Yamathon

So yesterday we did the Yamathon and jolly good fun it was too.

What wasn't fun was getting up at 4.45 in the AM to be in Harajuku for 6.00, that was hard but I managed it. Surprisingly large number of people getting the train at 5.30 on a Saturday morning, no idea why but smattering of school kids off to, I guess, cram school or sports fixtures, construction workers and others. They were probably looking at me thinking 'where's that weird gaijin in the running gear off to at this hour...?'.

So the idea is that in teams of three or four you visit every station on the Yamanote line in Tokyo and take a photo of your team at each. It's not a race, as such, as there are no prizes for position, but of course there is a bit of kudos for finishing first and as BST had three teams joining in there was always going to be a bit of friendly competition. Of our team there was me (regular runner and half-marathoner), Ava (regular runner), Charlotte (regular runner, winter sports instructor and zumba enthusiast (whatever that is)) and Alice (Tokyo marathoner, triathlete, crazily fit person). In other teams there were also marathon runners, sports enthusiasts, PE teachers and the like - so while the Yamathon is ostensibly a walk there was definitely going to be a bit of running going with a bit of needle attached.

The groups were let off in blocks depending on when they had registered, the other 2 school teams were in the first group who set off at 7.00 whilst our team, the British Staggering Team, were in the last group at 7.25 - gave us the incentive to catch the others.

The British Staggering Team at the start, 7.26AM - Ava, Alice, me & Charlotte

We figured we would run for the first bit as we would be fresh, the stations are quite close together so you can get through a few quite quickly (that said the longest stretch of track is only 2.2km between stations (between Shinagawa and Tamachi, should you be interested) so there was always a station just around the corner). Navigation was good and we whizzed past Yoyogi and Shinjuku barely breaking stride. Unfortunately we then, due to too much talking and not enough concentrating, whizzed right past Shin-Okubo and were half-way to Takadanobaba before someone said 'this seems to be a long stretch...' so we had to go about 750m back to the station to take our photo, an unnecessary round trip of 1.5km - not sensible! When we were running back we passed a group of three walking guys who for the next 15 stations always seemed to appear in front of us even though we ran past them, like they had some kind of temporal field generator to slip ahead of us when we weren't looking. The same thing happened to us with another team between Ikebukuro and Otsuka - maybe our navigating wasn't that good after all...

 

lost in Shin-Okubo

We ran pretty much all the way from Harajuku at the start to Ueno, notwithstanding a short toilet and banana break at Mejiro. As you had to have all team members in the photo of the station, as well as the station name, it meant you had to ask random members of the public to take photos of you - generally speaking this wasn't a problem as stations tend to have a lot of people in and around them, the problem was choosing the right person. At Nishi-Nippori the only person was a middle-aged guy who initially looked suitably nonplussed at being accosted by several gaijin waving a phone at him. When he twigged what we wanted he threw away his half finished cigarette and took my phone - one can only suspect he had never seen a smartphone before (or maybe he was just an Apple guy through and through) as my HTC phone seemed to confuse him completely. I even showed him how to shoot and what we wanted (4 people and a train sign - one of Hugh Grant's lesser known films) but he just couldn't get it. Eventually a younger woman, watching this from the side, decided enough was enough and basically snatched the phone, elbowed him out the way and got the shot. From that moment on the rule was 'young people only!'

Just before Ueno, at Uguisudani, we met the first team going the other way (we were going clockwise) and they looked suitably in a hurry. At Ueno we figured it was about half-way around so stopped for a proper food break and a sit down. We did the first half in 3 hours and at that stage were thinking of a 6 hour finish, a revised estimate after our initial sub-10 hour aim. The problem was that Ava had felt a  tendon twinge at the top of her thigh and the sit down probably didn't do it any good.

It was only a short distance from Ueno to the next stop Okachimachi and very crowded along Ameoko-dori so we walked to get back in the swing and let our onigiri go down. As the crowds thinned out we started running again but it was aorund here that the twinge in Ava's left turned into a strain - she gamely tried to run-walk from Akihabara to Tokyo but by then it was clear that she couldn't really run any more. From that point on it was walking all the way, though we did so at a brisk pace. Though 6 hours was out we hoped we might do it 7.

strange bloke behind Charlotte's head

After Shinagawa we took a short cut through the back streets to cut off a loop of track and found the first of the other BST teams. They had run a bit but had tired of that so decided to start drinking instead. We found them outside a convenience store, Chu-hi's in hand and having a great time. We set off together but as there was another BST team in front of us and we really wanted to catch them we ended up moving ahead of out colleagues.

By Gotanda Ava was really starting to struggle, but as by then we only had 3 more stations to visit she kept on it. The last bit was hard for her and by now the rest of us were feeling it, it was a long way, about 50km according to friend in another team who kept his gps runkeeper thing going for the whole route.

Ava struggling in Gotanda

We hit Shibuya, our final station, at about 2.40pm. By then we had had a text and photo from the first BST team, safely in a bar with a big beer in front of them - they were 4th home in 5 hours 46 minutes, a really great achievement having run all the way. For the last leg, from Shibuya to the finish line, we had a celebratory chu-hi was well which started to damp-down the leg ache.

Shibuya, your final station stop




We finally crossed the finish line in 7 hours 35 minutes, good enough for 15th place out of 100+ teams. Then it was to TGI Fridays for beer and food, the first team had already gome home by this point but the last team did make it for beers with us later.

The finish line at 3.01PM

All in all a really good day. I reckon we could have done it in 6 hours if Ava hadn't got injured, but there you go, it's not like it was her fault. If we do it next year, and I think we will as we all said we're up for it, then I think anti-clockwise might be best, get the longer sections out of the way first, and probably a bit more training prior to if we want to run the whole way.And now we have a BST target to beat...

Tokyo Yamathon 2013

 This saturday i will be getting off my backside and try to give something back - I haven't done a great deal for charity, I must admit, though doing stuff for the Japan Scottish Highland Games was sort of for charity, as were the event for the St Andrew Society... so I have done a bit for charity but anyway, here's a bit more.

The Yamathon is a 12 hour walk-run-stagger around the Yamanote line in Tokyo, the Yamanote line is like the Circle line in London only thankfully a bit smaller - about 35km if you follow the tracks and I reckon about 40 if you don't. You get 12 hours to do it and my team and I reckon we can do it in 10 or less, so here goes.

My team is me, Charlotte, Ava and Alice - 3 colleagues from work who are decidedly younger and probably fitter than me (Alice ran Tokyo marathon in February) but hopefully I'll be able to keep up.

We are raising  money for Oxfam for their Democratic Republic of Congo project, details can be found here http://www.oxfam.jp/en/whatwedo/emergency_work/drc/

If you would like to donate please go to my fundraising page here http://uk.virginmoneygiving.com/fundraiser-web/fundraiser/showFundraiserProfilePage.action?userUrl=JustinBowdidge 


Should be a blast...

Who was that Man...?

So The Man Who Kan is officially now the Man Who Couldn't. As I said before, he was dealt a shitty hand but seismic catastrophes are in the job description for a Japanese PM and I'm afraid to say that he didn't handle it particularly well. Yes, politics is riven by factions, especially within his own party, but at some point he had to stop, draw a line in the sand (after clearing away the wreckage and checking for radiation), grow a pair and, firstly, tell Ozawa to f*ck off and expel him from the party (and deal with the crook later) and then take charge of the country post-quake, show a bit of leadership, be strong, fight and all that. Sorry, but on both counts: FAIL.

So he finally did the decent thing, after the 3rd emergency budget was passed (or whichever one it was) and fell on his sword. After a bit of ministerial tooing and froing, the suits of the DPJ elected another of their own, Yoshihiko Noda, as the new #1. Of the candidates he was one of few who I didn't really want to get it, mostly as he looks like a toad (imagine a flesh-coloured Baron Silas von Greenback and you'll see what I mean), and he sounds a bit like one as well - and kudos to him if he ever starts burping really loudly in a cabinet meeting in a vain attempt to attract Renho for a ministerial debrief...

So Noda has also been dealt a pretty shitty hand by the fates, but at least he has the excuse that he saw it coming. Of course the main problem is the economy - at the moment government debt is running at about double the annual turnover of Japan Inc, meaning that we are well mired in the deepest of deep shit. That said, unlike the mountainous debt of Europe and the US, most of the people the J-govt are indebted to are the people of Japan, as pretty much all the IOUs are written to Japanese banks backed up by the savings of millions of households across the land. This is a good thing, and the only reason Japan Inc hasn't gone bust for the last 20 years, as the people of Japan are very unlikely to stop saving, take the cash from the bank and blow it all in Vegas (or, in the case of US/European debt, the Chinese suddenly saying, "hey, you know all those IOU's? Reckon we'll cash them in now...").

But with a shrinking popuation and no mass immigration any time soon, the tax base will decrease and govt income fall even before the rebuilding of Tohoku gets underway. So sales/consumption tax will probably have to go up, no defintely have to go up, from its current 5% - I can see that at 10% in the next few years and probably 15% in a decade. It's going to hurt but it's got to be done. The Tohoku clean up is, naturally, another bit blot on the landscape (quite literally) - of course things have begun and lots of work already done, I think pretty much all of the displaced people now have temporary housing, as opposed to living in gymnasiums and other evacuation centres - that's pretty damned good going, considering how many people lost their houses. But rebuilding lives, towns, communities, jobs and all the other myriad of things that go into a place to live, that's going to take some work.

And then there is Fukushima. The nuclear plant is still not safe, though the chances of it blowing up and spewing radioactive crap all over Japan have now, it appears, receded. Interesting that everyone is now happy to use the word 'meltdown' to describe 2 or 3 of the reactors - it seems that the partial meltdowns happened within days of the disaster, certainly when we were sitting at home in Tokyo wondering whether we should get the hell outta Dodge. If anyone had mentioned the 'M' word at that time we would have been on a plane without pausing for thought, as would about 12 million people around me. So in a way it is hardly surprising that no one used that word, panic would have ensued, but now the attitude is more 'we I lived through it and I'm not dead yet, so the cores melted, big deal, there's no mushroom cloud over Tokyo...'. Probably way too blase, that, but there you go.

Anyway, good luck with all that, Noda-san.

What's going on...? (as a famous man once sang)

So it's been an interesting month or so, to say the least.

First the earthquake, then a lot more earthquakes, then (not really) nuclear armageddon in Fukushima, then a gaijin-only broohaha (about flyjins or denyjins or cryjins or whatever the label de jour-jins was), then (not really) social and infrastructural breakdown in a large city an awfully long way from the earthquake and (not really) nuclear armageddon zones and a whole load more stuff as well. Phew, it's been a ride!

But for us good folk of Arakawa Riverview (in the large city an awfully long way from the earthquake and (not really) nuclear armageddon zones), life has been reasonably normal, to tell the truth. In the week after the quake there were indeed shortages of foods like milk, bread and dried and canned stuff, but since then things are back on the shelves. There was a subsequent yoghurt scarcity, but that's pretty much OK now, and then a very real scare as breweries suddenly realised that beer producing and shipping capacity was way down and Tokyo running dry suddenly became a very real possibility. So far so good on that one, but we are monitoring the situation carefully (and stocking up on red wine and gin (I will re-label myself a gin-jin)).

Also in the week after the quake the British Embassy (to whom I will doff my cap to a job reasonably well done in the face of enormous stress) changed their travel advice from 'everything is pretty much OK' to 'British nationals should consider leaving Tokyo'. This freaked me, along with the Guru, out and we made plans to move south to a branch of the family down in Kyushu. But after a little reflection and a realisation that the travel advice was more to stop people coming to Tokyo, thereby giving the embassy more responsibilities if things did go bad, rather than a cry to run to the hills (and not Roppongi Hills), we decided to stay put. Others didn't, some went to Osaka or Kyushu, some went to Singapore or Hong Kong, others further afield to Australia or the UK. Fine, I have no problem with that, people make the decisions best suited for themselves and their families. What I find most poisonous is the subsequent name-calling and label-making mentioned above - people that left became flyjins, branded cowards by some who stayed; people who left called the stayers naïve, delusional and crazy to put themselves in harm's way. Basically everyone trying to justify their actions, as if a) it matters or b) it has anything to do with anyone else. So, anyway, get over it people as we’re all people and we don’t have to justify our decisions to others.

Now because of the goings on in Fukushima TEPCO (that’s Tokyo Electric Power Company, for those who have been living in the north pole for the last month) and the Japanese Government have come in for some pretty stinging (by Japanese standards) criticism in the last month. The main foci have been:

1) Tepco don’t know what they are doing

2) The govt don’t know what they are doing

3) The govt don’t know what Tepco is doing

4) Everyone is covering up the scale of the nuclear related problems

The first 2 are undoubtedly true as neither Tepco nor the govt have a clue what to do about the Fukushima Dai-ichi power plant or, if they did know what to do, they have no idea how to do it. The 3rd point is probably true – Tepco are definitely the bad guys here (except the valiant Fukushima 50 (and probably more) who are trying to cool the reactors and sort out the problems – these heroes are distinct from the homogenous Tepco mass as I think they do have a clue what they are doing and probably a clue how to do it (and are trying to do it the face of seemingly insurmountable incompetence by their “superiors”)). Er, yes, Tepco, definitely the bad guys, or more likely lethally negligent guys…lost my train of thought. Ah yes, so, not only does it look like Tepco have been pulling the wool over the eyes of their staff and the people of Fukushima, it seems that they haven’t really told the whole story to the govt, or the IAEA, or anyone else. This does not, as you may well imagine, fill one with confidence about what is happening there right now, but it will, hopefully, mean that those (ir)responsible will be brought to book when the (radioactive) dust finally settles. One thought – some argue that Tepco should be nationalised, as should all nuclear power production, but I wonder. Private firms will cut corners to save costs, thereby endangering lives like now; however state industries can be woefully inefficient and ‘jobs for life on the state sector’ can very easily lead to similar sloppy work procedures. So what to do…?

Point 4 above, that everyone is covering up, does, I think, have some merit as an argument. The reason, I think, is that the govt need a diversion to take everyone’s mind, and view, off what has happened to Iwate and Miyagi prefectures in the aftermath of the quake and tsunami. The devastation up there, the sheer scale of the rebuild that will need to take place is, I think, on a level that people cannot comprehend, and when they do start to think about it the excrement will hit the slowly rotating cooling device. So, better to keep the focus of the people and the world on Fukushima, which so far has killed 2 people (I think) rather than on the destruction wrought upon Tohoku area on 11th March, after which some 30,000 are dead or missing. So when, again, the radioactive dust finally settles, (the man who) Kan can quickly whip a satin sheet off Tohoku, say ‘ta-daa’ and show everyone that the clean-up is underway, reconstruction has already started and things aren’t as bad as you thought they were, so keep calm and carry on. Mark my words, you read it here first.

But here’s a seditious thought – why bother rebuilding Tohoku? It was full of old people, most of whom were unfortunately swept away by the tsunami. Rural depopulation is such that the areas affected were dying anyway, there was little inward investment above the govt building useless roads to nowhere and empty concert halls in vainglorious but futile pork barrel projects. Schools were closing and classes amalgamating in towns all over the area as fewer and fewer children were born because the kids that were born moved to Tokyo as soon as they were old enough, never to return. So why bother? Rebuild the ports and the fishing fleets as they were useful; and then put all the rice fields together in one big lump and either nationalise rice growing in that area or sell the land as one or two blocks to a major agricultural business and let them grow rice on an industrial basis as opposed to the millions of mom & pop farms that again are slowly dying as the kids realise rice farming is hard work. With the hundreds of thousands of displaced people, ship them to Tokyo or other areas of rural depopulation (which is most of Japan outside the major cities) and start filling up the gaps in those communities – Tohoku is lost, don’t bother trying to find it again. Japan needs a radical rethink towards the countryside, maybe this is the time to do it…

Of course the counter argument to that (apart from the humanitarian one), is that Japan should be trying to de-centralise, especially Tokyo, as there is too much important stuff here so if/when the big one hits us (as it surely will) too much infrastructure will be destroyed. What Japan should be doing is rebuilding Tohoku and encouraging (forcing?) govt departments, businesses and the like to move to these areas to disperse the potential damage when another quake hits (I don’t mean when another quake hits that area – Tohoku could be the place to go as it has now been ‘disastered’ so the chances of another catastrophic event are, compared to Tokyo which hasn’t had a major quake since 1923, hopefully reduced). I don’t know, I don’t think there is a right answer, just options that all seem a tad bleak.

Let’s leave those happy thoughts for a while and talk about fashion.

I don’t, and won’t, claim to know a lot about fashion, especially where young ladies are concerned, but a recent trend has got me confused. As a rule I don’t criticise what people wear – if they want to look foolish then that’s their lookout, also I don’t want to sound like an old fart, which is getting harder as the years go by.

Anyway the recent trend is for women to wear glasses. Nothing strange there, I know, but the fashion is to wear what look like oversized, plastic framed glasses but only the frames, no lenses. Now wearing glasses is a pain in the, well, often the nose and behind the ears, but generally it’s more just annoying having something stuck to your face, so why go to that trouble if you don’t need to?

A pictorial reference to the fashion would look something like this

OK, yes, she’s fit, but she would be without the frames.

The Guru says these women are wearing the big glasses to make their faces look smaller and therefore more cute. If this is true it seems odd, as to me it looks like they have big glasses on, not a smaller face. Another explanation is that they actually need the glasses and lenses, but can’t wear them with the lenses in as they get in the way of the artificially long eyelashes – this, I think, holds more water as a theory.

So I don’t know, but it seems to me that this fashion cocks a snook at people who really do have to wear glasses. ‘Ha haa’ they seem to be saying, ‘I can take my glasses-frames off and suffer no degrading of my sight, whereas you, have-to-wear-glasses-person, you will stumble around bumping into things if you tried to do the same’. This seems a little rude to me, but there you go. If I fine out the real reason I’ll let you know.

Friday night and Saturday morning

So at about 7pm most of the parents had collected their offspring so we had to thing about getting home. We have to take a train home, it's too far to walk or bike (especially as we're either bringing or taking Marcus with us). At this point the trains were not running but we were hopeful that they might start again that evening, but at maybe 7.30 or 8.00pm an announcement was made by JR that train services would stop for the night.

OK, what do we do? Well, we could try looking for a hotel, you never know... (at this point I should mention that the Guru had, at about 3pm, suggested that she should go and get a hotel room as things looked dicey about getting home - I naturally poo-pooed this, having far too much faith in JR getting their trains running again; silly me). So we loaded up and with the IT Manager Rey, his wife and kid (who live about 2 minutes from us in north Tokyo) set about trying to find some food and a bed for the night. We were lucky in that we knew, if we couldn't find anywhere, we could just stay in the school, many others didn't have that luxury. We wandered up to Children's castle on Aoyama-dori as we knew they had rooms, but naturally all was full when we got there. Also, judging by the number of people on the streets, we figured pretty quickly that every room in Tokyo would probably be taken by now. So, after a brief stop for contact lens solution  (which I subsequently found I had already bought and put in my office earthquake emergency pack for this very situation - I'm organised without remembering it) we headed off.

Thinking about food, we walked down towards central Shibuya but, as you can imagine, most eateries were either closed or packed, whilst all convenience stores and coffee shops were empty of easily eatable food. On the way passed we checked the Tokyu Hotel on Meiji-dori but the scrum in the foyer put us off, so then we headed to TGI Fridays - again I poo-pooed this suggestion, thinking we should stick to less crowded areas, but when we got there not only did they have space but they could do us a table for 6 in the non-smoking section! So with minimal wait we sat down to burgers and well deserved beers. It was busy there, but probably no more so than a nornmal Friday evening, and the staff were surprisingly positive, helpful and unstressed. So hats off to them, they shall now be known as TFI (Thank Fuck It's Open on) Fridays :)

After refuelling we headed back to school. The business centre/office was one option, but I realised that the teacher's staff room would be a better place as they had sofas and cushions. We thought that a few people might already be there, but all was in darkness when we arrived. The cleaning crew were still in school and a few others from the business group who couldn't get home, so some went to the library to sleep, others in the office and we in the staff room. All this time the youngster and Rey's little boy (the year above but he and Marcus are friends) were having a great time, completely hyperactive, excited and enjoying themselves thoroughly. By 11pm they should have been spark out but it was a struggle to get them to sleep.

A check of facebook, a few more emails and text messages and a phonecall with the folks later and that was it for me; off to sleep. Unfortunately the staffroom is on the 6th floor of the school so every little aftershock made the building sway, so sleep was hard to come by, for the adults at least - Marcus slept soundly all the way through but I reckon I got about 2 hours, on-and-off, through the night.

Yes, it wasn't the most comfortable place to spend the night, but we were dry, warm, together, fed, alive, relatively safe and had a roof over our heads, things that people in Miyagi, Iwate and Fukushima did not have. I counted my blessings several times over.

Next morning we woke early as the blinds aren't too effective in the staffroom. The tv news said trains would start running around 7 or 8am, so after a bit of breakfast (Rey had sensibly bought food before everything went from the convenience store the afternoon before) we headed to the station. As we left we walked past our next door (Japanese) high school we saw what looked like all their students leaving the building. I think that they kept all the students in over night to make sure they were safe - goodness knows what they did for food and blankets.

At Shibuya station it wasn't the chaos I had half expected. It seems the Japanese don't do chaos (or rioting, looting or any of the other things you might expect to happen - it seems more akin to British blitz-style stoicism). We got to the platform and there was a Yamanote line train waiting to approach the platform, whilst our Saikyo train was about to leave Ebisu. About an hour or so later neither train had moved.

On the way we had seen a Ginza subway line train moving so we decided on a subway strategy that would get us almost all the way home. So, hot-foot to the ginza line, check the Namboku is also working and then onto the platform. We just missed the departing train but were first in line for the next, but just then there was an announcement that due to overcroding at Ueno the ginza line was suspended... Loud groans but what can you do, JR wasn't running either. So we waited and after only about 10 minutes they decided to start running agin. From there it was plain sailing - ginza line to Tameiki-Sanno, change to the namboku and it took us all the way to Akabane, which is only 2 stops from where we live (but the last bit is JR only, hence trying to take the train before).

We decided to get a cab home for the last little bit, well, 2 cabs, one for each family. As we were walking down the road to the taxi rank Rey was lucky enough to hail one and got off straight away. We weren't so lucky and so had to join the queue at the rank for what proved to be the longest wait of the journey home. Over an hour we waited but finally we picked up a cab.

At 11am we finally got home and I'm glad to say our apartment was entirely undamaged and the tv, which I was sure would be on the floor in a million pieces was standing proud and upright.