Yongfook is a web producer and usability consultant based in Tokyo

And so my holiday has ended and Cheryl has returned to Singapore.

Cheryl arrived at Fukuoka airport a couple of weeks ago. It was my plan to stay in Fukuoka for a few days, then go back to my house for a few days, then travel up to Honshu and visit Kobe, Osaka and Kyoto. Since my brain seems to retain about as much as Billy the Amnesiac Goldfish, I’m a bit hazy on the exact details so forgive me if I can’t remember much about the holiday or if I have elaborated some parts of the story. As a failsafe, just ignore the parts about things like huge robot dragons or me excreting diamond-encrusted tiaras.

Everything in Fukuoka was pretty much the same as the previous times I had been there. Apart from, that is, the fact that half of the city was COVERED ankle-deep in mud. You see, Fukuoka city had fallen victim to flash floods the day that I arrived (one day before Cheryl flew in) in an almost suspiciously ill-timed natural hiccup shakes fist at God. I guess irrigation in the city must be a bit pants, since the water had seeped into every shop, hotel and office that hadn’t sand bagged all their doors and had poured into spaces underground like bars and car parks, literally filling them with water. As the water mixed with the dirt from the city, and then started to evaporate in the summer heat, it created mud. Lots of it. As if this wasn’t enough (welcome to Japan darling! It’s all covered with shit!), the hotel I had booked was deeply, deeply shafted.

I walked into the Green Hotel, Hakata and was confronted by a scene of absolute mayhem. The sheer mayhemness of this scene was marred only by the fact that the electricity was fricked and the lights were off, making it slightly hard to see. The place was like a refugee camp. Families, travellers and businessmen were camped in the lobby, waiting until they could check in - the electricity being off meaning the electronic card-key system wouldn’t unlock any of the rooms. The floor was covered in muddy footprints and the air was thick with heat since the aircon was off and this small seating area had literally about 100 people in it, all sweating away and flapping uchiwa’s furiously.

I was shepherded into a queue which seemed to be the thing most people were waiting for, so I idly sat down, lit a cigarette to qualm my now racing panic and waited. After about 30 mins, I finally got to talk to a staff member at the front desk. In a mixture of semi-crying and humble sucky-upness, the lady informed me in uber-polite Japanese that, in a nutshell, the hotel was reeeeally fricked so, like sorry. And all the other hotels are like this. I was told that the electricity should be on ’soon’ but there would be no hot water. Sheepishly, she took out a map and gave me directions to an onsen, where I could bathe that night. And such was the routine for the next few days. I can only imagine how far BEYOND terrible it must have been for Cheryl to learn that her first wash in Japan was going to be in the audience of a bunch of old naked women, who are so shrivelled up they look like something out of a cheap conbini bento or that bit in ET where he is all dying and stuff. In the end, the hotel didn’t charge for our stay, so that was a mild consolation.

Fukuoka is also where I started my latent addiction to UFO catchers. You see, up until now I had never played them, going on the pretext that they are impossible to win and that all people who play them are FOOLS. Whilst the fool part is slightly true, I have found that it is entirely possible to win things in UFO catchers, and sometimes, you can get really cool things. Winning the thing really isn’t the point though, it’s all about being a ‘man’ and ‘winning’ things. You look - at the UFO catcher place the vast majority of people playing are men, trying to win prizes for their girlfriend or wife. The mantra of the modern man is no longer “Walrus! I killed a Walrus for my wife to cook!” or something like that, its now “TOY. I CATCH TOY. IT PHYSICALLY FOR MY GIRLFRIEND BUT ACTUALLY FOR MY EGO”. Anyway. A lot of the time the prizes are absolute crap, like unending machines full of Winnie the Pooh dolls which seems to just scream out “dying trend surplus” or just downright pointless, for example probably the stupidest prize I have won - a foam rubber banana, the intended uses for which I can only speculate. Occasionally though, you find a gem. A machine full of Dragon Quest blue slimes (a cult icon I shite you not) or cute pink bears with comically massive white claws. And so I gradually learned to spot a good machine - a toy that just needs tipping in, a claw that has been adjusted to be either too weak or strong, toys that have been surreptitiously pinned down with tiny thumb tacks - and somewhere in all of this I stopped and wondered where my life had gone.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 4th, 2003 at 5:31 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.