On Monday, with Fran off to work at school, I pottered around Chez Fran tidying for a bit luxuriating under the kotatsu, then put on my big coat and went for an explore. I didn’t get go far, nor see much exciting apart from a bunch of buildings and a little graveyard under a spreading tree, and I’ve already done my self-indulgent ramble about architecture, so here are some photos instead. The (few) locals about mid-morning on a Monday stared at me, mostly without malice, though I got the most ferocious glare off an older-looking dude on a bike wearing a facemask. Cycling on pavements is standard procedure here, though people ride in a slower and more chilled-out fashion than at home; nobody wears helmets or any of that godawful lycra cycling crap; it seems to just be viewed as a sensible way of getting around.

Heading back into town, I located a “Family Mart” for lunch and, using only pointing and smiling, successfully purchased a sort of bready meaty dumpling and a battered thing which turned out to be a giant chicken nugget, for a couple of hundred yen. I love virtually all kinds of cheap street food, and that this was given to me in individually-taped packages with happily smiling mascots and packages carefully designed to be half-opened for minimum finger greasiness made it no less genuine and excellent than the sickliest 2am Rooster House.

In the afternoon I got to meet the Tendo Board of Education, a lovely bunch of people in a thoroughly cheerful office atmosphere; Fran told me to stand up and do a self-introduction, which I winged completely but seemed to go down well (possibly because she translated it for me), and while the ALTs were away for a meeting the staff all grilled me through the one lady who had the best English. The regional superintendent (I think; there were lots of impressive-sounding titles flying around) came over and talked to me about his two children in London in pretty good English, but when he asked me about a football game and I said I wasn’t really into sports, looked rather disappointed and went back to his desk. I shook lots of hands and was very polite and respectful, which I think went down well. The whole building was sweltering hot – when the Japanese heat rooms, which apparently isn’t often, they really heat them – and one of Fran’s co-workers gave us some giant apples and some boiled sweets, as you do.

For dinner, Team Tendo and I went to Fran’s favourite restaurant, a joint run by a wonderfully friendly chap named Yasuhiro Kuboki with dyed blonde hair and (apparently) a strong regional accent, who served excellent katsudon (pork cutlet on rice) with a smile, cheery conversation and high-fives. He got out a tablet with a translation app and had me speak into it, and it translated with remarkable effectiveness (except that once it heard “restaurant” as “restroom”, so rather than effusive praise for his establishment, it sounded like I was giving effusive praise to his facilities.) After our meal, he gave me a little shoulder bag (blue! The best colour!) which I think is actually going to be really handy, and, as we were leaving, cracked open the vending machine in the car park and gave us all a free drink. Spurred by curiosity, I had grape Fanta, which was odd but nice.

After that, we all went to English conversation club at a room in a nearby community centre place, where at the door you changed your shoes for open slippers that were far too small for my feet. The club’s usual suspects were a tiny, rambunctious yet charming chap called Shoji; a lady named Takeko who I’ve seen in some of Fran’s photos of kimonos, another lady, Nobuko, who teaches Fran and Mindy to play koto, and a slightly mournful gentleman named Tetsu. All were pretty ancient, but genki (energetic, healthy) as hell; Japanese people don’t really seem to age (though Tetsu, rather gloomily, said in his introduction “I fear I do not have much time left”.) We wrote my name up on the board and I told them about the histories of Bristol and Birmingham (Bristol being a total bitch of a word to pronounce for Japanese people, due to the L-R phonemic confusion, but they did pretty well) and just sort of happily chatted in English while Aaron chided Shoji; then we all went to an American-themed diner place for huge ice cream sundaes, and let Shoji try on my coat (which reached the ground).

Tendo is a city of about 60,000, situated where the rice-paddies meet the foothills on the east side of the wide, sprawling Yamagata valley. Fran’s flat is on the western bounds of town, with a clear view across the valley towards the mountains beyond – when I can find her camera cable I’ll be taking loads of photos. Yamagata prefecture gets a lot of snow, and Tendo was half buried the stuff when I arrived, but in an utterly controlled way – shovelled off the streets and pavements and piled up conscientiously in backlots.

Buildings in these parts are almost all very new (Tendo was only founded in the fifties, apparently), and generally bland, with neither the standard depressing ugliness or occasional inspired flair of Western modern architecture. Hard edges, blocky shapes and right angles predominate; doors slide, or open outwards, and there are no chimneys anywhere. They all seem to be built to a very high standard and, unexpectedly for a nation stereotyped as ultra-conformist, there’s a high degree of individuality in the buildings themselves; though almost all houses follow the basic two-storey, first-floor-terrace pattern, they all seem built to different plans and no two actually look alike; there’s a roadside eclecticism much more genuine and endearing than the insecure suburban English trend of attempting to bling out identical semis with aftermarket windowpanes. Shopfronts and city buildings, too, have this strategic ugliness yet tactical grace: the broad styles are functional and unimaginative, but the detail is individual and very attractive.

After arriving and getting myself acquainted with the kotatsu (a table about a foot off the ground, with a blanket around it and an electric heater underneath: possibly the best thing Japan has ever invented), we went out to celebrate my arrival with soba – thin, square buckwheat noodles; a Tendo regional speciality. Tendo has lots of regional specialities, another being shogi (Japanese chess), and tombstone-shaped shogi pieces adorn the city’s manhole covers, bollards, the tops of some buildings, and whatever else people can think of. So the walk to the soba joint was an exercise in spotting shogi pieces, and in trying not to be unnerved by the thousands upon thousands of crows which gather on all the overhead wires at dusk (and there’s lots of wiring: power lines are almost all above-ground in Japan, I think as an earthquake precaution.)

The soba place had a breastshot waterwheel outside, which I assume was some reference to milling the buckwheat flour, and was warm and full of tasty food smells, with staff in orange overalls and blue aprons happily waving us in. As well as the big bowl of noodle soup, with two huge prawns in tempura batter, they gave me a little bowl of pickled vegetable things, another of miso soup, and unlimited quantities of buckwheat tea. An elderly couple next to us, overhearing English chatter, said hello! England! Beatles country! and Fran engaged them in some Japanese conversation while I nodded and smiled along. Tendo people are generally extremely friendly, but, lacking any other way of communicating, I seem to be forced to smile a lot. This is extremely uncharacteristic and uncomfortable for me.

On Sunday, we took a train over to Yamagata City, the prefecture capital, to book our shinkansen tickets for the return journey. The train wasn’t crowded, but was extremely warm, and definitely built for Japanese people; the dangling overhead handles whacked me on the head more than once, and I had to bend over to see out of the windows. The tickets, bought from a rather intricate vending machine were 230 yen – about £1.70 – each direction, but they don’t do return journeys here. A party of small girls, after spending some time staring surreptitiously at the foreign giant, whispering to one another and working up their nerve, ventured “What country are you from?” to me, and were seemingly delighted when I returned “England” – and subsequently shocked when Fran asked them in Japanese who their English teacher was (turned out to be her neighbour and fellow ALT Mindy, who I’d briefly met arriving in Tendo; good work there.)

Roads, waterways and the ground itself all have a landscaped, carefully constructed quality to them. Rivers are allowed to run pretty much wild and free outside the towns, but as soon as there’s a hint of human habitation or industry they’re running through managed, manicured artificial channels, steep-sided squares for the smaller streams and double levees for the great broad rivers. If I had to pick one thing that epitomised civil engineering here, it would be the concrete-tiled artificial embankment; they’re everywhere, on riverbanks and railway cuttings, forming roadside abutments and the foundations of houses.

At Yamagata station, we secured our reservations at the ticket office after some milling around outside wondering whether it was the appropriate place; an older gentleman, seeing our confusion, came up to us saying “May I help you?”, and, like the kids on the train, looked thoroughly surprised when Fran answered him in Japanese. After that, we went on a brief adventure to locate a cinema Fran remembered, but found that they weren’t showing The Hobbit after all. The film posters in the lobby all focused closely on characters’ faces.

We wandered the streets for a bit, and then went to a fast-food-y gyuudon place for an early lunch. You put your money into a vending machine in the little lobby, press the buttons next to your dish of choice, and it issues you a ticket which you then present to the serving staff inside. Having been warned about Japanese portion sizes, I bought the 480-yen super-size, which actually turned out to be overkill – I could barely finish it! The food was simple – bacon-thin strips of beef on sticky Japanese rice – but extremely tasty, and our bit of table came equipped with various sauces and a jar of pickled ginger. For another 50 yen I bought an egg which, beaten with and poured over the rice, was delicious as well as binding it all together and making it much easier to eat with chopsticks.

In the evening, after returning to Tendo, we went out for dinner with the other JETs – Mindy, her fellow Kiwi Aaron, and an American chap called Chris; Aaron drove us to an all-you-can-eat yakiniku place. Yakiniku is a pretty close second to the kotatsu in the hierarchy of Japanese Stuff I Think Is Amazing – we sat at a table fitted with a grill in the centre, and were provided with endless plates of incredibly tasty thin-sliced raw beef. The meat grew fattier by our third and last plate – I don’t know if that was the restaurant dropping us subtle hints and trying to limit their losses to the ravenous foreigners, or just that they had run out of the good stuff.

After that, we went for karaoke, which I’ve never done before. Seeing as I a) can’t really sing, b) the only songs I actually know really well are obscure hipster trash which weren’t on the machine, I embarrassed myself terribly with the only two songs I tried solo (and probably on the duets as well, but the glory of it was that I couldn’t tell.) And the point of karaoke is to have fun and be entertained, rather than demonstrate any actual skill… I’m going to keep telling myself that, anyway. (Fran, of course, broke these rules due to being an amazing singer, but pff, she’s just a show-off.) The other JETs are all great fun and totally lovely; it’s really nice to see that Fran’s fallen in with such good folks.

We returned to Chez Fran, hoarse, happy and thoroughly meated out.

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Like most good adventures, this one began horrendously early, leaving the house at 5am for a ghostly, headlights-in-fog drive down to Heathrow, for the usual near-interminable queue, brisk frisk, and equally near-interminable departure lounge sprawl. I can’t say I particularly like airports, but I don’t dislike them nearly as virulently as my dad does, and there’s a certain odd appeal to a built-up, permanent establishment designed specifically for fleeting engagements, intended to exploit the largest possible number of people in the briefest window of time. A certain odd, impersonal, viciously expensive, let-the-rest-of-the-world-hang jet-setter appeal. Which isn’t terribly appealing, put like that.

Of the giant awful airline conglomerations, I have to say “Star Alliance” is a much better moniker than “Skyteam”; they both sound like low-budget superhero themed trash, but the first sounds like it’s intended for twelve-year-olds rather than six-year-olds. Oneworld just sounds like a marginal late-nineties telco.

I had a window seat for the first leg out to Charles de Gaulle Airport – a window seat directly above the wing, on a day so overcast one would be forgiven for thinking that the world as we know it was actually the inside of a sphere, so not much of a victory. The brief cross-Channel hop passed without event; halfway through they handed out biscuits and cups of mediocre tea, immediately before a bout of mass-scald-inducing turbulence. What I saw of Charles de Gaulle was significantly more swish, modern and well-groomed than what I saw of Heathrow this jaunt, but no less soulless, and a near-empty people-mover with an American robot voice rolled me over to the next terminal, where I joined a gigantic queue of Japanese people next to a parked Airbus A380.

I would love to tell stories about how much more wonderful this thing was than any other plane, and of its endless luxurious legroom and built-in pool and art gallery, but it was just a normal plane only bigger. The cabin crew were great fun, though, and the in-flight meals the most delicious microwaved vac-formed ersatz-nutrition I’ve ever had. Though my ticket said K, it was actually only the ninth seat in the ten-abreast lower passenger deck (I know they usually pull the letter I from these lists to avoid confusion with 1, but J?), and was again above the wing – no views for me this trip. I was sat between a Japanese bloke about my age who didn’t say anything, and one of the five or so non-Japanese people aboard: an extremely tattooed English chap in his late twenties called Sean who was going to New Guinea to visit his mum and then spend six months in a tattoo parlour learning how they do it on the far side of the world.

Naturally, in an Air France jet flying from Paris to Tokyo, with French crew and almost entirely Japanese passengers, the primary language I heard spoken was English. The flight was twelve hours, and sat in the middle in a narrow seat with two angle settings (upright and bolt upright) I had no chance of sleeping, so I watched a couple of films I’d meant to catch up on – The Dark Knight Returns, disappointing incoherent nonsense by people who don’t understand how suspension bridges work, and Bourne Legacy, which felt like an excellent season finale to a high-concept miniseries, but weirdly lost as a film. Then I rewatched Fight Club, which with its constant mentions of the subtle potential horrors of air travel and trippy, insomnia-raddled plot, is the perfect movie to watch on a plane after twenty hours without sleep. At one point we got an announcement that a passenger had been taken ill, and for any doctor aboard to contact cabin crew, but I heard no more about that.

Narita Airport was damn near empty, and I needn’t have sprinted to the front of customs: my bag with its Firewater album-freebie luggage tag was one of the first onto the carousel, and after a brief, polite grilling from a mask-wearing customs lady in a spick and span uniform I was free to go. The only thing which had me doubt whether I’d make my train was the train company itself: in the JR East office, beneath a swarm of posters advertising various parts of Japan and how great the Japanese rail system was, two utterly languid clerks took their sweet time fixing me up with the pass I’d paid £140 for in advance. But I got it eventually, and hopped aboard the Narita Express, a terribly futuristic-feeling train with big comfy seats and combination-lock loops on the baggage racks to appease the paranoid traveller (I didn’t bother.)

The first thing I noticed on the one-hour trip into Tokyo was how hilly everything was around Narita. Not rolling hills like the Cotswolds, or even steep hills like Bristol, where the scenery goes up and up and up, pauses for measured consideration, then goes down and down and down; the landscape here bounces up and down excitedly with wild abandon, and the roads and buildings pretty much have to deal with it. But the second thing I noticed was how weirdly like Britain it felt. Obviously, everything seems more English on a grey drizzly day, and railway embankments are pretty similar the world over, but to my sleep-deprived eye the differences were subtle rather than overwhelming. The flora is yellow-shifted, and if you look closely the leaves are all strange shapes and what you thought was willow was bamboo, but the balance of trees to buildings, of houses to tall apartment blocks is right, the general aesthetic feel of the landscape – it was surprisingly like home.

Tokyo Station just felt like every other giant rail hub I’ve ever been to, except full of weird alien-looking shinkansen and people in peaked caps. The platform is fenced off with specific gaps to alight, and on the platform painted lines delineate the correct areas to queue, which people scrupulously obeyed. Tsubasa 137, my great big JR East train, pulled in and a squad of caretaker types in red fleeces jumped aboard to tidy up and rotate all the seats (which are reversible, mounted on gimbals in pairs).

A shinkansen feels more like an aeroplane than a train, with folding-down tables, the right sort of padded seats, and that careful space-maximising style of internal ergonomics – but the windows are huge, and there’s masses of legroom. Uniformed conductors bustled up and down regularly, as well as people pushing trolleys of snacks, but nobody checked my ticket. I got a few odd stares from people on platforms looking in, and the little girl on her parents’ lap in the seat behind me was very amused by me (which I think owed less to my non-Japaneseness than to the fact that my head stuck up over the top of the seats).

The skyscraper forests shrank down into seas of two-storey houses, then plains of paddy-fields and broad mountain-lined valleys, and quietly, smoothly, Tsubasa 137 ate up the three hundred kilometres to Tendo.

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