The Olympics

In the north of Beijing, on a large patch of newly-developed land, carved out between the skyscrapers and five-lane highways, large crowds are gathering.

Some of them stop to crane their necks to the sky and admire the wheeling kites above. Flown by old fellows in peaked caps, brandishing acres of string, the colourful and crazy designs proudly claim their patch of blue sky - an ancient and highly popular Chinese pastime.

Back down on the ground though, most people have come to witness the scene of more recently-introduced sporting endeavours - the Olympic Games.

In this year, 2008, no visit to Beijing is complete without a trip to see the Olympic stadium.
It’s China’s National Day tomorrow, a big public holiday, and it seems that every citizen of Beijing is on the subway heading out there to gawp at the ‘bird’s nest’, as the stadium has been unofficially-officially titled.

It’s a fine sight, like a big bowl with holes in it. Another wonder for Beijingers to add to their impressive portfolio: the forbidden city; the Great Wall; the Temple of Heaven.

Not that we got a chance to inspect the stadium at close quarters - it is so popular you need a ticket to even get within 500 metres of it, let alone inside.

And this is over a month after the Games have finished.

We felt vindicated then in the decision we made when planning our trip, to avoid Beijing during the Games - many times we have been told of the massive crowds, exorbitant price rises and constricting security measures.

It was still interesting, though, to visit this Olympic city after the show has ended. In the immediate aftermath we were able to witness the changes that hosting this huge sporting extravaganza has brought to the host city.

Being adopted Londoners, the city due to host the next Games, this was of particular interest to us, giving us a flavour perhaps of what London can expect in four years time.

When London Mayor Boris Johnson (how odd does that still sound?) attended the closing ceremony in Beijing, Jerusalem, Greensleeves and the shipping forecast booming out in the background, to introduce the next host city, what must he have thought of the challenge Beijing has laid down?

Surely he’d have been impressed by the cycling facilities, for Beijing still is very much a city of cyclists.

And undoubtedly he’d have enjoyed the clean air, thanks to the strict curbs on vehicle emissions introduced for the duration of the games. Where were the massive clouds of smog that the British media had told us about?

Then there’s the public transport, where a ride on the fast, efficient and sparkling underground system sets you back about 18p, or on the modern, multi-video-screen buses, relieving you of all of 9p.

But perhaps he’d have been perturbed by the security and its associated costs. Every trip on the metro here necessitates an x-ray check of your baggage. Soldiers and security guards seem to stand on every corner.

Given that he doesn’t have the resources of the People’s Liberation Army will Mayor Boris be shoring up his defences by forming a new Dad’s Army?

I have to admit I have my doubts about ‘London 2012’ ™. But, whether you think flinging ten billion at laying on an exclusive party for a load of lycra-clad athletes and the MDs of the world’s largest corporations whilst much-need projects to benefit ordinary citizens go unfunded is a good idea or not, it’s happening.

Londoners are lumbered with the Olympics and, in the time-honoured British fashion it gives us something to grumble about other than the weather.

So bring on London 2012. As long as it’s got kite flying.
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Behind the great firewall

News sensation! World in slow motion has been blocked! I’ve always wanted to be a rebel…

For those browsers in China at least, the WISM way has been deemed by the cyber police as leading to ‘spiritual pollution‘, and therefore our blog has been blocked by the sweetly-named ‘great firewall of China‘.

It wouldn’t be so bad if other websites pouring out hideous tripe were also blocked - Richard Littlejohn for instance. Or Phil Collins.

But no - these are allowed by the powers to have an online presence whilst WISM is not. Perhaps the content is just too darn racy for the good 1.3 billion living behind the ‘bamboo curtain‘.

It must be the dodgy photos of hats. That’ll bring them out on the streets.

We can still post content however we can’t see it, which might result in all sorts of odd layouts and typefaces etc popping up. So please, dear browser, bear with us whilst we try and overcome this slight technical hitch.

In the meantime here’s a nice picture of us on an altogether different type of wall that the locals constructed some time ago.

The Great Wall (or Walls, to be precise) essentially served the same purpose as this firewall (i.e: keeping out foreigners and their decadent ways).

It might have looked impressive but it ultimately couldn’t stop the tide and failed. Perhaps there’s a lesson here…

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A different shade of grey

Beijing feels different to Shanghai. Twelve hours north on the sleeper and the temperature has halved. Leaving behind the 30 degrees-plus of steamy, sticky Shanghai we shivered as we stepped out into bracing Beijing, the thermometer struggling to reach 14 degrees in the pale light of morning.

It feels distinctively autumnal up here. Inside the air con is off and the extra blankets are on, outside the leaves have started to curl up and expire, falling lightly onto the pavements. The hot yam seller is doing brisk business and the sun sighs and packs it in well before people have got home for dinner.

The sun is often a vague presence here, lending the city a strange light. It doesn’t tend to blaze away but rather seems to seep through the thin clouds, bathing everything it touches in a soft light - a photographer‘s light perhaps, where lines are defined and colours aren’t washed out.

The colours themselves are strange. In Beijing the predominant colour is grey. This isn’t anything new on our travels - we found Japanese cities overwhelmingly grey. But somehow this hue is different. A different shade of grey - a grey that glows. Sounds like a subtitle for John Major's autobiography.

It goes nicely with China’s favourite colour - red. Since it is considered to be the luckiest colour red is the colour of anything on which people which to bring success. Our hostel must surely be the luckiest place in town, for it is swathed in red, from the carpets underfoot to the lanterns hanging from the ceiling.

Tucked away up a little alleyway, we have spent a pleasurable week in this hostel, holed up in a hutong.

The traditional houses of which hutongs are comprised are almost fortress-like in their design, set around a sheltered courtyard, protected by high walls and guarded by a sturdy pair of doors spanning an archway which leads onto the street.

Hutongs have been much mentioned in the many lead-up pieces to the Olympics, cited as an example of the changing face of the host city where the old alleyways and courtyards have been bulldozed to make way for skyscrapers.

And whilst this is true in many parts of the city it doesn’t appear to be happening here.

Rather life seems to carry on as it has for centuries, with clichés straight out of a travel guide encountered at every corner. Life is so rich and boisterous, so vivid and garrulous, that we struggle to take it all in as we cycle through the streets.

Out on the main street a man sits outside the steamed dumpling shop singing to himself, while next door girls in facemasks serve pastries to a heaving mass of impatient customers.

A grimy-faced fellow heaves an old tricycle along, stacked high with old cardboard boxes while electric bikes zip past him, weaving between the trolley buses.

A wrinkled old lady sits on the pavement, flogging off old factory cast-offs, t-shirts and hair accessories from a sheet spread out over the pavement. She sits amidst the detritus of a hundred hurried kebab meals, their pointed sticks and scraps of meat littering the pavement.

Large crowds sweep the pavements clear of bystanders, traffic fights its way along the street, and everywhere there is noise noise noise.

Off the main street, down a maze of little alleyways we happen across our local market. Prices are lower here, foreigners are scarce. We pass a cavernous fish and meat market, its air pungent and floors slippery underfoot, haggle at ramshackle hardware stalls, and weave between mountains of fruit and veg.

Behind the tea merchant’s stall a young boy pees between parked bicycles. An old fellow shuffles past, dressed in his pyjamas, a lady hawks fruit and tends to her offspring, playing in the heaps of oranges, lychees and watermelons.

Grease monkeys tend to broken bikes on the spot, their owners patiently waiting for a quick patch-up, and young girls compete at their pastry stalls, vying for the endless current of passing customers.

Around the market, in the hutongs themselves, the scene could have been painted onto the front of a packet of tea: respectable ladies walking their Pekingnese; old man decked out in Mao jackets; caged birds singing outside cafes while inside men play cards amidst a pall of smoke.

On our trusty bikes, we pootled deeper into the labyrinth of narrow streets, weaving between other cyclists, ancient old tricycles, groups of man engrossed in strange board games, large queues outside Mongolian barbequed meat stands, kids playing in the streets, mothers hawking DVDs of obscure Chinese war movies…

It went on and on, long after we had returned to our own little piece of the hutong, and turned in for the night, safe behind its big wooden doors.

Who said grey is dull?
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Made in China

I knew there was something I had forgotten to pack - my pink illuminated horns. Come to mention it, I could also really do with my clip-on flashing shoe wheels. I really shouldn’t have left England in such a hurry.

Or so the pedlars on Shanghai’s Bund seemed to think. Relentlessly touting their wares: miniature kites, dancing beans and squishy fish, never taking ’no’ for an answer. The only successful method to avoid hassle was to out freak them. Our fellow travellers were very successful at this, dancing alongside the pirated CD cart, playing African music balls and trying to sell donkey sex. I had a go at the intellectual approach, asking their opinion on sustainable consumption and production and whether, perchance, they had read the I Will if You Will report. They merely shoved their flashing gismos further into my face and then scuttled off.

China makes Japan seem sober. Consumerism is rampant. Everything is for sale and people go out of their way to drag you from the street into their shop. Most of the rip-off goods and tat are, of course, locally produced. On the way up the Huangpu River into Shanghai International Ferry Port we passed scores of factories and hundreds of ships all making and moving resources and goods to and from China. The air on deck was so thick with smog that you couldn’t see the top of the skyscrapers and pictures became ghostly. Nearing China the water turned from a healthy blue to a murky brown to match the air above. I have never seen or tasted (literally) industry on this scale. This is the home of the three pound hair straightener and novelty balloon. Seeing where it all comes from brings a whole new meaning to the label ’Made in China’.

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Can I press you to an opium fish head?

Shanghai offers, apparently, some of the finest dining in China.

So it was with some excitement that we, alongside our increasingly international retinue of companions - a kind of gastronomic group of UN food inspectors perhaps - set off up East Nanjing Rd in search of sustenance.

Whilst the range of options was not disappointing, the lack of English - or indeed any comprehensible language - was a bit of a hindrance. We were therefore delighted to meet a friendly chap who accosted as we strolled down a little street, bathed in neon, seething with suicidal cyclists and raucous street vendors.

A few minutes later, having been ushered into his restaurant, we congratulated ourselves on our good fortune, our enthusiastic waiter hovering over us and pointing our particular delicacies we might like to sample.

We surveyed the range of options - a mighty impressive variety. Looking down the menu, particular dishes which caught one’s eye included the following:

The oil explodes the ricefield eel silk food
The hairy crab meets the oil
Steams the young lad chicken
The peas fry the sausage
Burns the juice eggplant to clamp the meat
Grandmother red roasted pork
Fried bamboo shoots with shepherd
The hairy crab fries the lunar new year cake
Opium fish head

Hmmm...seems like the Chinese are not just talented at manufacturing products, but their marketing is rapidly becoming the envy of the world as well.

Surely the great titans of British retail could learn a thing or two here. Tesco would mop up any remaining vestiges of the market they may have failed to penetrate if only they detailed such hairy crab adventures on their packaging.

And whilst they're at it, why not go a little further and experiment a bit more with the ingredients. I'm sure the adventurous customers at Waitrose would just die for a good deep-fried granny or sauted shepherd.

Can I press you to an opium fish head, vicar?

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The old slow boat to China cliché

Sometimes it is very hard to escape the old clichés about the countries you travel through. And we’re sitting on one now, steadily swaying about in the indigo waters of the East China Sea, as our ferry ploughs a slow path between Japan and China.

There’s no doubt about it: the MS Su Zhou Hao is definitely a slow boat to China.

It’s hardly the image I had in my mind of course, you know the romantic one of am old-style Chinese junk, all rigging and multiple different decks, laden with manufactured goods and opium, and calling in at various exotic ports on a mission to discover the secrets of silk.

But it is certainly slow and, I would imagine rather more comfortable than some rickety old wooden tub.

I rather like leaving a country by ship, indeed I prefer it to leaving by plane. The pace of travel gives you time to relax and reflect on your time in the country you have just left and to anticipate what lies ahead in that to which you are headed.

Rather than zoom into the clouds in burst of kerosene, on a ship you can slip gracefully away, giving you chance to bid a long farewell to the country you’re leaving .

It allows you to appreciate the physical space between countries - so important in determining the character of a nation such as Japan - as you watch the land slip slowly out of sight and you enter the embrace of the open sea.

Time to digest your adventures in one country before scanning the horizon for the first sight of the next.

I found this a particularly pleasurable experience doing this from the luxury of my own large, albeit slightly grubby Japanese-style communal bath. As the sun set and I sloshed about in the warm water, I could gaze out the window across the island-strewn Inland Sea towards the lights twinkling on the shore and reflect on a month in Japan.

We had spent the previous day in the somewhat down-at-heel port city of Osaka.

Perhaps it should be expected, typical of port cities the world over, or perhaps it was just our chosen part of town, but after clean, tidy, well-behaved Japan, Osaka was a rude dose of reality.

The city seemed populated entirely by gaunt, middle-aged men in grimy vests, its streets lined with cheap hotels, gaudy pachinko parlours and discount manual clothing outlets for manual workers.

It felt like a great receptacle for all Japan’s unwanteds: down-and-outs; drunks; and disabled people, airbrushed out of the tourist sites and dumped here like some embarrassing mad Aunt locked away in the attic.

Osaka is looked down on by citizens of some other cities, seen as less glamorous than Tokyo, less refined than Kyoto. It proudly boasts of its status as ‘Japan’s kitchen’ (well it sounds better than ‘Japan’s answer to Southampton’) and seemed stuffed with cheap, slightly grubby eateries where you could enjoy the pleasures of battered octopus balls and other such greasy delicacies.

Indeed the food seemed to lean more towards China rather than Japan, drenched in oil and served up with little of the excessive finesse we found elsewhere.

It wasn’t just the food either which came with a distinct Chinese flavour. We the influence of Japan’s largest neighbour in the Mahjong parlours in the scruffy arcades, where old men gathered to smoke rollups, and amongst the people, where Chinese and Korean immigrants remind you of Osaka’s role as Japan‘s gateway to the world.

Raffish, bawdy, lively, exuberant; was Osaka a harbinger of what was to come for us in China?
Leaving Japan for China, I anticipate some clear similarities but perhaps many more differences.
Certainly the Japanese I encountered have always stressed that, though echoes of their Chinese-influenced past resonate throughout many aspects of modern Japan, theirs was a very different path towards the 21st century, and one which has made them very distinct from their continental neighbours.

I don’t expect to make many of the same wonderful discoveries in China as I did across the Sea of Japan: the Shinkansen bullet trains; excessive politeness and incessant bowing; Salaryman and Visor Woman; ’washlet’ space-age toilets with built-in bidets and fart-disguising fake flush sounds; not even Blueberry yoghurt drink.

And in China I hope not to encounter some of Japan’s other excesses: the emphasis on ’saving face’ which compels hotel receptionists to hang up on me rather than risk embarrassing themselves by attempting to speak English; the ridiculously over-packaging of food; the frankly-annoying and pointless us of multiple slippers; the utterly irritating emphasis on the supposedly ‘cute’ and kitsch.

I will miss this - the wonderful, whacky, eccentric Japan, seedbed for a million mad inventions, home to a million crazes.

It is a country you enjoy on the surface, but one that takes years to fathom its depths. Still insular, comfortable being isolated Japan does not seem to absorb its immigrants like Britain has - as Will Ferguson notes in his excellent book ‘Hokkaido Highway Blues, like it or not, in Japan you will always be a gaijin - a ‘foreigner’.

I can’t imagine we’ll blend in that well upon making landfall in Shanghai either. Another country, another language to decode, another whole set of cultural mores to understand.

We’re entering a world of superlatives: the largest population on earth; one of the largest countries on earth; a booming economy; an emerging superpower that is making the rest of the world a little nervous.

A Japanese friend told me that the US is seen as ten years ahead of Japan, Japan as ten years ahead of Korea and Korea ten years ahead of China.

Does this mean that two days on a boat will take us back to the 1980s? Or was Japan a vision of the future?

I thought that China was now being looked to as a vision of the future.

I’m sure we’ll find out. But first we’ve got to dodge this typhoon, brooding somewhat uncomfortably close on the horizon…

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Trainspotter's paradise

As I write this we are screeching along the Pacific coast, hurtling like an exocet through the endless huge grey cities, their low roofs, driving ranges, skyscrapers and orange and white chimneys a blur.

We glimpse the occasional flash of green paddy fields before another city hoves into view, then its suburbs, before they seem to merge into the next and the next…

No this isn’t my driving. Nor are not strapped into a space rocket. This is the shinkansen, the fabled bullet train.

Japan is rightly famous for this rail network, for it is surely like no other on earth. Linking most of Japan‘s major cities it reduces journey times so much that it rivals, if not surpasses the aeroplane for getting passengers from A to B.

And unlike the plane, the shinkansen offers maximum comfort and convenience.

Huge, sleek, 16-car trains glide into stations, their elongated engines looking more like spaceships than trains. Surely it is no coincidence that my word proceesor keeps automatically changing ‘shinkansen’ to ‘slinkiness’.

A brief stop at the platform and they are off once more, accelerating at a pace that would leave Lewis Hamilton for dust.

On board it’s comfortable and spacious, with acres of legroom and plenty of seats for passengers and space for their luggage. The staff are unstintingly polite (plenty of bowing and cap-doffing), and the ride remarkably smooth given the speeds you are travelling at.

Oh and they are always on time.

At the other end, upon reaching your destination an array of transport options for your onward journey are waiting for you. A range of local trains, local and rapid, are quick and simple to catch, the larger cities boost metros, and most stations have bus stops and secure cycle parking right outside their entrance.

In short Japan Rail (JR) offers passengers everything they need and more. Japan is a trainspotter's paradise. Gordon Brown should dispatch his Transport Secretary, Ruth Kelly, here without delay, for a spot of work experience.

Many of the stations themselves are sights to behold: Kyoto station is an immense cathedral of lights, its many levels home to hundreds of shops, hotels and even an anime museum; Tokyo station felt like a sprawling mini-city, populated by thousands of scurrying worker ants, factory of a million bento lunchboxes.

Although often big, even bewildering, JR stations are not unpleasant. This being Japan everything is ordered and well-signposted, passengers rigorously observe the queuing systems and delicious soba noodles are only a stall away.

Thev are bright and airy, pleasant places to spend the few minutes you‘ll need to wait for your carriage to arrive. In Himeji station they even play bird calls across the platform, soothing the nerves of even the most stressed-out salaryman.

All this doesn’t come at too high a price for the savvy traveller either. You don’t need the equivalent of a down payment on a family house in order to board the shinkansen. Read our ‘how to…travel around Japan' hints and tips piece to find out how to do this.

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How to…travel around Japan

Japan is easy to travel around, thanks to its excellent public transport networks.

Many signs are in English, as well as one of the three Japanese scripts, and staff usually speak some English once they’ve got over their initial shyness.

Still, we found it helpful to get hints and tips from fellow travellers, both before we left and when we were travelling around, which helped us to make the most of it.

The following are a few tips we thought you might find of use. Do let us know if you think we should add any more.

JR Pass

William Morris would approve of the Japan Railways (JR) pass: it is both aesthetically pleasing, with a nice shiny rendition of Hokusai's famous The Great Wave off Kanagawa on the front, and remarkably useful, giving you the freedom to travel Japan’s extensive, efficient rail network at your leisure.

Only available to purchase outside of Japan, the pass is regarded with considerable envy by some Japanese, for the fantastic rail services they enjoy come at quite a high financial cost.

So if you plan to travel around Japan do yourself and your wallet a favour and buy a JR Pass before you leave home. Although it costs a weighty 350 Euros or so the pass is more than likely to pay for itself in just a few journeys.

Armed with one of these beauties you can use local trains, Shinkansen bullet trains (only the super, super fast Nozomi service is out of bounds) and even some ferries.

In addition, with a JR Pass you can cunningly negotiate your way around cities by using their local train services - given the size of a city such as Tokyo this helps you save a tidy sum.

Try and purchase your JR pass in your home country. If you run out of time before you leave , and you are visiting other countries before you reach Japan, then you should be able to purchase a JR Pass in that country. Certainly this should be possible in Europe (we bought ours in Finland).

Full details about the JR Pass are available on the Japan Rail website here.

Train ticket reservations

Trains are rarely completely full. Outside of the big cities in the rush hour, we never encountered trains that were fit to bursting with hundreds of weary passengers hanging onto the handrails.

Still it pays to get to train stations early and reserve seats. Do it ahead of the day you travel and you won’t to arrive early, plus you’ll be able to pick seats with a good view.

For example, on the Shinkansen heading south out of Tokyo try and get a seat on the right hand side - you should get a view of Mount Fuji (cloud / smog permitting).

If you haven’t reserved a ticket, consumed one too many earthenware bowls of sake the night before and overslept don’t fret. There are several carriages on each train for passengers without reservations.

Simply study the map of the train (found on the platform or the entrance to the platform) for the location of unreserved carriages.

Like the civilised people they are, the Japanese rigorously observe the queuing system. These are denoted by tramlines marked on the platform with people standing between them, whilst the smug passengers with reserved seats lean nonchalantly against the counter of the noodle bar, catching up on last night’s baseball match.

One final thing - when on the train, if people suddenly get up and start swinging their seats around 180 degrees don’t call for the authorities, this isn’t a spontaneous act of mass vandalism.

Rather this is another one of these clever Japanese technical gizmos. The train has come to the end of a single-track line and passengers can swivel their seats on an axis in order to allow them to continue facing in the direction of travel.

Be sure to remove your belongings from the pocket in front of your seat if you don’t wish to see it ending up halfway down the carriage.


Train timetable and prices

It helps to go the train station pre-armed with information about train times and prices. This is easy to do thanks to some new-fangled thing called the internet. The JR website’s ‘Hyperdia’ search engine gives you up-to-date train times and prices.

Bicycles

Don’t forget the jolly old two wheelers! Bikes are often a great way to get around cities such as Kyoto, where the sights are quite spread out.

Japan is a comfortable place for cyclists. You see little road rage and many locals use them for zipping down to the shops or speeding up the commute.

Most train stations have secure bike parking facilities and many locals use them. A day’s parking should set you back 200 yen at the most.

Hotels and hostels often lend them to their guests free or for a small charge. Don’t forget to ask when you book a room.


Buses

Where the train line stops, the bus route starts.

These proved slightly tricky to understand at first so the following should help:

1) Enter at the back of the bus and exit at the front

2) Take a ticket when you board from the funny little machine at the top of the steps. You pay your fare when you get off

3) Fares are shown on the rather whizzy laser display board-type arrangement at the front above the driver. The number printed on your ticket correlates with that you on the board, with your fare displayed beneath it.

Budget on about 200 yen for a journey across town. There is a change machine incorporated into the ticket machine, located by the driver at the front of the bus. This comes in handy when you only have a 1000 yen note rather than the exact fare you need.

Drivers seem to be incredibly docile, slurring their words over the tannoy, leaving you bewildered about quite where you get off for that temple.

Don’t fret: buses seem to be populated entirely by old people, garbed in sun visors, white gloves and sensible shoes. They are invariably kind and helped us out of several pickles when we hadn’t the foggiest where to get off.

Oh and one more thing regarding buses: this is Japan and people are small. It helps to be the size of an oomph-loompa and carry nothing bigger than a pencil case on these buses.

Or you could measure six foot, and sway about with massive bags the size of sumos thwacking all in your path like us. Your choice.

Trams

Some cities, such as Hiroshima have trams or ‘streetcars’. These are a great way of pootling through a city and, from our experience, were easy to use.

Fares are usually clearly displayed and paid on leaving the tram to a nice chap at the door, who has a ticket machine similar to the one on buses.

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Japanese cuisine

Food has been one of the highlights for me of our month‘s exploration of Japan. We have devoured the well-known and dined on the unexpected. From sushi to pickled apricots and noodles to grasshoppers our taste buds and bellies have been having a field day.

We ate the majority of our meals in noodlerias. Little backstreet restaurants with white flags outside their door indicating business. There are three main types of noodles in Japan, served in a variety of ways:
Soba noodles - made from buckwheat flour. These are typically eaten cold dipped in soy sauce flavoured with wasabi (horseradish) and spring onions.
Udon noodles - thick, juicy, white, wheat noodles. Served cold with dipping sauce or hot in soup. Chanko, the soup of the sumo, is a wholesome bowl of regular udon noodle soup with an unusually (for Japan) large portion of vegetables.
Ramen noodles - Chinese noodles of the type you get in Supernoodles. Served in a big bowl of miso (fermented soy bean) or pork broth soup, usually with bean sprouts, mushrooms and slices of pork. There are, apparently, regional differences between these soups. For example, the Hokkaido speciality adds a knob of butter and a spoonful of sweetcorn, suddenly becoming buttercorn soup. Essentially the same dish and actually available up and down the country - we found some in Himeji.

Noodlerias often serve barginous ‘sets’ for a mere three to four quid. These usually consist of a noodle dish with accompanying rice platter - rice balls, or rice bowl with shredded beef, pork cutlet or thin omelette on top.

Noodles pop up in other regional favourites too, like Hiroshima’s okonomi-yaki. Here noodles, bean sprouts, shredded cabbage and bacon are piled on top of a pancake then flipped over and encased in a fried egg. They are cooked on and eaten off the griddle in front of you with lashings of salty brown sauce.

Sushi is perhaps the most famous Japanese dish of all. A sushi meal is double the price of noodles (but still half the price of back home) so was reserved more for a treat. In the sushi restaurants of the revolving belt ilk (like Yo Sushi!) you simply pick off the delicious raw fish dishes as they whizz passed you. Of course, the Tsukijii Fish Market sushi took fresh fish to a whole other level, but I’ve said enough about that already. However, there is one sort-of-sushi that we did regularly indulge in - onigiri - or rice balls. These rice triangles wrapped in seaweed contain meat, fish or seaweed in the centre and make for very good breakfasts and/or lunches.

The bento box is the commuters’ favourite. This box of delights usually contains a mixture of pickled/sugared/salted things, fish, fried meat in breadcrumbs and a generous portion of rice with a pickled apricot on top.

Snacks are very popular and before each long journey Japanese friends would load us up with a crazy assortment. All are extremely salty or sweet. Many are made of rice, others are sticky and lots taste of fish and/or seaweed. Outside temples the favoured snacks are sweet redbean paste in raw dough and green tea icecream.

The Japanese diet is surprisingly lacking in fruit and vegetables, spring onions excluded (they appear in most savoury dishes). Perhaps not that surprising when you look at the prices - for example, one pound for one nashi, our favourite juicy, jumbo pear. Although there are enticing vegetable patches in the suburbs and villages, little is on sale or in the restaurants and I can‘t believe that people are getting anywhere near their 5-A-Day. When fruit and veg do turn up it is in heavily mutilated pickled, sugared and salted forms, so that it is hard to recognise what you are eating. It would appear that instead of getting minerals and vitamins from food, the Japanese add them as supplements to drinks, sweets and snacks. However, we were lucky to eat our fill of fresh produce during our WWOOFing week in Hokkaido.

Most Japanese flavours are quite clean, albeit strongly sugary or salty. That is apart from bar food and kusikatu. Most pubs require you to eat small dishes with your drinks. You can choose from an eclectic mix including fried chicken cartilage, fried lotus roots, steamed soy beans and raw eggs to dip things in. Kusitaku is a disgusting mixture of fatty meat, fish, vegetables and cheese kebabs battered and deep fried. They’d go down well in Scotland.

Fresh is a key word in Japanese cuisine and many dishes - sushi, okonomi-yaki, kusikatu - are prepared right in front of you. Sukiyaki is particularly exciting as you cook this dish yourself. Or at least you light the fire on your table over which a prepared bowl of beef, vegetables, noodles and egg then boils away.

The highlight of our culinary tour was without a doubt our dinner in the ryokan (traditional Japanese inn). Here we were served a smorgasbord of tiny dishes including tempura (lightly battered and fried okra, vine leaf and noodle), shiitake mushrooms, cured ham, dried tofu, black bean rice, rainbow trout and grasshoppers. Yes, we ate grasshoppers, and they actually tasted good!

So as we prepare to leave the land of the rising sun we say goodbye to sushi, seaweed, rice, noodles and random fried things and hello to rice, noodles and random fried things. Chinese chow here we come!

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Britons! Take a bow...

We have been in Japan for almost a month now. The food is no longer an adventure into the unknown, we can speak a few words of the lingo, we can even navigate our way through the spaghetti-soup map of Tokyo’s metro system.

But there is one thing that I still haven’t got used to: bowing.

It didn’t take long to make this serendipitous discovery. In Japan, they do it everywhere: in shops; in the street; on public transport, people get on down and bow.

Sometimes you feel as if you’re in a Monty Python sketch. Enter a shop, a hotel or a restaurant and you risk being attacked by profuse bowing that’ll leave you blushing and bewildered. Have I inadvertently been mistaken for a Knight of the Realm? Has Queen Victoria suddenly popped up behind me?

Japan must be a chiropractor’s dream, for bowing is the norm and indeed it forms an essential feature of one's social interaction people with others, be it friends, colleagues or complete strangers.

Children are taught at home how to show respect and bow, job seekers are shown the exact angle their bow should take, and workers are expected to bow as part of their daily work

In the land of the ‘salaryman’ white-collar worker, bowing helps show respect to colleagues and acknowledges the rigid hierarchy which structures the company.

Like many other aspects of Japanese society there are strong norms that define how one behaves towards friends and colleagues and different degrees of bowing to follow according to one’s place in this hierarchy.

The more important the person, the deeper the bow, and more outwardly fawning you must be. A kind of replacement for the days of the shogun when one prostrated oneself before the ruler.

Hence you witness a frenetic outbreak of bowing amongst work colleagues, at train stations and other public places, when they go their separate ways at the end of the working day.

In the company of those higher up the work hierarchy poor salaryman doesn’t dare turn his back and show disrespect to his seniors, rather he must shuffle backwards, through the crowds, bowing and scraping as he goes.

This isn’t just restricted to salaryman. It is rife across all workplaces. I have seen train drivers bowing away, performing a strict ritual before changing shifts.

Bowing is not restricted to the workplace but is commonplace throughout peoples social lives as well. You often seen friends leaving each other at the end of the night with a bow, as we might a hug or a handshake.

I’ve even seen two friends bowing to each other after a baseball game, on one the station platform, the other inside the train.

Surely all this back-bothering can’t be good for the old lumbago.

As a gaijin you don’t escape this curious social proceedure. Every time I enter a shop or ask a stranger for directions I get a bow. And actually purchasing something can spark a frenzy of spine-stretching, accompanied by an effusive flurry of thank yous and please come agains.

In a hundred yen shop in Nara today the young cashier bowed so deeply and so vigorously to me I was worried he’d knock himself out on the counter.

My surreal encounters with this odd social ritual haven't been limited to shops either. I've been bowed at by ticket inspectors on the train (one of them even doffing his cap as well), by the little lightsabre men who control the traffic at roadworks, by post office clerks and waitresses, theatre ushers and even a policeman.

Blimey, a policeman! Imagine such a thing in Blighty - that would knock the stuffing out of even the most hardened criminal.

Shortly after arriving and getting my first bow, I began to learn to steel myself before attempting to speak to a local, suppressing the urge to giggle and returning them the level of respect they accorded me.

After a week, the bowing, like so many of the other bizarre things I have encountered in Japan started to become normal, then even tiresome.

By the third week I had started to find this excessive politeness unnerving. When even hotel cleaners bowed to me (surely it should have been the other way round, considering they were about to muck out my stables) I felt uncomfortable, as if I was some colonialist oppressor, baying at my coolies for shaking my sedan chair.

But perhaps all this bowing has a purpose other than acting as some quaint, albeit rather odd, courtly hangover from days long gone.

Maybe bowing plays a key role in helping to maintain social harmony in what is a densely populated nation, the well-ordered and disciplined society we witnessed where good, upstanding citizens abide the law and respect each other.

In this way it could even make a vital contribution to Japan’s economic prowess, instilling in its citizens the values of good, honest hard work, self-discipline and respect for authority.

Without wishing to go all Daily Mail how has Japan held on to many social values which Britain appears to have lost? Perhaps bowing is their secret.

So why not give it a go back home? After all, ASBOs have failed, and if we can try them we can try anything.

Of course, any politician would be laughed out the House if they tried to introduce this. No, this has to be more organic, to come from the people themselves. This demands popular action!

So go on, give it a go. Next time you’re at work, down the pub or at the football, face your boss, your friend or your colleague, bend down and give them a good 90 degrees. Trust me; it'll catch on in no time...
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Sumo wrestler vs karaoke star

It has been a very Japanese 24 hours. This time last night I was doing ninth floor karaoke. Then I slept in a capsule bed (aka a wooden box) and was woken to go to a sumo match. Two classic forms of Japanese entertainment back to back. Both delightful and different in their own peculiar ways...

The karaoke took place in a skyscraper with a golden castle on the roof. Ten floors and over 100 rooms devoted entirely to singing along to music videos. Claustrophobic, smokey, poky rooms with sticky tables and chairs and flashing lights. Sumo on the other hand takes place in a dedicated stadium with a single spotlit ring in the centre. A ring with a sand surface encircled by sandbags. A ring that is raked and watered with care and attention. Both venues sacred and carefully attuned to their purpose.

Similar attention is paid to dress in sumo. Or lack of it. A padded girdle with dangly sticks does the job along with a decorated jewel encrusted sponsorship apron for show at the beginning of the match. Waxed topknots are carefully chosen and maintained to suit the hair of each sumo wrestler. Whereas for karaoke, you just go as you are. Jeans and baseball caps are popular. A similar gulf is apparent in the preparation required for both sports. Sumo wrestlers have stable masters and live a life of strict diet, ritual and practice to achieve the best on the big day. The only preparation that karaoke stars make is to down a few beers to loosen the vocal chords. In spite of the huge quantities of food that sumos are allowed to eat, I still prefer the karaoke regime.

Drinking is an important part of karaoke. Beer helps the karaoke star build strength and confidence. Sumo wrestlers prefer to sip water before a game, to purify the body, and draw on the audience for their inner strength. The sumo crowds are only too willing to help, bellowing the name of their favourite wrestler loudly from the rafters. In karaoke your companions also egg you on, swaying along when you sing and clapping politely even when your rendition of Lionel Ritchie`s "All Night Long" is wildly off key. To accompany the drinks, karaoke stars order salty snacks. Sumo wrestlers use salt to throw on the floor and purify the ring.

The music is, of course, different. Karaoke is the predictable mix of eighties, nineties and noughties hits with a good mix of Japanese and Korean favourites, and I was delighted to see that the Forest of Dean's own EMF still make the karaoke hit parade in Tokyo. The only music in sumo is a chanted verse sung by the referee as he waves his fan accompanied by the banging together of two sticks and the sound of wrestlers slapping their thighs.

A risk assessment of both pastimes would favour karaoke. After singing solidly for a whole hour (my Japanese friends were so impressed by my skills that I wasn't allowed to put the microphone down) I only came away with a sore throat and husky voice (or is it a cold?). The sumo wrestlers however were covered in support bandages, especially on their knees. I suppose carrying 100kg of blubber on a delicate ball and socket joint does take its toll. Spectators are also at risk, as wrestlers are regularly thrown out of the ring into the seated crowd below.

Two very enjoyable and very Japanese pastimes. I may not have the belly for sumo wrestling, but I was a hit with the karaoke. My Japanese friends enjoyed my soulful rendition of Tina Turner's "What's Love Got to Do With It" so much that they requested, and were rewarded with, an encore. Japan is such fun!

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City of Cartoons

In Japan everyone is crazy about cartoons, fanatical about the fantastical.

Tokyo is no different. Like the proverbial rat in London, in Tokyo you are never more than six feet away from a cartoon of some sort.

There are the advertising medium of choice for many businesses; the film (anime) of choice for many cinemagoers, the book of choice for all and sundry.

On the metro you are just as likely to see a businessman perusing manga (comic books) as you are to see a schoolkid flicking through the backpages of their favourite superhero.

Indeed, such is the Japanese mania for manga, their ardour for anime, that it’s sometimes had to tell whether some of them have a steady grip on reality. Certainly for me, after spending a few days in Tokyo it has become hard at times to discern what is real and what is make-believe.

This is a city which celebrates the outlandish and delights in being over the top. It is drenched in neon, buzzing to the tune of a million different polyphonic jingles.

We enter a megalopolis of such fantastical wonders where, it seems, anything is possible. There’s capsule hotels, rollercoasters on top of office blocks and people bowing all over the place.

In Tokyo, art imitates life, then life imitates art and becomes a cartoon.

This is a city of cartoons.

The following are some of my favourite characters.

Lightsabre man

Around Ginza Lightsabre man is busy at work. There‘s traffic to direct, people to usher across the road.

Move over Batman, stand aside Spiderman - Lightsabre man is a true superhero.

Carefully attired in his regulation uniform - reflective stripes, white helmet, white gloves and trusty glowing baton - he guards Tokyo’s good citizens against all possible hazards, from potholes and roadworks to broken-down escalators and car park exits.

Lightsabre man is anywhere and everywhere, ever vigilant and primed to act. A true hero of the streets.

Visor Woman

Up in Asakusa, Visor Woman heads for the temple, camera at the ready. She’s been hard at it in the hot sunshine, taking in the sights of this vast city, ticking off the must-sees.

And she’s well-equipped for this awesome task.

On her head she sports a sun visor so huge her companions could eat their okonomi-yaki (Japanese pizza) off it. This massive millinery monster covers her head and indeed her face, so much so that it could double as a motorcycle helmet, or indeed protective wear for any budding astronaut.

To complement this, Visor Woman chooses comfortable trainers, casual trousers, a blouse, handbag and miniature towel to discreetly dab her brow in the heat.

And seeing that it is thirty degrees and the sun is high in the sky she plumps for the gloves ‘n’ arm covers look as well, just to ensure every inch of flesh is covered. It just wouldn’t do to go back to the folks back home with a suntan.


Pachinko man

Down in Roppongi Pachinko man’s making a killing. Working the one-armed bandits and other yen-grabbing machines he an old hand at the gambling game.

When it comes to slot machines, Pachinko man knows every trick in the book. He’s surrounded by a piles of ball bearings, coughed up by the machines as winnings and stacked up in boxes on the floor around him.

Well-adapted to withstanding a sensory assault like no other, Pachinko man is immune to the wall of sound, the epileptic fit-inducing flashing lights and the heavy fug of fag smoke.

Amidst this cacophony he inhabits his cocoon, ceaselessly working the unfathomable games till it starts to grow light outside.

Then it’s off home his newly gained winning, to bed and dreams of a Sega-filled paradise.

Salaryman

Way out west, amidst the scryscrapers of Shinjuki, Salaryman has his head buried away in his account sheets.

Salaryman is the unsung hero of the nation, the worker ant of business, the backbone of the economy. He’ll willingly sacrifice his family time for the company, displaying unswerving loyalty in the cause of the balance sheet.

This city stalwart has been at it since 8.30 am, and will stay there until 6.30pm (if he’s lucky).

After work he’ll share a beer and slurp noodles with his colleagues, or brave the rush hour and head for home.

Salaryman is one of two million who pass through Shinjuku’s stations every day, short-sleeved robots, brandishing mobiles, briefcases and inbuilt sat-navs to help them follow the well-trodden path between office and home.

If he’s lucky Salaryman will find an inch of space on the Metro, room to sit down and peruse a document headed “Offsetting certificates of deposit against high-coupon debt”.

If not he’ll nod off on the train, yet still somehow wake up just as he pulls into his home station.

Salaryman is prone to tiredness from overwork and the sight of collapsed salaryman on the Metro, exhausted and a little the worse for wear, is not unusual.

Some 30,000 a year die due to overwork - the economic miracle came at a high price.

The rock kids

Over in Shibuya the kids are united. In their love for replicating their pop idols.

Here West meets East in a potent cocktail of haywire hormones and overweening peer pressure to keep up with the latest fashion.

Teenagers - large gangs of identical girls, smaller groups of swaggering boys - take to the streets and pout and preen their way to stage one of the great mating game.

Every detail is meticulously copied, from their hair and clothing to their attitude and gait.

Amidst the fickle flux of fashion, ‘Japlish’ endures. English words, Japanese grammar, rendering slogans on t-shirts incomprehensible to the bemused tourist: ‘Elephant special dreams’; Great bless my honor’; ‘Connects and it pulls’.

As a bloke named Brian once remarked ‘we are all individuals’.

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Plenty more fish in the sea?

The alarm sounded at 5.30am. Within the hour our sleepy heads were leaping over saline puddles and dodging mini pick-ups laden with treasures from the sea. This was Tokyo’s Tsukiji fish market. Every day over two thousand tonnes of fish and seafood pass from auction to wholesaler to restaurateur to sashimi platters and seafood soup. The Japanese consume a whopping thirty per cent of the world’s fresh fish. The market is a testament to this fact and a poignant reminder of the ruthless plundering of our marine resources. In an attempt to curb over fishing Japan’s quota has been slashed, but the market is still buzzing with increasing amounts of imported fish.

Given my time as a fish geek I can’t resist the opportunity to plug the work of the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) and the Marine Conservation Society (MCS). Both working to reduce over fishing, promote sustainable fisheries and make sure that there is enough fish for us to enjoy for centuries to come. The MSC eco-label indicates fish that have come from well managed stocks, and the MCS Good Fish Guide is a useful guide to choosing good fish in a shop or restaurant.

In Japan, there is little evidence that the consumer gives a monkey’s about sustainable fisheries. One evocative example is bluefin tuna. This Japanese favourite, auctioned at the market as frozen torpedoes, is on the verge of extinction yet is still on sale across the country. However, alternatives are available. So when breaking my fast at 7am in a sushi shack in the market, I opted for king mackerel instead. Those few mouthfuls were the most succulent, soft and delicious morsels of fish that my mouth has ever experienced. For the delight of moments such as that, I sincerely hope that we all start to manage and consume fish more sustainably.

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Zen gardening

There’s not a lot of Zen in a Zen garden. At least not when you are surrounded by hordes of snap happy tourists, fresh off the coach armed with sun visors and umbrellas. All noisily pondering the meaning of the carefully placed rocks in the carefully raked sand pit, or perhaps just noisily discussing how the noodles were at lunch. Either way, noisily.

Then there is the wildlife: Large flying wind-up beetles revving and squawking away like canaries on motorbikes, butterflies that look like flying ewoks and mosquitoes. You can’t get any peace anywhere when there is a mosquito around, and during the humid days we were in Kyoto there were mosquitoes. Lots of them.

It is also difficult to gaze at the sand and rock scenes long enough to clear the mind or solve the riddle without getting photo guilt. The guilt you get when you know that you are spoiling other people’s photos by standing in the background, or next to them, or directly in front of the temple. But in a Zen garden in Kyoto in summer you simply can’t get out of the way. Instead, you quickly shuffle along the carefully trimmed path hemmed in by bamboo fences. Stunning as the temples and picturesque as the gardens may be, a stroll through a Zen garden isn’t quite the same meditative experience as it was for the masters of old.

But, there are those who appear to be having a Zen time of it. The Zen gardeners. This dedicated fleet of workers pimp and preen the gardens to perfection: Sweeping up fallen leaves, pulling out individual blades of grass and washing stones. Wearing long protective clothing, bonnets and mosquito coils, they are protected from the tourists and insects alike. Through such meticulous gardening practices they must surely be on their way to enlightenment.

For me, I didn’t get any closer to Buddha, nor did I solve the mystery of the sand patterns. However, I did write my first haiku:

In a Zen garden
Glow the first leaves of autumn.
Quickly, fetch the brush!

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Ban the bomb

The city we’re staying in is very pleasant. It’s bright, buzzing and modern. The sun smiles down on wide tree-lined avenues, where trams trundle past, carrying beachgoers down to sandy beaches dotted along the bay. Herons and egrets hunt along rivers which spread throughout the city like outstretched fingers, whilst kites wheel overhead and palms sway gently in the warm sea breeze.

But something is wrong, very wrong about this city - it holds a terrible past.

This city is Hiroshima.

63 years ago, this city, then of little global significance was suddenly, unwillingly, propelled in the pages of history, becoming the first city to experience the horrors of nuclear attack.

On 6th September 1945, at 8.15am, the Enola Gay, an American B29 bomber dropped ‘Little Boy’, an atom bomb, on the heart of Hiroshima.

The resulting explosion, equivalent to 15,000 tonnes of TNT, obliterated an entire city, destroying 70,000 buildings and killing hundreds of thousands of its inhabitants.

And whilst this attack, combined with the subsequent atom bombing of Nagasaki three days later, ended the Second World War, Japan, and the world, would never be the same again.

Strolling along the river, flanked by all the trappings of a modern Japanese metropolis, I initially found it very hard to grasp the enormity of this single event.

But as we drew closer to ‘ground zero’, which was directly under the hypocentre of the blast, the pleasant surroundings became overshadowed by the ghostly apparition ahead of us. We faced a shell of a large building, its brick walls crumbling and decayed, it’s domed roof reduced to a bare, rusting frame of girders.

This was once the Hiroshima Prefectural Commercial Exhibition Hall, where the region’s goods were proudly displayed and business bustled. Somehow, when the bomb dropped close by it survived, albeit now reduced from its former splendour into a withered skeleton. Post-attack it quickly became reborn as ‘The ‘A Bomb Dome’, a globally recognised symbol of the terror of ‘the bomb’.

Across the river, in the monument-strewn Peace Park, the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum left me in no doubt as to the grim reality of nuclear weapons, grimly describing in great detail the events and after effects of the attack.

When Little Boy exploded, some 600 feet above the city, it sent out a shockwave which reduced the city to rubble. Grainy photos show grid-pattern streets, their white dusty lines dividing up the great piles of piles of charred concrete into neat squares. The flattened landscape looks as if a tsunami has hit it, relieved only by the odd blackened tree, defunct telegraph pole or reinforced concrete ruin.

Immediately following the shockwave came extreme heat rays, so hot they melted roof tiles.

Where they met people they left little trace. On part of a building left standing by the blast, one can make out the darkened form of person, sat on the steps of a bank as they waited for it to open. One moment they were here, the next they were gone , instantly vapourised, leaving behind nothing but their shadow, seared into the stone by the heat.

Later that day black rain fell. Thirsty victims, struggling through the levelled streets, drank it out of desperation, seeking to quench their thirst. Where it fell on walls the rain left eerie marks as the radioactive black liquid dribbled to the ground.

As the massive numbers of casualties poured in to whatever makeshift medical facilities could be provided, those doctors that survived became the first medics to witness the gruesome effects of atomic radiation on the human body.

The exhibition stands resembled a house of horror, some pictures too grotesque to bear. Mutilated bodies, unspeakable suffering.

Some say the death toll stands at 200,000. To me it seemed rather pointless, almost ghoulish, to try and establish a precise figure of how may people died that day, or suffered and expired from the effects of radiation in the years after.

Even today, many are still living with the physical and emotional pain. We met one of these ‘hibakushas‘, survivors of the bomb, of which there are some 95,000 still living in Hiroshima.

Mito approached us outside the A-Bomb Dome. A bright and lively chap in his early 60s, he was a four month old foetus in his mother’s womb when the bomb dropped. She was 10km from the hypocentre and so he was spared the physical pain suffered by some many of his fellow citizens.

Now he joins in the efforts to educate the rest of the world about the horrors of nuclear weapons, becoming a ‘peace navigator’ and giving up his time in order to engage with and give free tours to Hiroshima’s many visitors.

I found meeting a hibukusha not only very moving but also a frightening jolt of reality. We are living in a nuclear-armed age, characterised by chaos and uncertainty. Speaking to a survivor of a nuclear attack shook me out of my comfortable Western complacency and shattered any lingering illusions I might have had about the need for a nuclear deterrent.

You can try it for yourself and listen to some of the survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings here.

Aside from the horrific impact of nuclear weapons our visit to Hiroshima provided us with an enlightening insight into the reasons being the atomic bombings.

From books and school lessons I had been informed that dropping the bomb was a necessary evil, an act which may have killed hundreds of thousands of people but saved even more by shortening the war.

Now, learning about things from the other side of the fence the doubts I harboured have turned into fully-fledged scepticism.

Before the bomb was dropped Hiroshima, although of major military significance, was curiously spared the airborne onslaught suffered by other Japanese cities. There is considerable evidence that this was a deliberate policy by the Pentagon, in which Hiroshima, alongside a handful of other Japanese cities, had long been earmarked as a kind of testbed for the US’s new fearful weapon.

Concerned about the Soviet Union’s expansionist ambitions, and anticipating the arms race of the Cold War, the hawks in the US administration might have been anxious to test it ‘in the field’.

Despite all this, it is strange to witness how strong is the US influence in this country: 'convenience stores', 'parking lots', a major American military presence and, irony of ironies, a baseball stadium standing opposite the A-Bomb Dome.

One thing I am now certain of is that by dropping Little Boy, many of those responsible acheived the direct opposite of what they may have hoped, at least in the long term.

This bomb didn’t end all bombs; instead it created more, ushering in a new era where death and destruction could be wreaked on a far greater scale.

Bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki may be argued to have been the right thing for world peace in the short term, but it was surely disastrous in the longer term.

Hiroshima’s legacy is a frightening dangerous one - a nuclear-armed world, in which the citizens of the countries possessing them have been duped that their nuclear deterrent is the only guarantee of a secure and stable world.

Today these weapons are sought by the warlords and fundamentalists, from Washington and Moscow to North Korea and the Middle East. Ever since the 6th September 1945 the world has never been further from peace and harmony.

I consequently came away from Hiroshima sad at the inhumanity we all seem capable of, and uncomprehending of the apathy in which many of us back in Britain seem to be mired. I felt like a fifteen year old again, all tie-die, Doc Martens, CND badges and hopeless idealism. A hardened peacenik.

It’s encouraging therefore to see that the struggle for a nuke-free world continues, and Hiroshima plays a full part in these efforts. Its citizens seek to educate the rest of the world about the folly of going nuclear, sharing their experiences with people from across the world and never losing the faith that one day there will be a world without nukes.

This is symbolised by the flame of peace, burning in the centre of the Peace Park, a flame which will only be extinguished when the final nuclear weapon on earth has been destroyed.

Every time a nuclear weapon is tested the Mayor of Hiroshima sends a letter of protest, calling on the nation responsible to cease such activity. These go on display in the museum.

I found one addressed to a certain Mr Anthony Charles Lynton Blair, dated as recently as 2006, the same year that our (then) Dear Leader committed the UK to spending up to £20 billion on a replacement for the Trident submarines which currently carry its nuclear missiles.

Walking through the galleries of the Peace Memorial Museum, confronted by the reality of a nuclear attack, it is hard to comprehend such a decision, or even justify the millions spent every year on maintaining the UK’s current ‘deterrent’, each warhead many times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

But amidst all this madness there is hope. You need only to look at modern Hiroshima to see this: within one year of the attack trees were blossoming; within ten the ground had been cleaned up and the city rebuilt.

Today it is a bustling, attractive home to over one million inhabitants. Despite the horrific events of sixty-odd years ago life has returned.

Back in the Peace Park the flame continues to burn. It might sound trite but surely we all owe it to the people of Hiroshima, who keep it burning, to work together to abolish nukes so that one day soon they have to keep watch over it no more.

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Kyoto's legacy

In the sweltering late summer heat of Kyoto, I was most grateful I had the company of Captain Stag.

But this was no pith-helmeted adventurer, bristling moustache and pink gin at the ready. Rather my companion was a small, zippy Japanese bicycle, and jolly useful he was in covering the city‘s streets in the soup-like heat.

I wasn’t alone in choosing this eco-friendly form of transport to pootle through the little streets, as elderly housewives and smart young businessman whizzed by on their own little two wheelers.

This got me thinking about this great city, its green credentials and those of Japan.

The former imperial capital of Japan and justly famous for its splendid temples (a mere 2,000 or so), Kyoto has more recently become closely associated with a more contemporary issue, namely the global fight against climate change.

Finally waking up to the warnings of climate scientists, in 1997 the world’s leading polluters gathered here, seeking to secure a binding agreement to reduce their emissions of the greenhouse gases driving climate change.

The resulting agreement, commonly referred to as the Kyoto Protocol has since then been ratified by over 180 countries, including all developed nations (with the very notable exception of the United States) and Kyoto became a byword for progressive action towards a cleaner, greener future.

A decade on from Kyoto and progress towards the targets set is still painfully slow. Once more Japan is in the lime (or green?) light, having just hosted the annual G8 nations summit, placing climate change high on the agenda.

At the Hokkaido summit the Japanese proudly showed off their spectacular volcanic surroundings to their guests, but what impression did their own record in preserving their natural environment and tackling climate change leave?

Is this crowded country of 120 million leading the world towards an environmentally sustainable future?

Their ambitions are impressive, with (now ex-) Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda announcing before the summit a new target of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 60-80% by 2050,
though of course in practice they have a long way to go.

In Kyoto’s famous Ryoan-ji temple I came across a sign which I though rather neatly reflected the Japanese attitude towards the natural world:

“[Ryoan-ji is] renowned throughout the world as the ultimate example of kare sansi, or ‘my landscape’ style rock garden, in which nature is compressed and given abstract expression within the confines of a very narrow space“.

Can extend this to Japan as a whole?

Japan often seems a country at war with, or at least under siege from, the natural world and its more violent manifestations: typhoons, earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis. And their response, in this mountainous country, appears to build, build, build, on the flat coastal plains they are squeezed into.

To the visitor it can seem like the entire country is made of concrete, passing through gigantic urban centres, like the south of Honshu, where one city seems to merge into another. Here, in the land of ‘salary man’, business is the new emperor and profit is the new creed. Heavy industry scars the coastline and naked development runs riot.

But outside of here, up in the ‘Japanese Alps’ or in the wilds of Hokkaido, it is still possible to lose yourself in the wild. Many Japanese revere these places and great efforts are made to protect them. Here the Shinto emphasis on working harmoniously with nature remains.

When it comes to their relationship with the natural world, perhaps for many Japanese the religious, or spiritual, influences still run deep.

In the zen gardens of Kyoto, the urban dwellers are given an idealised impression, an artificial world where nature is scrubbed-up nature and every blade of grass, every piece of gravel is placed according to how it should be.

Maybe this explains the extraordinary number of zoos and aquariums. Every town, every city we’ve visited seems to proudly boast at least one caged animal-related theme park.

Animals and birds are seen as cute and cuddly, but to be kept at a safe distance, preferably behind bars.

The Japanese are meticulously clean; in the hot summer heat everyone seems to have their own little towels to mop their brows and regularly wipe their hands, and throughout the year people often venture outside wearing surgical masks to prevent infection.

Where foreigners are sometimes feared for their supposedly lax approach towards hygiene, goodness knows what they think of animals.

Their love of nature, their shy curiosity, their tendency towards the artificial, the cellophane-wrapped, the air-conditioned - this all helps to explain the phenomenon of the Japanese tourist.

Left unbounded mass tourism is strangling the very places they love - visitors often complain about the tendency here to build ugly hotels and shops next to beauty spots.

We witnessed this in Toya Ko, with hideous hotels despoiling the natural beauty of Lake Toya and, more recently, at the famous Miyajima, where the Itsukashima temple's famous O-Tori gate, ‘one of the three best views of Japan’ ™, seemingly rises out of the sea - an extraordinary sight.

Were it not for the monumentally ugly line of hotels scarring the hillside directly behind it.

But perhaps the most apparent manifestation of excessive consumption, and the damage this causes, is the incredible amount of waste this country appears to generate.

After a day strolling through a Japanese city, I find myself weighed down with a huge mountain of packaging, simply from visiting a few food outlets.

Everything is sealed in packaging. Often you find yourself struggling with an item of food, from sushi to bananas which, to the Western mind at least seems over-elaborately and excessively wrapped.

It becomes fiendishly difficult to penetrate some wrappers; for example I defy anyone to successively unwrap a triangular rice ball in the manner in which it was designed.

For the budget-restricted traveller you can’t escape the world of 7/11s; individual grocers or other small food shops are scare, and hence you become part of the problem, adding yet more to the 25 billion disposable chopsticks the Japanese throw away every year.

So a lot of work to do then.

But it’s not all green gloom. I’d rather be optimistic about this astonishing nation. The Japanese may do many things to excess but this can bring advantages as well. Take their fantastic public transport system, fully integrated and boasting superfast Shinkansen trains that negate the need to fly.

And consider their incredible postwar economic recovery, which has allowed them to sit firmly amongst the leading industrial nations in the world. Time and again Japan has been looked to be its peers for technological innovations and solutions to the problems posed by a burgeoning world population.

Witness their many inventive answers to the considerable problems posed by dense urban living. Thanks to these their cities, with their huge populations, are civilised, clean and ordered. They work; something we can all learn from.

Japan has woken up to climate change. Like a salaryman after too much Suntory Whisky and Okonomi-Yaki pizza this country is already witnessing the terrible effects of their over-consumption, be it more and devastating extreme weather, the effects of over-fishing or rising oil prices.

They are beginning to realise they have to live within their means. And if any country can do this, Japan can

Rightly or not, our great leaders are pinning their hopes on technology as a way out of climate catastrophe, and we they are going down this route we need Japan, with its wonderful capacity for innovation and resourcefulness at the forefront.

So here’s to future Captain Stags…

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Move any mountain

Mount Usu’s four foot fountain of efficacy of each source is expected to have a soft Leave baking soda fountain is the source of the efficacy neuralgia muscle pain, joint pain, motor paralysis to fatigue recovery has been goodneuralgia muscle pain, joint pain motor paralysis to fatigue recovery has been good and our YK proud of the valuable real hot springs, of course, 100% multiplied sink heating source, and any injection is not See the analysis at dressing room as detail

I pondered the meaning of these words as I soaked in the steamy, murky depths of our Youth Hostel’s onsen.

Baking soda aside, they certainly seemed to make some kind of sense: fresh from WWOOFing at Takano Farm the healing waters soothed my aching limbs.

Furthermore, I could well understand the locals pride in their extraordinary surroundings, after all not many people can boast of having 100% naturally heated water, free and, quite literally, available on tap.

However, what seemed less certain to me was their nonchalant attitude towards the heating system which bestowed them with this miraculous aqua.

You see, Toya Ko sits on an enormous puddle of liquid hot magma.

There’s nothing particularly unusual here - after all the entire planet’s crust floats on top of the piping hot liquid core - but, unlike in somewhere nice and safe like say, Abingdon or Wantage, in Toya Ko this magma is somewhat closer to the surface.

The town can thank its geological location for this, positioned as it is on a fault line, where the Pacific and American tectonic plates meet, allowing the magma to rise up.

This is all too evident in the enormous volcanoes poking up across the landscape. Toya Ko itself lives in the shadow of a particularly energetic beast, Mount Usu, one of the most active in the whole of this volcanic nation.

Mount Usu has awoken several times and with catastrophic consequences, most recently in 2000.

Living with the constant threat of being showered with molten hot rocks and shaken by earthquakes, was the volcanic nature of their environment a blessing or a curse to Toya Ko’s residents?

The ones we talked to didn’t seem too concerned. One chap, keen to practice his English, had lived here for 40 years and witnessed both the 2000 eruption and the one preceeding it, in 1977. Did he live in fear? He just shrugged his shoulders and laughed.

Bravado or not, if it wasn’t for the hot springs this place wouldn’t be home to the numerous massive hotels blighting the lakefront, their guests wandering the streets in ill-fitting kimonos in between their hot dips.

And without the smoking volcanoes the roads would be empty of the fleets of luxury tourist buses ploughing the highway up to the cable car station and views over the brooding craters.

However, this natural phenomena has its flip-side. The threat of a apocalyptic natural disaster can be a big turn-off for many a potential house buyer. Unlike in Highgate High Street, estate agents in Toya Ko seemed rather thin on the ground.

And even if one were able to forget the showers of flying pumice, rivers of molten lava, cascades of hot mud and clouds of ash the evidence of previous disasters lies all around.

After visiting the new volcano visitor centre, home to ash-coated vehicles, buckled railway tracks and lots of mind-boggling information about ‘pyroclastic flows’ and ‘lava domes’, one can step outside and see for oneself the devastation a volcano is capable of.

The appropriately-named ‘Konpira Crater - Remnants of the disaster walking trail’ features an abandoned part of the town, where buildings devastated in the 2000 eruption have been left in the state they were found in.

A new crater was created in Mount Konpira and from there hot water turned into a river of hot mud, gushing down the hillside and into the hot springs district.

An apartment block stands between dead trees, its first floor buried, its roof pockmarked by falling rocks .

A former bathhouse stands abandoned, its doors caved in, windows smashed, furniture poking up out of the piles of mud which built up in the rooms inside.

Nearby, a large steel bridge lies at a bizarre angle, its girders poking up, streetlamps twisted against the ground underneath; ripped away from the highway and swept along on a river of mud to its final resting place.

A little further up the hillside the highway which once linked the town with the outside world is kinked and twisted, its tarmac rising up at grotesque angles before running into the grass and ending abruptly, a highway to nowhere.

Even closer to home for us, rising behind our hostel, Mount Showa Shinzan broods menacingly, its summit seared of vegetation, steam pouring out of vents.

This ‘parasite volcano’ only appeared in 1943, growing up out of a corn field, sometimes at a rate of up to 1.5 metres a day.

Thanks to the efforts of the local postmaster, a Mr Masao Mimatsu, this wonder of nature was recorded in great detail, the first time such an event had ever been recorded .

The enterprising Mr Mimatsu also bought the land on which the volcano appeared, thereby preserving the new natural wonder for future generations and protecting it from the Japanese tendency to build ugly great hotels and shopping precincts selling useless toot right next door.

Sadly elsewhere in the area developers were able to get there first. Above Lake Toya itself, a beautiful 11km-wide caldera formed by volcanic activity, the hideous silhouette of the Windsor Hotel stands out starkly against the horizon.

Incidentally, why do people insist on calling hotels worldwide by this name? Perhaps they find Saxe-Coburg-Gotha rather a mouthful and it leads to all sorts of confusion with cabbies.

In July this venue played host to the G8 summit, an event so monumental that we weren’t even aware of its location until we stepped off at the train station. I guess no-one noticed the extra hot air here.

Whatever progress they made on tackling climate change or reducing their golf handicap I do hope George, Gordon, Nicola and co had time to try out Toya Ko’s many free on-street hot baths.

These mini-onsen cater for passing pedestrians, offering them a chance to bathe their hands or feet. There’s something very zen-like about sitting in a small bandstand, in the rain, with one’s feet in hot water.

Back in the proper onsen, my skin is turning pink and my are fingers beginning to resemble those strange pickled apricots the Japanese consider a delicacy. Yes, living by a volcano does have its benefits.

I’m still puzzled by the baking soda though.

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