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CRACKS ME UP EVERY TIME!

The journey of 2,136 kanji begins with 一。

I’ve memorised chapters 1 to 3 of Remembering the Kanji which is really just going over old ground but you have to start somewhere. Less than 2,100 to go! The system is each kanji is presented with a key word and an unusual. You don’t learn the reading or compounds at all. It’s an exercise simply in learning to recognise or read the kanji in terms of its key word meaning. The rest comes later. The system has its detractors but as I understand it is well regarded, generally speaking, and there are plenty of positive reviews to be found. It’s only early days, again, but let’s see how far I make it. Hey, WAGMI.

Kanji journey

Ok, please don’t roll your eyes but I’ve decided that I want to go back in time and start my Japanese learning journey again, just as if I was sitting at a desk in that Takadanobaba language school all those years ago. So with that in mind I refound the old Kanji Clinic column that used to appear, and baffle me, in the Japan Times when I was a newcomer to Tokyo. My map for this journey will be Remembering the Kanji, a book I bought so many, many years ago, tried to master a couple of times, and then put right back down again. Well, I’m inspired to give it another go in the never say die attitude. And I do it as an expression of love for my old town and all the people that made me so welcome and were so kind to me. I just want to remember those times, as I Remember the Kanji.

The park with the windmill and other happy musings

At the end of m street there is a park with a lake and a windmill. On my day of arrival, that intensely hot July day, I walked from the station to my apartment and noticed that windmill straight away. “What’s it doing there?” I wondered. It was a kooky thing to see in a park in Tokyo, with a digital clock display capturing that whimsical Japanese sense of cuteness with functionality. It looked a bit aged, like something from the eighties or early nineties. “Why put up a windmill?” I wondered again as I trudged along the footpath with my suitcase. It was standing in a lovely park though. Green and full of cherry blossom trees, with old men fishing at the lake. At the far end there’s a rising embankment that conceals the golf course behind it. I’d come to climb that embankment and walk along the footpath to Akabane, two stations away. There was a river too, Sumidagawa, and I used to look and think to myself “so much for Tokyo being a concrete jungle.” I was in a wide open, green space with a broad view of the sky and surrounds. How lucky I was. I loved it. 

I remember the day I moved out of Legend 101. Mitsuki’s dad had one of his truck drivers drive over and pick up all my stuff, not that there was much, and then drive to Todoroki. It was a blue truck, pretty battered, I think with a small crane on the back for picking up rolls of stainless steel. He was a cheerful old bloke, and with Mitsuki we chatted in broken Japanese and English. As I left the apartment I took lots of snaps of every room on my keitai but that disappeared long ago. I never did print those photos from it sadly. I remember taking them, thinking I’ll keep these, but I don’t have them or the phone anymore. I wonder what happened to that phone. I do wish I had more photos of good old Legend 101, my first of two abodes in Tokyo. 

I took a course of beginner Japanese lessons in Takadanobaba. It was a free course for beginners as it was a teacher training college and the teachers were about to graduate and start teaching Japanese for real, so this was the final practice for them. They were so kind, and some pretty nervous. One instructor held his fists to his ears and squeezed really hard to emphasise listening, then flicked his hands open and a paid of big, foam fake ears popped out which was pretty funny. There was another guy I think names Suzuki san who was one of the nervous ones. He motioned to a name badge that they were wearing on their shirts, and underlined it with his finger as he pronounced “Suzuki desu, Su-zu-ki desu,” but the only problem was he wasn’t wearing his name badge. I laughed at that as well but looking back I guess it was just part of his shtick to break the ice. It was cute though. Another time, Suzuki san was getting me to pronounce ringo which is apple, and you kind of roll the R as a soft sound, and to Suzuki san’s ear I obviously wasn’t getting it and he really stuck on it and made me repeat it so many times until I started freaking out a bit wondering whether he was ok! I told that story to Mitsuki and Rita a while ago and they laughed their heads off. It was pretty tense! I just looked up the school and it seems to still be in operation and using the same flyer from all those years ago I reckon!

Here when I want to be there

I had a 40 minute Line video call with Atsu in Kanazawa last night which was good for the soul but heavy on the heart this morning. Naturally, distance gives us rose coloured glasses and no place is perfect, but I cast my mind back to my recent trip as I watch the goings on from afar via Line and I just wish above all that I was back there, living a life different to the one I have chosen for myself and have attempted to forge. I say this with a sense of the utmost selfishness - it was me that drove the charge back to Melbourne all those years ago. It was my wife who gave up life with her family and home town of Tokyo. It was me that created a picture that we’d be better off here rather than there. The reasons that were so clear to me back then I can’t really recall now, but the reality is that I was wrong. 

But I don’t want this blog to be a place of sad musings. I want it to be a celebration. So let me cast off the heavy heart and come back to my cheerful memories and pleasure at good conversation and funny interactions, like last night. It was so good to get a window into EJC again, even though I was actually there not that long ago. Yes, it is like looking through a sliding door but if I zoom out Japan for me will always be open. Never closed, and whatever happens, it will always be my most special place.

I wander the midnight streets of Kanazawa.

Atsu contemplating the library of whiskey.

Nostalgia is a beautiful thing

When I was in Tokyo recently I got a kick, as I always do, out of silly things like going to the local supermarket and seeking out old products that I remember marvelling at or even using back in the day. Below are two very special items that my non-existent readership may recognise from a couple of posts on this very blog from 2005. 

I’m sorry but when I encountered these two little beauties I felt like I had been reunited with two old friends I hadn’t seen in 18 years. Am I insane? I don’t think so, it’s just that I get such a kick out of anything that connects me to this place Japan and reminds me that I was here, living and breathing and treading my path. A different me to now but still me, and I’m so glad that the back then me of me made the effort to explore life and seek adventures. I guess I haven’t changed. The same things that drove me and fascinated me back then are still in me today which is probably why I love exploring and trying new things as soon as I’m back, and why I get so much enjoyment out of the small, everyday, household bits-and-pieces like “Shall We?” short bread and “Creap” creamy powder…I love them, me old mates!

https://tokyorush.blogspot.com/2005/07/yes-we-shall-damn-it.html

https://tokyorush.blogspot.com/2005/05/milk-cream-or-creap.html

Wow, it’s great to be back.

Nothing lasts forever but it is true that some things cannot die. I know where to put this blog out of those two scenarios. What can I say other than here we go again, resurrecting this old relic, posting and thinking and dreaming of Nippon. 

The good news is I’m back a couple of weeks from our first trip back to the land of the rising sun in 3.5 years and it was beyond magnificent! If you want to know, or even need to wonder, why it took us 3.5 years to get back just google “Covid.” 

But don’t bother. Why’s don’t matter. We got back and plugged straight back in. Reconnected massively. It all felt good and fresh and happy. I even had lunch with Old Mate Gav down Uki Funado way. It’s late, I’m posting on the spur of the moment but it feels good. I started this thing in Uki years ago, and here I am back again. Can’t keep an old Blog down. 

Me in an Oden shop in Kanazawa.

Gav out front of a Legend 101 all these years later. Love ya Gav. Missed you Kid Kane. Cheers to history.