Travelling: Kobe

Kobe was always on my list of places to visit in Japan. I'd heard good things about it before coming to Japan, and then more good things from other people while in the country. It seemed to be just a nice place - a large city (not unusual in Japan), fairly vibrant, good to walk around and not too far from Osaka if you want some more travelling. It was almost chance then, that the woman (friend of a friend) who kindly showed my family and I around Kyoto when they came to visit lives in Kobe, and kindy offered to give me a tour of the place for one weekend in June. So I took some time out of studying (or cramming if you prefer) for the Japanese Language Proficiency Test the following weekend and paid the city a visit.

Once off the shinkansen, I met up with Mrs Ketano and her daughter, Ikuko, who would kindly show me around. The first place they took me to was the nearby Ijinkan ("Different-People's Homes"). Kobe was one of the first places in Japan to attempt to integrate with foreigners, and it was only in Kobe that foreigners were allowed to own property and businesses outside of a strictly controlled "foreign zone" found in most other cities. Kobe still holds that reputation for being both well integrated and fairly multicultural as a result, and also home to a large number of foreign tourists and residents. Naturally the first Ijinkan we looked at was the British one, which even had a lawn (grass for the sake of it is rare in Japan), even if the inside had been transformed into some sort of Sherlock Holmes museum.

Next stop was a trek up Kobe's mountain, to see what we could see. It was a good location - it was close enough to the city to not be inaccessible and it was not far enough that it felt removed. The mountain ended up being a place just to go to look over the city and maybe get some peace and quiet for a short while, before heading back down. At the top are various rose gardens and scenic spots, all making for good views of the surrounding city/countryside.

Off the mountain I was taken to Kobe's Disaster Reduction Museum to learn about the large and devastating earthquake that happened there not much more than a decade ago. It then hit home that my guides were alive and living in Kobe at that time, and while a bit of a sensative subject, to hear their own experiences of what happened was actually more valuable than wondering around the museum. Japan is prone to this kind of natural disaster though, and will probably suffer even worse in future, despite the museum's best efforts to convince and educate architects to rethink their designs. When I first came to Japan we were given huge amounts of information on the upcoming Tokai earthquake, a big one that's been overdue for a couple of years, and that some of the recent extreme weather has made people worry might not be too far away.

The museum itself was on the harbour, and we drove a bit further out onto the chains of artificial islands to get a shot of Kobe from the harbour. So I managed to get to see the city from both sides, land and sea.

The next day was a day trip to go and see Himeji Castle, probably Japan's most famous castle due to its "fairy-tale castle" kind of image. This was another big travelling checkmark for me, because I knew that in the very near future (maybe next couple of months) the entire castle will be covered in one giant tent for restoration works, and will be closed to the public for approximately 5 years. I figured I should get to see it before then at least, and very luckily that's what I got.

The castle is very well preserved, I suppose because it takes so long to service. It was designed for big and imposing-ness points, and for sheer defensibility.

I ended up wondering around it imagining myself as some invading army. I'd forgotten all my seige engines else I'd have trebuche'd my way in. And I also forget it's completely made of wood, so I left my vats of boiling oil with the babysitter. The basic formulae is you end up battering your way through a gate, being shot at from all sides from small slits in the walls with arrows and guns (yes, they had gunpowder by that time, however people don't like the idea of samurai with guns), then charging up another uphill narrow corridor only to hit another death-zone gate. If the hills don't get you the projectiles will. And all the time you can see the main castle and you keep believing you're getting closer when in fact even after getting all the way around the outer walls you're still nowhere near, and the way in can even be entirely hidden so you end up where you started. Hats off to the strategic genius.

When you finally got inside, there was still no guarantee of success. Ridiculously steep staircases topped with trapdoors, and more slits in the floor for more shooting people as they climb. And about five floors of that, with supposedly Chief Bloke sitting at the top. Goodness knows what would happen if he decided to order pizza or nip to the nearest supermarket or something, take him hours to get back in.

Coming back out of the castle was the end of the weekend and of my travels around Kobe. It was amazing that I had had the chance to look around both the castle and the city of Kobe, and in the hands of expert guides.

How Not to Mend Your Shoes

One small ideal that I always try to cling to is that, when things break, it is better to fix the old one than immediately go out and buy a new one. In the same vein however, it does mean that I am terrible at buying new clothes until they literally fall to pieces, which ironically has been the fate of my sandals, leaving strange black powder/lumps of sole in the corridor between my room and the kitchen. Unfortunately, as maybe some of you worked out from my ExtremeShoeEngineering(tm) in Hokkaido, where I resorted to wearing a sock-bag-sock combo to keep dry, there was a small waterproofing problem with my shoes. July/August in Japan is well known as the Rainy Season, and after a number of soaked feet incidents I have been prompted to properly repair my shoes.

(NB. Without really checking, I just assumed that the chance of me finding new shoes in my size, in a style that I liked, and within a reasonable price while in Japan would be small enough to discount. Ah well.)

So, my shoes and I made trips to a small shoe-repair shop near the main station, and were promptly told that they couldn't repair them directly, and whatever they did probably wouldn't solve the waterproofing problem. When I went to a larger "Shoe/Leather Expert" shop, they explained that they couldn't do much for it either because the sole was one whole set piece, and they couldn't slice it up well enough to make a repair. The leather on the sole was pretty thin anyway, and wouldn't really have sliced at all. So, no real chance of professional help with solving the footwear problem.

This was about the extent of the problem. Although in the background you can see the strawberry plants - having wielded no more than four strawberries, I figured there must be something wrong with how I was keeping them (or that the season had changed...), so I adopted the strategy of just leaving them to take over the balcony. It works very well for growing the plant, but still no strawberries...

Anyway, back to shoes.Then I remembered I saw some sort of liquid plastic something in Tokyu Hands the last time I was there, so went off to investigate. I found this.

Not only did it have a fun name, but the rear instructions were fantasically optimistic as to how well it would work.

So, application. Squeeze out of tube, spread on with ice lolly stick. The kit also came with a nail file, but my nails were ok so ended up not needing it.

It went on pretty well, staying liquid long enough for me to contort the shoe a bit and get it well into the hole(s).

Both shoes done, just a matter of waiting. The weather was still hot enough to dry it pretty quickly, and it was well done within about two days, though I decided to do a second layer to cement things a bit more.

They sealed pretty much perfectly, and thanks to the new insoles I had sent from home they were back to fully weather proof again. Hurray!

PS. After about a month and a half of wear, and the tsuyu (rainy season) showing no sign of stopping, they eventually split along the hole again. It was easy enough to use Shoe Goo to fix them again though.

PPS. By the end of the year, they're almost back to their original state of holiness. Ah well. Time for more goo...

My Experience of Contact Bridge

That might seem an odd title, but there's a story attached to this. The story actually took place yesterday evening, so this might be the most up to date blog entry I've posted yet, a fact which is both a source of pride and embarrassment, but hey-ho.

Mondays are swimming days, that is, the university's elite swimming team finally have an evening off and they open the floodgates of the pool for free to the rest of the unwashed who can't splash out on a public one. I tend to turn up, swim a kilometre or so trying not to notice how many times I'm being lapped by everyone else, then decide that that is fair exercise and cycle home. Yesterday, this bit went fairly normally, save that temperatures in Nagoya are now consistently over 25ºC and so the pool was pretty full of people escaping the heat.

Also, I've been trying to get back into piano, and have managed to stick at it by teaching myself bits and bobs of music on the free-to-use digital piano at the back of the Foreign Students' Centre. One of the tricks is I think to play what you want, not what you have to, and I've been away from learning the instrument long enough to have a good desire to be fluent in a couple of pieces, so things will all go well hopefully and I'll be able to bang something respectable out before I return to the UK. The best time to practice is of course when everybody has already gone home, and so on Mondays I usually make it after swimming.

Wandering in to the centre and seeing the piano already taken, I figured I could just wait 10 minutes or so and then it would become free. I had barely sat down when I women came around the corner and asked if I'd be interested in joining in her card game. I said why not, and went around the corner to discover a mysterious board (North South East West and other arcane looking coloured markings), a plastic cage of playing cards and four stands full of strangely marked cards that would put the average Taro artist to shame. The other players included two Indian-looking guys, and a petite Japanese girl, all of whom had already heard the rules and understood them several years ago so I was fairly behind from the go.

The woman then helpfully proceded to try and explain it all by means of a printed piece of paper with a grid of numbers and suits on it. This would have been ok, except there were also odd tetris-shaped lines running around and over those number/suit combos, dividing them into strange areas I didn't grasp the importance of. One of the "y axis" resembling bits of the table as it were was the "points", which I think I wanted to get as much of as possible, but there was no obvious way to climb up the table through the tetris to get to the "ultimate trump" or "7 no-trump" or "7 spade" or whichever was the goal of the whole thing.

We each got 13 cards, which we were meant to count and then arrange in some certain order, and even my card-holding posture was sternly corrected. From 13 cards, you were then meant to work out how many points you had, from the system Ace is 4, King 3, Queen 2, Jack 1. Once you'd worked that out, the game would begin from the person whose direction on the board or coloured markings had "dealer" next to it on the cage with the cards in. Hm. With no real goal in sight and no real actual playing strategy, we moved on to the "Bitting Stage", which I couldn't tell if it was a misspelling of biting or betting.

This was the start of my doubts as to my proficiency for the game. If you didn't have 13 points, then you would take from your card-holder the triangular green "pass" card and put it in front of you, this was simple, and all three other players did so. However, if you did have 13 points (I had 14) then you counted the number of cards of any one suit that you held, and then if you had 5 or more of some then you could take a "1" card of that suit from your card holder thing instead. I did so, having plenty of spades and I declared "1 spade", whatever that was meant to mean. At least I was somewhere on the mythical tetris-based score card.

My partner then put down a "2 spade", which I was told meant he had anything from 6-9 points. I failed to see the relevance of that, along with the relevance of the NSEW directional thing, the card cage and the still baffling stand full of different tokens. And how on earth he'd got 2 and I'd only had 1 befuddled me, especially seeing as he didn't have 13 to begin with. I was assured this was good (I still didn't really know what I was aiming for) and we did two more goes around where everybody passed. "This is defensive play" I was assured, though defending from what exactly I had no idea.

At that point my partner (I keep saying partner, the guy directly across from me who I didn't know) then lay down all his cards neatly on the table and we had to put all the strange tokens from the first bit back in the holder, as if it had all been for nothing. The game then basically became Hearts, with some arbitrary card being trumps, and I had to play both for myself and also tell the guy across from me exactly what to do. Also, for some unexplained reason you consult the colours on the card cage and decide who gets the honour of putting a card face down on the table and then being told to turn it over (eh?). Every time I tried to play Hearts the woman corrected me, saying that I should already know what cards everybody has because of the first round, which I couldn't remember. How that helps you win at Hearts was even more confusing, and thankfully soon all the cards were used and the wins/losses for the rounds where counted.

At that point, it was revealed that although I'd declared "1 spade" I was actually up somewhere in 4 spade, and in a different tetris area on the scoring card, but because I'd done badly at the Hearts bit I was back down to 2 spades. This failed to strike me as in any way significant because I still didn't know what the hell that meant. Regardless, the card cage was replaced with a different one with different colours and the game began anew. I was then asked how I was faring - I said I didn't understand and I didn't really know what the blazes was going on. She made the point that it was like a novel - you start off reading and don't know how it goes but the pieces fall together later on, and why shouldn't I play it because the Royal Family Windsor do. She thus invited me with a flyer to the rest of her group's recruitment drive about the university campus, and it was only at this point that I discovered that the game I was trying to play was called Contact Bridge, something I'd seen next to the chess puzzles in the Times and paid very little attention to. It wasn't looking likely I would in future much either - one game had been far too confusing for me, and it seemed to have not only kicked down the "Keep It Simple Stupid" rule as far as steamrollering it then pegging it out over a termites' nest.

In the next game, I didn't have 13 points, so I passed, as did my partner. However, on the second round he said "Oblivion" or something I didn't quite catch which suddenly meant his cards were worth something different and the 13+ rule didn't apply. This also meant I had to do something they assumed I'd know, but by this point the piano was gathering cobwebs with lack of use and I made my excuses and left before my head exploded.

Thank you kind woman for trying, it was a valuable experience, and I'm sure my misunderstanding of your world-class explanation at the start let me down. Thank you for bearing with my faulterings and misunderstandings at every turn, but I must turn down your offer, and leave Bridge to the readers of the Times and people who might actually stand a chance of understanding the multi-tiered rule system.

The cost of the incomprehensible cards, cage and taro-esque card rack would probably be prohibitive too.