Japanese convenience

Most of the dormitory resident prefer to do their convenience store shopping at the nearby Ministop, but when I embark with a similar purpose I break in the opposite direction. When it comes to buying useless stuff I don't need, Circle-K is the only love I know. There are three reasons for this: One is legit and two are stupid.

Selection. Sometimes I'm too busy, sometimes I'm too tired, and sometimes I would simply rather eat nutrition-free garbage than food, but I often buy a snack to be consumed sometime in the day, perhaps during my kanji reps. Convenience stores here have most everything you would expect to find in your own country, along with specifically Japanese products, sandwiches and onigiri and the like, and hot canned drinks (which you can also get from vending machines.) They even have alcohol.

And they also have all manner of bread, an entire array of racks, ranging from the delectable (soft melon-pan with cantaloupe filling) to the revolting (oven-baked sausage with cream cheese). I've made a game out of trying something different every time, and I've discovered that Circle-K just has higher-quality products as well as a wider selection. Also, have you tried Ministop's chocolate chip melon-pan? It's terrible.

Nostalgia. Me and Circle-K, we've got history together. There're some good memories invested in that store, because it was close to where I lived with one of my host families during my last exchange. I want to make it clear that I am grateful to all of them, but of the five that I had in that single semester, these were the people with whom I got on the worst. The fact that I was a dumbass kid who didn't make enough effort to participate in the family and would occasionally come home drunk and late at night probably didn't help or anything, but insufficient language skills on both sides and a lack of patience on theirs made a bad relationship worse.

At some point they got it in their heads that I had told them they weren't feeding me enough. This never happened, and I could think of nothing I'd said that could be misinterpreted in that way. But in any case, their reaction was to cut me off completely. I didn't even realise what was going on until the second night, around 2 am, when it dawned on me that I'd been abandoned.

Luxuriously, the room they'd given me had its own balcony, onto which I would often walk out to ruminate, sometimes accompanied by people stopped at the nearby light gesticulating at me. That night, I tried to find an escape route, and although it was a storey off the ground I realised that I could creep along the fence to the sidewalk, from which juncture I could also climb back.

I strapped on my backpack so I would have both hands free on the return trip, popped over the railing, and hung by my fingers off the top of the fence, carefully working my feet along the crossbeam. I wore my hood up to conceal my identity, feeling like a ninja. Every time a car passed by I pressed myself flat and froze, praying they wouldn't notice me. It was so absurd it was surreal, and all I could think was “Oh God, if someone sees me they're not going to think I'm sneaking out – they're going to think I'm a burglar!”

Getting away from the crowd. Most of the time I like to avoid my fellow guy gins, and I've got a whole post about why that is eventually coming down the pipes. Suffice it to say for now that I like to differentiate myself, and also step away from the bastion of English that is the dormitory. Circle-K is a little bit farther and thus virtually unknown to them, devoid of other foreigners except for a rarely seen Saudi, and so would probably be my preferred destination on that grounds alone.

However, when travelling with my own kind I do sometimes have occasion to visit Ministop instead.

Recently we ryuugakusei were required to submit a number of papers to the school's international office. Most were photocopies of documents with which we had already provided them in order to come here, and the rest were lists of information that they had easy access to. To procure the necessary materials, I teamed up with Kojak, a stylish, chain-smoking, coffee-loving Italian who looks like a serial killer but is actually the nicest guy ever. He is not bald. For the first few days he had a habit of apologizing for his (excellent) English, until I finally told him that if he ever comes to Canada, then he can apologize for his English. In Japan, it makes as much sense as me apologizing for not speaking Italian.

Anyway, we weren't too vexed about the task because pretty much every convenience store in Japan is equipped with a photocopier and fax machine. Colour? Non-standard page sizes? No problem! For the extremely reasonable price of ten yen per page, you pick your settings and get to cloning.

It's all part of the Japanese service culture, which even the Hate Japan blogs are forced to admit is world-class. Japanese convenience stores are genuinely convenient, open 24 hours without exception and spread so thick that there's one every few blocks. If it's a hot day and you can't decide if you want a drink, don't worry that you'll have to go back – just stop off at the next one, five minutes away. This is in contrast to my hometown, where it was common to literally take a taxi to the nearest convenience store, then make your purchase through a tiny window near the locked doors. Maybe this is just because the population density in Japan can sustain such a high frequency of convenience stores, and because if a stick-up ever did occur it would go something like, “My apologies, but if you have a moment and it's not too much trouble, would it be possible to have you give me all the money in the cash register and then get up against the wall?”

Learning to read

“Some of you are new to the language,” the school's international coordinator wrote, “and some of you are already very experienced in it, but I encourage all of you to study as much as possible in the months leading up to your arrival.”

No problem. I already study a few hours every day. So just keep up with that, right?

Not long after, though, I reconsidered. After all, I was missing a crucial component from everyday life: I am functionally illiterate. My first Japanese teacher had us running hiragana and katakana in no time, but the intricacies of kanji have largely eluded me. As summer 2011 opened, I knew only the most common readings of 400 or so characters, meaning that, frustratingly, I could often pick a few characters out of a more technical string and get the gist of the meaning, yet still not be able to read the word.

To be honest, I didn't even mind until recently. My Japanese communications are predominantly verbal, and since I intend to move here permanently, I always assumed I'd eventually acquire the knowledge I needed. I pictured myself in the throes of organic learning, picking up characters one by one through context, until finally I'd taste victory and burn through the last stretch. It was only a matter of time.

Indeed, the vast majority of my study philosophy centres around exposure. I watch dramas and anime (subtitles are for the weak, by the way), and listen to music, for at least an hour a day, usually around three. I read Jump. I play JP-only video games. I've changed my phone, computer, and every application therein to Japanese. Unfortunately, I had to concede that this method just wasn't getting me where I needed quite as fast as I wanted. The problem was the handful of academic courses I'm taking in Japanese on top of the compulsory language and culture ones designed for ryuugakusei. While I can mostly follow the lectures, the written material is almost impenetrable.

There was no way in hell I was going to attain a university-level reading ability in a couple of months, but I saw no reason why I shouldn't be doing everything I could to soften the blow. If nothing else it would make my life here that much easier. So I got a proper night's sleep for once, sat down with the kanji book I'd received a year earlier and barely touched since, and got serious. On top of the book, I had the pocket Japanese dictionary I carry with me everywhere as well as my phone, with its draw-to-write recognition app.

With these resources and various papers arrayed around me, I started on the one thing I'd always assumed was worthless: Rote memorization. I wrote lines of kanji, over and over and over again. With each rep I'd give the reading in my head. For each non-verb reading I picked a compound and wrote that. Then I wrote out the other half of the compound and repeated the process for each of its readings, until I ultimately ran out of material and moved down the list. I started at the beginning of the book and launched.

The first day I studied for six hours, setting the tone for the whole exercise. My Japanese friends who witnessed the burgeoning weight of my studies reacted first with surprise, and then with growing respect as I relentlessly hammered on. More than one told me that watching me had inspired them to study English harder. I was sleeping through the night for the first time in years. My back and fingers started to hurt. I heard “Gonna Fly Now” playing in the background.

Experience teaches language (and everything else) better than any textbook, but there's something very satisfying and concrete about this kind of studying, too. You can really throw yourself into the task, for one thing. And after watching an episode of drama, I know I've learned something, but how much, and even what, may be a mystery, because things like pronunciation, cadence, and word usage improve incrementally. After storming some kanji, however, I have a good sense of just how many I studied, how many I mastered, and how many I need a few more runs at.

Even my short-term retention had lengthened; content I'd have forgotten almost immediately started to hang around for at least a few hours. Your brain lets go of information it thinks it won't need, so as I reinforced the idea that this is stuff we'll be using, memorization became increasingly automatic – this compounded by the fact that it's simply easier to learn more the more you learn. It's mentally exhausting, and I have to take regular breaks to keep the law of diminishing returns from interfering – the rainbow Jell-O that is my knowledge bed needs time to set before the next layer can be added – but that's sort of the point: to just keep bashing away until things start to make purchase. It's even helping my vocabulary.

As a weird side effect, although I never altered my listening study at all, for the first couple of days after beginning this regimen my speaking ability dropped dramatically. I guess the different aspects of language maintain a kind of equilibrium within your head that they don't like having disturbed.

I then mounted the other half of my two-pronged attack. Although I've never considered myself a self-learner, extremely little of what I know came out of a textbook or a classroom. I've learned primarily by watching TV and talking to people. It's made my grammar quite colloquial, because I don't actually know the rules, I just know how people talk, and the things they say. But this has its own benefits, and to me it's more than worth the tradeoff. So I decided to take my “learn by doing” strategy directly over to this new territory: I would achieve literacy by reading.

So I started procuring Shounen Jumps from the Book-Off in Vancouver, reading them cover to cover. It wasn't exactly a snap, but it's only at a Junior High School reading level, and the twin crutches of furigana and illustrations unquestionably facilitate comprehension. I read one installment every day until I left, and I've have done a lot more if it wouldn't have meant I'd have run out of material. I figured it didn't matter much; once in Japan I could pick one up for a cool 300 yen anytime I wanted.

I ended up studying much more sophisticated material instead. My Japanese Literature instructor provides not only English translations of each short story we study, but, mainly for the benefit pf Japanese students, there's also the option of reading it in the original Japanese. So after absorbing the English, I take a walk through the original. I can't get much, but every inch is progress.

One of the authors profiled was Yokomitsu Riichi, and as I read his biography I was struck by some superficial similarities to Ernest Hemingway. One of his major novels, Shanghai, is the story of a Japanese guy who visits the titular metropolis during the May Incident of 1925. One of my favourite authors, the best Chinese city, foreigner life, Japanese people and the Jazz Age? Did Yokomitsu write this book specifically for me?!

Now I'm taking on the ultimate challenge: I am going to read a full novel in Japanese. Not only is the prose adult and dense, it's replete with era-appropriate language and kanji that aren't even used anymore. Reading a single page takes about 45 minutes. I need to look up every third word, and whenever I look back I find I've already forgotten words appearing earlier in the sentence I'm currently reading, so my comprehension was scattered at best. I don't care. I may not be able to completely appreciate the quality of the writing, but I'm gripped. I can feel the progress. It may take months, but I am going to read this book.

And then I'm moving on to Murakami.

Conversation is as awesome as ever, but it's actually my steadily rising reading that has provided the greatest gratification. I can work through notices and class handouts. I can browse menus, follow simple instructions, and read through a list of ingredients. Currently there's some construction going at the university, and when workers stretched building-high lengths of fabric across the walls, I saw that they were emblazoned with 音防 and knew exactly what they were for.

Not only that, but being exposed to Japanese reading materials through my 日本思想史 class is actually improving my writing abilities. I just bashed out a short writing assignment and I was tossing out the なお's and the である's like it was the most natural thing in the world, and a few weeks ago I literally didn't know what either of those things meant. I have to say I'm pretty proud of the results. Maybe one day I'll pull an Ayn Rand and pen a novel in Japanese?

My goal of reaching a Grade Four level by September turned out to be a little too ambitious, which was discouraging, but recently I had an epiphany: Undeniably, I am measurably improving, week by week. After studying Japanese for a year I could barely string a coherent sentence together, but I kept at it, and now I hold my own. I haven't always progressed at the rate I would like, but at the risk of spewing platitudes, my persistence has paid off. And if I just keep throwing myself at the hardest obstacles I can find, the same thing is going to happen with my written skills. However long it takes, if it pushes me beyond my limits, I will learn to read.

Daaaarumasan ga kooooronDA

Of all the things in all the world whose presence I find difficult to endure, children, old people and dogs top the list. Wait, let's not get started off wrong; I have enjoyed conversations with children wise beyond their years, and I love meeting energetic, well-spoken, non-terrifying old people (however, there is nothing to recommend a dog). But nearly all are some combination of stupid, ugly and disgusting, and moreover they are ubiquitous.

It turns out that once per year, the university invites the general public onto campus to enjoy a variety of activities organized and held almost entirely by the students. This is in marked contrast to my Canadian university, where outsiders attract dirty looks at guest lectures and children anywhere outside the daycare invoke suspicion and discomfort. Anyway, the ryuugakusei traditionally play games with the hordes of anklebiters who swarm campus, and I had visions of my participation ending in tears, and I don't mean the children's. But I had to have a reason if I wanted to excuse myself, and "I hate children" was for some reason deemed inappropriate for an official form, so even the most resistant among us somehow all got railroaded into joining.

Preparation was scheduled for hours longer than was necessary, giving us plenty of downtime to enjoy the free lunch and bitch to each other about what a lost day it was. The ones who like kids had a blast, the few of us who didn't stood around awkwardly and tried to interpose those people between ourselves and the objects of our fear. We didn't have time to enjoy any of the other events, which was a pity, because the other native speaker and I were quite intrigued by the advertised "Somen Flow," whose font all but begged us to read it as "Semen Flow."

The event itself was a great success, attendance was impressive, the organizers did a great job and they should be proud of what they accomplished. A student leader myself, I can well understand the planning and effort that would be required for a project of this scale. I actually ended up enjoying myself more than I thought it would, which doesn't say much considering how low my expectations were. However, this is not because I have finally discovered the innocence and joy of childhood or any such thing, but rather because my group played Darumasan ga Koronda, meaning I was not required to interact with them in any meaningful way.

Hieisan Photoglut

Credit (again) to the ever-wonderful Stupid Ugly Foreigner for inventing the word, though I think it's transmorphilating into a general blog term now.

Towards the base of the mountain, while still travelling on our feet, we came across what looks like a temple-type substance. But there was a workshop nearby where a guy was in the midst of carving temple-type components out of stone, so I have to wonder. But I like to think that if somebody approached the complex in Heian times, this spot or something like it would have been among the first sights they passed, too.

Buddha atop a pillar. Notice how he's surrounded by construction materials.

Another private little spot a ways further up. Stumbling across these hidden, less-seen temples and such is what made the trip so worthwhile.

Fallout: Kyouto.

 I saw it and I had to have it.

I can dig giving Buddha and even animals handkerchiefs and stuff. But that on the right? That's a goddamn pole with goddamn apron on it.

The various areas of the complex are connected by kilometre-high, 90-degree angle staircases.

 In case you get thirsty.

 I lay flat on my back to get this shot. Everyone stared.

"Fuck yeah, bitches!"

 

This was outside the funeral hall. Any ideas how it works?

 It didn't sit quite right, taking a picture of somebody's grave. Though for some reason posting that same photo on the Internet feels perfectly fine.

 There's a long and winding path between Saitou and one of the Enryakuji sub-areas, lined with these little lantern-looking things. Every one has a different inscription.

 Buddha being tempted by Satan and pleasures of the flesh. You can totally see the one girl's tits, look.

 I really do need to stress that some of the stuff at Hieisan is really old and cool.

 This strange thing sits at the back of Ruridou. Cologne thinks it's a lightning rod.

 Straddling the border.

 Ironically, we found this towards the end of our tour.

The above picture basically sums up Hieisan. Because it's basically these and things like them. Constantly, four hours. Not that I mind, but man are there ever a lot of them.

In any case, I think we can all agree that Hieisan is a hell of a looker.

Hieisan

For some reason, it seems like every time I plan to leave the house it turns into a goddamn adventure. I really can't complain, I just wish it weren't so consistently a result of my own incompetence. Today, Cologne and I started things off right by both oversleeping.

“Rude Boy...it's 9 o'clock.”

“I know.”

“We were supposed to be downtown to catch the bus at 9 o'clock.”

“I know.”

It was far. I had another class I could be attending instead of going on this stupid field trip. I lay motionless for several more minutes, until Cologne's impatience got the better of him.

“Come on!”

Getting downtown was easy, but we spent over an hour and a half trying to decipher the map the teacher had provided. A Torontonian with an insatiable urge to overpronounce every single Japanese word that passes through her lips, she had pieced it together from several different online maps of different scales that displayed different information, then added to it in her own hand. It was an abomination of cartography.

We gathered that we were first to take the bus to Ginkakuji, adjacent to the main entrance of Hieisan. As it turns out, Ginkakuji is actually over 6 kilometres away from Hieisan. We debated boarding another bus, but decided we could probably walk. After all, monks in the Heian Jidai didn't have cars, right? Ok, so maybe they did have horses, but halfway up the mountain, we got the next best thing: A pony-tailed, shrewd-eyed, 32-year-old Japanese man who stopped to offer us a lift.

If he were ever called upon to add, say, a toothpick to the ensemble of stuff in his van, I am not sure where he would have fit it. Every available inch was filled from floor to ceiling with plastic tubing, industrial strength extension cords, books, seat covers, a disassembled bicycle, flattened cardboard boxes, broken home appliances and other garbage. Clearing a space for us in the back took some doing, but he managed to seat us atop a couple of coolers, which lurched alarmingly around every turn.

“There's my house,” he said, pointing. That didn't make us feel great, because now he wasn't just being friendly, he was going way out of his way. “Three of us live there.”

“With your girlfriend?” I asked, because Japanese people certainly enjoy asking me about my relationship status.

“No,” he said, and then looked at me very seriously. “Thing is. If you live with your girlfriend, you can't have fun with other women.” A slight pause. “That's what I'm doing now.”

He was able to take us as far as the main gates, past which, it turns out, we weren not allowed to proceed on our feet, and had to wait for the same bus we had earlier decided not to take. We rode to the very top of the mountain, which has a beautiful view of Biwako.

But it turned out to be way too far, so we rode back down to the Enryakuji area, where, at 14:00, we finally caught up with our classmates and the teacher.

They were just wrapping up.

Well. We've come this far, right? We headed on in...

...and I realised I've been here before. In another life, really. Four years ago, in the first few days of my high school ryuugaku, when my interim host family took me. But at 17, I really couldn't appreciate it, because at the time, I had yet to discover Taira no Kiyomori.

Hieisan or Mt Hiei is basically a Japanese Angkor Wat. It's on a much smaller scale, but as mentioned, it's still big enough that there are shuttles to take you from one part of it to another. It's also, as far as I know, the most important Buddhist site in all of Japan. None of that by itself makes it especially exciting, because if you ever visit or live in Japan, you will absolutely at some point be subjected to what I like to call the Hundred Temple Tour. It's understandable that our Japanese hosts want to show us their culture even when we'd rather be shopping, but the thing is, for most people, once you've seen one Buddhist temple and one Shinto shrine, you've kind of seen them all.

Hieisan sets itself apart by being a complex, so although the individual buildings generally aren't as large as, say, Byoudouin (which is pictured on the ten-yen coin and which I used to live fifteen minutes away from), there are tons of them, and you can have hours of fun just exploring the paths that snake through the forest between them. More importantly, the monks who lived there required protection from the political instability and dangerous elements that saturated the region for much of history, so they contracted soldiers to defend them and their relics. The term “warrior-monks” (souhei) is misleading, because you didn't have to be a monk or even Buddhist to work as a security guard at Hieisan. But they were pretty cool:

This guy was called Benkei. He was one of the more famous souhei, and the one who has the strongest presence in modern remembrance; he was even the subject of a Kurosawa film. He supposedly duelled 1000 samurai, collecting their swords, and later died standing up as he covered for his buddy, who was busy committing suicide. You can see that he's wielding a naginata, the preferred weapon of the souhei, a type of polearm with a more sophisticated blade than a mere spear or what have you.

The souhei steadily gathered power, and in the Heian Jidai they decided that they were pretty hot stuff, and started meddling with politics in the capital. Eventually Taira no Kiyomori, principal character of Heike Monogatari and at this point a rising star, got sufficiently pissed off and, armed with nothing but a bow, rode to Hieisan and started yelling at everybody. They came out and told him he had best be on his way, because anybody who so much as looked at their sacred ground the wrong way would be struck dead instantly.

They'd been using this threat as leverage against anybody who challenged them for a while now, and Kiyomori had come to put a stop to that. He notched an arrow, sent a bolt straight into one of the temples, and continued living. After a few seconds of shocked silence, the assembled souhei all ran at him waving their naginata. “Shit,” thought Kiyomori, and then he decided it was time to leave.

Annoyingly, the problems between Heiankyou and Hieisan went on for a while, so they aren't resolved in Heike Monogatari, but they cause problems for Kiyomori and the Taira for the rest of his life.

Revisiting Hieisan with this new knowledge was like visiting Jerusalem. Somewhere on this mountain, Kiyomori kicked some ass and took some names; hell, at some point I may well have been standing on the exact spot that Kiyomori once passed through. I was unable to read much of the signage and we didn't have the benefit of the tour so some of the historical significance of each exact location was lost on us, but that didn't keep us from enjoying it.

Seriously, there's a lot to see.

This is Kaidan-in. I'm getting a few conflicting sources of information about this one, but it seems to have been originally established in Nara during the Nara Jidai as one of Buddhism's Big Three, then reestablished in Hieisan during the Heian Jidai following the death of the Tendai sect prelate.

I threw in a petty ten yen, sounded a fairly reserved gong, and made a bit of a scattered and nonsensical prayer. I'm pretty sure that basically ensures it won't come true, so I'm not going to hurt my chances further by telling you what I prayed for, though I think that might be ok in Buddhism.

Since the complex is still in use, kind of, there's a lot of modern stuff mixed in with all the history. Personally, I think this is the way to go - I mean really, stuff has been added to Hieisan continually, so what is it that you're ultimately trying to preserve? There's a really interesting discussion in there about whether or not declaring something protected as a tradition is tantamount to admitting that it's no longer relevant, but I don't feel the urge to get into it just right now.

This is what I mean - this funeral hall, Amidadou, was built in 1937.

Directly next to it is the Hokke Sojiin, originally built 400 years ago, burnt down, and then rebuilt in 1987. Dude - 1987. The cars in this shot are kind of a fun contrast. I assume they belong to the monks who were inside the building to the right, just outside the frame - they were chanting a sutra of some sort. I wanted to get a picture of some monks but that seemed a little inappropriate.

Basically you make a wish and hang this on the wall in the hopes that it comes true. I've done it many times with paper at Tanabata, and also at the school's Open for some reason, but I've never used one of these fancy wooden plates. I didn't do it today, either.

This one was moved here on the orders of Toyotomi literally just because he felt like it.

There are many many effigies of Buddha, as you would expect. People like to give him clothes to keep him warm, kind of disregarding the fact that it's currently summer.

I thought the whole Enryakuji area was pretty cool as well, but as far as Cologne was concerned this was the centrepiece of the Hieisan collection. Unfortunately, I can't find any information about it, although the sand reminds me of Byoudouin. Whatever that's worth.

If one of the words occurring to you right now is "samey" or something like it, believe me I agree. But it stays interesting when you anchor the various stories to the stuff you're looking at.

I was thinking I should get myself a little Hieisan souvenir, something to add to the Shinsengumi haori and Hanshin Tigers something-or-other I intend to buy. But I bitched about the price for a while before deciding to let it be. Twenty minutes later I was already hating I walked away. By the time we made our way back, the store was closed. Who knows when I'll ever be back?

We took so long because we ended up spending a lot of time seeking out Ruridou. The truth is, the Hieisan complex actually used to be even more massive. But then the fearsome and intimidating Oda Nobunaga

one-upped Kiyomori by deciding he'd about had enough of these uppity souhei by besieging the place and - or so I'm led to understand - burning the entire thing to the ground. All of it. (Many structures were rebuilt and are certainly very old, but they aren't original.) Which does raise some questions, mainly: Did he truly not see this as an overreaction, and just how long did it take him exactly?

Towards the end, his guys got interrupted and somehow Ruridou alone survived, and I badly wanted to check it out. I have Cologne to thank, because he was the one who actually located it. We had to walk down the road – like, the road, for cars – and push our way down an unkept path that announced nothing in particular. As Cologne put it, “No wonder Nobunaga never found this place.”

I'll admit it's not much to look at, but for the heritage alone it was also one of the coolest things we got to see. I guarantee you not many have. Its establishment was still a few hundred years removed from Kiyomori's time, but it's the closest you're gonna get.

We finally made our way back to the entrance, only to find our fears had come true: The last bus had long since left. So we started walking, thumbs out. Startlingly, within minutes of our setting out an energetic old man had stopped for us.

I jump shotgun so we can chat. Cologne sits in the back, listening. I thank him profusely for helping us out.

“God saves the people he's going to save,” he tells me. Then he sings a few bars of a song. “Do you know it?” I don't. “Ah, then you're not Christian. I'm Christian.”

This is a revelation, because for the next several minutes he amuses himself by asking us how to say various dirty words in English and German, going into some detail on the multitude of equivalent terms in Japanese, and their particular nuances. Then, for seemingly no reason, he sings the entirety of The Star-Spangled Banner. Cologne wants to take a picture of Biwako and the old man tells him to hurry, because he's on the job.

“Do you work on Hieisan?” I ask him.

“Yes, I'm an official photographer.” I figure that I've probably seen his work.

“Ah, that must be nice!”

“Oh?”

“Well...well yeah. Because Hieisan is so beautiful and interesting, right?”

He laughs.

“I guess I thought so at first, too. But it gets boring eventually. And I wonder sometimes if it's really worthwhile work. Actually, my father was a soldier. Fighting for Japan in the Philippines. 'For the Emperor, BANZAAAAAI!!' ...is maybe how he died, I don't know. But in any case he lived in service to his country and his people. Although the truth is, although Japan was hurt by losing the war, I think it's better that we did.”

He means World War II, not what happened in the Philippines. I'm interested to hear his perspective, especially as he's from a more classical generation, so I gently press him. It doesn't take much; he certainly hasn't been shy about sharing so far.

“Yes, the Japanese way of thinking at that time was really quite bad. It's better that it was cut off. It was definitely a very difficult time following the war, but people worked through it and rebuilt Japan to make it better. Now we're a country of peace. So although it's tragic, you could say that the people of one small stretch of time had to be sacrificed in order to ensure the happiness of Japanese people living today.”

It's a pretty Christian sentiment; I wonder if he's conscious of it.

It's around this time that I realise: Hitchhiking my way down from Hieisan and speaking on random topics with Japanese people? I don't just admire Will Ferguson – author of the best Japan book ever – I've become him.

I want to ask the old man what he thinks would have happened with the rest of Asia if Japan hadn't been defeated, but he's started telling Cologne that he looks like Jesus.