya, I was quite interested in going. For some reason after many tequilas this became a burning desire, much to the amusement of the other gappers, who the next day were quoting back to me various things. After paying a horrendously expensive bill, most of the gappers retired to the hotel but Rhys, Lee-Anna, myself and David went to Denny’s for some breakfast.
I asked Rhys the following day how good my Japanese was after I was drunk, and whilst I can apparently remember most of the vocabulary I’ve learnt, my grammar is beyond terrible. That said, I somehow forgot the word “ramen” and when Rhys and Lee-Anna were quizzing me on what I’d just eaten, the most I could struggle out was “Soup…y… Soupy noodles!”. Nevertheless, we got one of the early trains back and got about four hours of sleep at the apartments, only to be awoken by Tom asking if we wanted to meet them in Sakae at Outback Steakhouse for some lunch. It was as good an idea as any, so after a quick shower the four of us went back to meet them. I was happy to see I didn’t feel any worse than some of my companions looked, and we sat around talking about the night previous and planning our day.
In the end, we didn’t do a whole lot. Tom wanted to buy Windows Vista because he’d bought a laptop two weeks earlier only to realise he couldn’t actually understand a Japanese only computer. So we went with him and some of the others to an electronics shop in Osu. Like many of the shops here it was’t just an electronics shop but it sold pretty much everything, so it was fun to look around for a bit. The best part of this shop however had to be the salesman who was explaining the product to Yurika in Japanese. I don’t think words can convey the hilariousness of his squeeky voice, but we were somehow able to capture a video of it that will be on this site very soon (as soon as I can fix my youtube thing out). He was probably a eunuch.
After we finished, we meandered around various shops in Sakae before craving somewhere to sit down and settling with Starbucks. We reminisced some on the events of the last 24 hours and then seperated – the Nishio guys were in a rush to get back for a party they ultimately missed, and Lucy and Lee-Anna were as drained of any kind of energy as Rhys and I were. So that’s where our party came to an end. Even though it wasn’t really a holiday for us guys as we still had work during the week, it’s felt like one.
On a completely different note, after I returned home to my apartment I decided I was probably too tired to learn Japanese but not tired enough to sleep, so I picked up a novel by Haruki Murakami that Rhys had recommended to me as one of his favourites, called Norweigian Wood. I very rarely read at home, but I can’t recommend this book enough. Since picking it up last night, I have done nothing but read it and sleep, and make this post. It’s very difficult to explain why I am enjoying reading it so much, but in addition to being a real page turner, it is so thought provoking and well written (especially considering it is translated from Japanese to English) that it is making me think about my own life and experiences in new ways. It’s kind of weird. I think I’m reading it at the perfect time also, as it’s set in Japan and I can understand some of the subtle behaviour of the characters that would have seemed strange had I not been living here.
And so, another week passes and the fun doesn’t look near to drying up yet. We’re planning a trip to Kyoto, the old capital of Japan, in the very near future, and on the horizon there are christmas parties and hopefully skiing holidays. Until next time!
またね。
which is the changing of the colour of the leaves in Autumn. Kyoto is meant to be the best place to see this and now is the best time, so expecting to book transport and a hotel within the week was a little optomistic and foolish. Suffice to say it didn’t work out, but we did manage to organise a trip next weekend – no worries. 
Italy Village is located on the edge of Nagoya Port, and as soon as we approached the main entrance the atmosphere transformed from deserted to overcrowded. In the centre of the main square was a christmas tree, complementing the tinsel strewn around the foot-deep canal that ran through the ‘village’. We walked past a pizzeria and I was impressed that the chefs looked to be Italian, at least, they weren’t Japanese. They looked at us as if to say “Why are you here?!”. As Rhys put it bluntly, going to Japan to work in a replica Venice’s Pizzeria is selling out. 
