Walking around the temples of the ancient capital city, Nara, I was politely bombarded by a very enthusiastic group of kids, who had strayed from their school trip to ask me various questions from their English textbooks. 'Where you from?', 'What is your name?', 'What animals you like?' A firm believer in interactive teaching methods I thought I'd be very encouraging and ask them questions in return. Unfortunately we got rather stuck on question one ('how old ...

Sumo. I know what you're gonna say… Fat men in nappies. Well I think I might be coming around to the idea. Japan is the mothership of oddity as far as my Western mind is concerned. A baffling example can be found on most street corners in Japan - the Pachinko parlour. Masses of seemingly sane men (many Saga healthcare worthy) spending endless hours in these frantic, garish, neon institutions where you basically sit at a vertical pinball machine and try t...

I seem to spend most of my time here carrying rubbish around. No, I have not become a crazy bag lady (though my friends wouldn't be the least bit surprised). It appears that the recycling system in Japan is so technologically advanced that there's nowhere to dispose of actual, bog-standard trash. There's an almost ridiculous array of public bins for everything from bottle caps to tissues (I'm surprised there's no facility for the disposal of pervy Japanese men,...

Narita Tobu Airport Hotel - (4am jet lag blogging) As a child I was delighted by testing out toilets in public places. Actually, to be more accurate it was more of a harmless, but no less weird, obsession. Ever since I got the hang of toilet training I became fascinated with the sheer variety of bathroom set-ups around. Would there be posh soap/cheap soap/no soap (have yet to get over my disgust about that last one), would there be hand dryers/paper towels/f...

Taken out to dinner by our Japanese administrators in the nearby town of Kitano, I don't think we were quite prepared (or drunk enough) but who needs dessert when you've got 'Hey Jude' to wash your sashimi down with :) And we didn't even have to move from the dinner table!