Japan – World Cup

IKUZO, IKUZO, IKUZO…
(‘ere we go, ‘ere we go, ‘ere we go…)
 
As recently as a scant 150 years ago, Japan’s strictly enforced policy of self-imposed isolation guaranteed any visitor to its shores a terminally warm welcome: The hapless tourist would be met on the beach by an enthusiastic crowd armed with a large cauldron of water into which he was unceremoniously plonked. This in itself might not constitute grounds for rapid itinerary revision, were it not for the habit of the locals to light a substantial fire beneath the vessel and bring the contents slowly to the boil.
 
Since finally opening its doors to the rest of the world, however, Japan has forfeited such culinary based castigations in favour of the rapid, indiscriminate embracing of great gouts of Western culture, dubious or otherwise: Today, despite boasting a Football Association with but ten candles on the cake, spanking new stadia are already thicker on the ground than ticks on a sheepdog and, at the time of writing, just two weeks remain until World Cup proceedings get under way here.
 
Nonetheless, though evidently delighted at the imminent arrival of one Daibido Beckamu, many Japanese, fearful of the ‘ooligan accompaniment, would clearly be heartened to find a sound poaching still numbered high amongst the list of approved crowd control techniques.
 
So concerned about the sweaty influx of 4000 official, Kirin powered, I-gi-ri-su, I-gi-ri-su, I-gi-ri-su chanting fans are their hosts that they’ve adopted anti-hooligan measures previously unheard of in Japan. Even unto the creation of an all female division of riot police called the Lilac Squad for one-on-one marking purposes… The premise behind said ranks of body armoured, mascara tipped baton-wielding fairer sex being to “subliminally deter fans from indulging in aggressive behaviour.” Indeed. And something big and pink just shot past the window…
 
Needless to say, however, just in case 19 tins of studiously chugged Sapporo modify any fan’s perspective sufficiently for it to suddenly seem unreasonable for him to forfeit the potential weapon that is his umbrella at the entrance to the ground in the height of Japan’s rainy season, the Lilac Squad always have black belt judo, karate and aikido to fall back on.
 
Even the British Foreign Office have been nervously getting in on the act. Amongst FO tips for travellers are to cover tattoos, “associated with criminals” (the yakuza ) in Japan, avoid “loud and boisterous behaviour, keep your shirt on in public places as exposed bodies may cause offence, refrain from sleeping in the streets, and drink in moderation…”
 
All of which merely serves to heighten the suspicion that Britain’s embassy to Japan is actually sited in, well, Perth. For not only is drinking in moderation the one sure-fire way of attracting attention to yourself in downtown Tokyo of an evening, but also the FO has neglected to mention the worst faux-pas it’s humanly possible to commit in Japan; blowing your nose in public. This, surrounded by the corporate might of Mitsubishi’s design office, I discovered all too late: Honking at a tissue with a vigour that would pass muster in a catarrh laded pachyderm, I surfaced to a stunned silence that could not have been more absolute had I dropped my trousers and crapped delicately into the boss’s misu soup.
 
Such unforeseen pitfalls remain rife in a highly complex society that is exact, terrifyingly polite and culturally far more alien than first appearances would have you believe. Which is why, after three days at the helm of Mitsubishi’s new Airtrek on a whistle-stop tour of the delights awaiting visitors from the land of the Currant Bun, it strikes me that it’s probably not the Japanese who’ll have the problem after all…
 
Stand at any window on the 48th floor of Main Government Building Number One in Tokyo’s Shinjuku district, and it’s easy to see where Ridley Scott found his inspiration for Blade Runner. Under an extraordinary, purple night sky -the mixing palette for a riot of neon flaring from myriad streets below- an endless urban sprawl punctuated by visceral, pulsing red building-top beacons stretches far beyond every horizon. From up here, Tokyo seems the most alien city on earth; a feeling reinforced by a disconcertingly complete inability to get my bearings at ground level. Though major road signs in the city duplicate kanji -the Japanese pictoral script- in western text, you have only to stroll 50 yards off a main artery to find yourself hopelessly lost amidst a teeming warren of identical street corners, noodle bars, mah-jong gambling dens, pachinko parlours and eye watering neon.
 
Soliciting help from the locals merely elicits an eternity of Ealing Comedyesque map twirling and heated pointing. Even they, it seems, haven’t the faintest idea where they actually are. Nor should you expect any help from taxi drivers; they neither speak nor read English. Indeed, but for a Get Out Of Jail Free card in the form of the name of our hotel written in kanji -a three legged street lamp, a monkey wrench and a wok falling off a Hostess trolley- I’d still be wandering aimlessly as we speak.
 
Even eating is a problem. Having once inadvertently sampled the bri-nylon delights of Lanzarote’s main drag, I swore I’d never succumb to pointing at pictures of food when hungry. Wrong. Shun the inevitably available delights of a sashimi and egg McMuffin and there’s little alternative. Mercifully, most noodle bar windows boast revoltingly realistic, plastic replicas of the menu and, amidst much tittering, the staff are only too happy to come outside, identify your selection and then serve you something completely different.
 
Naturally, then, we opt for a restaurant with no pictures in the window and sit at a bar built round a small barbeque, happily gulping Kirin and waiting for one of the locals to tuck into a dish we like the look of. So it’s not until preparation of our chosen dish gets under way that we realise we’ve opted for eel. Incredibly fresh eel: From a large barrel under the counter the chef retrieves a vigorously squirming victim, half decapitates it, pins its head to the block with a large nail, guts it, fillets it, dunks it in marinade and throws it, still trembling, onto the hot coals, all in the time it takes to read this… Absolutely delicious, it transpires. And a pleasant change from what is to become our staple diet from now on; noodles, for ever and ever, ramen.
 
Next morning, faced with a daunting odyssey through the very heart of the most traffic congested city on the planet, jet lag comes to the rescue. Awake at 4.00am and armed with the kanji for Mitsubishi Motors Corporation’s Shiba address -a dumbbell atop a partially collapsed camp bed, a Lowry matchstick man and two flags committing an intimate act- we pile aboard a Nissan Cedric taxi whose driver appears to have slept outside the hotel to guarantee promptness and take a detour en route to Tokyo’s legendary fish market at Tsukiji (squashed fly, merry-go-round with awning).
 
Covering an astonishing 56 acres, the first thing that strikes you about the 1700 wholesaler’s stalls that make up the fish market is just how much longer the sea can continue to cough up the 2300 tonnes of marine life delivered here each day. Over 400 types of seafood are available. If it lives underwater and so much as twitches, the Japanese will hoick it out and slap it on a plate; mountains of diminutive eels resembling piled mattress stuffing, dried squid stacked like decks of well thumbed playing cards, giant spider crabs bubbling with mute rage under a sprinkling of sawdust, jellyfish, sea urchins and every conceivable, and several inconceivable, species of fish… Pride of place goes to man sized yellowfin tuna which sell for up to 1 million yen each. Deep frozen tuna are sorted by fork-lift trucks wielding giant buckets and dismembered by band saw behind each stall. Whilst fresh specimens are lovingly dissected under wicked two man blades so sharp that the firmest flesh offers all the resistance of chocolate mousse. Strict practices apply to the carving process to avoid bruising flesh and slivers are regularly taken and help aloft to assess colour and quality.
 
Forewarned, my feet are encased in plastic bags; the narrow corridors between stalls run deep with fishy water. Sadly, the bags do not work. Sadly, this is my only pair of shoes… Pedestrians share the corridors with hurtling ta-ray, motorised mini-trucks with an engine housed in a large drum atop a single front wheel. To steer, simply grab the rim of the drum and turn the entire assembly. To survive an encounter, simply leap clear; the driver of a ‘Mighty Car’ takes no prisoners in his fight to clear the throng between his fishy dodgem and the refrigerated lorries waiting outside…
 
Noodle reinforced, we’re finally united with the Airtrek and outline our planned excursions with Mitsubishi PR’s English speaking Masayuki Sekino. He goes very quiet. Which is as close as the ultra-polite Japanese ever get to saying “No”. Or, in our case, “You’re bonkers.” It transpires that the two stadia we plan to visit in Oita and Kobe, south of Kyoto are, despite being within two and a half hour range of a shinkansen bullet train, at least twelve hours drive away. It seems hardly gracious to leave the Airtrek here, so we hastily lower our sights whilst Sekino san programmes the Yokohama stadium down the coast south of Tokyo into the car’s sat’ nav’ system.
 
Bad start. We may have to leave the car here after all; we cannot find the way out of the underground car park. Eventually, the process of elimination reveals that the kanji for ‘exit’ is a nest of G-plan occasional tables and an empty cardboard box, which finds us out on the street and straight up the back of the biggest traffic jam in history.
 
It is 28km to Yokohama (woman standing beside television, Bofurs gun, lame Indian elephant). The journey takes four hours, during which time we discover that nothing green whatsoever interrupts the relentless urban sprawl connecting the two cities, that blood pressure can only go so high and that the reason Japanese stereos are so complicated is to give you something to do whilst stuck in traffic. This Airtrek is fitted with a Kenwood that offers a choice of a dozen screen colours, or a constant mix of all twelve. Disco.
 
“Don’t touch the sat’ nav’ screen and you’ll be fine” warned Sekino san. Snapper Gus, bored, touches the sat’ nav’ screen. Our route vanishes in an electronic huff. Astonishing panic ensues. Roadsign concessions to Westerners peter out rapidly once you leave the environs of Tokyo and, already buried deep within a faceless suburb by the guidance system, our feeling of helplessness is so absolute as to be momentarily hilarious. Mercifully, the only kanji free icon on screen is a little car which, once stabbed, brings the system back on line. “I won’t be doing that again” murmurs Gus…
 
Targeted at the likes of the Subaru Forester and both Honda’s CR-V and smaller Hormone Replacement Vehicle, the Airtrek is a perfectly respectable place to while away traffic. The driving position is suitably uppity for a soft-roader, without being overtly van-like. And, with the exception of an ungainly plastic housing to the driver’s instrument binnacle, the interior is clean looking and nicely detailed, abetted by a centre console mounted gear lever, and on-the-cusp-of-orange leather trim to seats and dashboard. Proposed changes to the exterior for the European market render further comment injudicious, save to say, Why? This iteration already looks a tidy enough package.
 
Mirth inducing car monikers further ease the passage of interminable traffic time, and both the Subaru November Forest and Mazda Bongo Friendee have just been relegated from the top spot by a delivery van christened Canter Guts when Yokohama stadium hoves into view. Astonishingly, this four year old, 72,000 seat stadium is the only one of 20 venues in Japan and Korea not built specifically for the World Cup. Ironic, isn’t it, that at a time when debt and recession has relegated Japan to the status of Czechoslovakia and, erm, Malta in the eyes of the international banking community, the country can still build 9 brand new stadia whilst the English government can’t even get it together to renovate the rotting carcass that once was Wembley…
 
Yokohama is the venue for the World Cup Final on June 30th. Which, I fear, makes it more than likely that I am the only Englishman who’ll be sitting here this year. Still, no harm in a little homework: With the place to ourselves, stadium PR official Yutaka Miyata runs me through a few essential phrases you may care to tattoo about your person for future reference; Hitori ni wa naranai… (You’ll never walk alone…), Daibido Bekamu wa tada hitori, tada hitori, Daibido Bekamu… (One David Beckham, only one David Beckham…), Lefuri, doko me tsukentendayo..? (Are you blind, ref..?), Dare ga pai o zenbu tabeta..? (Who ate all the pies..?), and, perhaps most importantly; Gari san, omu mitai ni byoki da yo… (I’m as sick as a parrot, Gary…).
 
Next stop, Shizuoka stadium (Dalek, badly decorated Christmas tree, Graham Norton’s coat rack), a fair lick to the south west down the Tomei Expressway. It’s only thanks to the helicopter’s eye view of our surroundings afforded by the now eerily dormant sat’ nav’ that we eventually lunge, fuming onto this elusive toll road, which promptly sets about extorting anything from a fiver to twenty quid everytime the automatic box of the Airtrek even looks like finally making it into fourth gear.
 
Stunning views of Mt Fuji are promised through gaps in thickly forested foothills, but fail to materialise due to the anti-cyclonic haze that has consistently enveloped us since we arrived. Still, the exorbitant cost is worth every penny; occasional patches of clear road allow us to wind the 2.0 litre front wheel drive Airtrek almost off the clock. Truth be told, the car puffs a tad under pressure, the gearbox frantically hunting through gears to keep up with the right foot. but the permanent 4-wheel drive version destined for the UK should fare better with a bigger 2.4 litre unit in the re-styled bows. There is a speed limit, but I’m buggered if I, or anyone else for that matter, can tell you what it is. The police seem happy to condone those finally free of coronary inducing congestion in letting off a little steam.
 
Sadly, our goal is not, it transpires, anywhere near Shizuoka, but a good hour further down the coast at Fukuroi (woman snogging dragon, small wine rack). Impressive though the stadium is -fabric roof resembling the discarded ruff of a giant, overheating Elizabethan toff- it’s perhaps fortunate that England do not seem destined to play there:
“Scuse me guv, can you tell me where the Shizuoka stadium is, please?”
“Fukuroi.”
“Well f**k you an’ all.”
Large dust up….
 
Two hours of futile lathering about the streets of Shizuoka in search of the charming, traditional ryokan bed and breakfast promised by an enthusiastic but largely useless guide book sees us bedding down for the night in the cramped yet pricey Station Hotel. Shizuoka is the earthquake capital of Japan which, in a country recording over 1000 tremors per annum, is saying something. The city is one vast, Linguaphone lesson repetitive suburban sprawl. The air of grim clutter exacerbated by an all-encompassing cats-cradle of electrical wiring which risk of the post-earthquake fires that have decimated urban Japan for centuries has relegated to airborne status. Neither cold Kirin nor the well slurped noodle can raise flagging spirits and I fall asleep, earth sadly unmoved, trapped twixt the roar of bullet trains and the thrum of adjacent vending machines offering cigarettes, hot coffee, cold drinks and the vacuum packed, previously owned panties of Japanese schoolgirls… The mechanised hum of another world.
 
Rising, once again, before dawn to beat the traffic and, once again, failing, today’s agonising dawdle takes us back along the coast to Kamakura (man with begging Shitzu on lead, BLT on wholemeal brown), once Japan’s capital. Still no sign of Mt Fuji; I’m beginning to suspect those postcards are an wholly fallacious, computer generated tourist lure.
 
Kamakura, boasting 19 Shinto shrines and 65 Buddhist temples, is about the closest you’ll get to old Japan within a day’s sitting-behind-the-wheel of Tokyo. It has the gentile, faded, seaside air of Torquay, plus more traditional architecture than you can shake a stick at. Decoration aside, the structural clarity and simplicity of these temple buildings shares much in common with Japan’s spanking football stadia. Entirely apposite, it strikes me; football recently replacing baseball as the dominant religion for so many young Japanese. That these temples have survived generations of earthquakes is testament to the savvy of bygone architects. Many of the structures stand main columns atop giant stone cups floating free on simple platforms rather than bedded into earth, thus surviving ‘quakes by simply wobbling to and fro like Sunday novice roller-bladers.
 
Paradoxically, however, the serenity of an empty football stadium offers a tranquillity unattainable in Kamakura today. To the backdrop of a fistful of elderly shrine worshippers lobbing coins and clapping to attract the attention of their gods, a moon faced young temple official in traditional costume, clutching a giant feather duster and clopping about in patent leather shiny wooden clogs the size of tug-boats, seems altogether out of place amidst crocodiles of identically IQ reducer’ed school children bussed in for a brief history of times past.
 
Back on board the Airtrek, I’m beginning to suspect that the Japanese aren’t remotely interested in motoring anywhere in a hurry. There cars offer a rare commodity in Japan; privacy. It’s either that or a ‘Love Hotel’: Strangely, these gaudy retreats, lining main roads everywhere, have little to do with clandestine liaisons between businessmen and freshly laundered Bo-Peep outfits. The clientele largely comprises ordinary married couples happily paying for the privilege of an entire shoe-box, all to themselves, for a whole afternoon at the Hotel ‘Seeds’, boasting ‘Creative Room’.
 
Sekino san has suggested we stay the night in Hakone (man in bad hat running into Suzuki Wagon R, woman leaning against Suzuki wagon R with puncture), a verdant, hilly area boasting views of Mt. Fuji (not). The region is a recreational favourite of the richer Tokyo resident and the Hotel Fujiya -all gently baffled Americans and Koi carp cruising like spent torpedoes- one of the oldest in Japan. The hotel roof has fat, grey, fluffy, rain cloud facsimiles built onto every corner. A traditional motif for warding off the perils of fire.
 
In a fit of astonishing generosity, Sekino san has agreed to come and meet us this morning and shepherd us to the Saitama stadium, north of Tokyo in Omiya (bowl of noodles, PE teacher, bakelite telephone). This, of course, has nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that he’ll have to get up in the traffic-free hours, has an Evo VII GTA at his disposal, and that the roads around here are favoured by Tokyo’s young blades for night-time hooning and sideways behaviour. No matter, with the smell of char-grilled brakes heavy in the air, we’re pathetically grateful to be led through five hours of uniquely Japanese suburbia -a giant, monochrome, child’s toy box upended all over the countryside and decorated with the contents of a bad electrician’s van- to our final destination.
 
Saitama stadium, where England will have tackled Sweden by the time you read this, is a masterpiece of space frame technology and concrete poured with a precision only the Japanese seem able to master. Twin, translucent roof sections like the opening carapace of a beetle taxiing to the end of the runway are tethered to the stadium bowl with such minimal structure that I’d have grave reservations about weathering an earthquake anywhere in the vicinity. Amongst the legion innovations of this design is a rain storage system integrated into the structure to water the pitch and, er, flush the lavatories…
 
Not that this should bother any of the 4000 gaijin ‘ooligans from Blighty: On the basis of the last three days, it strikes me as highly unlikely that any single one of them will be able to so much as find their way out of Tokyo’s enormous main railway station.