:o)

Anyway, I’m not trying to write a review… I was just wondering why so many copies of such an old, unfashionable, untraslated book were on display. Eventually I found out that Hayao Miyazaki’s son, Goro, apart from being a six-limbed giant monster at the end of Mortal Kombat, is currently directing the newest anime production from Studio Ghibli (Princess Mononoke, Spirited away, My neighbour Totoro, Howl’s flying castle and so on) based on the third and fourth books of the Earthsea quartet: ゲド戦記 - Gedo Senki: Tales from Earthsea.

To me, it’s a relief. After having seen my favourite book being butchered to pieces by the infamous Sci-fi channel production The Legend of Earthsea that not even the presence of the beautiful Kristin Kreuk could redeem, I was waiting for something that would bring such a wonderful book to the general public and display on screen what so far could only live in my imagination.

There are, however, some concerns in the fan community. First of all, this is the first major piece of work directed by Goro, who could simply cock it all up. Fortunately, it seems that there has been a substantial input from Miyazaki sr. who hopefully helped to put everything on the right track. Secondly, due to the need of cutting cost and production times, Gedo Senki will be completed in half the usual time and replacing lots of manual work with computerised graphics. I have no idea of what the final result will be like, but I’m currently hosting the latest Gedo Senki trailer here. Download it freely and see for yourself.

The anime will be released here in Japan in July. This summer, men and dragons will be as one.

Sometimes it’s not what you do, but how you do it… and despite my best intentions, I caused her a lot of pain. From her point of view, I guess all she could see was me slamming the door shut in her face. It took me about one and a half years to realise this, and the considerable quantities of intoxicating substances I ingested didn’t really have the purifying effect I was hoping for. Nor did the flings I had after that 30th of July take her out of my mind.

All we did afterwards was to write one yearly e-mail for each other’s birthday, as if we were nothing but remote acquaintances. But there was still one feeble thread that linked us together: when breaking up, we promised each other we would have met again at the end of university - one of those epic gestures I used to do all the time.

That time has come. I know, I’m not technically done with my course, but the point was that we would have waited for three years before seeing each other again. It was a strange feeling…. you know, you keep on imagining something in your head thousands of times over until you think you know exactly what you are going to do for anything that might happen, and then that time comes and you find yourself completely clueless on what to do or say.

So, there I was, on the 19th of April, ready for the usual birthday email. But this time I added to the usual happy birthday one-liner another line about a promise that a young (and very different) Marco made three years ago. All I want is a coffee together, and the opportunity to say that I still have a beautiful memory of our time together and that I behaved like a complete idiot. And, obviously, to know that she’s well. Hell, I’m not going to do anything foolish, we are two completely different people right now… but I think it’s a very nice feeling to know that a person that has been very important for you will always preserve a good memory of the time spent together. Plus, I don’t think I like blondes anymore .

Surprisingly enough, she replied. She knows that I’m in Japan (news travel fast and you just cannot escape the UWC network), she will graduate this June and, yes, apparently she is going to keep our promise when I get back - three years and two months after I saw her last. So… I’m ready to book a plane to Zagreb one last time, October is going to be the time for a home-made version of Before Sunset. Quite possibly with a different ending.

Per gli italiani e soprattutto per Anna, Zuco e Giorgia nel caso mi leggessero: prometto di non fare cazzate, tranquilli …

In the past three months lots of things have happened. More precisely, I started getting the hang of life in Japan, so I started making more things happen. Apparently there are three phases for every foreigner in a new country (I should’ve known): initial crazy enthusiasm, rejection and integration. Which means that I probably spent my first three months as a tourist, my past three months as a grumpy self-declared outcast and now I can finally enjoy an (almost) balanced view on my surroundings for my remaining six (!!) months here. Thinking about it, I might have skipped the first phase when I got to London - oh well, blame me and my ex-girlfriend for it. Anyway, life here is getting busier and busier, I’m finally making non-European friends and I’m growing more and more certain about what to do after this Japanese adventure.

But luckily for you these past three months haven’t been just about inner self-discovery processes - that’d be boring and I wouldn’t want to write it here in a language that any random internet psychostalker can understand. Yes, I am trying to be careful about what I write… I’m hearing too many bad stories, some of which affected me deeply, about people stalked or bitten back for stuff they put out for everyone to see. I’ve always avoided forums exactly for this reason, I have an anonymous email account for these purposes, now it’s time to start being careful about my “public secret diary”. Mind you, I’m not being paranoid, I’m just a quasi-engineer aware of the technology out there and of how it is used. If you write something on the internet, it’s there forever. Despite all the time and effort you might put taking it down, it’s going to stay cached somewhere (Google anyone?). To top it off, even employers are now starting to look for web traces of applicants - the only legal, free way to know potentially everything about the personal life of someone you don’t even know. “That’s discrimination!” I hear you cry? Welcome to the real world… you are feeding your ego by showing how “cool” your life is to everyone, it’s not something to be taken lightly.

Let’s be clear, I do not intend to take this blog down, my accounts will be vague enough not to offend or involve anyone else in particular and accurate enough not to make the whole thing too boring. Maybe for one of the first times in my life I am actually trying to be a bit careful instead of diving in head-first as usual. But this is going to be an exception …

Anyway, where were we? Ah, yes, Christmas. Christmas in Japan is a bit peculiar. If most self-righteous Mediterranean self-professed Catholics complain about Christmas losing its soul (everyone wants to sound deep and anti-establishment enough to show a noble soul but still receive GAP jumpers hand-knitted by a bunch of Vietnamese kids - which is exactly what I’m doing now), then Japan doesn’t really have that problem, as Japanese Christmas is not supposed to have a soul. Christmas is not about Christ, is about Santa, lights on the streets, Coca-cola bottles, snow, and going out with your girlfriend to a fancy restaurant. While Christmas back in Europe is normally spent with one’s family, here it’s like St. Valentine’s day with the snow. Presents to your girlfriend, night in the restaurant and that’s it. I spent it with my colleagues, big party, everyone brought food, I cooked some disgusting crepes with bechamel, ham and mushrooms that everyone except me lapped up. My first Christmas spent away from my family, much better than I thought, much more cheerful. At the end of the day, the panettone is the sufficient and necessary condition to make Christmas happen, even on the 25th of August.

And while we would party all night for new year’s running about in the streets cheering and chanting, here is mostly a family thing. Obviously, we could not ignore our roots and I spent the night of the 31st in the biggest club in Asia together with my friends… Despite the fact that we did the countdown while still queueing, it was a very fun night. It was also the last clubbing night in Japan of my senpai, who as you can see from the picture below (courtesy of www.ageha.com) left his mark and left Japan with a bang. Not literally.

On the morning of the 1st all the japs would go to the temples dressed in traditional robes and celebrate for good luck. We were coming out of the club, definitely too tired (and stinky) for any of that stuff. Plus, I had to start packing up for my trip to Hong Kong.

A note about my trip to Hong Kong. First of all, before going there, I had no idea whatsoever of what Hong Kong was supposed to be like. I had seen no pictures, and despite all the HK-ers I met I’ve never had an account of what was actually IN Hong Kong. All I knew was that two people predicted two very different things: one told me that I wouldn’t like it, the other one told me that I would love it. Knowing who those people were not only made knowing which opinion to trust a no-brainer, but in retrospect made everything very, VERY ironic.

Hong Kong was… incredible, in the very literal meaning of the word. If I had to make a top 10 list of my most incredible trips, the Hong Kong one would be right at the top of the list together with the one to Prague when we’ve been evacuated from the hotel at 4 am and moved to a soviet-style concrete monstruosity in a forsaken part of post-communist Czech suburbia because of the greatest flood in the last 150 years. What happened in Hong Kong is the final outcome of a series of coincidences that could well be the plot for a movie… If I look back at everything that happened, starting a couple of weeks before my trip, everything looks like it had been planned by a skillful director. Just when I thought that this kind of stuff would not happen to me anymore, here it comes again. Apparently, it only happens with the right people. That’s probably a good way for me to understand when something it’s just supposed to be. Not that I had any doubts about it. Definitely not about this one.

Anyway, back to less cryptic stuff. Hong Kong is quite the opposite of Japan: in Japan things expand in breadth, in Hong Kong they expand in height… you might be on a bus in the middle of what looks like a mesh of jungle and Mediterranean vegetation when you suddenly see five skyscrapers with a self-sufficient community of thousands living inside. Japan is more like lots of low houses taking up loads of otherwise usable land to host the same number of people. Hong Kong is buzzing in a chaotic way and the humid warmth adds to the feeling, whereas Japan is too organised and orderly. Hong Kong is stinkier, dirtier, more dangerous than Japan. That’s why I like it

I want to walk around a city having the feeling that I’m actually in a real city, not in some kind of plastic model where everything is perfect and tidy. Hell, just look at the way I cook to get an idea of what I like. If Japan is an aseptic Delia Smith, Hong Kong is definitely Nigella Lawson: it’s an intense pansensory experience. Hong Kong has the Blade Runner feeling that I was looking for in Japan… I don’t know whether it has the same variety of entertainments on offer (I didn’t spend long enough there to know - but judging from a very well-written local newspaper it looks like there’s quite a lot of stuff to do…), but people seem warmer, they talk straight (damn keigo) and the international atmosphere (which is what I miss the most about London) is a hundred times the one in Japan.

The food there is not for the faint-hearted. Forget about all the care and finesse of the Japanese way of presenting food, here it’s all about taste, quantity and informality. But it might look scary. Why did I say “here”? Maybe I’m getting carried away too much…

So, I spent a wonderful week there, the weather is great… I like humidity and warmth, it’s like in Sardinia, where I was born. Definitely a nice movie, this Hong Kong one… will there be a sequel? Let’s put it this way: if it was just up to me, I would be willing to give up anything in order to give it a shot. All that is made can be remade somewhere else, but all that is found is gone for good once we let it go…

Well, that’s definitely enough for this post, I’ll continue with the catching up next time. Listening to Counting Crows now, Hard Candy. How does it go?

You send your lover off to China
Then you wait for her to call
You put your girl up on a pedestal
Then you wait for her to fall

In this first issue, I will talk about something that is kind of wrapped up in mystery. The Japanese fetish for used knickers. Is it true? Can you really get them from vending machines? Does everyone do it?
For the ones less familiar with the concept, if you are a manga reader, or an anime fan you might have been puzzled at the sight of some characters that seem to be obsessed with panties. Stuff like this:

‘Why do they do it’, you might ask yourself, ‘it’s not even funny!’. Well, in Japan, you have to understand that for lots of reasons that I’m not going to discuss now, the nerd population tends to have slightly peculiar sexual tastes. This is mirrored by the popularity of dating videogames and porn manga with the most absurd scenes, from tentacles to incest to rape to stuff I don’t even know the name of. Because of the so-called Lolicon, frequently the subjects tend to be very young girls, and a direct consequence is the obsession with schoolgirls and, obviously, their panties. I will try to discuss this phenomenon in another post.

So, together with my senpai we went looking for one. But before such a dangerous mission, I needed a suitable disguise:

Fantastic, nobody is going to recognise me now. I kind of like this Owen Wilson-ish look. Anyway, we were all set, and we started going. I’m not going to say exactly where it was, but we went to Shibuya. Shibuya is exactly how you imagine Tokyo: loud, dazzling and packed with people. And it’s nothing compared to Shinjuku.

There we are. If the indications are correct, it should be on the second floor of a building in a back alley. We start climbing the stairs, there’s a door slightly ajar in a very anonymous corridor. We open it.

Inside, a small neon-lit small room, cctv cameras everywhere, and a guy at the counter that without even looking at us keeps on reading his… erm… magazine. The walls and the aisles where crowded with uniforms, schoolgirls uniforms, all kind of stuff. The most expensive ones had pictures included of the girl that owned that uniform. In the second picture, you can see socks pinned to the wall and next to them, racks over racks of amateurial videotapes of girls all recorded in that very store. Crazy stuff. Expensive as well.
And then, there they were:

This image kindly provided by my senpai since my attempts were all blurred. This is exactly what you think it is. A huge stash of used panties and bras.

So, yes, these shops do exist. It would be untrue and unfair to say that EVERYONE here does it, but exactly like we have perversions and fetishes back in good ol’ Europe, here there are some weird things that really do the trick for some people….

Keep on emailing me your questions!

Update: These shops apparently are called Burusera shops (ブルセラ　ショップ). Just click on the link for more information about it.

Anyway, I made all this up in order to justify almost two weeks of prolonged silence. To all of you who sent emails without receiving an answer, I’m sorry, I will start replying now. It all started when the Japanese police displayed their dismay over my famously annoying parking spots by attaching lots of friendly tickets such as this one to the handle of my bike:

I think it’s pretty self-explanatory. Now, what would a well-behaved, conscientious citizen do? Ignore them altogether of course! It turned out that it wasn’t such a great idea. You see, in Japan bikes are everywhere, and they all look the same. So you can easily imagine that this could be very confusing for a person like me with very limited memory for details like where the hell did I park my bike? or where do I live? or, waking up the morning after, what is your name again?. That is why I was quite happy when I found that my bike had a bright yellow umbrella horizontally stuck in the middle of the front basket: I could spot my bike from thirty metres away in a crowded parking spot.
Unfortunately, so could the police. And I have the vague suspicion that they wanted to teach a lesson to the moron who kept on parking in no parking areas with a big bright yellow umbrella flagging his bike. And so they did… my bike disappeared without a note. But is it really my fault if no parking areas are in such convenient places? I mean, seriously, why don’t they put them where nobody parks? Honestly, some people…

No worries, I could still go and take it back. Unfortunately the bike depot was VERY far away, so there was only one way to go and get my bike back. To go there by bike. It makes perfect sense. Jesus. I actually tried to get there. By bike. I mean, another bike. And I got lost. So I lost half a day and I had to spend another week without bike, since obviously the only day I could go to the depot to get my bike back was Saturday.
In the meantime, I was experiencing life as a pedestrian. Life in slow motion, I might say… it was so frustrating, it takes so long to get anywhere. And then I was actually going to work as if I was riding a bike, often finding myself walking in the middle of the road and wondering why people were looking at me weirdly.
And then one night, after a very hard day at work, I felt the sudden craving for a big bucket of KFC. You know what I mean. It’s one of those itches that cannot be satisfied without the real thing. A yearning for fat, greasy chicken. Yes, that nice juicy chicken in crispy breadcrumbs… and in Japan it’s served with Coke, not with Pepsi. Perfection in a bucket. Anyway, it was late, I was tired, and it was freezing cold outside, so I asked a friend of mine to lend me his bike to go to the city centre.
As I was cycling along, eagerly anticipating the tasty meal, I get stopped by a group of four policemen. Policemen in Japan really are Jedis, as you can see from the lightsabers in the picture below. At night, they light them up and you can see the evil red flashing beams from several dozens of metres away. Well, I would have seen them if everything on Earth in that moment wasn’t looking like a fried chicken to me.

Anyway, I get stopped and these guys ask me to turn the bike’s light on. It takes a while, since it’s not my bike and I’m not particularly gifted for mechanical things, and I struggle long enough for them to realise that what I’m riding is not my bike. So they ask me whose it is. My stupidly naive answer: “A friend’s”. I could almost read their minds: gaijin behaving suspiciously + night + borrowed bike = dirty foreigner stealing our honourable bicycles.
So they held me a good twenty minutes in the freezing cold while calling the central to check whether the bike was stolen. As a pleasant way to kill some time, they started asking me questions answered in rudimentary Japanese like:

“Where are you going?”
“To the city centre”
“What for?”
“To eat chicken”
“Is Maruko your name?”
-_giggles from the female officer, since it’s a girl’s name_
“Yes”
“Such an Italian name”
-_If only these guys did not have a lightsaber….

Ok, they got my details and they let me go. I started speeding like a madman towards KFC, nothing, NOTHING could stop me now. So I thought. Because of the time lost with the evil policemen, KFC was closed, and I had to resort to an instant ramen. The satisfaction I got from it was directly proportional to its cost: about 50p. So sad.

As expected, things got downhill from there: at work I got assigned the most boring task one can possibly imagine and I got ill. Obviously I didn’t take any days off since they are a very precious (and scarce) commodity here in Japan, and this plus not being able to rest during weekends because of ethanol-based parties (more about that in another post) only prolonged my suffering. As a consequence, things started stacking up, and I found myself with laundry to do, room to clean, work and study to catch up with and, of course, blog posts to write.

When trying to catch up with a lot of things there is always the problem of fitting a small tablecloth onto a large table: you pull one corner, and the opposite one gets exposed. Trying to so many things at once just increased my stress level without actually helping me in getting anything done. And haste causes bad accidents:

Yes, that is my carpet. And yes, I hate ironing. Now I hate it even more. So, this is what I usually do when I’m in this kind of situation: first of all, I get over and done with the things that have to be sorted out before I can take on everything else. Such as cleaning up my room and doing my laundry. Order brings order and inner peace. Then I make a statement: I create a perfect evening where I do some small things that I really like. It’s like a romantic date. Without any annoying girlfriend. This perfect evening will be the starting point, the cornerstone for the comeback.

So, what did I do? I set the air-con to 30 degrees, I got my DVD rental card, I rented “Four weddings and a funeral” (which I never managed to watch beyond the first half) and I prepared fried eggs with bacon. What more can a man want ?

PS: I have a new bike now. It’s orange. And pigeons keep on crapping on it. Geez…