Swirly World

I leave my capsule early and follow the instructions carefully written on a piece of paper for me by the woman at the ticket information office in Shinjuku the day before. I have to change trains three times to get from Asakusa to Maihama. Three different subway lines, then, in Hachōbori, I change onto the red JR line that takes me to Maihama, where I will be meeting the other GEOS teachers from Higashi-Kansai, our area or “shisha”.

When I arrive, I notice that this station is not only close to the Tokyo Bay Hilton, where today’s inaugural session to the Big Jump special teacher training will be held, but even closer to Tokyo Disney Land. The spacious area in front of the station is full of high school girls with ornate Mickey Mouse ears on their heads. People in casual holiday outfits are streaming out of the station, enjoying burgers and iced oulong tea at Becker’s café, some carrying big paper bags sporting Mickey and friends, full of newly acquired goods from Disney Paradise. I, on the other hand, am wearing a grey skirt suit and cherry blossom pink lipstick and, as usual, constraining tan tights and black shoes with heels. My hair is professionally tied up. I wish I could let it lose and enter into this swirly world that pervades even the space outside Disney land.

I still have two hours until I’m meeting my crew, so I walk across the wide sand-coloured space and past the big fountain and settle at Café Mono. When I order a “sakuratte”, a word composition containing “sakura” and “latte”, I am served a creamy pink concoction in a round white tea cup on a white saucer, crowned with a swirl of white, stiff and fluffy cream, red stripes lining the crown, and a real cherry blossom topping it off. There is roll bread, a type of muffin with a similar looking surface. A mouth watering world. Even the chairs look like pots of recently stirred, creamy honey, excerpts from a tray of freshly baked, smoothly twisted cinnamon buns. The triangular stand-up menu carefully details how to eat roll bread. Carefully separate the ruffled cardboard cup from the edges and – voila – you’ve turned it into a little plate. Everything is ever so convenient in this swirly world. A sweet, swirly world. In a cup, on a plate, on a chair. Everywhere.
Not the vortical swirls of every day misery, of corporate structure and profits and sales I will be sucked into later on, but vertical swirls, rising towards the sky around an invisible, creamy axis that shows only in the end, a pert tip pointing towards the sky, beaming with the constant aim of swirling the world upwards on the invisible, creamy sustenance of hope, imagination, and the effort to realise them.
The café is full of girls, most of them in pairs, waiting for the shopping village to open, gorging themselves on sweet, creamy drinks and swirly roll bread. The windows have patterns in them, and colours, so you can see the world through different shapes, squares, circles, wavy stripes, and the spaces they create together, hugging, crossing, overlapping, intersecting. The sun is shining in, aiding the warm sparkle of elegant, European-looking lamps, white crystal shades, black, ornate fittings. Disney songs flow from the speakers, rendered in bells, like lullabies from a musical box.
But as the end of my sakuratte approaches and I eat the cherry blossom, which breaks the creamy sweetness with its salty taste, I am unpleasantly awoken to the fact that I cannot stay forever in this swirly world. I have to get up and leave, and meet my co-workers from Higashi-Kansai. At least I’m not the only odd one out anymore when my equally suited colleagues arrive and join me outside the gates of Maihama station, most of them new faces, pleasantly asserting their individuality beyond their grey and black suits. We exchange first greetings, small talk getting bigger as we take the monorail train to the Tokyo Bay Hilton. So close to work, we desparately hold on to the Mickey Mouse shaped overhead handles and longingly look at Tokyo Bay through Mickey Mouse shaped windows. There it is, the Tokyo Bay Hilton.

Guest Photographer

You may have noticed that I changed the pictures on my “Cats and Dogs in Inōkashira Park” log and that the new pictures are much better than the previous ones. If not, have a look now, especially because I know most of you are here for the pictures, not my writing.
One more reason for you to read THIS, as it is introducing my guest photographer on this blog: Paul Leeming. He also took the picture of me and my seal, and I’m sure I will be using more of his pictures as they will increase the visual quality of my blog considerably.
As opposed to myself, Paul actually knows a lot about technology and its use in creating visual and audiovisual art. He also HAS the technology and the skills to do it. Here you can see him with his camera with its big image stabilisation lens, which is only part of his bigger set of accessories.
Taking photographs is not his only talent. He is also a film maker. In the summer, he will become the proud owner of a Red One digital cinema camera which he plans to use as well as rent out to expand on his existing film business. His two sci-fi short films “Eve” and “Birth” will be on Australian TV this month, and have been accepted into the National Science Fiction Convention in Melbourne in June.
So if any of this has made you curious, and you want to know more about Paul and his work, see his films, rent out his camera, or work with him in any other way, please let HIM tell you more and have a look at his website at http://www.visceralpsyche.com , yeah?

Capsule Hotel

From the outside, the Riverside Asakusa looks seedy. The walls look white turned yellow, the lights advertising capsules for ¥ 3000 (£ 13/ € 19) a night are flickering on and off. Whatever. If it has a capsule for me to sleep in, I’m happy. I go to a nearby combini to get a drink, a tooth brush travel set, some green tea mushi-pan (chewy, steamed cake) for the next morning, and a dodgy manga to make all this a truly Japanese experience.
Then I brace myself and walk up the narrow winding staircase to the entrance of the capsule hotel. A friendly man with unusually big, brown eyes greets me in the lobby. The place is much cleaner and much more welcoming than expected. There are cereal bars on the counter that can be bought for a hurried breakfast, or midnight meal, a large lobby with sofas, vending machines, lockers to lock your shoes away, slippers to slip into. A man sits on one of the sofas watching TV and having a smoke. The place reminds me of a youth hostel.
The man at reception greets me in broken English. “Sleep in a box?” he asks. I reply in Japanese, which makes him happy. “A, you speak Japanese. That makes it easier. You’re on the eighth floor. Only for women that floor. Please give me the key for your shoe box.” I hand him my key and pay for the night. He gives me another key. I take the elevator up to the eighth floor. It opens into a room with a large wash basin and mirrors. Soap for washing your face, lotion, and moisturiser are supplied, neatly lined up in clean looking light blue bottles. There is a toilet where I find a notebook. I open it. It has the same sentence scribbled all over it, again and again, on every single page from beginning to end. This must be an important message. I take a deep breath as I start deciphering what I take as a sign from the God of capsule hotels (there are 8 million gods in Japan, so there must be one responsible for capsule hotels, too). His honourable message reads:
“I’m raising my heart to be free and wide as the sky. To be taken by nothing. To learn living without ties.”
I clap, not to ask for favours from the gods like people do here, but in a more Western fashion, to applaud the God of capsule hotels and thank him for his time and consideration, to leave this notebook here for me, behind the toilet door like a toilet cleaners’ log book, yet filled with such unexpected pearls of wisdom.
I wash the sweat left behind by a Tokyo adventure off me and brush my teeth. I lock away my things in one of the L-shaped lockers before the toilet and walk past the sink and mirror into the capsule room, remindful in its space saving fashion of a ship's interior, capsule beds lined up on both sides, bottom beds and top beds. People have made these capsules their homes for the night, putting out knickers and socks to dry, carefully arranging pairs of slippers before their doors. At the rear end of the two rows, on the bottom, I find my capsule. No 8018. It has a screen that can be closed to partly shut out the light outside that must burn through the night to welcome other guests who may arrive at any time under the moon. Inside my capsule, the sheets are white and soft. There is a radio and a TV. Watching it costs ¥ 100 for half an hour, and ¥ 500 for five hours. But I have my manga, so who needs TV. There is a light inside the capsule, too, that can be dimmed and brightened. I am content in my capsule, but keep reading my manga and cannot sleep because the light is coming in through the little wholes in my screen. More and more strange manga stories. More and more dotted light on my pillow. But I need to sleep, so the dots of light turn into sheep, and I start counting. Good night little seal. Good night, Anna. And finally, my consciousness is sealed for a few hours, light earthquake like vibrations leading into a haphazard chain of light little dreams, too light to be remembered by the time a full, bright morning pours in through my blinds and tells me to leave my capsule for the Tokyo Bay Hilton.

A Seal from Kabuki-chō

Kabuki-chō is Tokyo’s entertainment and red light district. We take the orange Chūo-line to Shinjuku and get out at this busy station’s East exit from where we enter the streets of Kabuki-chō. This is the big metropolitan Tokyo we know from photographs in travel guides. Big screens with flashy commercials on them look down on us from huge buildings, like a group of Cyclopses, making us feel small in a moving concrete canyon. The large round space in front of the station is much busier even than holiday Kichijōji.
As tomorrow’s training will be all work and it will be a strenuous task trying to stay awake through seven hours of speeches in a warm room, making a respectable face, taking notes, downloading information, today I have set myself a fun task. I want something to play. And it has to be a seal. Kabuki-chō is my treasure hunting ground.
The first shop front flashes large breast-shaped pillows and an elephant head covering the crotch of a plastic male body. The shop turns out to be a maze, much deeper and bigger than the small entrance suggests, its merchandise a strange combination of clothes, home appliances, make up, and bizarre toys.
We might need something seedier to find my seal. Around the corner, we find a small shop called “Wild One”. It is nothing but a small corridor, a wrinkly mama behind the counter with short hair and a serious make up overdose gluing the pores of her face shut. Looking around, I can’t find anything resembling a seal. There is a penguin.
“Excuse me,” I finally ask her. “Do you happen to have a seal?” “Seal? Hm.” She is unfazed by my request and slowly gets up from her seat. “I don’t think we have a seal. As far as cute things go,” she says with a voice marred by years of smoke, guttural noises, and other dirt passing through her throat, as she combs through a small glass shelf at the entrance, “We have a dolphin and a bee. The dolphin is ¥ 4000 Yen, the bee ¥5000.”
She shows me both, but I have to disappoint her and tell her I’m not interested in bees or dolphins. I have come to find a seal. And it will be a seal or nothing. Of course I know that the latter is the more likely outcome, but you have to try if you want to succeed, and trying itself is fun.
We wander about gazing at the variety of shows and massage parlours, the suited men standing in front of them to invite people in. Cheap shops, expensive shops, none of them spelling out explicitly what happens inside them. They have pictures of scantily clad girls on them, some in school uniforms, some wearing nothing, some foreign, some Japanese. There are prices for different times. ¥ 6000 and for an hour’s “course” (whatever that may entail), ¥ 10,000 for two hours. The most explicit message we find, written in English, is “Only Japanese”.
Finally, an inconspicuous grey plastic curtain along a darker alleyway leads us into another shop. This one seems to have no particular name. The words above the door are content-related and simply functional. “Adult Toys”, it says.
We go in, and again, the shop’s size is not impressive. But the array of goods in this shop seems to be more extensive than that at the “Wild One”. A man in his late forties with a balding head, hair combed across it in thin strands from left to right, fixed with copious amounts of wax, politely welcomes us and gestures at a wall of lit-up vibrators. “Omiage, omiage!” he says. “Get some souvenirs for your friends at home!” “Actually,” I confess, “I’m not here to buy omiage. I’m looking for a seal.”
“A seal? Well, there are al kinds of things here, so just have a look, you might be lucky.” I comb through the shelves. Again, they are full of dolphins. This time, I find a penguin, as well. Lots of nun-like women that creepily glare at me in semi-see-through colours, filled with pearls. When I think I have looked at every single item this shop is selling and am about to leave, Wax Strand calls from the other side of the room: “What about a fur seal?” “A fur seal?” Within a second, I’m next to him to see whether he is actually telling the truth. He holds up a see through box with a little white thing in it. I take a closer look. Jesus, Mary and St Joseph. It is in actual fact, a seal. Bent 90 degrees in the middle for perfect vibration distribution, its cute little head looking up at the golden gate, its tail fin spreading across the beach of pleasure. On the control, there is a picture of a smiling fur seal, and it says “otossei – a fur seal”.
I can’t believe my luck. “I’ll have that.” I say, and then can’t stop laughing about the bizarre and unexpected result of this impossible seal hunt. “I’ll make it cheap for you,” says Wax Strand. It’s usually ¥ 5000, but I’ll give it to you for ¥ 4000.” He puts in some batteries and checks whether it is moving. The fur seal is moving. He returns it to the box and puts it in an innocent looking red-chequered paper bag for me. Mission accomplished.
It is time for food again. We try to find cheap yaki-niku (fried beef) and ask one of the men inviting people into shops that sell “courses” for help. He lends us the high-tech skills of his mobile phone navigation system, polite and caring, and walking us half the way to the restaurant as another man appears out of nowhere, runs across the street, and wordlessly takes over his post. We find the place we are looking for, but it is full, and we are not willing to wait for 40 minutes. Instead, we find a Wara-Wara and eat a variety of dishes, including fried mochi (sticky rice balls) with cheese and bacon, Okonomiyaki, Hokkaido pumpkin gratin, salad wraps, and fried pork with spring onions. When our stomachs are full, it is still early, so we embark on a last little adventure between our different train stations.
We get off at Ueno, hoping Ueno Park might be lit up and offer another opportunity for taking pictures and enjoying some more relaxing views after the endlessly sparkling and flashing streets of Kabuki-chō. But there is not much light in the park. Mostly benches covered with blue plastic tarpaulins, the little sleeping cells of homeless people. There are animal statues made of lit up wires. The light in the wires changes colours. They are live-sized and, arranged into scenes taken from “The Carnival of the Animals”, offer a mesmerising little spectacle, A reindeer pulling monkeys around on a sled. Big penguins, a giant bear, a peacock. We take more pictures and finally have a last coffee in Ueno before we go our separate ways again.
P is off to get his subway line, I am off to get mine: the Ginza line to Asakusa, where I can sleep in a capsule for ¥ 3000. Walking down the steps towards my train, I whistle happily at the drab, yellow walls. I’ve got a fur seal in my pocket. Capsule today, Hilton tomorrow. A seal in your pocket eats all your sorrow. Come here, Seal, you have talent. You can bark, you can purr, Seal, so purr tonight. I’m taking you to a capsule tonight, just you and me in a capsule tonight, ooooh, just you and me. As I step onto the train, I swear I can hear Seal clapping his fins in my pocket.

Cats and Dogs in Inōkashira Park

The 21st of March is a national holiday: “higan”, the day seven days before the vernal equinox when memorial services are held for the deceased. On the 22nd of March, I am attending the Big Jump special teacher training inaugural session in Tokyo. The plan GEOS has made for me is to leave Osaka early on the 22nd and come back early on the 23rd, on time for work. As this is a work related trip, I get my travel expenses reimbursed. So why not go to Tokyo on the 21st. I ask head office, and am granted my wish. The Shinkansen tickets cost the same, whether I leave Osaka on the 21st or the 22nd: ¥ 28,740 (£125/€183) for a round trip from Shin-Osaka to Tokyo station.
The train is packed, and I’m happy I have reserved a seat. I enjoy a good two and a half hours savouring the next bit of my Murakami novel, taking time to look up kanji and words, writing them on a key-ringed set of study-cards sporting a cute black cat and the wonderfully strange German phrase “Eine boshafte schwarze Katze” (“an evil black cat”). Apparently this character is a Korean invention. I spotted it last week when, panicking about my fatal lack of orientation, I arrived in Shinsaibashi, the en vogue young people’s shopping and partying district of Osaka, about two hours before our local teacher training session. In a shop full of different cute characters featured on a cornucopia of kitchen, home, and office paraphernalia, there was a whole section devoted to the “boshafte schwarze Katze” that does not look “boshaft” at all. It was excellent pre-training entertainment to read through the clumsy phrases printed on stationery, pens, notebooks, and study cards. “Selbst wenn sie sie nahm, war es ein groβes Abenteuer.“ („Even when she took her, it was a great adventure.“)
Sitting on the train, I have to laugh again as I read the words on my study cards. The novel progresses, my Japanese vocabulary expands slowly, and the white Shinkansen Nozomi train with the big round nose gets me into Tokyo in slightly more than two hours.
My plan is to meet P, a friend from my initial Tokyo training days who is based in Tokyo, to re-visit my Tokyo from four years ago and bathe in a tub full of healthy nostalgia, walking around exclaiming “Natsukashii!” at every street corner, and, possibly, buy myself a toy.
I meet P at Kichijōji station, Kōenguchi exit. It is a sunny day, and a national holiday, so the narrow streets of Kichijōji are crammed with moving crowds. P and I squeeze into the crowd and move with it, crossing the busy road with café Stone and KFC, and the next with the bus stop, past the Body Shop and the big O1O1 department store, to enter that old acquaintance of mine, a friendly little street home to stalls selling giant battered octopus, deep fried (bakuhatsuyaki), green tea, coffee, and vanilla flavoured whippy ice cream, sausages pierced by a rib for easier eating, and, at a German restaurant called König, Weiβwurst and Glühwein. The latter seems completely inappropriate on a sunny spring day like today: a guest from cold German Christmas markets where it serves to warm everybody’s heart and soul. Here, he seems lonely and out of place, the spring sun unnecessarily warming him.
We continue down the little road, past jewellery and fashion shops, an Indian restaurant, a shop selling handmade pillows sporting cats. I wonder whether these cute looking cats, too, are in fact evil creatures that curse you with big adventures every time you take them.
I have not been here in over four years, but still I know my way around, and it feels like I’m showing P one of my many homes. Finally, the Starbucks and the big yaki-tori place on the right, the fancy Japanese restaurant on the left, and Inōkashira Park opens up before us. The bridge, the lake, the many kinds of ducks. Salary men in casual garb on their day off, taking the family, renting swan-shaped boats, and paddling them around the lake between the ducks. Ahirun-run-run, ahi-run-run-run. Young people enjoying their spring. Musicians and their instruments. Children. Couples. Dogs. Most of them pocket-sized and flaunting the latest prêt-aboyer spring collections. A sand-coloured chihuaha in a pink jumper with a lacy hood. A French bulldog wearing a T-shirt that says “Vintage Dog”. A poodle in camouflage. The only naturalist dog we see is a big St Bernhard that looks the size of a bear in comparison to the fashion conscious miniature dogs that seem more common here. He is not wearing any thing on top of his everyday tricolour coat. Finally, we spot the most bizarre pet in the park: a cat on a lead, wearing a Mickey Mouse T-Shirt. P gets out his professional camera with its big, long lense and image stabiliser. While P tries to get a better shot of the cat, I comment on its taste in clothes to the proud owners, a young couple, he with a small gap between his front teeth, she wearing a bright pink skirt, hair died light brown.
“O yes, I bet he does like Mickey Mouse.” Gap smiles. “He loves Mickey!” “What’s your name?” I ask the cat, but Gap answers for him. “This is Sō-kun,” he says. “Yoroshiku onegai shimasu. – Nice to meet you!” When we’ve got Sō-kun on digicam, we move on to take pictures of other things.
On the boat-free side of the bridge, there are fountains colouring the air rainbow between us and the red temple on the other shore. Flowers coming out. The golden hour starting to turn the world into honey. We leisurely stroll about, blending into the crowds of people, taking pictures. We eat pork and boiled egg, and sticky fried rice in lotus leaves at the little café in the park. A random man asks whether he can take a picture of us, and we model for his shot.
When we cross the bridge back, there are two new musicians sitting on a bench by the river. One young man with features that could be Japanese as well as native South American with a guitar. An older man wearing a hat playing a snake-skin shamisen. They play Shima-uta, the old Okinawan song, and I have to go talk to them. In no time, the shamisen finds its way into my hands, and Hat corrects my posture. For a while, I improvise on Japindian’s friendly chords. “Do you play the guitar?” he says. He speaks perfect English. “Yes.” “If you play guitar, it’s very easy.” P takes pictures, until we move on again. When he takes some shots of the German restaurant for me, I buy us two giant cones of green tea whippy ice cream which we kill on our way back to the station. Next stop: Kabuki-chō.

Jazz and Happy

First Miy-san and I agree to meet at 10 in the morning. But then, Miy-san realises she has a dentist’s appointment and asks whether we can make it around two instead, and she’ll contact me again that day. Around 11.30, she sends me a text asking whether we can make it one. Of course we can.
Unfortunately sending money to my German bank account at Sone yubinkyoku takes ages. On top of that, a woman with bad breath chats me up and asks whether I want a free credit card on my account. I do, actually, as that will mean I can withdraw money even when the post office is closed, which I can’t at the moment. The restricted ATM opening hours in this country are rather annoying at times. I tell her I would love a free credit card, but unfortunately I don’t have time right now. It only takes five minutes, she only needs to take my name and address, she promises.
Of course it doesn’t take five minutes. I’m juggled back and forth between the woman at the counter who is not used to the procedures and makes me fill in one sheet twice because the first time she doesn’t realise I was supposed to put my address into the boxes in romaji, not kanji, and the woman with bad breath who is a salesperson and has therefore lied to me about the time it takes to get a card. I’m not sure what use it will be to her if I sign up for a free credit card, but knowing how things work in the world of sales since I involuntarily entered it working for GEOS, I assume she gets commissions. When the counter woman sends me to the ATM outside to withdraw the cash I want to pay into my German account (why under god they can’t take it off my account directly, as they are the institution where I have my account, I cannot fathom), I give Miyuki a call and apologise that I will be late. Hoping the procedures must be almost over now that I will pay the money, I optimistically tell her that I will be on the next train. Of course I won’t. The ATM spits out a brick-thick bundle of bills that make me flinch in horror. Have I entered a zero too much and just bankrupted myself into a myriad of debt? No. The ATM has simply given me 80,000 Yen in 1000 Yen notes. Fine. I hand over the 55,000 I want to pay into my German account plus 2,500 Yen administration fees. This is always the same sum. It doesn’t change, no matter how much or how little money is transferred.
The woman with bad breath needs to know another zillion details. How much would I like to borrow on my credit card? What do I want to make my one time withdrawal limit? Am I working for a company? Which one? Which branch? How many other people work in that branch? What is my annual salary? I feel tempted to use bad language but I don’t have the vocabulary, and of course I’m always polite.
Finally, she asks me whether I would like a post office money bank, a post office alarm clock, or a post office note pad for a present. I choose the red, old school alarm clock. “There’s a battery in it,” she tells me, “So please just pull off the seal.”
I run to the station. It is raining buckets, but I have the black umbrella with me the kombiniya-san from Friday aikido class kindly presented to me on a morning when the rain caught me by surprise after aikido training, in my working clothes. On the platform, I call Miy-san again. “Don’t worry,” she says, “I’m in a book shop. See you soon.”
I take the Hankyu Takarazuka line to Ishibashi, two stops behind Toyonaka, and find her engaged in what must have been a long bout of tachiyomi (standing up reading). He hair is almost as curly as mine. Naturally. Rare. She smiles, and we walk through the rain across a big street, turning into a quiet residential area. One of those little Japanese neighbourhoods with blue roofs and little shrines and flower displays, where everything looks the same, but everything looks very different at the same time. They are cosy but scary to a direction illiterate newcomer like me. Hōko-onchi - direction-unmusical, say the Japanese. I always get lost in this type of neighbourhood. But this time, I have Miy-san to lead me, with her flowery umbrella and her curly Japanese hair.
Finally, we arrive at a two-storey tall building with a slant roof where some steps lead up to a second floor entrance. It is an average house, but somehow it has an unassuming kind of elegance about it, just like Miy-san. “This is it,” she announces, and we climb the steps around a corner up to her family home. I marvel at her grace as she holds her black and white chequered handbag, disposes of the flowery umbrella, and unlocks the door. There’s a pair of guest slippers waiting for me from the guest slipper stand. White, soft plastic slippers.
A minuscule dog with bulging eyes and light beige spots on short, white fur comes a-running and madly wags its tail. He madly slides around the floor in circles and jumps up at me in enthusiastic curiosity and excitement. But he doesn’t bark, which I appreciated greatly. “This is Happy,” says Miy-san, while she walks into the kitchen that doorlessly opens up on the left, across from the sofa and armchair area living room on the left. Happy indeed. I play with Happy and take him up for a cuddle. I’m not usually a fan of dogs smaller than a kitten, but Happy deeply impresses me with his non-stop enthusiasm and happiness. I wonder whether Miy-san does this to people and dwarf dogs alike, with her mere presence. On the left stands a large electronic Yamaha piano, complete with two main keyboards and a foot keyboard for the base lines. And a multitude of buttons with different functions that remain obscure to me, even when I see Miy-san use them later on. You get books that come with floppy disks that give you the right rhythm and the keys the right sound for whatever sound spectacle you want to create on it. I’m deeply impressed when I hear her reproduce perfectly the sound of the “Pirates of the Carribbean” and “Terminator” title themes.
“Take a seat!” says Miy-san, while she takes up a glass teapot. I sit down on a bench at the longish kitchen table and play with Happy, who can’t get enough of it. I am served hot black tea with orange flavour in a very English looking cup and saucer, complete with blue roses and golden edges. Happy keeps trying to kiss me on the mouth. When I direct him away from it, he licks my neck instead and tickles me into fits of laughter. Finally, Miy-san restrains her hyper little pet and puts a little lead on him that goes across his chest, as if he was a little reindeer. “Now he thinks he’s being taken out,” she says, smiling cruelly, and puts the loop of the lead on one post of her chair. Happy sits there and breathes, without spite. We have some scrumptious, moist sweet potato-cakes, shaped with a big spoon probably, but pointed on both ends. She shows me her “aesthe” room, the room where she makes people beautiful. You get a full “aesthe course” for 4000 Yen. “I would love one,” I tell her. “Great, I will prepare the room then,” she says. But then, somehow in the middle of her preparations, we land on the long piano seat and sing. Miy-san is a virtuoso electronic piano captain. She presses buttons here, and turns little wheels there, plays three keyboards all at the same time, and gets the sound of a whole jazz band out of the machine. It’s very impressive. She gives me the books she studies from. Her singing teacher writes down the songs adjusted to her lower pitch, and Miy-san listens intently to the CDs, to learn how to pronounce the lyrics of which she claims to understand nothing. Pure sound-imitation, but that makes her pronunciation better than most of my students’. No wonder, really. After all, sound imitation is the key to good pronunciation. But it is still impressive to learn such long combinations of foreign sounds when their sequence and intonation must seem utterly random, and void of meaning.
What songs do you know? She asks, and I go through her books and pick a few. Cheek to Cheek, we sing, and Lullaby of Birdland, and Summertime. Happy sits tied to the chair in his little reindeer outfit, his eyes bulging a little sadly now, and sings, too. His size does not allow for dog-like howls. He sounds like a budgie. Also, he is not as musical as Miy-san. Finally, there is a song I don’t really know, so I start improvising. “Hamotteru!” She exclaims happily. We’re singing in harmony. If I practise I can make up better melodies, I tell her, and she is all fire. “Let’s do it!” she says. Let’s practise, and then let’s have a concert here! And invite all the aikido people, plus the Sensei and his wife. His wife really likes jazz, too!”
“Excellent. Yes! Let’s!”
We sing and sing, with Happy chirping along, and Miy-san plays her charming chords and handles buttons that exude sax and trumpet, and brushing drum sounds from the speakers. ‘S Wonderful, Mr Gershwin! What are you doing the rest of your life? Let’s fall in love, why shouldn’t we fall in love. When you walk, let your heart lead the way, and you’ll find love any day, Alfie.
Her son K-kun returns with two friends, and they take Happy into K-kun’s room and play with him.
Then Miy-san calls the kids into the living room and serves juice and chewy rice sweets. The two of us get tea instead of juice, and the strawberries and little purple potato cakes I’ve brought for snacks. The three boys savour the sticky rice balls on sticks and their juice. And finally listen to Miy-san and me sing a few more songs. They are all very well-mannered little boys and listen with big eyes and genuine admiration to the sounds we produce with our voices and the Yamaha piano. Miy-san shows me a poster she has made for a school choir performance. It is a perfect little elf, singing out swirly notes. Clear influences of manga and art nouveau. Finally, K-kun’s two friends leave, and I Miy-san and K-kun give me a lift to Shōsenji, where I train aikido with Jazz lingering in my heart, head, and body, guiding me, swinging me stable in the essential effortless flow of movement the Shihan preaches.

Translating the Word of God

“Rather interesting,” said Seal, savouring the first sip of the coffee I had made him. He had an Oxford accent.
My heart was drinking the world the furry creature had brought in with him, and it was filling up from all sides like a sponge.
The moment he suddenly showed his round, black eyes at the window, he made me open what had been closed for a long time, and now my bedsit was breathing heavily, air wafting through the room in waves of pressure lifting the insides of my stomach like a swiftly rising elevator, and my heart was drinking desperately, lapping at the substance oozing out of Seal’s presence.

There he was, giving me that opening look through the glass, warranting immediate access, already inching in, fins pulling furry fat across the window sill, sliding onto the floor, moving across the carpet in his awkward, zig-zagging seal walk, stopping in front of the sofa. He turned his neck to look at me. And again to look up at the sofa. I walked across and, sinking into the white folds of his neck, lifted him up and put him on it. He sat there, fins on his belly, breathing. In and out came his furry belly. In and out. His eyes were zonked, staring straight ahead at some indeterminate point. In space? Time? Or was there another dimension he knew and was seeking to stare into my flat little world with his big round eyes?
“I wouldn’t mind a drink,” he finally said snapping out of his zonk.
“Coffee?”
“That would be fabulous.”
I made coffee and served. He savoured.
“I have come to talk,” he said.
“Have you?” The situation’s components registered. Conversation with Seal. Immersed in and pervaded by unknown substance. No escape.

“Yesterday,” said Seal, “when you left the library, you bumped into my car.”
“Your car?”
“Yes. A black Subaru Imprezza. Which happens to be quite dear to me.”
I imagined Seal with his streamlined, finned body trying to drive a Subaru Imprezza but finally decided to take my response from a different angle.
“But I don’t drive.”
“That bears no relevance.”
He took another sip of coffee and smacked his tongue on his palate.
I stalled. “But how could I have bumped into your car? I was on foot!”
“You bumped into my car. And it is dear to me.”
You’re out of your mind, Seal, I wanted to say. But then I remembered I was talking to a seal and didn’t say it, and said instead:
“I’m awfully sorry. But I don’t remember.”
“That is a common occurrence.”
A common occurrence.
“Would you mind me searching your memory?” asked Seal.
I looked into his big, black eyes, and they forced me away from the content of our talk into different territory. When my mind got back, I had already spoken.
“You are free to search every nook and cranny of my memory.”
“Wonderful,” said Seal and slid down the sofa. “Where shall we do it?”
“Where?”
“You need to lie down comfortably and take off your clothes,” said Seal.
Seal certainly had the odd baffling trump up his fin.
“That is the only way you can search my memory?”
“I’m sure there are other methods,” said Seal wriggling towards the mattress that was my bed, “But this is the one I know.” He gave my bed a quick once-over and said: “This seems to be a good place to do it.”
I took off my clothes, jeans, socks, polo shirt, pants, and folded them into a neat pile on the chair next to my bed. Seal waited next to the bed, unimpressed by my progressing state of nudity and its stark completion. I lay down on my stomach and closed my eyes.
“Are you comfortable?” said Seal.
I was as comfortable as I could be.
At first, his fur was light on me, with no weight whatsoever. Was this his fur? There was something hovering along the edges of my entire body simultaneously. Gradually, it closed in on me and made circles starting from impulse points in the middle and spreading pressure evenly in concentric circles around these points, overlapping, and moving away from the initial pressure points at the same time as closing in on them. One pressure point was the next one’s outermost circle. As circles and points began spreading through my body, I stopped thinking in a linear fashion, and what had been a tool for thinking cause and consequence broke into ceaseless circling and pointing, constantly starting from nothing and everything, returning to everything and nothing.
When my mind re-surfaced, Seal was in the same position as before, facing the bed, looking me in the eyes.
“I found it.” He said.
“Found it?”
“Yesterday, in the library, you told Carol to come back, because you could fix it. Then you took out a book. ‘Translating the Word of God’.”
Seal was telling the truth, wherever he had found it.
“But I did not bump into your car.”
“You did. You bumped into my Imprezza, and it is dear to me. I would much appreciate your cooperation in correcting your mistake. Take back 'Translating the Word of God'. Tell Carol the truth. You can’t fix it. That will fix my Imprezza, and I shall not bother you again.”
You didn’t bother me, I wanted to say. But as Seal wriggled towards the window and somehow managed to clamber up and out, my voice dissolved into fits of crying, and I couldn’t stop till I fell into a bottomless sleep.

I found the book next to my bed. Now I had to take it back I wanted to read it more than ever. My heart heavy like a sponge full of truth, I faced the dark winter morning to meet Carol at the library.

A Beautiful Castle

I’m having a succession of days that are not the best. You know what kind of days I mean. I stay up late with uneasy thoughts on my mind and holes in my soul, pervaded by the darkness of night, and then can’t get out of bed in the morning, fall asleep again, accidentally switch off my alarm clock instead of putting it on snooze and end up having to run to work, picking up new tights in a kombini (convenience store) on the way because mine burst as I try to speed things up running. At the kombini that’s usually empty, five people are standing in front of me, all wanting to pay their gas bills and buy nikuman (big Chinese meat-filled dumplings) and have them warmed up. I realise I have no money left and run across to the post office to withdraw some, but it is Saturday morning, and the ATM is closed. Relax, it’s not the end of the world. It just gives me heartburn and makes my back even worse that it already is. I’m not even thirty, and I have back pains. Not enough weights workouts, probably. I’m trying to increase my workout number but there is too little time for all the many things I want to do, so I try to do a little bit of everything and never manage to do enough of anything. I have so little time, I hardly get to read. I hardly know what’s going on in the world. I want to study kanji and new words so I understand more of what’s going on in the news I occasionally watch in the evenings. I want to pass the Japanese proficiency test. I want rhythm. I want music. I want, I want, always want what I don’t have. Never mind. I have a job. I get paid. I’m in Japan. I have a place to myself, a world to myself. That’s quite enough. Plod on. Gambare.
To prevent morning haste, which I hate, I get up and go to the gym early and run a number of exhausting, long, fast intervals with only short slower breaks on the treadmill. I have enough time to stretch, shower, and stroll to the station, but before I know it, I’m talking to another runner who, I thought, just wanted to use the treadmill next. But he wants to talk. He is 59 and studied German at university 35 years ago. He can still say “Ich bin Student.” (“I’m a student.”) And he used to run half marathons, but now he just runs 10 km races. I should stay in Japan forever, he tells me. Talk about forever. I try to wrap up the conversation for lack of time. Never enough time. Even friendliness turns into a difficult subject in all this haste.
In the evening I want to go home as soon as possible after my last class to get some sleep. I can hardly suppress my yawns during classes, and it is unthinkable to yawn in front of my students, who are paying a lot of money to get competent, efficient, friendly English teachers, wide eyed and bushy tailed, which by definition, mustn’t yawn. Hagakure cautions the samurai that he should lick his mouth when he has to yawn, in order to suppress it. I try my best to heed that old samurai advice but feel that constantly licking my mouth in class won’t make a great impression, either. I was chosen to go on a special teachers’ training program starting in Tokyo in two weeks, so I have to pull myself together and serve my master single-mindedly. Continue to spur a running horse. Plunge recklessly towards an irrational death. By doing this, you will awaken from your dreams.
Somehow, paperwork pops up out of nowhere, and the computer needs some time to recover from an unexpected attack to his carotid arteries, so I can’t log myself out of the system and have to wait, captured in a virtual world of real working hours. When I get to the train station, I can spot the socially inept pervert who told me he had always dreamed of having a foreigner by his side the other night. And I was pretty, and he wanted to go for a drink with me. I don’t want to talk to him again, so I hide behind a kiosk, make sure I get on a different coach, and get off at Hattori, not Sone, so he can’t catch up with me.
I have to force myself out of bed again. But I’m motivated. My first destination today is Shōsenji for women’s aikido training.
Where I’m not told to plunge recklessly towards an irrational death. But purposefully towards a meaningful life. Zazen in its perfect form means thinking nothing.
“So I sat there, thinking nothing for a few days,” says the Shihan with the blue eyes. “And after that, although on the outside, the situation was still the same, I suddenly stopped feeling resentment and started feeling gratefulness.”
“There are many types of prayer,” he says, putting his hands together in front of his chest. “But what matters is the feeling we put into our gestures, not the form they take. It is the feeling that gets through, across language barriers. If it is real gratefulness we feel, we can communicate it to anyone. And rather than thinking about other people, about a single hand, a single direction, think this: you are a beautiful castle with a moat around it. That’s where things happen. Inside that beautiful castle.”

In my children’s classes, we have spent our last three lessons with the three little hippos. First, we made a straw house. Then a stick house. Then a brick house. The wolf couldn’t blow the brick house down, but there are more evil things out there than wolves. Dark nights. Tan tights. Closed ATMs. Alarm clocks. Yawns. Maybe it is time for me to upgrade again. Maybe I should build a castle. Not out of straw, sticks or bricks this time. What makes the perfect form? Let me think, let me think, let me think. And when I stop thinking, I can start building.

The Singing Fists of Shōrinji

Surfing the net for Shōrinji -ryu karate in Ōsaka, the first hit I get is a dōjō in my neighbourhood. Even though they train on Thursdays 7 o’clock when I’m still working for another three hours, I follow a spontaneous whim and call the contact number anyway.
Enter T-Sensei. Well, his voice, rather. It is a very friendly voice, and he tells me they are training on Saturday nights as well. From 8 o’clock. On Saturdays, I tell him, I work exactly till 8 o’clock. My heart sinks. “No problem!” he says. “We train till ten, so just come whenever you can make it!”
The first time I can make it is two weeks later, because the next Saturday is taken up by my GEOS Juso school welcome party, where I obviously can’t be missing.
The training takes place in Ōike Primary School near Toyonaka Station. I leave work as soon as I can and take the same train I usually take home, only going two stops further. Map in hand, I traipse through Toyonaka in my work clothes, in search of Ōike Primary School. Wandering down a dark alley that, according to my map, should take me straight to the entrance, a stranger walking along with his two little daughters asks me: “What are you looking for?” “I’m looking for Ōike Primary School. Do you know this area?” “Ah, that’s just over there.” As I turn the way he points, I can actually see a door opening up and revealing a light patch of sports hall in the dark. However, there’s dark, a high fence in between me and the light. The man says: “I think this entrance won’t be open now, so you have to go around that way.”
I thank him and go around that way, and find the entrance to the school, only that it looks dark and closed. But I have seen a light on the way, so I try to open the dark gate anyway, and sesame opens up to me. I walk around the side of the dark, dark building, through tiny little paths next to flower beds, and finally find the sports hall. A bunch of kids are sitting with some parents, putting on their shoes after training, getting ready to leave. When I enter, nobody notices me as I bow respectfully to the dōjō. It is huge. There are still several kids and several bigger people sitting around on the floor, with bags and clothes next to them. Some people are training karate in different parts of the hall, doing different things. I walk around aimlessly in the giant dōjō, looking for T-Sensei, or somebody else I might ask what to do next. But I don’t have to go looking. He finds me.
“Ah, you must be Anna-san!” calls an energetic looking man in a black dōgi from the other side of the hall. Sensei’s voice. “I am.” I shout back. He leads me to the changing rooms. “Just get changed in there, and then come back in.”
I get changed, and am introduced to Senpai, who seems much younger than me, but nonetheless a lot better at karate. He takes me through the basic movements of the style, which are stationary moves that include all the main movements. Importantly, changing from kiba-dachi into zenkutsu-dachi, using a lot of hip movement.
Senpai is strict and very good at teaching. In all the necessary detail but no more, he tells me how to adjust and improve my movements to match the style. After we have finished going through all the seven types of moves two or three times, T-Sensei calls everybody together for some pad work. First, he wants to see mine. Senpai holds the pad, and I’m tested on a range of kicks first, not doing great. Sensei watches and nods. “Ah, I think I know what kind of karate you did before.” He assumes a perfect Tenshinkan stance and dashes forward to hit the pad with several perfect Tenshinkan punches and kicks. “Was it like this?” “It was,” I admit, impressed, and Sensei then assumes a Shorinji-ryu stance, which is turned slightly sideways, more boxing-like, and ready to kick all the time, using a lot of spinning flying round house back kicks like in kickboxing. These ones I have to get used to as I’ve never really done them before. “So this is how we do it,” says Sensei. “Hold up the pad,” he tells Senpai, as I am supposed to punch it, and then he adds in a more quiet voice: “I think she’ll be much better at that.”
I can’t wait to have the pad put in front of me and dash forward with the punches Sensei tells me to use. Everyone makes a face. Some people go all quiet and whisper “Scary.” At least there is something I can do, I think, and then the whole group gathers in pairs to do more pad-work up and down the hall. Apart from small children, a wide range of age groups trains together here, from young teenage years to middle age. Everybody instructs and helps each other. Atmosphere A. After training, I am to stand in front of the group and give the obligatory jikoshōkai (self introduction). I can’t think of much to say and just tell everybody I’m from Germany and am teaching English here in Osaka, so I will be here for a while. Please grace me with your kindness and benevolence in the future. I bow. Sensei says: “It is great to have Anna with us. She has come from far away and is training with us. And I want everybody to train hard so you can punch like Anna.” Thankfully I don’t have a tendency to blush. Instead, I bow again, and ask for everybody’s kindness and benevolence once again. You can never ask often enough, especially when you're talking to a group of karate people.

Two weeks later, T-Sensei schedules a welcome party for me. Training kung-fu in Ōsakajō-kōen before and getting confused about which trains I have to take when and from where, I end up making everybody wait for a long time, and the worst thing is that my mobile is out of batteries. They will leave, I think, and I hate myself for messing things up so badly and treating people who are treating me with so much kindness and benevolence in such an ignorant and careless manner.
When I arrive, everybody is standing there, waiting for me. I hail apologies on them, but they just shrug them off, and we walk a couple hundred yards to a warmly-lit, light-wood-coloured Japanese style restaurant in Toyonaka. There are five of us, and a little woman with big eyes joins us later. So we sit and drink beer, and talk. “Please ask us lots of questions tonight,” he tells me, “And everybody else, please ask Anna lots of questions tonight!” So the night moves on as we sit at a long table eating croquets, salad, spicy pieces of raw octopus, spaghetti with mushroom and cream sauce and more delicious snacks, drinking small glasses of beer, and asking and answering questions, learning. Mainly about the individuals present at this party. But there is some country-related talk as well.
Sensei is interested in history and wants to know why Germany, although it lost the war like Japan, has a normal military now. I explain that in Germany, the allies tried to erase the world of Nazi thought that had made the war atrocities possible by replacing all jobs of authority, introducing a new curriculum into schools and in general being strict about cleansing the country from Nazi ideology, so there was no need for a peace clause like in Japan, where article 9 of the post-war constitution restricts Japan’s military to a self defence force not to be used in attacks. I also explain that even though Germany does have a military, every dispatch of it to contribute to UN missions is still viewed critically inside Germany and turns into a major news item every time it happens. He savours his beer and the new information gained.
We have gradually filled our bellies, and start leaving, but Sensei has planned a second venue. Most people need to leave, as for them, the next day is Monday, a normal working day. Sensei, Senpai and I, however, make our way to a nearby karaoke bar, where we order some non-alcoholic drinks this time, and a party set of snacks including crisps, eda-mame (small green beans), and chocolate sticks in strawberry cream.
This is probably the most enjoyable part of the evening. Politely, one after another, we put songs into the machine and sing. While I offer pieces of the English song menu, such as Norah Jones’s “Don’t Know Why” and Dido’s “Thank You”, I get an impressive range of Japanese music in return. I’m surprised by Sensei’s good singing voice as it appropriately whines the traditional Okinawan “Shima-uta” and breathes love songs like “Mayonaka sugi koi” and a song from the seventies called “Anna”, written with the same kanji I use for my name. I’m also very impressed by Senpai’s interesting choice of songs including “Tokyo no hiyori” and “Josei A”, both of which I try to find on i-tunes later that night, but without success.
We sing, eat, drink, and laugh, until the time comes to leave. Sensei refuses to accept money from me and invites me to my welcome party. And to sum up the theme of the party, and create a hopeful start to our joint efforts to become better and better at karate, we have our picture taken together in the karaoke lobby. Smile, CHEESU! And KAPOW!

Jazz

We are in the changing rooms at Shōsenji temple. For some reason, Miy-san mentions that she likes jazz. Mis-san stands out because of her beauty. Stunning in an unassuming manner. Her actions are graceful like sunbeams dancing in a birch forest, and her smile could open up a tree full of slumbering cherry blossoms. Her comments about jazz prompt me to mention that I am quite a fan of jazz myself. She invites me to a concert in Kobe next Monday. These are the most popular jazz performers in Kansai, and the place is class. It is a restaurant called Sone, and it is the oldest jazz establishment in Japan. Of course I will go. I’m training aikido on Mondays as well, but I can come after that. We exchange phone numbers and e-mail addresses.



One day before the concert, Miy-san sends me a text message saying that she can make a request to the band if there is a song I like. I tell her I like “Cheek to Cheek” but I will be quite happy to listen to whatever songs they want to sing.

The next Monday, 26 February, I train aikido and, after that, take the Hankyu Kobe line to Sannomya, the same station that has brought Manager and me to Nanking-machi only one day earlier. I arrive rather late, and am hoping I will get to hear some jazz that stretches across a long enough time to allow me to lean back, let small amounts of cool alcohol seep into my tongue and flow down my throat, and relax. Liquid and sound equally permeated by the bitterness of life turned sweetness of feeling. Art.
Miy-san masters a rare feat and sends me perfect directions in a mobile phone message. I only have to ask somebody where Benetton is, then I see DoCoMo on the other side. These two shops mark my entry into Kitazaka, an ascending road lined with ramen bars and other restaurants, that leads me across a big street, and after another ten yards, reveals Sone Restaurant on the left.
When I enter, the place is almost empty. Only three or four small groups of people are sitting on the old, elegant chairs on old, elegant tables, on top of old, elegant Persian rugs. The place’s atmosphere gets a 1A, managing to fit perfectly into my European sense of cultural homeliness, while being in the middle of Japan. It is old and elegant. The waiters are well groomed and dressed, and handsome. They walk upright, only bending at the waist with straight backs, but effortlessly like the brilliant bass player plucks his strings. They whisper in my ear while the band is playing, the singer singing, the world swinging. I order ume-shu, but they do not serve that. I've ordered it mainly because I thought it would look prettier in this place than a pint of beer. But, swinging away, the place itself forces me to turn my order into a pint of “super-dry”, cold, sparkling lager.
I am surprised to find Miy-san alone. I assumed she would be going with other friends. But, back straight, legs elegantly crossed, her wavy hair falling across one shoulder, she is sitting all by herself, on a tiny round table, sipping a glass of oulong tea after she has finished her beer. She smiles at me. There is a piano, a big bass, a set of drums, and some energetic female vocals, with eyes beaming like stars, and a body moving like a young cat with the swing of the music. When I sit down, she looks me in the eyes for while, welcoming and greeting me with their sparkle and achieving relaxation on my part within seconds. Her voice is clear and has soul. Rare, bell-like, versatile, with a wide range in which every note swings. And so does the body moving along with it. She is Phillippino but speaks and sings with an American accent.
“We got a request on the telephone,” she says, and the bass player launches into a virtuoso solo that makes me want to jump in my seat. “Look at them,” remarks Vocals fittingly, “They are so in love with you! You are so sexy!” She is absolutely right. His bass play is breathtaking. She starts singing. The song continues as a bass and vocals only performance that takes everybody’s breath away and stops hands holding pints in mid-air, on the way to the mouth. It is “Cheek to Cheek”.
Touched, I thank Miy-san for making my request. She smiles and drinks a sip of oulong tea. After listening to the shimmering lights of Manhattan, and the happiness found dancing cheek to cheek, Vocals introduces her musicians. The young drummer wears glasses that make him look astute and friendly, in teamwork with his winning smile. “I love him,” she says. “He’s young, he’s handsome, AND he’s good at drums.” She makes everybody else in the room fall in love with him, too. Her bass player. Well, we’ve all seen how sexy he is with his bass, and she tells him and us that she wants to dance with him all night long, while he continues making everybody dance and fly from one cloud to the next, puffing out every single one of them, up to number nine, with his smooth, feathery bass pay. Finally, the wonderful man on the piano. She hopes she will get to dance with him next time, and she loves him, too. Ladies and gentlement, there’s a whole lot of loving going on in this room!
Piano launches into a sparkling one for the road, full of accelerating and decelerating notes that tickle the stomach and give rise to goose bumps, leading into a bass-round, piano-polished, drum-brushing finish. We are happy. People leave, and Bass comes back out to clean his instrument. Miy-san knows him, and he comes to our table. We chat comfortably over the rest of our drinks. He performs in all sorts of places, but this one is his favourite. He goes and gets a schedule for us that has all Sone acts on it. Then, Miy-san and Bass get into insider details about scheduling, and I drift off into the atmosphere of the place.
Murakami Haruki is from Kobe. Murakami Haruki loves jazz, too. I can’t help thinking that he, too, used to spend the odd night of ecstatic relaxation time here at Sone Restaurant, and I’m surprised there are no photos to be seen that claim the presence of famous people in the past. But the place doesn’t need it. It is its own best advertisement. And yes, we will come again!
But before that, we will meet up at Miy-san's house and sing together, aspiring to the sounds we have heard tonight, with the aid of Yamaha and whatever we may find inside ourselves that will kindly turn itself into voice. And JAZZ.

Praying Mantis Kung Fu

After my adventure in Nanking-machi, I am faced again with the difficulty of finding somebody on an unknown train station platform without a mobile phone. Not having my phone, I don’t even have the number I’d have to call to find out. But I remember the memorable mobile e-mail address and ask Manager to lend me her phone. That way, walking in search of a cinema where she will savour her free Sunday afternoon watching “Dororo”, I get the number and, as I will be late, ask for directions to the actual training grounds, so I can find them by myself without making anybody else late.

I see off Manager to the cinema and take the JR circle line to Osaka-jō-kōen, the giant park around Osaka Castle. From the station, the castle is nowhere to be seen. A few stalls selling yakisoba and takoyaki frame the broad path when I leave the station. Crowds of people are enjoying the overcast but spring-like weather in Osaka-jō-kōen this late February afternoon. I heard there were plum blossoms, which bloom in February before the cherry blossoms unfold their seductive pink petals, but I cannot find any on my little dander in search of praying-mantises.

Get out at the only exit, follow the road on the left, and stop when you see a group of people practising kung fu in the park. When you reach the Kyudojo, you’ve gone too far.

It is indeed the Kyudojo that prompts me to walk back and finally spot some martial movements behind a secretive constellation of skinny trees. No more than three people, two foreigners and the Japanese teacher, are practising in a hidden little patch of park, and yet it is immediately obvious that they are praying mantises. This is how you recognise them: they wear comfortable Sunday afternoon clothes, they bend and batter their bodies into long, low strides interspersed with cat stances and twisted squatting positions; their hands change shape swiftly from round fists across flat tiger paws and back to the eating mantis claws that are their own, index fingers touching the thumbs, and the rest of the fingers rolled up.

Respectfully and quietly, I approach the group. “Is this the one you were talking about?” Sensei wordlessly asks B-san who has kindly told me about this training ground. “Yes,” B-san replies wordlessly, and Sensei, a small, smiling man with glasses, starts doing something new for me, and I try to join in. We practise a kata that starts with a fourty-five degrees sideways leg movement into a cat stance. Sensei picks up a stick and draws the angle in the sandy ground for us. B-san, an extremely dedicated Canadian martial artist, already knows the kata, and the second student has done kung-fu before, so knows a lot, but still has more to learn than B-san, or so it seems, as Sensei repeatedly asks B-san to watch his movements and correct them. He does the same for me, as I still have to learn everything. I enjoy the multitude of different movements, which are called “dōsa” in this branch of martial arts, as Sensei tells me when I ignorantly use the term “waza” that we use in karate and aikido. To clarify the meaning of a particular dōsa for us, he picks up a stick and writes the kanji in the sand. This is the name of the kick. Sensei’s kanji are very complicated, and I wonder whether any of us can be fertile ground for his valuable teachings scratched into the ground. Listening to his explanations, and recognising the first kanji, however, I can integrate some of this into my dōsa. The first kanji means bullet. And a variety

of other things including “spring off” and “be generous”. Sensei emphasises that it contains the kanji for “arrow” on the left. The kanji on the right means leg, he says. When I look it up later, I learn that it usually spells “thigh”. So your leg becomes an arrow when you kick.

“Pew!” sings Sensei in a rubber-like high-pitched voice, turning temporarily into a plucked shamisen string, and kicks with a springy action that makes lower leg snap forward as soon as the thigh is pointing the right way.

We do lines of kicks and punches, kicking and punching with opposite hands and legs, fists upright, palms facing inside. We always finish pulling our invisible opponent towards ourselves with one hand that takes his arm hostage from the outside, locking his elbow, and then rising through underneath his armpit with the other arm so one arm finishes pointing up, the other pulled back. We stand on one leg like a crane, now ready to move to the other side again with another row of arrow legs, or dog-handed cat-stances, or one of the other ten zillion dōsa I have yet to remember and practise.

Moving back and forth in easy-to-remember basics, however, is not the praying mantis way. There are complicated kata and combinations that will take a while to settle in my mind and body. But I can’t wait for the settling and flowing to start.

Finally, we practise tsurugi. This is a light Chinese sword with a wobbly pointed blade, sharp on both sides. It is never only the sword hand that moves. The other hand elegantly pointing with index and middle finger while the other fingers touch in the middle, moves along, drawing graceful curves in the air that aid the thrusting and cutting of the tsurugi.

Again, B-san knows the kata, and helps us learn it along with Sensei’s explanations.

Gradually, however, it is getting dark in the park, and we have to finish. “Sensei always stays till it gets dark,” B-san tells me. Also, Sensei doesn’t ask for money. “Not until you’re sure you want to do it,” he says. “I just want people to get good. That’s the most important thing.” When you really want to do it. May. When it gets warmer. Then it will be 3000 Yen a month. Nothing compared to this new world I am let into. Sensei is light and smiley. Sometimes he forgets the next move while explaining something and has to start a few movements ahead to recall it. He makes the impression of a slightly scatterbrained professor who is wise beyond caring, happy, and extremely forthcoming and friendly.

After the darkness closes our session, he hands out soft, delicious anpan, and little candy-shaped chocolates to everyone. B-san gives us chewy candy he has brought back from a recent trip to New Zealand. I feel bad that I can’t contribute to this picnic and resolve to bring something next time. B-san cycles into the night, and Sensei, Second Student and I walk up to the Hankyu line station. Sensei has to take the same train as me. He has his own dojo, too, he tells me. Sometimes, to get better, they go on trips to China and learn from Chinese teachers. When I tell him I would like to have his kanji lessons written on paper, so I can study them, he hands me eight A4 pages tightly packed with Chinese characters and smiles broadly. “There you go. Now you have something to study. I thank him. Finally, he has to get off the train, and I have to stay on it. “Come again,” he says with a slightly bowing semi-wave and disappears into the crowd on the platform. Yes, I will.