You Are Here

Time and reality are such are such wierd concepts.  If there’s one thing guaranteed my full attention on TV, it’s documentaries on the nature of the Universe, of reality, and of time.  Forget the stars of hollywood, forget seminal music legends like Lennon & McCartney, Berry Gordy, ‘Toots’ Hibbert and Neil Young. Forget even the supreme bringer of divine footballing light, John Hewitt; the guys that describe the universe in such documentaries are the guys I’d like to spend an evening with.  The nature of reality and meaning of time have been questioned, deliberated and postulated for longer than my adopted country has been around. Next Friday will be exactly 2 months since my arrival in Japan, but it barely seems like yesterday that I was boarding my first flight in a daunting 23 hour journey to the other side of the planet, and until last week, it didn’t feel real yet either.

Late afternoon sun at Torii Gate, Hakone Jinja 20/11/2011

In Einsten’s theory of relativity, time passes at a seemingly different rate, according to where you are, and the speed you’re travelling at.  While travelling faster, time will apparently pass slower.  So does this explain why the 18 hours of my journey spent travelling at 500 mph in the air felt much longer than the next 18 days travelling at walking pace?  Well no, because not only does your relative speed affect time, but so too does your proximity to large objects have a slight slowing effect, and since I was also 30,000 feet further away than I usually would be from the surface of the earth, this would have something of a countering effect to the speed.  But before anyone with even a slight grasp of the theory tells me how much bollocks I’m talking, I think I should get to the point.  Not to mention scaring off the readers of my last entry, who are probably still trying to recover their liquefied brains after attempting to comprehend Japanese numbers.

So, leaving relativity and quantum mechanics behind, we’re left with a more widely known absolute truth; that boredom slows time down to painful levels, and being busy makes life feel as short as the click of your fingers.  Busy though I was in my previous job, there were always days where the clock seemed to be stuck at 9:55.  No such problem since my arrival in Japan, as 45 minute lessons pass in the blink of an eye.  Japan is well known for cramming a lot into small spaces, whether we are talking about microchips into gadgets, people into trains and buildings, or a whole working week into one day.  This week, I was still being introduced to 1st grade Junior High students, and one of the questions on the pre-prepared worksheet for my first lesson was “What time do you get up?”.  My (honest) answer of 7 a.m. prompted the response “That’s late”!  When you consider that I’m one of the last to get in to school in the morning, at around 8 – 8:15, and that I leave up to 4 hours before most teachers at 4:45 – that’s right they work in excess of 12 hours a day – it’s no wonder that if you walk on to almost any train on the Tokyo Metro, up to 50% of people will be asleep.

Wedding at Meiji Shrine, Tokyo, October 2011

Even with my (ahem, relatively) short working hours, the intensity of the work can leave you feeling mentally exhausted at the end of a day, so all considered it’s no wonder that I’ve barely had the time to take stock of how real moving to a totally foreign place actually feels.  Sure, I was seeing new and interesting things every day – since I’ve been here, I’ve seen numerous shrines and temples, neighbourhoods old and new, palaces, parks, gardens, a traditional Japanese wedding, wierd fashion victims, a man walking his pet macaque outside Chanel in Harajuku, and more neon signage than you could shake a timelord’s stick at, not to mention feeling about 4 or 5 earthquakes, including an admittedly slighly worrying 5.1 quake, with it’s epicentre only 6km from my home – but at no moment did it sink in that I was actually here, living and working in Japan.  After all, although everyone speaks a different language from me, and although it feels weird not seeing another non-Asian person for potentially weeks at a time, life here follows largely the same pattern as at home; we get up, we work, we eat, we sleep, and consumerism is pushed in our faces evey minute of every day, with advertisements even plastered all over the handles on train carriages.

Fuji from Lake Ashi, Hakone National Park

Then, last Sunday, I’m pleased to say it hit me.  I caught my first glimpse of Mt. Fuji from the train, on my way to Hakone National Park.  Finally, a you are here moment, where reality pulls you from a slumber (those early mornings again) and says “see, told you it was real”, with a smug, pointy 17th century Frenchman’s finger. I’ll admit, I had absolutely no idea how big it was until I realised how far away you can see it from. Even 60 miles away in Tokyo it looms large, dwarfing the Tokyo Sky Tree, which is the second tallest building in the world.  The best was yet to come as we caught the view above from a boat crossing Lake Ashi, and saw the Hakone Jinja (shrine) in the late afternoon sun.  Even the majesty of this ancient volcanic wonder and its surroundings, though, couldn’t match the value of an experience money can’t buy, a mere two days later.

Back at school, a discussion on football led to a male colleage attempting to explain the offside rule, in Japanese of course, to two female colleagues.  Going by the looks on their faces, it seems that no matter what language you speak, some things will forever be lost in translation.

I am here.