2008, Year of the Mouse

On the Chinese zodiac calendar, it is now the year of the rat.  The Japanese are a bit different though, so here it is the year of the mouse.  Quite fitting then, that around the same time the new year was dawning on the Land of the Rising Sun, I was singing about a mouse (of a sort) in a karaoke booth in Sakae.  The first words of Linda Linda, a song made famous by The Blue Hearts in the ’80s, goes a bit like this:

“Dobu nezumi mitaini,

Utsukushiku naritai,

Shashin ni wa utsuranai,

Utsukushisa ga aru kara”

In Japanese, ‘nezumi’ is the word for mouse, or rat.  I suppose that’s where the confusion over whether this is the year of the rat or of the mouse arises from.  Regardless, it’s not really important.  On New Year’s Eve, we didn’t have much of a plan.  So, we went to Sakae.  As I said in my previous post, Christmas isn’t a particularly big deal in Japan, if you look past the marketing driven rush to buy presents for friends and family, and the obsession with tacky illuminations.  New Year’s, on the other hand, is comparable to the Christmas we know back in England.  As everybody returns to their homes for the occasion, the streets of Sakae on the night of the 31st of December were almost as quiet as they were in the day.

Not to say that Sakae was empty – the main bars were throwing events and were packed.  On the other hand, Heaven’s Door, a pretty small, quaint, bar we found way back in September, wasn’t open.  It’s a bit hit and miss as far as meeting other people is concerned, since it’s a bit out of the way it’s usually empty.  The owner has a nice comprehensive collection of old LPs though, so it’s got a good relaxing atmosphere.  Our backup plan was The Hub, a supposedly English-style pub, which as we expected was chock-full of Gaijin.  After making our way through the crowd, we bought a pair of extortionately expensive Grolsches.  We tried to make them last whilst we discussed how we’d end up spending the New Year.  At that point, it didn’t look like we’d be doing very much at all.

Nevertheless, we noticed that some girls sitting near where we were standing had noticed us, and they then started singing along to some of the British music playing in the ‘pub’.  I think it was Franz Ferdinand, or maybe the Arctic Monkeys again.  It was a good chance to start talking to them, and before we knew it we’d left the bar and were walking in the direction of Big ECHO, one of the many big karaoke buildings in Sakae.  Karaoke used to be mainly in big clubs with big audiences, like it tends to be in England, but due to the shyness of the Japanese it moved into small booths.  There are probably well over three hundred karaoke booths in Big ECHO alone, spread across ten floors.  I’m not exaggerating.  After a few embarrassingly out of tune performances of both English and Japanese songs, I put the mic down and we said goodbye to our new friends.  We remembered we had a friend to call, Tom, who had come up to Nagoya from Nishio, where he’s volunteering much like we are in Yagoto Nisseki.

 We headed back towards Sakae station, where we knew there’d be a payphone.   We were there just in time for the New Year countdown – well at least, we were running down the subway stairs as they called out the last “San, ni, ichi…”.  There was a bit of a show for the event outside of Sunshine Sakae, a sort of department store I believe, with a giant lit-up ferris wheel outside.  Presenting were who I could only assume were some Z-list celebrities, like the people you see turning the Christmas lights on in cities in England.  After they finished their set, an amateur band showed up, so Rhys and I watched them for a while.  The singer was a girl, and she had a nice voice.  Also, the bassist had no fingers, but could still play completely well.  The music was inoffensive, standard pop rock and roll.  It was quite fun and allowed us to forget once again about calling Tom, but after a few songs we remembered and got to a payphone.

After walking around Kyoto for hours upon hours back in November, the layout of the city is etched onto my mind forevermore, as if every detail has been chiseled onto my skull by a little cartographer.  On the other hand, I can still get lost effortlessly in Sakae.  I’m not really sure why, it may be due to all of the buildings being so tall that any significant landmark is obscured from view, entirely, until you’re practically standing underneath the thing.  So when I called Tom and he said he was outside iD Bar, I cheerfully replied that I knew just the place, got the subway to Fushimi, only to realise I was completely off the mark.  iD Bar is actually located a few minutes walk from Sakae station, nowhere near Fushimi.  As we walked back, Rhys pointed out we had this on a small map printed on the iD cards we got the time we went in there with Yamashita ages ago.  I felt adequately stupid.

It was our turn to wait when we finally arrived at iD.  At least we weren’t bored, there was a fairly constant stream of amusingly well drunk patrons stumbling out of the building.  When Tom finally arrived with a Canadian friend he’d brought from Nishio, we went with them to a bar called Frisky, not too far away.  When we arrived, there was already a man at the bar having his face being ceremonially drawn on with a permenant marker, to mark the new year.   We hadn’t seen Tom since he came up with the other Nishioers in November, so we spent a while catching up and talking about the funny things about Japan.  Like how it’s very common in Japanese pop music for the chorus to be sung in poorly articulated English, or more accurately Engrish.  Kimura Kaela is a bit better than most, being half English herself, but you don’t have to look any further than Linda Linda – or Rinda Rinda – to see what I’m talking about.  We also talked about learning Japanese.  Rhys and I have both now been able to spend some time working on the peadiatrics ward at the hospital, so we’ve had plenty of time spent with the children there.  It pales compared to the amount of time Tom has however, as he works at a nursery in Nishio.  Although Japan is well known for having a very homogeneous population, there is a fairly large community of Brazilian Japanese, so he looks after plenty of them at work.  As a result he’s not only learnt Japanese since arriving in Narita with us in September, but also basic Portuguese!  Only the type of Portuguese that is useful for telling off small disobedient children, but still an interesting thing to take back from this sometimes very strange land.

Some more of Tom’s Canadian friends joined us, and for some reason we ended up going back to karaoke.  Well, I guess it was a special occasion.  As we left Frisky, the man I mentioned earlier had been completely coloured in black, and was now claiming to be Tupac.  Despite it being four in the morning by this point, the first karaoke building we tried was full, completely, every room of every floor.  Almost unbelievable.  We tried the next one along and were in luck.  Just like Big ECHO, we were treated to MIDI renditions of the songs we chose.  Presumably this is to save money on the licensing fees for actual versions of the songs, but it elevates the tackiness of these places by the power of ten.  They share these MIDI symphonies with all of the supermarkets I’ve visited so far.  Walking around Valor, our nearest supermarket, or Aeon, the supermarket at Jusco, I can often recognise a butchered version of a popular Japanese pop song I’ve either heard in passing or have bought, playing down all the aisles.  Often to make up for the lack of lyrics there is a tinny vocal melody line in the MIDI.  Getting back to the karaoke, this place was called Karaoke Kan – see the picture, if you can read Japanese.  Basically karaoke building, not very imaginative.  After we were finished, Rhys and I got the tube back to Yagoto.  As it was New Year’s it seems, the subway was running all night so we could go back at any time.  It was about six.  I slept for four hours, and then got up to visit Atsuta Jingu, for the second time.

It is traditional in Japan to visit the three main shrines at New Year, as a sort of pilgrimage.  I was never going to do that, but as one of these shrines is a mere stones throw away from my apartment, or more precisely twenty minutes away on the subway, I knew I had to check it out.  Compared to the relative dead of the streets in the days leading up to this, even before I got off the subway at Jingu Nishi, I had no doubt it would be packed.  Every time the train stopped on the way to Jingu Nishi, the closest station to Atsuta Jingu, the number of people riding it increased exponentially.  Not much later I disembarked from the train at Jingu Nishi.  It was, unsurprisingly, exploding with people.  So full in fact that yellow barriers had been erected to control the traffic of people inside the station.  I joined the flow of human traffic and left the station through Exit 1, also labelled ‘Atsuta Jingu’.

Just like when I’ve been to Gifu after no more than a brief nap of four hours, the fresh air made sure I was awake as could be.  But, not just the fresh air here, but the combined enthusiasm running through everybody around me had transferred across and was flowing through my veins too.  I didn’t understand the real significance of this trip, and wondered if maybe it had lost it’s significance to the Japanese too; just a trip they made because of tradition, because they always have.  Not that that mattered.  Community is very big in Japanese culture, as is family , and from there conformity.  Being carried as if a pebble caught in a stream through this crowd, I felt some of that conformity, even standing out as obviously as I did.  I didn’t notice another foreigner, and certainly not anybody who seemed to be taking as many pictures as I was, but I was still excited to be part of this mass movement for just a short time. 

Through the main gate and down another path, I saw a huge gathering of people.  They were queuing up to wash their hands before they passed under the gate that led to the shrine.  Around every side of this square pool was a dense crowd of people, I noticed quite a lot of families and couples who had come together to perform this ritual.  Around the pool are large wooden ladels, which you’re meant to use to tip water from the pool over your hands.  I don’t know what’s so special about the water, it may just be ordinary water with some symbolic meaning.  Whatever it was, it felt important at the time, such was the fervour of those surrounding me.

I continued from this well to an even more crowded pathway.  I could see why it seemed so crowded, as the tori gate in front of the main shrine presented a bottleneck junction, as everybody saw it as paramount that they pass under it on this important day.  I followed suit.  On the other side,  the main shrine was not open due to the amount of people.  Instead, it had been opened up, with a large white carpet surrounding it like a semi-circle.   Around it a fence stood, and around that stood the people who had passed through the gate.  I had heard about this, so brought some of the excess, otherwise practically useless, five yen coins which had accumulated in my apartment.  I did as everyone around me did, and threw the coins out onto the carpet, clapped twice, and wished for a happy new year.