Eulogy for a Sneaker

Tomorrow I am leaving Japan for the third time.

For me, leaving Japan has strong associations with throwing away a well-loved pair of trainers.

In 2004, it was a pair of dark blue Sketchers which had never given me so much as a blister. At the time they were the most expensive pair of trainers I had ever bought, and I had loved them. But all loves must come to an end.

In 2009, it was a pair of turquoise Nike Air Force, which I had originally bought to adorn my feet whilst playing basketball. They were, are, and perhaps always will be, the most garish pair of trainers I have ever owned.

In 2011, it is a pair of Nike+ running shoes. Bought in January 2008 for, well, for running. Bought because I'd gone to Fukuoka to play futsal on a Wednesday, but futsal was cancelled that day, so instead I bought expensive trainers and went to the pub. Nike+s, we have travelled hundreds of miles together, thanks to you the onset of heart disease and diabetes may have been put off for a few years. We have run on tarmac in Japan, sheep sh*t in Wales, and paved streets in Salamanca. Your soles are worn down, your seams are torn, you are filthy and you smell terrible, but I have loved you. I hope you can join Turquoise Air Force and Dark Blue Sketchers in Trainer Heaven.

Amen.

You know you've been watching too many films when...

On the bus last night I was unable to stop myself reading over the shoulder of a man who was composing an email to his girlfriend. Sadly nothing smutty at all but I was fascinated by the amount of time he took to choose his words. Now, I'm fairly anal about writing and I pore over what I've written, worrying about whether or not the reader will understand my arrangement of words in the way I intend them to, but I am nothing compared to bus-email-man. Not a sentence did he fail to delete and re-write multiple times. He couldn't decide whether to put 'ningen' (humans), 'hitotachi' (people) or 'nihonjin' (Japanese people) to describe the crowds of Homo-Erectus (no matter how hard I try I simply can't consider them 'Sapiens') at the train station. He couldn't decide whether to describe the station itself as 'nigiyaka' (busy) or 'uzai' (annoying) - eventually opting for 'uzaka' in the local dialect, another fascinating choice. All in all he took about 15 minutes to write a fairly simple phrase - there are too many people at the station, and it's very annoying. (I completely agree, I myself feel that the station turns me into an idiot magnet: every day without fail at least four or five people will manage to walk into me. And yes, the extension of that metaphor to suggest I am the polar opposite of an idiot, ie a genius, is intentional.) Anyway, back to bus-email-man. He closed the email with an even more interesting phrase. "ashita kiku-chan wa eki wo souji suru kamoshirenai." 'Tomorrow, Kiku-chan will probably clean up the station.' Now this is open to a certain degree of interpretation in my cynical, second-guessing mind. Sure, Kiku-chan may just be an ordinary cleaner, one of the hordes of workers essential to our comfort and well-being whom we nevertheless do our best to ignore as much as we can. Kiku-chan may be one of the construction workers who have done a great job of completing the horrifically ugly refurbishment and nauseatingly trite redecoration of the station in time for the launch of the Kyushu shinkansen (bullet train) today. But, on a more sinister reading of the line, Kiku-chan may well be a member of a sarin-gas wielding sociopathic cult, which has been planning a terrorist attack to 'clean up' the 'humans' at the 'uzai' station, to coincide with the launch of the new line. Don't laugh. Yes, I am paranoid, but it's coming up to the the 16th anniversary of Aum Shinrikyo's attack on the Tokyo subway which killed 13 people and injured 6000. Remains to be seen what will happen... Meanwhile I'm glad that Friday is my bus-only day and I'll be no closer than 3 miles to the station throughout the day...