Yes its been overused by the lovable internet community and those going to or living in Japan. But I don't care. I remember watching this the first time it came out as a BBC three launch programme (!) and laughed myself silly.

So altogether now;

We'll I've been to a lot places in this big ol' world but I've never seen a place like this,

The buildings are kinda tall and the people are kinda small
And everybody eats a lot of fish

The streets are pretty busy, it can make you awful dizzy
When you're trying to find your way around

So here's a little rhyme, You can use it all the time
When you're lost in Tokyo town

[※ Wakarimashita
Wakarimasen
Wakarimasu ka?

Ah, doko desu ka?
Itsu desu ka
Nani desu ka?]

Its a fascinating city but it looks a little shitty
When its raining and its grey

When the sun's gone sinking and the lights are all a blinking
And baby it looks okay

Well they say its futuristic but its also innovistic
Its a contradictory place

When I'm walking through Shibuya, feel like singing Hallelujah
Even though theres limited space

※ Repeat

Omotesando!
Ikebukuro!
Shinjuku!
Harajuku!
Meguro!
Hibiya!
Roppongi!
Ginza!
Ebisu!
Mita!
Ueno!
Akebanebashi!

※ Repeat

Suimiiiiiimaaaaasseeeeeen!

Recently I keep getting asked or often yelled at people "Why do you hate Japan", normally after that a "OMG" is added. These people often have no chin and tend to have no soul or sense of humour as well.

Now whilst I do enjoy a good ol' rant against Japan and Japanese related things now and again, I never said I hated Japan - so that's a clear illusion. I mean why spent all those ten minutes of life creating a blog with the word Japan in the title and rag on Japan, unless I was some sort of Chinese historical revisionist site.

To lighten the mood a bit against my previous no-holds bar rant against something Japan related here's why I actually like Japan and Japanese and why I am spending so much of my life doing what I do (even though it kills me somedays.)

1. Japan is actually quite a nice country. yes it has its bad-points but its one of the more advanced nations on the planet and is theoretically westernised. Its got a great eco-system and has nice weather compared to the UK.


2. Japanese people are very patient towards people like me who stumble around the language and culture despite a greta urge to learn more from it. They respond deeply to the inner souls and harmony of the group in Japan and have deeper respect other people because of it - unlike the UK with tends to shit over everyone else for the sake one big-headed twat. They do customer service as an art-form.


3. The language fascinates me. I find the language perplexing difficult and somedays I wish God hadn't invented keigo or kanji - but on somedays I just find myself wanting to learn new kanji and vocab and really start learning new stuff about the language, i find delving into the roots and backgrounds of words utterly fascinating.


4. The culture and history fascinates me. Japan is an enigma. One giant question mark that makes us want to keep asking questions. We never find the answers of course, but that's not the point. Its seeing the cultural and social idiosynracries work that makes you want to know more, but without ever the desire to completely understand it.


5. Japan offers me a future. Or at least a gateway to a wider world. It has offered me a large social life, both here and in Japan, it has increased my job-prospects and given me a much wider view of the world. by appreciating Japan, I can appreictae myself more.

6. Japan is the home of the zany, cool and the future of the world's technolgical advancements. Its home of the PS3, the Sony, the Panasonics of the world. Its leading the way foward with robotics and is a home for the world of tomorrow. To be a part of the technoligical future is exciting.


7. Japanese people are awesome. Yes the girls are cute and the guys are laidback crazy but you won't find any more insane people in the world. They are diverse mix of rock-dudes, fashion chicks, smart guys and gals and the absolute originals in this world. In short, they are really friendly and nice people.


8. The public transport system kicks arse! Its nearly always on time, and the trains go everywhere and anywhere. Well compared to the UK, its actually decent!


9. The food is the best in the world. Katsudon? Sushi? Ramen? Udon?


10. Japan, despite its flaws and everything else is still something so far from home. It is my academic love and my social interest and bond. And that is why I love it.

For everything I moan about Japan, there is just enough that keeps me wanting more. there are far too many things I could list about Japan that I really like. I never got the whole 'hate' thing though. Sure I can rant, but that's not hate, that's vicious scorn. Hating is like hating a child, you sure as hell can't say you favour it over your other children and you love it in equal measure as everything else. Its all about balance in my life, a balance that Japan is apart of; not simply a formation of.

I ♥ 日本

PS: there is not bit of sarcasm in this post.

Normally on a Tuesday night, I'm sat in my local furrowing my brow over questions about the length of the Gold Gate bridge or other such nonense. However this Tuesday, for the first time in 6 weeks was slightly different as I spent it cold and alone by myself watching my football team try and beat Scunthorpe United. We succeeded btw. 2-0.

Now even though I am currently seeking a compassionate loving girlfriend, yes I know its hard to believe that a stud like me is semi-single; but I do think I would make someone a good boyfriend, husband, whatever. I can take care of myself, I can cook, clean (just about) and can pay the bills on time (well almost.)

To increase my international standing in the world of the culinary art-form, I decided to cook myself a spicy keema and wild rice (I forget the name, but it sounded damn exotic and would have been sure fire bonus if I had a girlfriend.)

Despite the wonder that cooking shall bring, it begin with a bit of a disaster as I discovered some idiot had accidentally frozen my lamb mince, meaning I had to hack it to pieces and fry to solid baked heaven in the frying pan by chiseling it pieces with a small knife.

Soon after 10 minutes my furious stabbing techniques had allowed me to break up the mince and get the stuff cooking. Add a little bit of chickpeas and vegetables and then some spice-mix and water and then shazam… we are cooking. I then decided to make myself some wild-rice to go with this spicy mincey little concoction but on a quick discovery in the cupboards some idiot (presumably the same idiot who stuck my mince in the freezer) decided to use all the small pans. So there I am using a gigantic pan to shove my tiny segement of rice into. I felt sorry for these small portions of rice all huddled together in this large brooding metallic cavern of a pot.

As the rice was cooking, I prepared some roti bread to go with my meal. Creating bread brings back those childhood memories of getting stuck in, creating a load of mess with the dough and rolling it around and having a laugh. But when you are an adult, the prospect of mess in a kitchen usually brings you out in a cold rash. I preceded to roll the mixture with the water until it was nice and gooey but then unconsciously started rolling it out onto the kitchen top, which I then noticed was covered with small semi-frozen molecules of lamb mince that I had been chiseling from minutes earlier. Oh dear. A quick flick of the wrists and small pinch and all this food hygiene business is swept under the table.

Once I had made a giant ball of dough, I then separated it out into 4 balls and left them on the side. My rice was done. On closer inspection, the rice had absorbed up most of the water but was still a bit too gooey rather than fluffy. However any excess moisture was to be soaked up the keema sauce

I rolled out the balls on a hastily cleaned chopping board but then forget the basic rule of dough: You gotta flour. Yep the frigging thing kept sticking and even though I laboriously chucked several tons of flour on the dough, rolling pin and board it continued to stick. Ah nuts to this. I kneaded it out in my hand creating a small palm shaped mini-pitta bread sized blob of dough and throw it on my second frying pan.

Now I discovered another problem. The pan I used to cook the keema in is pretty big and takes up half of the hob, so I ended up with trying to squeeze two frying pans together onto the hobs, which covered up the buttons, leaving me to anxiously dip my fingers under one of the pans to turn up/down the heat. Thankfully, I avoided burning off my finger-tips.

The results were the following;


Looks alright doesn't it?

In hindsight the keema came out slightly too thick and it congealed on the side of the frying pan, leaving really strong burnt bits of sauce stuck to the bits of keema. it passed the taste test however - it didn't taste of rotting lamb arse or frozen sheep turd.

The rota oth, ended up being small doughy bread but it still tasted good.


Hmmm. Well even this scruffy bearded sonofabitch likes it;


Overall it was an edible meal and one which I won’t be making again. Not least because of the inevitable food poisoning I will contract tomorrow. I think I'll stick my chosen classics in the future and not stray to far from what I know best. Still its good to increase my knowledge of world food and new techniques for poisoning my enemies.

"Narrow minds devoid of imagination. Intolerance, theories cut off from reality, empty terminology, usurped ideals, inflexible systems. Those are the things that really frighten me. What I absolutely fear and loathe."

- Murakami Haruki - Kafka on the shore.


Recently I'm getting slightly sick of these dreamers with narrow minds who think they can waltz into Japan and change it in someway. They are invariably the hapless idealists, a loose mashing of the wapanese and those nonsense do-gooders who like scratching around the floor on their backside, sticking their failed sociology degree nose up the rectum of other people's business. Japan seems to be suffering from a tremendous bout of illness which has manifested itself as 'Ignorance of Japan' - which for today's analysis I am labelling 'Japgornace' for nothing more but stylistic effect.

You see Japgornace is a disease, borne out of the remnants of nihonjinron which has worked its way across the continent and mutated alongside a distorted ideology of self-hate, loathing and anger towards ones own culture and way of life which itself is borne out of our own British colonial values and opinions.

We (and by we I mean British, sorry Americans, Australians and whoever) have longed for centuries to escape our rainy grey and sodden island and seek pleasurable avenues elsewhere. It surprises me somewhat why people would choose Japan as the vehicle for self-fulfilment and discovery. Out of all the wonderful little micro-nations and despotic tin-pot states across the globe; Mautirius, Suriname, Hong Kong - they sound unbelievably decadent, warm, exotic and so distant from this little place we call home in the UK. Japan has become the new 'popstar destination' for many travellers and academics purely for its low crime levels and isolated history and culture.

The sad fact is those who choose to leave the UK and undertake their cathartic lovespan to Japan, do so without ever realising the harsh realities of what this undertakes. Those who have undertaken the academic path to Japan travel on the err of cynicism, but do so with some level grounding in culture. Those that go on the blind romantic whim can always be turned loose but can fall on solid ground. But these are not my enemies, these are not the persona non gratis that are boiling my stomach bile. These are my friends, these are my pals, my buddies, my classmates, my nakama. My vehicle of hate is driven by the passengers of 'Japgornace'.

Recently, it is something I take with relish to abash these shamelessly wild of the mark proclamations about Japan and the Japanese. Its a nauseating whirl of sickness from people who are genetically engineered from the bones of otaku who seem to believe every Japanese girl looks like an anime character and wrapped around the meaty fleshy statements that the Japanese are the most wackiest and sexual obfuscated people in the world because they once stumbled upon a youtube link of a man inserting a probe shaped like a daikon upon a Labrador's anus. Its the same crass banality spouted from people with the intelligence of a grape and who think "Mock the Week" is the funniest thing on TV. Its not even nauseating. Nausea makes you sick. But my stomach is full of a sticky translucent glop of hate and anger that all I can do is perpetually choke on for hours on end.

Its not as if, I truly despise these people to the point of recruiting a lynch-mob, after all they can be contained, studied and frequently laughed at by a snobbish elite made up of myself and my imaginary Japanese friend called Takao. They are not the 'enemie totale' as they pose no risk or disturbance to Japan from a security level point of view. It is the new breed of nipponfilia, the so called "Shindokuo （新独男）" who actually intend to come to Japan, settle here, learn Japanese yet all the while believe and propogate these nonsense ideas about Japan to be true that is the biggest worry for the security of Japan's future.

I now seem to spend my darkest nights roaming the Internet, like a one-man crusade promoting the tyranny of the 'real' world to these people. Defending my corner against theories that believe Japan is one giant melting pot of fortune and wealth, where a foreigner can earn a shit load of money by teaching English, live in a three storey condominium in central Tokyo and have every piece of J-girl dousing themselves on their knees just to suck your fat juicy western cock.

If you have read up this point with no register of humour in your frontal lobe or shred of irony coursing its way through your veins, let me kill a few million illusions for you in a para second.

1. Thousands of soulless folks go to Japan every year and teach (read: 'speak' English.) You are not new, you are not different, you are not 'significant'. You are a stamp, you are a gaijin card, you are nothing but a katakana name with many individual hopes and desires but absolutely no outside reality. You are not different, you are not special. Everyone does not have a right to love you.

2. Tatemae and honne are essential in Japan to explaining why everyone can hate you. Japanese politeness is far firmer than British sensibilities but it still doesn't absolve a Japanese person for hating you, especially because you are either a 'shindokuo', 'gaijin' or simply 'an absolute wanker'. Just because the Japanese act polite doesn't mean they do so because they like you and are naturally attracted to you in someway.

3. Japan is hitting a recession. Japan is not in 1982. You cannot come to Japan with no qualifications, speak English and expect a fat pay-check. You are not a member of the Japanese Diet with an expense account.

4. Japanese is a hard language. I don't care if you've done JLPT level 4 and know 50 kanji and the kana and then think its easy. Congratulations, you are now at the level of a Japanese toddler. And the toddler probably has better bladder function than you do.

5. You don't need to speak Japanese to live/work in Japan. Maybe, maybe not. It all boils down to laziness, and if you are a shindokuo, you probably too critical to think of Japan as being a foreign country where they speak an entirely different language. You have probably never ventured to any country besides your own and have absolutely no understanding of the wider world. Japan is not an English speaking country believe it or not.

6. You don't need a degree to work in Japan. Well neither does a Filipino prostitute or a Korean labourer. And if you have this attitude, I really hope you spend the rest of your nights in Japan, sucking up salaryman cum in Kabukicho and working on a farm fertilising sheep in the middle of pile of a cow-shit on a Toyama farm in the summer heat.

It doesn't surprise me in many ways that shindokuo are mostly stereotypical obese wapanese/otaku who work in a petrol station convenience store spending their dreary nights reading some nondescript lolicon manga and opining for the dream day when all that hard-earned cash they have saved up, they can go to Japan and find a Japanese wife to translate their latest Shonen-Jump for them. They mostly don't have a degree, have no understanding of Japanese culture, history, society or more saliently; the language and ultimately they have no desire to climb the social moblity ladder, except in Japan - which offers that free of charge to every foreigner who comes through Narita immigration. In short, they know as much about Japan and the outside world as I do about the history of the Vanuatu's economic policies before the second world war. They wish to change Japan for the better, somehow believe that Japan is in need of a rigorous overhaul that they have the ultimate answer to and to which can only be resolved by the industrious economic input of someone who has spent their natural lives taking stock of the Mars bar collection.

Get a life, get a degree, and grow the fuck up. Japan owes you nothing, and you owe it diddly squat.

To shamelessly use the words of a famous art-exhibition in Scotland;

Kill your timid notion.

Please follow these instructions, if you are feeling sad, lonely, depressed or isolated;

1. Turn the volume and bass up on your speakers as loud as you can.

2. Prepare some vodka and mixer ready to drink. Put in a whiskey glass for effect. Get lots of ice too.

3. If possible find a nice girl to dance with, its okay to dance on your own though. We all know we are all sad lonely bastards on the internet.

4. Play the following video

5. Dance

6. If anyone asks you to turn it down. Tell them to shut the fuck up and dance.

Its fair to say Mstrkrft have saved my life in many ways. I'm torn twisted by the inactivity of this curious little girl in Japan - who said these wonderful things about missing me and now can't even be bothered to let me know she is okay after 3 earthquakes in a week in Japan. Oh well. At least I'll always have Mstrkrft. They'll never abandon me. Japan or no Japan.

You may notice one of the link on the side of my blog:

http://www.his-euro.co.uk

HIS Europe are a Japanese travel agents who for want of a better word are 'awesome'. If anyone is thinking of going to Japan for a year to study/teach/sodomise young girls then I would recommend the above company. I booked a return flight for Japan for £499 with that company. Far cheaper than anywhere else I looked and they were lighting quick to respond to my request.

Beats STA travel by about some margin. So check them out.

Okay, shameless plug end.

This week I've been having something of a recurring dream. I am sat alone in a windowless room, my arms tied behind my back and my legs strapped to a wooden chair and my mouth gagged with an oily rag. The chair is moist and the room smells of an acrid ammonia. I look upwards and see a gigantic chrysanthemum staring back me.

As I look closely, my eyes squinting due to this overpowering smell of ammonia, I notice that it has a nose, in fact I can make out two eyes and even a mouth. Slowly but surely a see a gap form amongst the small twiny little flower petals. And yes indeed, suddenly, a mouth forms and begins to speak to me. Yet nothing actually comes out from under its little gap of a mouth. It lets out a sigh, a sort of distempered little outtake of breath and with a slight adjustment its rotund flowery little face turns into disappointment and suddenly becomes distorted turning into a clear frowning face. The once neutral expression of this giant chrysanthemum has suddenly turned very sad. Once again its mouth opens and the little sides of its mouth open slighter wider and it draws itself in to my oily stained mouth and sweating forehead.

As it leans over, examining my curious sweating forehead, sat alone tied to this chair in this windowless room it looks as its about to whisper something into my ear;

Wake..... up.....
Its...... time.....

And that is when my dream ends. I return to normality and recover my consciousness and discover that I am in bed having suffered yet another giant chrysanthemum related dream.

Things have hit the ground running since Monday after I finally, yes finally received my certificate of eligibility from Japan. I've now booked the time off in 2 weeks to go to Edinburgh to turn this tiny bit of paper into my magical Visa that allows me into Japan.

Things are mostly a go now. All my flights are booked and barring any mishaps I should be in Tokyo in the 14th of September. I'm flying from Newcastle to Heathrow on the 13th and then on from Heathrow to Japan. I'll then be staying a hotel close to Shinjuku and then the next day I'm ready to head down to Seijo - to start my life as an exchange student there.

Thankfully Seijo have spared me the indignity of being poor in Japan, and barring me going to the stripclubs and soaplands on a regular basis, I should be okay for money. My rent works out at around £140 a month. Which is just fantastic really. Especially for Tokyo. My classes start on the 24th and I begin life as a foreigner on the 18th when I register as a fully fledged gaijin.

I'm pretty scared now, because its less than 6 weeks away and I am lost in a torrent of emotions and chrysanthemum related dreams. This year is going to be insane, and I mean that in various literal and non-literal senses.

PS: if you are confused by the chrysanthemum - its one of the national symbols of the Japanese state.