As I’ve already said, the bugs in Japan are bigger than elsewhere, here is just one that flew into class one day. Its pretty small compared to some others I’ve seen, but you can see the scale against the lined paper and I actually managed to get a photo of it.
On another bug related note, how are the mosquitoes here even able to extract blood from my kneecaps? It’s just bone. On the other hand they did leak some strange but interesting yellow liquid when I scratched the bites.
For some strange reason baseball is a huge sport in Japan. Whereas in Britain the boys will play football or rugby at school, in local clubs and eventually professional leagues the same is true of baseball in Japan. This is slightly strange given that it doesn’t seem to be much of a team sport in a country in which almost all social situations focus on the group rather than the individual. So, a little while ago I went to my very first live sporting event! A baseball match between the Tokyo Giants and the Eagles at the Tokyo Dome. As to why I went to see baseball it was basically a chance to see the Dome, an indoor baseball field in the middle of Tokyo, and watch one of the biggest sports in Japan rather than any particular desire to see baseball which, even after having watched a whole 3 hour live game still seems to me as inexplicably dull as before. Apart from the fact that the batter holds the bat with two hands in stead of one I honestly cannot see any difference between how baseball and rounders are played. Even the distance between bases seems to be about the same for the two despite one being played by professional sports players and the other by 7-10 year olds in the school playground. 
Still at least the match I got to watch was a big one with the Giants being equivalent to a team such as Manchester United and the Eagles, Aston Villa. At least according to the American exchange student who came with us and actually knew something about baseball, aside from the fact that is is basically commercialised rounders. I was also very excited to receive my very first baseball card of the star of the Giants, Alex Ramirez. Very Japanese sounding I know. To his credit he did manage to hit the ball more than once, which is a lot more than some of the other players could do. As you may be able to tell this wasn’t the most exciting spectacle in the world and so when I was in danger of becoming particularly soporific I went and got the obligatory hot dog. Here it is in all its freshly made glory. 
I did take some pictures of the game and strangely enough the pictures actually make it look like something exciting is happening, even the ones when nothing was happening and the players were just switching over.
This was the basic theme for the evening, most of the people on the pitch not even looking at the same thing.
Now I know why Americans invented cheerleaders. To actually get the crowd to look at the pitch and make it look like they are interested.
A rare moment of excitement as a player (Alex Ramirez) actually hits the ball.
Rare excitement indeed. The final scoreboard being filled with mostly zeros.
Next time I think I might just give the baseball a miss, apparently there was an ice cream bar downstairs.
One strange thing in Japan is the number of vending machines you find. They are literally on every street corner around Tokyo. Even if you travel outside the main city centre to what is really the country side, there are rice paddies everywhere, you will still find them everywhere. Most of them seem to be sponsored by Coca-Cola although not all of them actually sell any Coke but instead a variety of cold green teas; coffee in a can which heats up when you open it (very strange to drink), which comes in a variety of flavours including cherry; some vitamin water and fizzy lemon drink which contains 70 lemon’s worth of vitamin C in every bottle or as you can see in the picture 300% of your daily allowance! While there are drinks machines on every corner I have yet to see a snack machine selling chocolate bars or crisps. Maybe I could start a legend of the fabled vending machine that sold normal flavours of coffee in a cup and at least a packet of Hula Hoops. The other odd thing is that despite there being so many vending machines there is almost no rubbish strewn around the streets. This is even more amazing since there are NO BINS in Japan. I’ve had to carry rubbish with me all day through central Tokyo because of this and it’s very annoying especially when you forget to take a plastic back or something to put all the rubbish in. Either everyone carries it with them or there is some secret method for disposing of rubbish that is only known to Japanese people.
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About half an hour to the East of me is where one of Japan’s many mountain ranges begins and since it is one of the few things in Tokyo that is close to me, it’s quicker to get to the mountains than the city centre, it seemed a good day out. Actually I think I passed the evil lair of the Hood from Thunderbirds on the way as i could find no other logical explanation for this:
Mt Takao is only 599m high but it rises rather steeply with no gentle hills to ease the walk. The theory is that those who go up the mountain and pray at the temple will have good luck and there were a lot of people going up although I think it was more for a nice walk and the scenery than anything else. The path is full of Shinto shrines and there are several Buddhist temples at the halfway point. The strange thing is that although if you study religion in Japan you will always learn that they are Shinto and Buddhist but really they don’t seem to have any religion at all and even here on the pilgrimage trail any motions that they perform, such as washing their hands (purity is important in Shinto) or burning incense seems more from tradition than any actual belief. Of course it is completely arguable whether Shinto, which has no religious texts or dogma is actually a religion in the first place which may be why there is so little of it in Japan.
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Also the bugs in Japan are enormous. If you ever watch any old Japanese monster films and wonder where they got the idea for the monster from then it’s bugs. The flying ones are easily the size of a small bird, a robin for example, and also really fast so I haven’t been able to get a picture of them yet. But just to prove that the insects are one thing that are actually bigger in Japan than elsewhere, here is an ant:
