I have a muscular ache in my sides to day which should be alot more bothersome, were it not for the fact that such injury was incurred through 7 hours straight of raving in Fukuoka on Saturday night, to some of the best dance music I’ve heard in a very long time.

Louise and I planned some time ago to go and give our support to Junko, who was running her final night under the alias of ‘Pure’ at Kiethflack, as after four years she has decided it’s time for something new. Louise and I are turning into a silly obachan couple going to Fukuoka, going for the same ramen and to the same club as last time and quite happy to continue doing just that thankyou very much.

 Obachan we were not, however, when we hit the upstairs floor of the club at midnight to some house - yes! actual house music - being spun by an Irish character who doesn’t seem too fond of Louise and I after we drew attention to his Irishness when compiling a e-flyer for Pure a while ago (silly bugger). For al it was of the cheesier ilk, just to hear some proper four-to-the-floor sent my heart racing and and one point my knees a-knocking with sheer over-excitement, so I drank alot of gin to calm me down.

Following that were two tremendous sets from a pair of Japanese DJs, the first whose name I sadly can’t remember and the second named Hiro. The first set took Lou and I on a fantastic journey which testified to the fact that techno is in fact beautiful when it’s done well. The other remarkable thing about this DJ- and I’ve only ever heard this done once before by the Idjut Boys at Electric Chair - is that at one point he managed to seamlessly mix together disco and techno, a difficult sound to imagine but one which makes you dance like you’re life depends on it.

Hiro played a slightly more downtempo, minimal set, although similarly managed to skilfully drop in the odd bit of feel-good house for good measure. Speaking of good measure, this boy exemplified just how different Japanese DJs are to British ones. He was good-looking, for a start, and got through the night on water and a square of chocolate. There were no random birds or silly hangers on sorting his records for him or drooling over his decks; he could manage just fine by himself. And when his set finish at 6am to cries of ‘one more choon!’ he paused momentarily, gave a little sigh, took off his coat and proceeded to play not one more choon but a whole extra set, taking Louise and I and whoever else sauntered onto the dancefloor through til 7am.

Louise had not gotten drunk that night, and by the time we left I had sobered up completely, yet the two of us left the club BUZZING. We’d taken one short break for a snack and sat down for a cigarette a couple of times, but other than that we were at it in no-half-arsed manner for 7 hours. As soon as breakfast was down us the exhaustion hit and we passed out on the bus back to Shimonoseki, finally hitting the hay around 10.30am at Louise’s flat.

The foghorns from ships outside had a strangely soothing effect as I lay there on Louise’s tatami and thought about what a wonderful time I had had. There is something really special about finding someone who a) shares your love of music absolutely and completely and b) can go on little clubbing adventures with you and feel the same sense of accomplishment at having soaked up hours of aural joy and pounded it out on the dancefloor as hard as your little legs will allow (or big long legs in Louise’s case).

I hope we have another trip like that again, yet there was something about it which makes me think we’ll never quite repeat it.

Some time ago my friend Mitch made the claim that the English language quite simply has more words than most other languages, and particularly compared to Japanese. I have no idea what the statistics are, and am not about to start number-crunching now, but rather would like to share with you my still sapling thoughts on the differing social function of language in Japan as compared with England, if not the West in general. Being one who holds that language constructs a significant proportion of our social world, I think trying to understand not just the meanings attached to words, but the way in which the Japanese language constructs Japanese life, can help us to overcome some of the anxiety that goes with being baffled persistently and daily.

When I first began studying Japanese I learned that most of the time, the subject is usually omitted from the sentence (particularly ‘you’ or ‘I’), and thus a great deal is understood through context. I have recently come to discover, however, that context is important in a much wider sense when it comes to conversational Japanese. For all Japanese may have fewer phonetic constructs than English, there are a whole range of kanji for one particular set of sounds. Not being a kanji reader, as yet, it can thus be quite amusing when one finds that the word for lovesick is the same as that for a breed of whale.

As a native speaker of English, I’m sure I am blissfully unaware of how repetetive our use of language can become, yet the role of repetition  in Japanese seems to hold true to our conception of the Japanese concern with form over function. This is particularly true when it comes to greetings, and it does rather cheer me. So if ever a student sees me in the corridor - even if I’ve already seen them several times that day - there is always a perfunctory ‘konnichiwa’ (or more frequently ‘hello’ as should be the case). Beyond that, there are stock phrases for every activity  - a squawking of ‘onegai shimasu!’ at the start of every lesson and ‘arigato gozaimashita’ at the end; ‘itadakimasu’ to start eating and ‘gochiso sama deshita’ to finish; ’shitsurei shimasu’ upon entering a room and ’shitsurei shimashita’ upon leaving, and the list goes on.

While these may sound like banal observations, I just find it interesting that for all Japanese people are, in the main, much quieter than us gaikokujin, language itself serves a much more specific social function in tightly definining various social relations through the use and repetition of specific words and phrases. Many people are already aware that there are various registers of verb form which are used to address certain people according to the social ranking, but I think we take our understanding of language as contstructive of culture much further than this.

The repetition of the same words (the most common right now being ’samui!’ as it gets steadily colder), whether a conscious decision on the part of the speaker or otherwise, represents the agent not using a tool by which he or she can be clearly marked out as different from others, something that many of us in the West like to do, if not to be radically different then at least to be understood as individuals. We have utterances for the beginning and end of things, for entering and leaving a room, for saying hello in the morning etc., but by and large we tend to employ a much wider range of vocabulary in order to perform these social functions. The arbitrariness of language means that greater ambiguities can arise in the gap between speaker and listener when the vocabulary used is less predictable, and thus social relations between individuals take on new meaning and are more open to question. Here in Japan, this issue is less likely to arise as individuals adhere to a common lexicon on their day to day business, and thus social hierarchies are maintained.

 I am not for a minute suggesting that Japanese people do not make use of their own lexicon in interpersonal exchanges, but rather that the performance of specific utterances has more inherent meaning here than the meaning of the words themselves. As I said, these are just sapling thoughts at present; we’ll see which way they grow when my new year’s promise to get cracking on the Nihon-go comes to fruition…

I did my first lesson on Christmas today, and what a bizarre experience it was. It could have felt rather depressing were it not the fact the three weeks hence I will be back with my favourite people in the world preparing for a yuletide onslaught of outrageously festive proportions.

Trying to explain the excitement children in England feel at the prospect of some fat bloke squeezing down the chimney (be it the one in their homes or in their minds given that I certainly never had a chimney in my house, and could only conclude he found an open window) to these rather puzzled faces left me at something of a loss. But then out came the  crackers - exploding stuff! - and they were all over Christmas, pawing at prizes and paper hats, trying their best in English to ask me where I got my lovely plush red Santa, and if they could get one in Hikari. I did a quick round of Pass the Parcel with them, as although it’s not usually a Christmas activity it was an ace way to get them singing along to my oh-so-schmultzy Christmas CD and do a bit of present-giving. The comedy thing about it was that where in the UK kids would normally be savagely tearing the paper off in order to make as big a mess as possible, I kept hearing the famous Japanese phrase ‘mottainai’ - meaning ‘don’t waste it!’ -  uttered in worried tones by whoever the music stopped on as they very carefully tried to unpick my botched efforts at minimal taping in order to avoid ripping the wrapping. Very sensible and very cute, but see below for a rant which explains why I find this Japanese mantra faintly ridiculous:

http://www.lo-la.co.uk/2007/10/14/you-want-some-plastic-with-that/

 This dude isn’t exaggerating.

But back to Christmas, or seeming lack thereof in Japan, which comes in no way as a surprise except for the fact that they’ve ticked all the boxes - crap versions of Christmas carols in every shop, admittedly fewer adverts but still some spectacular illuminations, allusions to the importance of kinfolk and a general whole-hearted (when have the Japanese ever been half-hearted?) attempt at ‘doing’ Christmas, but just missing it. You can’t expect anything less really, but you’ve got to hand it to them for trying.

Roll on eight hours in Bangkok!!

Having returned from my biggest excursion to date, I feel like a whole new Japan has been opened up to me; one which shatters certain quaint illusions I had about this country devoted to beauty and manners, and which has stoked an insatiable curiosity about the effects of so little space on so many people, and the relationship between collectivism and individualism in this bonkersly vibrant world whose activities seem never-ending.

I decided to pack in as much of Kansai as I could into three days, and thus bombed my way between Osaka, Kyoto and Nara on one of the busiest weekends of the year (Friday was Labour Day and therefore a public holiday). The sadness with such cramming is that it is difficult to feel able to write authoritatively about one’s experience, although doing so much travelling opened my eyes to the scale of the urban landscape in central Japan.

 Osaka was a brief but fulfilling adventure. From the minute I stepped off the train I felt there was a difference in temperament that stretched beyond what one would normally expect from a big city. Osaka is angry, and likes to laugh at the rest of the world. It roars at Tokyo; and with an accent that requires use of every facial muscle and double one’s normal diaphragm exertion, it parades its dirty neon backstreets of love hotels, achingly trendy bars and thickets of fashionista boutiques denser than the Amazonian undergrowth like the crown jewels. Propositioning is the norm here, on the part of women as well as men - something I am not accustomed to in Yamaguchi.

Kyoto, on the other hand, was a city of subtle class, and of thousands of smiling and thoughtful faces amid the teeming throngs who had come to witness the almost-made-up autumn colours shrouding the dozens of temples that surround this beautiful city. I must confess any accurate rendition of Kyoto must wait until a later date, as my entire day was spent agape at the endless reds, yellows, pinks, greens and oranges that pigmented the perfectly formed maple leaves that hung from every branch of every tree that Kieran and I encountered whilst chewing the fat by the canal and indulging in a spot of culture along the way. Kyoto, having bee the capital of Japan from 794 to 1868, is brimming with temples and shrines and genuine cultural artifacts which were thankfully spared the US carpet-bombings during the Pacific War*. We saw only a fraction of them, which is a perfect excuse for me to return.

Nara shares with Kyoto the special privilege of having been spared American carpet bombings during the war, meaning it too is a religious and cultural hub, although thankfully a much more navigable one. I had very little time in Nara, but a couple of hours on a bike allowed me to get a good eyefull of the deer park, a couple of temples, and the spectacular five-storey pagoda at the entrance to the park - easily the most impressive structure I’ve seen to date. Nara has a European feel similar to that of Hiroshima, which I find immensely appealing; the little insect-people move more like nice glow-worms than the blue-arsed flies of Fukuoka or the preying mantises of Osaka.

 Despite having such a short stay in each city, I found time to get lost in each of them, which I was glad to have done each time. I find myself getting lost alot in Japan, and there’s a part of me wonders if it’s my subconscious mind making me do it on purpose. It’s as though I so often need to be in the right place at the right time that my brain goes out of the way to put me in the wrong place whenever it can, and whether it turns out to be the right or wrong time is a gamble which makes the adventure worth it.

 I will be going back to Kansai in a few months, and it will be interesting to see how much it makes me rumble with excitement from the inside next time.

*Most of the castles in Japan have been restructured, often several times, not only as a result of the Pacific War but of centuries civil conflict and torchings of disgraced kings and emperors. Osaka-Jo, along with the structures in Kyoto and Nara, is one of the few remaining genuine articles.