Disclaimer: I have tried to write this post (or similar) about four times previously and each time have ended up sounding like a demented fanboy so if I get a bit enthusiastic please forgive me.

When I was at school I vaguely remember one of my teachers saying that her boyfriend or brother or whoever collected every CD that Bjork releases, from the singles to albums to limited edition stuff. I remember thinking at the time that that was rather a cool idea but I never found an artist that it was worth doing with.

Until now.

Since the turn of the year I have been listening to the works of Shiina Ringo almost constantly. At first I was impressed simply with the way she sings, it’s very unique, but soon I discovered there was more to her. Much much more. It all started when I downloaded her complete discography and I began to listen from her first release, a single containing the song Koufukuron.

Never have I been so disappointed, this song was the very definition of sugary J-Pop that is so derided abroad. With lines like “You laugh and you cry and show me the real you, and so I love you just the way you are.” delivered in the most middle of the road way. Ugh. This single stinks of a singer being ground through the music industry machine to be discarded as soon as the next person comes along. I wasn’t at all surprised to learn that the single bombed and barely charted.

Undeterred though I was willing to give her another chance and gave her first album, Muzai Moratorium, a listen. It was all going swimmingly with a couple of nice little songs until track 4 came on.

I was blown away, it was Koufukuron again but this time, this time, it had changed. Suddenly it sounds like a punk song and Ringo sings it through gritted teeth (with added distortion) as though she despises it. The melody has been sped up with guitars and drums working overtime but Ringo is racing ahead of them screaming at them to keep up. She literally coughs, groans, splutters and spits all over it and this so called “Pleasure version” of the song is suddenly her bitch and she is injecting the venom hard and fast.

That’s when I realised that Shiina Ringo can do anything.

And she frequently does. The amount of different styles that she effortlessly plays with is a joy to behold. She frequently creates different versions of her own songs, each one unique and interesting. She has also produced some brilliant covers and I recommend everyone checks out her version of The Beatles’ Yer Blues. Go on, click here to listen to it, I know that you’re intrigued.

I also discovered later, with the aid of translations, that those first few “nice little songs” at the beginning of Muzai Moratorium were actually about prostitutes and her “getting off” on her amplifier.

Yes, she really is a bit of a tease. I recently bought one of her DVDs, her farewell concert of sorts where she announced that she had stopped working solo and introduced her new band to the world. At the very last part of the DVD, after a strange cartoon intermission with random body parts flying everywhere, the band appear for their first performance under their new name, Tokyo Incidents. There’s Miss Shiina in a lovely petite straw hat, her mole has mysteriously vanished and the crowd goes wild when they begin their first song. Just before the chorus though, boom, black screen, DVD finished. It seems like Ringo is saying that you’re gonna have to be patient and wait to find out what the band sounds like, the little minx.

There is plenty more I could say about Shiina Ringo but I think I will stop for now. I’ve gotten far too excited and need to make my point.

I have now decided that while I am in Japan, I will try and collect as many of her (and her band’s) albums and singles as possible. The amount and joyous quality of stuff she has brought out over the last 10 years really is astounding and I look forward to collecting it all. The great thing is that she is still only 29 so there is plenty of potential for a lot more to come.

For some reason everyone always waxes lyrical about Japanese mobile phones. While they may be technically more advanced than phones generally found back in the UK, design wise they are atrocious. I say this because there is only one: the clamshell. Every single bloody phone here is a clamshell, where’s the variety? There is just no attempt to experiment with the ergonomics of a phone, which results in every single one being a dull rectangle shape. My phone may be able to run Metal Gear Solid but God help my poor aching hands if I actually try to play the damn game.

Another slightly interesting thing about Japanese mobile fashion is the amount of “dangly things” on phones, I not sure what these should actually be called (charms? key chains?) but their overuse drives me up the wall. One or two of them are ok but when some young lady takes a mobile out of her purse that has three huge teddies hanging off it I just despair. It’s not only girls though, male and female, young and old do this (maybe not with stuffed bears though). How some blokes fit their mobile in their pocket, I have no idea.

Personally speaking though, I have also given into the dangly thing temptation. I wasn’t going to bother but seeing a flashing charm thingy which has a picture of Asuka from Evangelion saying “I’m No. 1″ on it was just too much to resist.

I am not sure if I am happy with my phone sometimes, it may be a pleasing blue colour and the train route finder is a God send but there are some things to it that are just lacking. The biggest problem is that it does not support MP3 (or WMA, or WAV, or ATRAC even) so my personal ringtones and text message alert sounds which I’ve had for years are not longer available. That makes me a very unhappy bunny.

My phone did come with some PC software that allegedly will transfer music to it but this software is incompatible with Macs and because Windows sucks, my copy won’t run Japanese programmes properly despite having Japanese text support installed.

One last thing about mobiles, you have to see to believe the way some women bling up their phones. Garish is not the word!

On my frequent trips to Tokyo I have often used the Yamanote Line trains. The Yamanote line stops at just about all the places in Tokyo you may have heard of: Harajuku, Shibuya, Shinjuku etc. On these trains there are wee video screens which pump out various bits of information such as timetables, the news, the weather and horoscopes. The also display adverts, lots and lots of adverts. Between the ads for Wii Fitness and 24 hour Mc Donald’s drive-ins, I noticed something interesting.

Berlitz English language schools have a rather unusual marketing campaign, they display a “one minute English lesson”. Here is a good example:

Now, I know that is interesting to learn idioms and the like but really, “Have a cow”?! Who, other than Bart Simpson, actually says that? What a stupid and pointless thing to teach! I saw another one which went over the difference between hard copy and soft copy. The only problem with that, of course, is that I have never heard anyone say “soft copy” in my entire life.

I may be getting all worked up over nothing though, when I am on trains I notice that I seem to be the only person paying the blindest bit of notice to these ads and I’m sure that people take everything they see in them with a large pinch of salt. However you don’t need to have read Spiderman to know that with great power comes great responsibility and Berlitz may want to remember that.

I once asked one of my students, who had lived in England for a couple of years, what he missed about Japan while he was there. His answer was not too unexpected, replying “food” but in particular one type of food: melon bread.

Now I have been vaguely aware of melon bread since I’ve been here, mainly because the shape it is usually baked into reminds me of brains. Any food which reminds me of brains should best be avoided, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom taught me that lesson. However my student’s enthusiasm for it peaked my taste buds and I decided to put my prejudices aside and give it a try.

I wish I had tried it sooner, it’s fruity yet bready, sugary yet…… well it’s very sugary. The important thing though is that it’s tasty and I’ve been missing out on it all the time I have been here. This taught me a valuable lesson: be more adventurous with what I eat.

While I do like Japanese food, most of the local dishes I eat regularly are things that I first sampled at home such as sushi, ramen, okonomiyaki and the like. I have so far shied away from the more peculiar dishes. Despite my annoyance at the lack of open-mindedness to Calpis, I have yet dare to sample Pocari Sweat; Usually when I see a picture menu, I dodge the more unusual food for a familiar katsu curry.

Well no longer….

From now on “Remember the melon bread” is going to be my mantra. I will no longer avoid the strange freakish looking option and give it a try, cos you never know, it might be really quite yummy.

When I was a lad I looked up to many sportsmen. Most of these were footballers or F1 drivers, names like Damon Hill, Alan Shearer and Carlos Valderrama. My favourite sportsman of all was Rob Lee. Some may think it’s an odd choice, perhaps only other Newcastle fans will understand why.

Rob Lee was never in the Ronaldo or Kaka class of flair footballers, the ones who grab all of the headlines, he was the kind who would always graft and work hard. He never really had a bad game for the Toon and he was perhaps the complete English midfielder, the kind that you don’t really get any more. These days midfielders perform one of two functions: Offensive (playing the defence splitting pass to the forwards) or defensive (trying to win the ball back from the opposition). Rob Lee would do both, win the ball and then play the killer pass for the likes of Andy Cole, Les Ferdinand or Alan Shearer to score. There was always something special about him, perhaps mystique is too strong a word but you always got the feeling that he was giving 110% for the team.

When I’m bored and have nothing better to do I often waste my time looking at clips of old footballers on youtube. It broke my heart that every time I searched for Rob Lee all I would get was this clip of him being hacked down while through on goal. I still haven’t forgiven THAT MAN for committing THAT FOUL. Imagine my joy then when I gave the Rob Lee search another go and lo and behold, I found this:

It’s a great little review of his goals and career at St James’ Park. It’s only a matter of time before the copyright trolls at youtube take it down due to their anti-Rob Lee stance, so view it while you can.

God knows, we need players like him now at Newcastle, where for the first time in living memory games aren’t being lost because of a shitty defence but because of a midfield that is about as creative as a photocopier.