Jinbocho – Tokyo’s second-hand book district

The bookshop: that melting pot where ideas and imagination come together to inspire generations. International symbol of freedom, knowledge, expression and the exchange of ideas. When I describe it that way, I feel more than a little guilty that in the last year I have bought the majority of my books in electronic format, therefore contributing to the decline of the industry. Oh well.

But the bookshop is more than just a place to buy books. It is a place of inspiration. The words and wisdom of thousands of writers, dead and living, waiting to be read, consumed and digested, hundreds of new or forgotten ideas ready to be discovered… And arguably, the main reason for visiting a bookshop shouldn’t be about picking up the latest work by your favourite author (it’s always cheaper online, let’s be honest), but about finding something you never even considered that you might like to read.

And if you enjoy the thrill and mystery of shelves stacked with unknown, potentially inspiring, possibly even life-changing books, you might enjoy a visit to Jinbocho.

Jinbocho is Tokyo’s famous used book district, known for its numerous second-hand bookshops and book stalls. And I’m not talking about picking up three 2009 bestsellers for a pound, or a battered old classic you say you’ll read but then never do (sorry Tolstoy). Sure, you can find those in Jinbocho, but the real allure is in finding something old and rare, or a forgotten remnant of another period of culture.

You can find classic manga from bygone decades; vintage posters for movies, bands and pin-ups; old science fiction novels with those cheesy covers, and a whole lot more.

One of my favourite shops in the area is Bookhouse. The ground floor is dedicated to children’s literature, with a carpeted reading area with sofas and big character plushies. There’s also a gallery at the back featuring exhibitions by various illustrators. It’s fantastic not only for children who love to read, but also for adults with an interest in the art of children’s writing and illustration, or simply with fond memories of childhood literature.

Climbing a gorgeous staircase leads you up to the English language floor, a place I could happily live in forever. It has a huge number of classics and books on a broad range of subjects, but my favourite section is one dedicated to Japanese history and culture as written by English speakers visiting the country, some as early as the 1800s. It’s fascinating to read accounts of a nation that was, at the time, generally a mystery to the western world. Exploring further on this floor, I found some rare-looking editions of classics, including a huge edition of William Blake’s poetry that I could barely lift (and which cost 63000yen – £360 or $630).

Other stores in the area include one that specialises in fine art books, one that sells science fiction novels and American comics, another selling old maps, one selling vintage magazines, and an antique traditional Japanese card game shop. You can even find a shop selling books on insect taxonomy, if that’s your hobby. In short, Jinbocho is a book lover’s paradise.

Of course, if you happen to be fluent in Japanese or Chinese, you can probably get more out of the experience, but a large number of the stores do stock English books, and there is a lot more to find here beside novels. Regardless of the language, though, the sight of so much rare and fascinating literature in one small area of Tokyo is a beautiful thing. It’s also heartening to see that the streets are always crowded with shoppers, a sign that curiosity and thirst for knowledge are very much alive.

The best retro arcades in Tokyo

Gamers at an arcade in Shinjuku.

Many people refer to the late 1970s and early 80s as the golden age of video games. At this time, video game arcades, originating in Japan, sprang up in their thousands across western Europe and the US, and were a popular hangout spot for both children and young adults. Sadly, by the time I started gaming in the early 90s, the era of arcades in the UK was already long dead, and these days if we find a lone Time Crisis or Dance Dance Revolution machine tucked away behind the myriad coin pushers at some beach resort we consider ourselves lucky.

In Japan, though, arcades are very much alive. In fact, in most cities you don’t have to walk more than a few hundred metres in any direction before you find one. I spent a great deal of time in these arcades during my first few visits to Tokyo, Osaka and Yokohama. Playing Street Fighter IV in an arcade was something I always wanted to experience, and trying out the various rhythm games (there are hundreds) was a frequent pastime whenever I had a spare hour or two.

After a while, though, the novelty began to wear off, and I realised that almost all of the arcades had the same selection of usually current-generation titles. As someone whose interest lies primarily in older titles from the 80s and 90s, I realised I needed to look a little further than the obvious places in order to find what I wanted.

I knew there must be arcades in Tokyo for retro gamers like me, and I set out to find them. This is a list of the best retro arcades I found in and around Tokyo:

5. Club Sega, various locations

Retro machines in Club Sega

Let’s get the obvious one out of the way. Club Sega is a chain of arcades which, although primarily housing newer machines, occasionally throws in a rarer, older title, which can be a nice surprise. The machines vary depending on the location, so it’s worth visiting a few. My favourite is in Akihabara, which has a rare SegaSonic the Hedgehog machine where you have to run by spinning a wheel (fun for about 3 minutes before your arm gets tired and you start dying continuously).

Highlights:

Depends on location

4. Super Potato, Akihabara

Cocktail table-style games in Super Potato’s jungle. Solid Snake is being stealthy in the background.

This is primarily a retro video game store, and it happens to be one of the best I’ve found in Japan. While it’s worth visiting just to pick up some classic Dreamcast games or marvel at obscure consoles and forgotten add-ons like the Panasonic 3DO or the Famicon Disc Drive, there is also a mini-arcade on the top floor with 15-20 machines, including some rarer titles like Splatterhouse and the very rare Pac-Land (a side-scrolling platformer that was made even before Mario popularised the genre). It’s one of the highlights of Akihabara if you’re a retro gamer, and you can even get some Japanese sweets and glass-bottled Coke while you’re there.

Highlights:

Splatterhouse

Pac-Land

Wonder Boy in Monster Land

3. Anata no Warehouse, Kawasaki

Anata no Warehouse’s unique decor.

Not technically in Tokyo, but well worth the half hour train ride to get to it. This one has the most character of any of the arcades I’ve seen. The exterior looks like an abandoned warehouse, while the interior is decked out to look like the Kowloon walled city in Hong Kong, a very dark piece of recent Chinese history. They really go all-out creating a dangerous, alien atmosphere too. After crossing the stepping-stones over some green, steaming abyss, you can hear distant voices speaking in Chinese and get a glimpse into some mocked up houses. The arcade itself is decorated to look like a street in the walled city, with graffittied walls, laundry hanging up on the rusty balconies above you, and food stalls promising imminent salmonella.

The game selection here is a pretty good mixture of new and old, with some surprising gems too.

Highlights:

Rad Mobile

Street Fighter (where you have to punch the buttons to attack)

Galaga (cocktail table version)

Gauntlet (for 4 players)

2. HEY (Hirose Entertainment Yard), Akihabara

One of many long rows of games at HEY.

It was a tough call to choose a favourite arcade for this list, and HEY! certainly makes a good case, with more retro games than any of the other places I’ve visited. Specialising in bullet hell-style shooters, it nonetheless has a great deal of variety, including many puzzle games, some beat ’em ups, and more. And if you want to take a break from pixels, the next floor up has a good selection of fighting games, both current and retro.

Highlights:

Dungeons and Dragons

Darius 2 (large cabinet)

The Ninja Warriors

1. The Mikado, Takadanobaba

The Mikado, Takadanobaba

This one tops the list partly just for its variety. Along with the 40 or so machines on the lower level with everything from Mr. Driller and Arkanoid to obscure shoot ’em ups and an Uno game with anime girls (why even), the second floor has a large number of fighting games, more shoot ’em ups, and a whole selection of other titles. It’s also the only arcade I’ve found that has pinball machines. To top it off, this place also has regular events and tournaments with commentators.

Pinball!

What really wins me over, though, is the independent feel this arcade has. Rather than the usual chains run by bigger companies, with neat rows of immaculate machines, this one has its own character and its own style.

Highlights:

Arkanoid: Revenge of DOH

Darius

Parodius

Pinball(!)

It’s good to see that retro gaming is still alive in Tokyo. Even in writing this post, I discovered and visited several arcades I had never been to, and arcade games certainly have a long and interesting history worth delving into. But more importantly, these are some great places to go if you ever have a few hours and a pocketful of 100yen coins to spend.

Japan and Too Much Information

Arashiyama in Kyoto

A bus ride in Kyoto, Japan’s former capital and a city famed for its sights, should be a pleasant and relaxing experience. But rather than allowing you to watch the temples and shrines roll past in peace, some higher power in Kyoto has decided that what you really need is an automated voice giving you endless information:

“The next stop is Kyoto station. The bus will soon be stopping. The bus is now stopping. The doors are now opening. Please take care. The doors are now closing. Please take care. The next stop is…”

And all of this, bizarrely, in a Microsoft Sam-style text to speech software’s robotic staccato. And just in case (god forbid) there’s a pause in this relentless stream of information, the bus driver is there to repeat the same information you just heard.

This was not my first experience of Japan’s obsession with information. I had previously worked in customer service at one of the country’s many popular ski resorts. Anybody who has been shopping in Japan will know how the staff speak to the customers. The entire process is narrated (“The total amount is 1,329 yen. I’m receiving 2,000 yen. I’m returning 671 yen.” etc. etc.”). My job at the ski resort was a little bit different, but worked on the same principle, meaning that we spoke almost constantly, narrating the entire procedure while telling the customer exactly what they needed to do. At the very end, we advised the customer on how to carry their equipment.

This last part was actually quite vital. If you have a large set of skis, two heavy boots, ski wear, gloves, goggles and only two hands, it can be a bit of a puzzle. Fair enough. However, I wanted to try an experiment. A cruel, cruel experiment.

A customer arrived at the counter asking to rent only a pair of ski boots. They had brought their own skis and left them in one of the racks by the locker room. A pair of boots shouldn’t be too hard to carry, I thought, so when I placed the boots on the counter, instead of explaining how to carry them (by the strap) I simply said, “douzo” (“here you are”). Then I watched them struggle.

They looked at the boots, and then at me, then back at the boots. They picked them up by the straps (yes! I thought. They’ve got it!), then put them back down. They wrapped their arms awkwardly around the boots and tried to lift them that way, but soon gave up and put them down once again. Then they just looked at me as if I was some kind of tormentor (which I evidently was).

Now, many people might argue that information is a good thing, and on principle it is. When a cashier tells you how much money you gave him/her and how much change you’re getting back, you know they haven’t made a mistake and short-changed you. But you don’t need a long list of safety instructions read out to you every time you ride an escalator. We have information-free escalators in the UK and so far I’ve seen very few people die while riding them.

I feel there’s an over-reliance on this information in Japan, and if you stop the constant flow, people feel lost and don’t know what to do. Simple tasks like picking up a pair of shoes become incredibly taxing, because people aren’t used to having to think about them.

A lot of the time, though, there’s a double redundancy. If the ATM doesn’t sound an alarm and an automated voice doesn’t tell you not to forget your card and cash, would you leave without them? Or are the on-screen message and flashing lights at the card slot and cash dispenser enough? If the bus driver doesn’t fill in the silences by repeating the information that the automated voice just told you, will you feel lost and start to panic? Probably not. If you weren’t listening, you can always read the screen at the front of the bus, or maybe, you know, look out the window and use the basic human function of sight. Otherwise, you can just enjoy a rare moment of silence in Japan before the onslaught of useless information continues.

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Thanks for reading!

Arashiyama in Kyoto

Travels in Japan – Tokyo and Kyoto (part 1)

It’s been over two weeks since I finished working in Niigata, and since then I’ve been going to so many places and doing so much that I’ve barely had time to take a break. Now that I’ve got a few hours free (sitting on a coach for nine hours as I go from Tokyo to Kansai for the second time), it seems like a good idea to keep a record of my travels so that I can look back and be reminded of my experiences, as well as sharing them with whoever wants to read about them. For now, I’ll just share with you a few highlights from the last two weeks.

Hanami

My work in Niigata finished at the best possible time, with the start of Spring, which, in Japan, means cherry blossom season. My sister Ellen arrived at the start of the month, and one of the first places I took her to was Ueno Park for what’s known as ‘hanami’, or ‘cherry-blossom viewing’.

It was a breath-taking sight, not only in Ueno Park, but at the Imperial Palace, Yoyogi Park, and all over Tokyo. Streets were lined with pink and white blossoms, falling in their hundreds as we walked from place to place. They floated on the surfaces of lakes and ponds, and even after seeing them every day for over a week, I still had to stop and take a photo. I feel lucky to have been in Japan in this particular season, to see something beautiful that is unique to Japan, and something that the country is famous for.

The Ghibli Museum

It’s something of a cliché to call Hayao Miyazaki ‘the Japanese Walt Disney’, but a venture into a few shops in Tokyo reveals just how popular Studio Ghibli is. Every toy shop seems to have a Ghibli section, as do a lot of book stores and DVD stores. These sections are usually accompanied by a TV playing one of the films, or a speaker playing the Totoro theme, and some kind of decoration or display that makes this little section into its own special tribute to Japan’s most famous animation studio. When I see them, I can’t help but feel that Ghibli has the same magical hold over children and adults alike in Japan, as Disney does in the west.

The Ghibli muesum is in a fitting location. Far out from the centre of Tokyo in an area called Mitaka, it doesn’t feel like you’re in the city at all. The walk from the station to the museum is alongside a stream, which at the time of our visit was lined with white blossoms, and the museum itself is next to a wooded area where we ate our lunch before going inside.

The building also has the kind of character you would never expect from something that calls itself a ‘museum’. From outside, you can see stained glass windows depicting the films, and a spiral staircase that leads up to the roof. Inside, it feels like a grand house, perhaps the kind of home you would expect the creator of Studio Ghibli to live in, with an ornate lift and another narrow, caged spiral staircase leading to the third floor.

All of this, along with exhibits that shed light on the creative process behind more than 20 films, ties together to make an afternoon at the Ghibli museum an Experience, as opposed to merely being interesting. Added to that, is the fact that your ticket also includes a screening of a unique film which can only be seen at the Ghibli museum, and the film you see depends on the date you go.

This is, of course, a place every fan of Studio Ghibli, and everyone interested in animation, should visit, should you ever be in Tokyo.

Kyoto

After Tokyo, Kyoto is the number one destination for travel in Japan. Famous for temples such as Fushimi Inari Taisha, with its iconic red gates, and Kinkakuji, the ‘golden pavillion’ which sits beside a gorgeous lake, it is considered to contain some of the world’s most beautiful sights.

Being the budget travellers we are, we made the trip to Kyoto on an 8-hour night bus, something I plan to never attempt again. After arriving at 6:30am, exhausted from broken sleep, unable to check into our hotel for another 9 hours, we found ourselves in a city not too unlike the one we had left. Or so it seemed at first. From a high vantage point, Kyoto is just another large city, all grey towerblocks right up to the horizon, but more than a cursory look and you start to see the ornate roofs of temples and shrines breaking up the monochromatic cityscape.

It took a little while to warm to the place, but we soon discovered Kyoto’s beauty, not just in its temples, but in areas like Arashiyama, with its Moon Crossing Bridge, bamboo forest and, best of all, a monkey park that lets you climb a mountain while monkeys walk alongside you.

On our final day in Kyoto, we visited the Kyoto Prefectural Insho Domoto Museum of Fine Arts to see an exhibition on the changing of the seasons in Kyoto, as depicted by a number of different aritists. It seemed an appropriate way to end our brief stay, seeing the same beauty we had witnessed ourselves, through the eyes of an artist, including some of the places we had visited and recognised.

After that, we returned to Tokyo (on another awful night bus). But that’s a story for another blog post!

Life as a foreigner in rural Japan

I’ve been living here in Japan for over 2 1/2 months now, so I thought I’d write a couple of blog posts about my experiences here, and my thoughts on some of the more interesting aspects of Japanese culture and society. I’ll start with what it’s like to be a foreigner here.

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Just a couple of weeks after arriving here, I was having a conversation with a Japanese girl in the cafeteria. After a brief conversation, I asked her to add me on Facebook. She did so, and when I got back to my room and accepted her request, I checked her profile. There, her last status, made shortly after we started talking, was, ‘I’m talking to a British person! So cool!’

The word she used was ‘kakkoii’, meaning both ‘cool’ and ‘handsome’, and it seems like it’s obligatory to use this word every time there’s a foreigner nearby. When we first arrived, our presence was something of a novelty for a lot of people who had never left Japan and never lived in a large city, so this reaction was something I had to get used to. Even so, as someone who does not like a lot of attention, it can be hard to know how to react at times.

The Japanese perception of foreigners was one of the things that particularly interested me when I first arrived here. One of the most amusing things I discovered is the concept of ‘gaijin nyoi’, or ‘foreigner smell’. One person jokingly complained to me that when his foreign roommate hangs up his clothes to dry, the whole room smells of ‘gaijin nyoi’. Generally speaking, the ‘foreigner smell’ is considered to be a good smell. In fact, you might occasionally hear someone exclaim, ‘I wish I had that foreigner smell!’ Once, a friend of mine even overheard a group of people debating over who at the ski resort has the best ‘foreigner smell’. (Not to brag, but I came out favourably in this discussion. Thank you, Dove for Men!)

The perception of foreigners here varies greatly depending on the person and their experiences. Younger girls tend to get excited about the novelty, whereas some older people seem very shy around us, or even a little intimidated. In general, though, everybody wants to talk to us and get to know us, which really helped to make us feel welcome in the first few weeks. Now, we have all made some good friends, and the perception on both sides is moving away from stereotypes and preconceived ideas, to something more real.

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In my next post, I’ll talk about some of the interesting aspects of Japanese manners and etiquette. Until then, thanks for reading!

Science fiction, and why it’s cool

There was a point when, during my final weeks at university, I was in the midst of an all-nighter, having wasted much of the several weeks I’d been given for the assignment. Around 5 in the morning, I made myself a promise. I promised myself that I would never, ever, no matter what, think about doing another degree, and that if the thought ever crossed my mind, I would think back to this moment and remember how I felt, red-eyed, delirious, hitting keys and just hoping I was still forming words, wishing I could sleep but knowing that I’d be awake for another 5 hours (AKA eternity). There’s no way I could do that to myself again.

Anyway, being the masochist that I am, I sometimes consider studying for a masters degree. In spite of everything, I do miss learning something new and fascinating every day. I miss the atmosphere of the university – the feeling of being in the library and knowing that there’s more knowledge in those books than you’ll ever have in your lifetime, and the fact that you see and hear so many interesting things just by walking around on campus.

One of the subjects I’ve considered a masters in is science fiction. I have a deep love of the genre, not because I think robots, space travel and time travel are cool (they are, obviously), but because as advancement in technology continues to accelerate, it’s becoming increasingly important that people think about the effect this is having on society, and on us as individuals.

One thing that irritates me when I go to most bookshops, or to the library, is that science fiction is always lumped together in the same section as fantasy, even though their purposes are so different. Personally, I don’t read for escapism, so while I know there are some excellent fantasy novels out there, the genre can rarely hold my interest. Science fiction, on the other hand, while there is sometimes an element of escapism, can encompass a great deal more than that.

SF novels are not about science and technology. They’re not about aliens, cyborgs or time-travellers. They’re about people. While fantasy takes you to another world, SF brings our own world to life, only not quite as we know it. SF writers think about how our own advancements in technology, culture, politics and other areas change the world we live in, and the way we live in it.

While the computer age continues to thrive, it’s been good to see a rekindling of interest in my favourite subgenre of SF, cyberpunk, a subgenre originally created in the 1980s when people were musing on what might be possible in the future thanks to computers. Now, of course, we have our own ideas about a future led by computers, though it’s interesting to compare our ideas with our 1980s counterparts, who imagined cyberspace becoming an actual space that you could enter. With inventions like Google’s Project Glass and the use of augmented reality in many smartphone apps as well as the Nintendo 3DS, we’re still thinking about the potential for virtual space, though we may think about it in different ways.

I suppose one of the things that draws me to science fiction as a genre is that the things it invents are within the realms of possibility (although things like telekinesis and genetic time travel disorders require some bullshitting). If we’re going to ask ‘what if…?’ it seems far more worthwhile if we’re thinking about things that could actually happen. Many SF novels contain themes that are relevant to our own lives, and it’s always been literature’s job to think about where we’re heading as a species and as a society.

In the 21st century, it’s technology (computers especially) dictating the direction of our progress, which is why science fiction is such an important area of literature.

If I do decide to do a masters degree in science fiction, I can only hope that when it’s morning and I’ve been writing all night, when the only thing stopping me from collapsing is the gallon of coffee I’ve consumed, I look back on these words and don’t hate myself too much.

Trying new things – part 2

This is my second post in a series on trying new things. Over the past year since graduating, I’ve been looking for new and exciting things to do with my free time, and I wanted to blog about those experiences for anyone who’s interested, or considering trying something new as well. Here are just a few of the things I’ve been doing:

 

Competitive Gaming

Playing video games has always been one of my favourite hobbies, and I like to think I’m pretty good at them. I’m naturally a competitive person too, so I decided to jump on the competitive fighting game bandwagon and try my luck in a few  Super Street Fighter IV tournaments. I went for the experience, rather than expecting to win, so I didn’t mind getting my arse kicked repeatedly. After all, the people who go to the larger tournaments and do well spend hours every day practicing, studying other players and reading up on the technical aspects of the game.  There is so much knowledge and depth to be found in fighting games that mastering them takes as much dedication as playing a sport at a professional level. There’s a reason, after all, that competitive gaming events are called ‘e-sports’.

Needless to say, my level of dedication will never be enough to match the knowledge and skill of some of the players I met. I’ll always be a casual player, but I found the community to be a welcoming one, regardless of skill or experience, and there was never a shortage of people willing to help me improve my game.

 

Learning an Instrument

This is something I’ve always wanted to do, but never believed I’d be able to. When I talked about music I enjoyed or musicians I admired, people would always ask whether I played an instrument, and every time I would say ‘no’, and add a comment about how I had no ‘talent’ when it came to music.

This was my mistake, though. The idea that it’s possible for someone to be naturally unable to play music is nonsensical. It’s something that anyone can learn. I don’t think I’ll ever be a concert pianist, but I found a lot of joy in the realisation that I can actually play the music I’ve always loved. It’s also a great reminder that few things in life are as difficult as they seem. In fact, most things are easy if you approach them in the right way and with the right attitude.

I’m still a beginner when playing the keyboard, and I’m considering taking lessons when I can afford to do so, but even at a low level, playing music gives me as much of a thrill as any other creative pursuit. Hearing the sound of the keys produce a (albeit crude) rendition of Yann Tiersen’s ‘Comptine d’Un Autre Été’ from Amélie and knowing that my own hands are creating the music gives me a great feeling. I’m already thinking about picking up my ukulele again, and wondering what other instruments I could try.

 

Teaching English

For the first 5 months of this year, I was giving private tuition to a student from Saudi Arabia, helping him to learn English. As I’m quite a shy person, this was a little scary at first, but I think one on one lessons are a lot less intimidating than, say, teaching a class full of 20-30 teenagers who don’t necessarily want to learn. The lessons were also very informal, which made it easy to just be honest about the fact that, for the first few lessons, I had no idea what I was doing.

The lessons themselves were not particularly difficult, once I got used to it. I found the best approach was to ask the student what he wanted to focus on, then prepare a lesson based around that area. There is a huge amount of resources online, and after a few awkward sessions I got the hang of teaching.

I’m not sure how people find work as a private tutor under normal circumstances. I was lucky, in that my father knew the student and told him I might be interested in teaching him. I think in other cases it requires experience and certification, so I think it’s unlikely that I’ll get another opportunity to teach in the near future. But if the opportunity does arise it’s something I’d like to try to improve at.

Despite only giving one two-hour lesson per week, I feel I played a small part in improving someone’s future. The student passed his entrance exams and was accepted into an English university. It’s been one of the more rewarding things I’ve done.

Trying new things (part 1)

This time last year, I had just finished university. To be honest, I’d been looking forward to leaving for a while. Towards the end of my final year, the stress of three years’ work had finally caught up with me, and, coupled with everything else that was going on in my life (in my experience, life problems tend to show up in gangs, usually carrying steel pipes and bike chains), I felt like I’d earned a break.

Unfortunately, having failed to come up with a long-term plan for the rest of my life, the first thing I did after graduating was become a cliché. I joined the ranks of millions of directionless twenty-somethings, trying to figure out what the hell they’re going to do with their lives. Finding work isn’t exactly easy either. I worked for 3 months as a Christmas temp at Waterstones, but since my contract ended in January I’ve only had one fruitless interview. I also applied for an English teaching programme in Japan, which I’d been counting on as a chance to do something meaningful and useful, and something that might give me some new experiences. However, I didn’t make it past the interview stage.

So, what I’ve been doing for the last year is sitting on a lot of free time. At first, I hated having nothing to do. The lack of responsibility and obligation was exactly what I’d looked forward to, but it was difficult to adapt to after three years of university. After a while, though, I started viewing it as an opportunity. Rather than vegetating in front of my laptop screen, I decided to start doing things I’d always wanted to try, but hadn’t had time for while I was at university. I wanted to gain some new experiences.

I also decided to blog about it. These are a few of the new things I’ve tried in the last year (more to come in subsequent posts):

 

Writing for a games website

When it first occurred to me that I needed to think about some kind of a career, I looked to one of my greatest passions. I’d always wanted to be a writer, and while I’d mainly written only prose, and occasionally poetry, I’d enjoyed writing the odd blog post over at Euphilia, and I wanted to try my hand at journalism.

At the time, I was surprised at how easy it is to get a position as an unpaid writer. All I had to do was email a few websites with samples of my writing, and almost all of them replied offering me a position. I was therefore able to take my pick. I decided to write about gaming, since it’s something I know a lot about, and it’s one of my main hobbies. There were a few games websites I’d emailed, but I quickly ruled out the ones with particularly bad writing (most small websites have pretty dire writers, as it turns out), as well as the websites with a superior, elitist tone that you quickly learn to recognise in the gaming community (a lack of humour and/or self-awareness is a giveaway, as is calling your website ‘Core Gamer’).

Anyway, I wrote a few pieces for one website, but I quickly found that it wasn’t nearly as enjoyable as I’d hoped it would be. Having strong opinions, I learned, is hard. For each piece, I would choose a topic, research it, and choose an angle to write from. However, as in most debates I come across in life, I found myself seeing both sides of the argument and not really having a strong opinion one way or the other. But I’d just choose a side anyway, for the sake of writing an interesting article. This had sometimes been my approach when writing essays at university (you don’t have to believe what you write at university, I found, as long as you can defend your position vehemently). This worked out okay, except for two things. Firstly, I was never particularly proud of anything I wrote for the website. I didn’t show these articles to anyone I knew, because I didn’t feel the words I’d written really said what I felt. And secondly, when people commented, disagreeing with what I wrote, I never felt any desire to discuss the article with them, or to defend it. Instead, I realised that I couldn’t care less about anything I’d written.

What I learned from all this is that this kind of writing is probably not for me. With blogging, there’s always some amount of self-censorship and catering to potential readers, but when writing for a specific audience, one that I don’t, despite being a gamer myself, feel a part of, writing becomes more like work. It’s a chore, and that’s not something I think writing should ever be.

 

The Guardian First Book Award

Ever since my course in English Literature had finished, I found there was something missing from my life: no longer was I being forced to read 1-2 novels every week, growing to despise many of them and wanting to shoot myself rather than read them. I desperately needed something to fill that void, and luckily, I found it.

Last August, members of the public had a chance to join a panel of judges, to read a longlist of 10 books nominated for the Guardian First Book Award, and to choose which 6 of those books would make it to the final shortlist. All I had to do to apply was pick up an application form from Waterstones, answer some questions about books and write a review of any book that had been published in the last year. After reading most of Stephen Fry’s autobiography in one night in order to write a hasty review, I submitted my form and soon found myself with a big pile of free books.

It turned out to be a great experience. Many of the books on the list were titles I would never normally have picked up, had I simply been browsing in a bookshop, but I gained a lot from reading them, even if one or two of them were awful (I’m looking at you, Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus. Ugh.) The winner, The Emperor of All Maladies, by Siddhartha Mukherjee, was particularly brilliant. Being a 500 page tome documenting the history of cancer, it was tough-going, and I’d been dreading the week when we’d have to read it. However, it’s a remarkable book, and I’m glad to have been made to read it, when I otherwise would never have looked twice at it.

 

Learning Japanese

I took a Japanese class in my final year at university, and I decided to continue studying when I returned to York. Learning languages has always been a passion of mine, ever since I started learning French at school. It’s also a way of feeling that I’m still learning something, despite not being in full-time education any more.

I’ve now reached the end of my course for this academic year, and I have one more exam left before I get my level 2 Japanese certificate. It was only recently, though, while revising for my exams, that I realised how much I’ve learnt. It’s satisfying to read a passage in Japanese and understand all or most of it, knowing that not long ago I couldn’t have pronounced half the characters, let alone deciphered the meaning. It’s also a good feeling to have got my head around Japanese grammar, which is so very different to English.

Despite having very little in common with English, and despite requiring you to learn 3 new alphabets, I don’t think Japanese is a particularly difficult language (unless that’s just how it seems at this level). It makes a hell of a lot more sense than English does, with regards to both pronunciation and grammar. And while the thought of having to learn an alphabet with thousands of characters can be scary, it’s technically not essential to learn them at all, as long as you know the basic alphabet of around 40 characters.

As well as being useful, taking a language class is a great opportunity to meet a lot of fun and interesting people. For anyone who’s thinking about learning another language through self-study, I’d recommend seeing whether there are classes nearby, because in my experience there’s no substitute for having a teacher, as well as a chance to practice with your classmates, which really helps build confidence.

Well, that’s all for this post. I’ll be documenting more of my ‘adventures’ soon~

My relationship with stories

When I was growing up, I was obsessed with stories. I loved to read, I loved playing video games, and I loved watching films. When I wasn’t doing any of those things, I was inside my own head, daydreaming and creating my own stories. I almost always featured in these stories, as someone much braver and cooler than the real me, and as someone living a much more exciting life than the one I led.

I had a strong emotional engagement with many stories at different points during my childhood and teenage years. In particular, I remember discovering the Final Fantasy series when I was 11, and feeling as if I was actually inside the world of those games. I didn’t just play Final Fantasy – I felt like I was living it. As in, I was really Cloud Strife, a hero who could fight bad guys with a sword and with magic, and Tifa, Barrett and Aeris were my friends and travelling companions. I became so absorbed by the games that even when I wasn’t playing them, I would still, in my mind, be in that world. It was far more exciting than my school life.

I also remember becoming obsessed by the Digimon anime at one point. It must have been around the same sort of time. Although I always preferred Pokémon, there was something about the Digimon universe that was alluring to me, as a child who was always looking for ways to escape reality. In Digimon, the characters were real children living in the real world – the same world I lived in – but they were chosen, as ‘digi-destined’, to go to the digital world, and to have a Digimon as a friend and companion. I think it was that aspect that made me really want to believe in the world of Digimon. I wanted to believe I could leave this world and go to a more exciting place, to have the kind of adventures that the digi-destined had, and, more importantly, maybe, the kind of friendships they had with each other and with their Digimon.

It’s hard to say what it was about my young life that made me want to live a different one so badly. I think perhaps I was dissatisfied with myself more than anything, because if I had only been brave, like the heroes I imagined I could be, instead of shy, if I had been more charismatic, more talented, or just more ‘cool’, my life might have been better. I’m not saying that’s true, but it might have been how I thought back then. There were things I wanted to do, girls I wanted to talk to, people I wanted to stand up to, but I couldn’t because I wasn’t the right sort of person.

I’ve mentioned two specific examples, but there were many other stories in my childhood that had a similar effect on me. Over time, though, I stopped getting lost in other worlds in the same way. I guess I had begun to accept reality for what it was, and also begun to realise that these worlds were never going to be real, no matter how much I wanted them to be.

So, by the time I was around 14, I had stopped believing in the possibility of some parallel dimension where I was supposed to be living with the characters from fantasy novels and video games, but I was still intensely passionate about stories. English literature was now my favourite subject at school, and I was reading the classics and discovering some of the greatest stories ever written. My interest in stories came from a different angle now, though. For the most part, I was interested in the techniques of the writers, the nature of stories, and things like subtext. Having said this, however, I had become hooked on a certain genre of film.

I had got into the habit of, every night, turning on my TV while I got ready for bed, and watching whatever happened to be on. Many nights, I would end up getting glued to a film, and staying up far too late. But the films I loved the most were the ones centred around characters who were growing up, discovering themselves, encountering problems, discovering love, and finding themselves. I found these films, with their small casts of characters and the close, personal relationships they featured, far more engaging than any huge-scale, fate of the world, impending doom disaster movie. This stuff actually meant something real. This was what life was.

These days, I find it hard to become emotionally invested in a story, and this is to my eternal frustration. Watching a film alone, like I always used to, is now a very lonely experience, when it used to be the opposite. Whereas I used to feel a human connection to the characters, now I feel isolated from them. They live in their world, and I live in mine. There is no way through the glass to the other side. And rather than living through the characters in books, and wishing for their success and happiness, I actually feel a certain amount of resentment for them when they reach their happy ending. They’re still living the life that I wanted, but I’m stuck here in the real world. And unfortunately, this world is the only one that really exists.

I’ve still not figured out quite where I am now. It might just be that the kinds of stories I used to enjoy belong to my past now, and that’s why they don’t speak to me like they used to. I’m not a young boy wishing he was a hero in a magical land, fighting monsters and rescuing princesses, and I’m not a teenager, still figuring things out, growing up and trying to find my place in the world. It’s probably no coincidence that the book I most enjoyed reading recently was Tao Lin’s ‘Bed’, a collection of stories about lost 20-somethings who don’t know what they’re doing with their lives, who wonder aimlessly, feeling cynical and depressed. These are characters I can relate to, who are going through the same stuff I’m going through right now.

I guess everybody who enjoys stories has their own relationship with them, and we all have our own reasons for enjoying them. That’s part of the beauty of art. I know, for example, people around my age who are still fascinated by the sort of stories I read when I was younger. And there’s nothing wrong with an adult reading teenage fiction or even children’s fiction. But those stories are no longer for me.

It can be a sad thing sometimes. There have been times when I’ve wanted to read or watch something that a friend has recommended, and though I’ve tried, I haven’t been able to appreciate it, even though I know that a younger me would have. There have also been times when I’ve wanted to rewatch a cartoon I loved from my childhood, and I’ve started to, but the only thing driving me at those times is nostalgia, and even that wears out after a few episodes.

But though it often makes me sad, I can look at it positively, by remembering what those stories meant to me in the past, how they helped me when I was growing up, what they taught me and how they contributed to the person I am now. Even though I can no longer appreciate them like I used to, I can look back fondly and recall a unique relationship with each story. I can remember who I was at the time, and how each story made me feel.

And even now, on occasion, I can go out and see a film or a play by myself, and just sit for a couple of hours in the knowledge that I’m having a unique experience. I’m the only person in the world seeing this story through my eyes, knowing what I know, being who I am. What that story means to me at that time, it means only to me, and it marks a moment in my life.

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I hope some of what I’ve said is relatable, and I’d like to hear about other people’s relationships with stories. If you want to share something, feel free to leave a comment below.

A Blank Page

Hello, and thanks for visiting my new blog. This is a place for me to record my thoughts, share things, and maybe post any scraps from my journals that I feel are ‘blog-worthy’.

As some of you may be aware, I have another blog over at euphilia.blogspot.com, in which I post about literature, music, video games and the like. But I’ve often felt that I want something with a wider scope, somewhere I can write about my personal experiences as well as my thoughts on society, culture, gender issues, the media and personal identity, among other things. Since my head is so often filled with pointless thoughts like this, I thought I might be able to make them marginally less pointless by blogging about them. If at least one person reads a post I make, I’ll have achieved something, and all this philosophising won’t be for nothing.

I hope you’ll check back now and then, or better yet follow the blog or my Twitter. I look forward to seeing you here!

Until then~