Tokyo living

It’s true. I am officially a Tokyo-ite. Last Saturday I moved into a brand spanking new apartment in Õji with two of the most fabulous girls in Japan and it is wicked. First things first, we found our local and it is dangerously close to our house. It’s a gorgeous little pub that holds 10 people when pushed to capacity. This pub is our new favourite place and in it we feel completely at home. It could be the fact that the décor is reminiscent of my nana’s living room or the lone old barman who wears a permanent cheeky grin or that we are always welcomed by our new best mate affectionately dubbed “Oji-san” meaning grandpa. He buys us drinks and shares his cigarettes with us, sings us songs and is currently organising a birthday party for Sandy. Our new local is also our new source of Japanese lessons. No one speaks English so we get to try out all our incredibly poor Japanese. It’s so exciting when they understand because most of the time they just look at us bemused.

I haven’t written for a while, and since I have the attention span of a goldfish I have forgotten what I have done in the last few weeks. And since I have been too busy to scratch myself, I forgot to report my encounter with the Prime Minister of Japan. Mr. Koizumi made a visit to my little town before the recent election, clearly because he had heard that I would be there. I witnessed his speech and it looked great, loaded with emotion, passion and vigor. Unfortunately for me it was in Japanese, so I have no idea what he was banging on about. But it looked interesting. I mostly just wanted to see if he really did look like Richard Gere as he believes he does. Rumour has it that he even dyes his hair grey for greater effect. I found these photos of the dashing duo on the internet so draw your own conclusions.