Well, despite my dire diagnosis (see yesterday) Japan were extremely unlucky not to beat world cup hosts Germany last night, eventually drawing 2-2 after leading by two clear goals. And as well as creating plenty of chances, striker Naohiro Takahara scored with two clinically-taken strikes to suggest that Japan might not be quite as toothless as I previously thought.

So, can they beat Brazil? Or is that a silly question?

With the world cup fast approaching, I've been getting into the spirit of things by listening to old England world cup songs. The English, me included, are big fans of world cup songs and until recently I just assumed that most countries had them. But when I asked my colleague about it today he had no idea what I was talking about.

I went to watch Avispa Fukuoka play FC Tokyo the weekend before last. It was funny watching the police keeping their watchful eyes on the 'rock hard' Avispa ultras. The fans were certainly vibrant, singing along impressively at full-volume from kick-off to final whistle, but it all seemed a bit surreal. Their banners and flags, containing symbolism and slogans directly lifted from Italian, Spanish and South American rascist hooligan groups, seemed a little out of place here in Japan. I wonder if they actually have any idea of what it is they are copying? Probably not. Anyway, the police presence was just as bizarre. It seemed almost as if the Japanese soccer federation and police forces had at some point in the past noticed hundreds of policeman at European matches and then decided they ought to follow suit just in case all those violent rascist yakuza thugs decide to wage terrace battles, hurl beer bottles or pig's heads at the away team's corner-kick takers and rip up and burn seats and throw them at the other team's fans. Unlikely. But at least the police's presence in the stadiums keeps them out of trouble and allows them a short break form the important job of stopping foreigners on bicycles.

Okay, back to the World Cup. Japan is in it for the third finals in a row and being English (and by default a football fan) all kinds of people such as work colleagues, students, salarymen, yakuza and even young women have been asking me about Japan's chances. I really want to say something like 'Japan has a good team, they will do well this year!' but I haven't been able to. Instead I rub my chin, screw up my face and say 'hmm...muzukashiiii*!' A goal-shy attack means Japan will struggle for goals and a less-than-convincing defence means they may concede a few too.

They have a hard group having being drawn against Brazil, Croatia and Australia. The Brazilians should win all their games but then it's a toss up between the others for the runners-up spot. Australia are in the competition for the first time in years and they won't be wanting to let this hitherto rare chance slip. I fancy that, if they find their game, Australia might finish second in the group. As for Croatia, you never know but it all depends on whether or not they decide to turn up. Japan's chances all depend on whether or not any of their players realize that the object of the game is to put the small-white-spherical-thing into the big-white-rectangle-thing at the other end of the pitch.

Japan did well four years ago. With home advantage and arguably their strongest team ever, it wasn't such a huge surprise to see them qualify for the knockout phase (although Korea did do better). However, I can't see Japan achieving anywhere near that kind of success this time around and I'm slightly worried that they'll be on the end of a couple of hidings and come home with only a couple of points or less from their three games.

Their opening game against Australia is going to be a cracker, but if Japan are to stand any chance at all of progressing in the competition it's imperative they don't lose. Defeat against the Aussies and the Japanese team will be at home again slurping ramen quicker than they can say vorsprung durch technik.

*difficult

Where did the time go? I've only got two months left in Japan and time is ticking away rapidly. I've reserved my flight from Fukuoka for the last week of July and everything for the trip home is (kind of) beginning fall into place. I am having a few problems with visas for one or two of the countries I'll be passing through on my way home, but hopefully this will all be sorted out in the next few weeks. And with a bit of luck I'll get most of my moving issues resolved before June 9th so I can sit back, relax and enjoy the World Cup!

This rainy Thursday I went with local boys Skip and Johnson to a nearby abandoned theme park, known to us as ニンジャ村 (Ninja Village). It seems like the park just stopped operating one day and then everybody left, with nobody going back to clear up all the mess. Despite its ruinous state almost everything is still (kind of) in place, including even tickets in the ticketing booth.

One of the coolest parts of this former ninja enclave is a room which causes you to not be able to stand up straight. No matter how hard we tried, we could not manage anything close to a 90° angle.


And this might also be a good time to tell you about our flickr sites. You can see Skip's here and Johnson's here. They've both got loads of cool and/or silly photos! And the link to mine is in the side-bar.

I spend far too much time on that website.

Henry vs Ronaldinho

What can be said about last night's Champion's League final?

Whilst I don't necessarily disagree with the referee for sending off Jens Lehmann, it's a shame we were deprived of the chance to see Arsenal having a real go at Barcelona. These are two teams I really like - Barça's my Spanish team and Arsenal is one of my favourite English football sides - so I kind of wanted to see them both do well.

Anyway, roll on la coupe du monde!

After months of procrastination, I finally took it upon myself to sort out my desktop. It was an absolute disgrace and took me over an hour to clean up. But it looks nice now!

柳川

In Golden Week I went with my friend Kazu to Yanagawa, a small town in the south of Fukuoka Prefecture known for it's 'Venice-like' canals and local speciality, eel.


We took a boat ride on the canal, there was lots to see but it was hot, so to protect my sensitive forehead I hired a silly hat for 100 yen like the one the punter is wearing (sorry, no picture available)




There were plenty of creatures living in the canals, such as snakes...


and terrapins...


And luckily for us, there was a mini-festival going on! That's my friend Kazu in the cap. It's not that he's small (he's actually a big guy for a Japanese), I'm just holding my camera up above the crowds.

Liverpool take cup, football the real winner

Anyone who saw yesterday's FA Cup final between Liverpool and West Ham will no doubt feel some degree of sympathy for the West Ham players and fans. In a game they probably deserved to win, the Hammers can count themselves extremely unlucky not to be FA Cup champions this morning. The game finished 3-3 after extra-time, with Liverpool winning on penalty kicks.

And it's a shame that one of the best finals in recent years had to be decided on penalties, and even more of a shame that, just like last year, the most deserving team lost. Okay, maybe I'm being a little biased here, but all of the West Ham players played out of their skin, whilst only one Liverpool player, Steven Gerrard, deserves any real praise. His rescue acts are legendary and yesterday he was the only thing that stopped West Ham claiming the trophy for the fourth time. Liverpool keeper Pepe Reina also deserves some praise for an awesome save onto the post deep in extra-time (as well as three stops in the shoot-out), but loses points for being at fault, either wholly or partially, for at least two of West Ham's goals.

In the 89th minute of yesterday's game, for a brief second when Gerrard blasted a wayward free-kick over the bar, for the first time on the whole FA Cup run I actually dared to believe that we were going to win it. I should've known better than to think like that against this Liverpool side and especially up against Gerrard, who never knows when to give up. His overall performance was not his best, but his two emergency rescue goals will live long in FA Cup folklore. He single-handedly, not for the first, second, or even third time, rescued Liverpool at a time when all hope seemed to be evaporating. His 91st minute equalizer was one of the finest ever cup final goals.

As a West Ham fan, to be only a few minutes of injury time away from one of the greatest prizes in football only have it so spectacularly taken away is not particularly wonderful. But West Ham played very well, playing entertaining football and scoring three goals in a cup final, which is more than most recent winners (i.e. so-called entertaining sides like Chelsea, Arsenal and Manchester United) could manage.

At the end of the day football was the real winner, and let's hope Steven Gerrard can show some more of that kind of lethal finishing this summer in Germany.

1964, 1975, 1980.

The team I supported as a boy, West Ham United FC, have won the FA Cup three times. I wasn't born until December 1977, so I'm too young to have seen any of them.

But today, for the first time on 26 years, we have another chance.

The FA Cup is the oldest football competition in the world, dating back to 1871. It has a history, magic and importance unrivalled by any other domestic cup competition in the world. The final itself is possibly the biggest event on the English sporting calendar, comparable in many ways to the American Superbowl. Today it will be televised live in almost every country in the world.

Manchester United, Chelsea and Arsenal fans wouldn't understand how West Ham fans all over the world will be feeling today. For fans of those clubs, success is expected. Glory is something which they are very familiar with and which they take for granted. But if you're a West Ham fan, unless you're a little over thirty you won't really know what it's like to have ever won anything. As a result we tend to take pride and pleasure in other things such as fantastic free-flowing attacking and entertaining football, which has become the trademark of all West Ham teams in the last four decades.

And as West Ham is my local club, I know there'll be many people back home to whom this football match will mean a lot! It's a great day for the West Ham community and makes me think back fondly to the old days when I used to stand on the North Bank at Upton Park as a boy.

This is perhaps a once-in-a-lifetime experience. It's taken the team 26 years to get to the final - this might not happen again in my lifetime - so if nothing else, it's a day for West Ham fans all over the world to enjoy, whatever the result.

And just for the record, our opponents, the mighty Liverpool, are the clear favourites!


Come on you irons!!

小倉城 (Kokura Castle)

Riverwalk, 小倉

どんたく

The cheerleaders proved popular with the crowd


As did the Brazilians, who are legendary around these parts


And don't be fooled...


...not all...


...is what it appears to be!

Fukuoka's dontaku involves street parades and lots of good festival food! Around three million people come every year, making it one of Japan's biggest festivals.


Music


Dance


Fun for all ages


や(ya) き (ki) と(to) り(ri) - fried chicken on a stick, one of my favourites


And Louis Vuitton girls enjoying some やきとり too!

**This week, as well as dontaku, I've also been to Kokura and Yanagawa so I've got lots more photos to show you over the next few days**

It's Golden Week here in Japan. For those of you who don't know what that is, it's three successive national holidays (today, tomorrow and Friday) which, when added to the coming weekend, makes for five days' holiday for the majority of the Japanese population (including me, hooray!). And of course this means a lot of people travel and generally clog up the transport network. The subway this morning was an absolute nightmare. To be honest, I'm not really sure what's quite so 'golden' about Golden Week, in my opinion a name like Let's Enjoying Large Crowds And Rubbing Up Against Each Other In Busy Trains Week would be more appropriate.

So now I'm sitting in Seattle's Best, one of my favourite coffee shop, using their rather nice free wireless internet service. I've just spent the afternoon watching the dontaku celebrations, which is one of Fukuoka's biggest and most popular festivals. This is my first time to see it (in the past two years I've done other things during GW) and after spending five hours today watching the parades I'm not really sure what it's all about. Well, for me it was all about taking photos, and I took about five hundred, which I'm painstakingly going through now as I slurp my ice mocha.

I had my first ever Hershey Bar yesterday. But I wasn't really very impressed. It was far too sweet for me.

I've been a bit busy lately, no surprise I know. With now less than 100 days left for me in Japan, things are starting to get hectic and stressful. This is the second time in three years I'm packing up my life in a foreign country and heading to a new and unknown destination. To use the term unknown destination might seem ridiculous seeing as I'm going back to England, but as things stand right now the UK seems a lot more foreign to me than Japan does. For me, England is like one of those old friends you have from school who you haven't seen for a few years but who you recognise across the bar and who you remember - kind of - but not too well. He's changed of course, and you've changed too, but there's something also vaguely un-changed about him, such as his funny hooked-shaped nose or his tendency to sniff rather too much or bobble up and down like a weeble when he laughs.

My four weeks spent in the UK this Christmas convinced me that my six years living abroad have made me into quite a different person from the one I was. This is only natural of course, so no surprises there either. But whereas people living in countries other their own are often exempted from following all of their adoptive society's rules and let off lightly when they make cultural faux-pas (such as wearing the toilet slippers back to your table), this is not really the case when you make mistakes in a culture which is supposed to be your own.

I've taken on quite a few Spanish and other European characteristics in the last few years, not to mention a few Japanese and American ones (strangely enough, I've spent an awful lot of time mixing with Americans). In comparison I've spent very little time with Brits. Mixing with lots of people from other countries has, somewhat naturally, allowed me to adopt some of their more favourable mannerisms and habits, whilst at the same time unconsciously discard some of my less desirable British character traits, whilst of course keeping some of the better ones.

But not all these new 'foreign' characteristics go down too well with the British in their own backyard (and particularly not with the English), as I found out once or twice the hard way at Christmas. I'm not trying to be different. Nor am I pretentious (at least not intentionally). Just like everybody else I'm merely a product of my environment. And in the last six years my environment has been quite different to almost everyone I know. Apart from university (which isn't real life so therefore doesn't count) I've spend my whole adult life living abroad as a minority species, often in a place where I have at times been illiterate and unable to speak the language. And as a permanent outsider your outlook on life naturally develops quite differently from that of most other people. I suppose when I go home I'm going to have to learn pretty fast because the English can be a particularly unforgiving bunch at times.

Anyway, one mustn't grumble! That wouldn't be very English really, would it?