Marathon preparations: toilet training

Today, something a bit scatalogical: the PRP, or Pre-Race Poo. If you don't want to read a load of shit, you can skip this.

Things don't taste the same

It's strange. My first Triple-Os burger in months was a bit disappointing - too dry, or not heavy enough on the sauce, or my mind was elsewhere - but the first time I went running in my new compression tights, they smelt like Triple-Os special sauce. And that was before I put them on: it wasn't as if I'd perfumed them with Triple-Os flavoured perspiration.

Marathon preparations: You can't give a baby booze!

Something I love about Japanese marathons is how skew-whiff they can be. As I approached the expo centre to pick up my race number, I spotted a bored looking young mother, baby strapped to her front in an ampanman contraption, iPhone in one hand, and a can of Asahi in the other. Because there's nothing that says "pursuit of athletic excellence" like waggling a premium lager in front of a baby.

Early morning in Osaka

The flight from Singapore to Osaka was easy; I arrived at the gate, had my seat changed to one 17 rows further forward than I'd been assigned at check-in, got on the plane and went straight to sleep, only waking to find myself watching a programme about dinosaurs at 5 in the morning. I don't think I've flown long(ish) haul with Jetstar before so it was a surprise to find they've got some in flight entertainment, even if it is only a screen hanging from the ceiling at the front of the cabin.

Narita

Narita airport is a curious anomaly in Japan, where everything is highly advanced and magnificently splendid. While the train from Tokyo to the airport is superlatively comfortable, fresh from the 23rd century, the airport itself is just a featureless purgatory.

Defeated

I woke this morning from ten hours of gloriously uninterrupted sleep, dehydrated and my mouth befouled with the taste of last night's dinner. Still, my headache had vanished and the whites of my eyes were once again white, rather than fully bloodshot. I slowly winched myself out of bed, showered and then heading out into the sunshine, ready to see Tokyo.

Disappointed by machines

One of the many wonderful things about the Tokyo metro is the ticket machines' ability to take pretty much any money you want to feed them. If you have a 5000 yen note and you want a 160 yen ticket, no problem. Plus, the machine will give you change in the most convenient way possible: 4 1000 yen bills, and the rest in coins.

To get some perspective on how amazing that is, you have to have dealt with British ticket machines for some time. They're mostly good at swallowing money and then pretending they never saw anything, or not giving you any change, or making strange grinding noises before giving you the wrong ticket. And the most you can put in them is a twenty pound note.

Ice Cream at Narita

Flying to Tokyo today wasn't as bad as I'd feared: I got a comfortable chair, food I could eat and the sun was shining when we landed.

Anticlimactic

Monday, the day after the marathon, dawned fresh and bright, and I wheezed and groaned and gradually extricated myself from my bed. Although we have a very nice room in the hotel, with a bed, and an internet connection, and some semblance of a wardrobe, the only view from our window is of three metal-clad walls, which gave us no clue as to the weather outside. The internet, too, was a unhelpful servant, as it turns out that the BBC's view of the weather in Osaka (raining) and the Weather Channel's forecast (raining all morning, sort of sunny later) were both way off: it was a lovely, sunny day, the kind that makes you regret tooling outside in a corduroy jacket and thick jeans.

Run out

Today I ran the inaugural Osaka Marathon. This is the first marathon I've run in over two years; the last one was the 2009 Tokyo Marathon - also the inaugural marathon in that city. Perhaps I'm going to only run marathons from now on when it's the first time they stage them in a particular place.

Megadeth and Japan

I read Dave Mustaine's autobiography on the flight to Osaka. It's packaged to resemble Slash's memoir, which is much filthier than what the man from Megadeth comes up with: there's reference to lots of sex, but there's not the explicit account Slash gives of what happens when you open the door on James Hetfield mid-groupie.

A certain lack of humanity in adversity

Yesterday I saw a series of adverts for Cathay Pacific at Admiralty MTR, each suggesting a different reason to fly with them to Japan. It seemed rather unfortunate given the past few days, but as there are so many adverts for holidaying in Japan in MTR stations, it wasn't that notable. There are more useful things for people to do than worrying about promotional material for a country that is now recovering from an earthquake.

Today, though, I saw Cathay Pacific were using their Facebook page to promote themselves with this:

We have introduced a special one-way economy class fare of HK$5,755 to help passengers without confirmed bookings in Japan to fly back to Hong Kong as soon as possible. For passengers who have bought tickets at the full published fare, we will refund to them the fare difference between the full published fare and this special repatriation fare.

... Which is all well and good, but since I flew with Cathay to Japan and back for HK$4,500 the week beforehand, it looks less like a sincere attempt to help than it does an attempt to gouge people in a pretty poor situation.

Japan after the quake

Talking to people in Hong Kong, the overriding opinion seems to be that this earthquake has instantly transformed Japan into a third-world country, as though it can never recover from this accident of history.

Which is odd, because Japan was still the third-largest economy in the world this time last week, and if the Wall Street Journal is to be believed, the prefecture worst affected was only about 2% of that. Yes, it's not good to get clobbered by a 8.9 earthquake and yes, there's a lot of devastation where the tsunami hit, but it doesn't appear to have been where there were major population centres; look at all the photographs and you'll see plenty of ruined low level buildings, but no skyscrapers, collapsed or standing.

That's of no solace to anybody who has lost loved ones in the quake, nor is it much comfort if a wave has washed away your house, but it could have been much worse. On the lowest estimates, Haiti's quake last year had a death toll of 90,000, and Sichuan in 2008 claimed 68,000 lives. It's obviously not a competition, and you don't get prizes for having more damage than anyone else, but the news coming out of Japan doesn't suggest it was the end of civilised life there forever.

On the other hand, Haiti didn't have many nuclear power stations.

News on the Fukushima situation keeps coming, and none of it seems good : explosions, leaks of radioactive steam and particles, parts of the building collapsing. The trouble is, few of us are experts on nuclear power, so wailing right now about how we're all going to die, or how the Japanese were irresponsible to build nuclear power plants in an earthquake zone, isn't helping the situation. This is one of those times where most of us just have to wait and see.

There are things we can do to help: you can donate to the Red Cross. Rich though Japan is, it's unlikely they had a full stock of everything required to deal with an earthquake of this scale - not least body bags, sadly.

But what isn't any use right now is for people to wring their hands about how Japan is going to collapse and be ruined forever by this. Japan is the victim of a pretty horrible combination of natural disaster and man-made problem here, but treating it as though it will never overcome this victim status isn't going to help.

Osaka Aquarium

For our last day in Osaka, we got up early and went to the Kaiyuken, a huge aquarium near Osakoko subway station. It's an enormous building, vaguely reminiscent of a house made of lego, and apparently contains 314 tons of hardened acrylic glass (one and a half year's worth of global production).

Koya-san

Today I got up early to go to Koya-san, a small town in the mountains near Osaka, filled with Buddhist temples and shrines.

Koya-san was declared a UNESCO world heritage site in 2004; I wonder if they were a bit slow to classify it, seeing as some of the temples have been around since the twelfth century. Still, I suppose there was no real rush: if the buildings had been there for that long, they could wait a few more years.

Although since the Kondo temple "has been repeatedly destroyed" according to our pamphlet from tourist information, perhaps it's best not to delay these things.

Leaving Shikoku

One of the joys of the Japanese rail system is how easy everything is. We arrived at the station an hour and a half early, and in just a few minutes we had our seats changed to a train leaving immediately, without any penalty or complaint from the ticket booth.

Try that in England, and from what I recall any mucking around with your ticket so you're not on exactly the train you specified three months ago, and you're in for a world of pain.

Gloomy in Marugame

I woke feeling dehydrated this morning, but not puking into a bucket. This is a good way to start the day after a heavy night of shouting with Japanese students, and is something to be thankful for.

However, I haven't figured out the air conditioning in the hotel room (or how to open the window) so the fetid, sauna-like conditions continue. Lucky I'm here on my own, though I feel sorry for the poor maid who has to come in and make my bed.

Trains and booze

I'm cold and tired, after another day of training. Some of it is physically tiring (having a big lad try to pull your hands off your arms always is), some of it is fatiguing to my self-esteem (being corrected by a youngster when we don't have a language in common is, it turns out, harder than when you aren't struggling for comprehension). I've also had a chance to get really bored by a powerpoint presentation.

Of being battered, and of toilets, and the Future

Today was my first day of training in Tadotsu, and indeed the first exercise I've had since last Wednesday, if you exclude walking to the supermarket and purchasing Pringles. For no apparent reason, I couldn't sleep until two this morning, which meant the day was a bit of a struggle, as it started with a couple of hours of being thrown around by Japanese students in the morning, and then being walloped by a chap from Australia, before an afternoon session of wearing sweaty body armour in an overheated room and getting punched and kicked again. By about 4pm I was ready to drop; by half past five, having sat through a lecture delivered in untranslated Japanese I was ready for bed.

Nothing much doing in Shikoku

This morning I woke from strange but prosaic dreams, wherein the Hotel Okura in Marugame was charging me like a wounded bull for internet access, to discover that it was foggy outside and cold, although as I was incompetent with the air conditioning the inside of my room was a miniature sauna. I snaffled down the strange raisin bread I'd purchased last night, gagged a little on my instant cream of onion soup, and then faffed around doing nothing much at all for a few hours before taking the train to Tadotsu, going for a walk round town and finding there was nothing at all to eat apart from hash browns at the bakery next to the station.