Remember those old Supasnaps cameras? The ones that had half the film case hanging out and the fold away plastic viewfinder? They were all the rage when I was a kid and I would often take mine on school trips. Unfortunately from a 24 odd exposure roll I would often just end up with 9 photos back from the shop. 1 would be any good, a couple would be blurry and the rest would contain my finger in some shape or form.

My nostalgia for these old things was triggered by discovering the No Finder iPhone app on iTunes. No Finder is a camera app that (you guessed it) contains no viewfinder, just a big red button and some colour options. So you basically have to aim the iPod in the direction of what you want to shoot and hope for the best. This leads to the same sort of unpredictable fun that the Supasnaps camera did in my youth.

I’m am basically a man-child so I decided to go on an outing to a random place and relive my childhood happily snapping away in random directions and discovering the result only after the event. The location I choose was Kappabashi-dori in Tokyo.

Kappabashi-dori is a road near Asakusa’s famous Sensouji temple and is the capital’s go to place for restaurant supplies. The shops along the road sell everything from super sharp knives to industrial fridges to menu holders. Everything including the kitchen sink. The shops are very open to bargain hunters and tourists searching for crockery or unusual gifts. For me however the reason to go was not for the plates but for the delicious plastic food.

If you have ever been to Japan you would have noticed that the most mouthwatering food is on display outside almost every restaurant. This food never goes off because it is not real, it can’t be eaten and only ever touched to give a quick dusting. The fake plastic food is one of the things that Kappabashi-dori is best known for and can be bought from there very easily, as the restaurants buy it or in the form of things like fridge magnets and keyrings.

So below is a collection of photos taken at random, Supasnaps style. I think it came out rather well all things considered but if I had done this with a real camera I would have wasted about two rolls of film or so. God bless the digital age.

I’ll leave up to your imagination quite how many blurry shots I had to edit out.

So there I was teaching my elementary school class about what a brown bear looks at when suddenly I was interrupted be some shaking of the ground and an announcement over the tannoy system telling the kids to get under their desks. The kids did this pretty quickly, a couple thought this would be a great occasion for a chat before getting shouted down by the home room teacher.

This process has happened a couple of times before, once for a minor quake, another for a drill, so I didn’t think too much of it. After about a minute it became clear that the ground wasn’t going to stop moving so I thought that was a good time to dive under the desk at the front of the class. I’m not sure how long I spent under there but as the stuff hanging from the walls began to fall down around me and the kids gave the odd shout all I could think of was how the earthquake simulation machine in London’s Natural History Museum had got the feeling of a quake spot on.

Eventually the quake died down and the kids all got up from under their desks and put their seat cushions on their heads. After this everyone filed to the playground and the whole thing appeared to be a bit like a fire drill from my youth. All the classes lined up while teachers took the register. What shocked me was that the kids were so calm about it all, I guess that they are well prepared for the situation. Eventually we were let back into the school and in the hall returning to class the first of many aftershocks took place, everyone was sitting on the floor quietly, for some reason there was a fish tank on a desk in the hall, I thought it best to hold on to it to stop it from falling.

So school was now officially finished for the day, parents had begun to gather at the gate and the kids could go home. I returned to the staff room and began to watch the footage of the tsunami on the TV, which was horrible, seeing live pictures seemed to make it even more real.

After sending a few messages out and about to my family and friends, my thoughts began to wonder to how I would get home. I work fairly far away from my home and we had received word that all the trains were out of action for the foreseeable future. Leaving the warmth of the staffroom at about 4.30 I noticed that the school had minimal damage, plaster from the walls and ceiling had fallen down in places and cracks had appeared in the walls. While walking to the train station I began to realise that all of the buildings around me had not suffered any lasting damage.

At the train station, it became apparent that the trains were not going to start up again for a while. I tried waiting for a taxi but none came and tried to work out a bus route using my phone but it was very difficult to sort out all the information and the bus signs were all in Japanese. So I had no option but to wait.

Fast forward an hour or so and we were finally able to get back on the trains. They ran them super slowly and only as far as the next main station. At this point I decided to get some dinner and try to chill out a bit. Later it seemed  like the trains would not start up again for a while so I decided to walk, there was nothing else I could think of doing. I followed other people in the vague direction of Seya, the road filled with cars and my journey was lit up by beacons of convenience stores, Japan’s backbone, amazingly still open and serving people.

Not properly knowing the area, I managed to walk passed Seya and ended up in Yamato after a couple of hours. I decided to wait for a cab from here but found a very large queue of like minded people had formed. I waited for a total of 2 and a half hours and was kind of shocked that nobody asked where anyone else was going. Rather than try to make groups of people heading in the same direction, people were entering the cabs individually and because taxis were only arriving once every 20 minutes or so, I thought this was a wee bit off.

After those 2 and a half hours of waiting I was still ten or so people away from the front of the queue but thankfully a man from the station let us know that the trains would be up and running soon. So I got on the train and waited.

I finally returned home at 12.30 am, about 8 hours after I left work.

Of course, this is nothing compared with what has happened to people in the north of the country, I’ve heard some terrible stories and seen some terrible pictures, I hope I can find some way to help them soon.

When I got home though, I felt like it would all be over for me. However continued aftershocks, problems with a nuclear power plant and power issues are causing stress. On Sunday it seemed like things were getting back to normal for the area but it proved to be a false dawn.

At the time of writing trains are not running to conserve power and while the schools are opening in the mornings, it is impossible for me to get to work. There will be scheduled 3 hour rolling power cuts starting from today, the first of these did not materialise however and the power company say they cannot say until a short time before they are scheduled whether they will take place or not.

I must say at this point that twitter has been amazing for getting news in English about what has been going on. The likes of @makiwi and @timeouttokyo have been brilliant getting information out to people. Reports say that there is a 70% chance of a large aftershock of about magnitude 7 happening in the next couple of days. I guess that nobody knows what will happen in the short term, everyone here is just taking it 1 day at a time.

The area around Harajuku and Yoyogi Park used to be loads of fun on a Sunday. Now it is less so, I cast a disappointed eye over the place.

Roppongi has quite a bad reputation. Located about 15 minutes from Shinjuku it has become some kind of foreigner centre. Go there for a night out and you will be propositioned by a collection of people promoting bars, strip clubs and even “massage” parlours. Once a girl grabbed my hand and said massage 3 times before I could wrestle my hand away from her.

This kind of thing has resulted in me giving Roppongi a bit of a wide berth when having a night out. Recently though I had to go there to get myself a Chinese VISA. As I had to get there ridiculously early I found I had plenty of time after to explore. To my shock I didn’t find people jumping out at me promising cheap drinks, cheap live music or cheap love but a rather nice bookshop. So after a bit of exploring I found a couple of interesting places that anyone who comes to Japan should check out.

F1 Pit Stop Cafe

I have been quite a big fan of F1 for the last 20 odd years, following the ups and downs of the drivers with much interest but I never expected to see an F1 themed restaurant. Inside is a treasure trove of F1 memorabilia, a load of celebrity signatures and even a Red Bull F1 car.

I came in at lunch time and the lunch menu had an optional salad bar and dessert but oddly every dish I could see on the menu was pasta. Is pasta particularly popular in F1 circles? Is that Bernie Ecclestone’s favourite? Why only pasta? Whatever the reason, I felt they missed a trick with the naming of the food. Why call something Spaghetti Bolognese, when you can call it David Coulthard This is my Year Bolognese? Why not have Ferrari Team Orders Lasagne or Champion’s Wall garlic bread? A missed opportunity indeed.

One more thing about the food is that they serve large portions for no extra cost, which is a bit of a bargain but I was not so hungry so I chose regular size. I was shocked that 2 different waiters had to check 4 times that I didn’t want large. Very odd, despite this strangeness the food was very tasty and I yummed it up.

Around the restaurant they had a number of TV screens showing an F1 race from 2009, can’t remember which it was though. There was also a shop were you can buy a large amount of overpriced F1 souvenirs.

As I left the bar I noticed that someone was eating steak and chips. Maybe I should have turned the page when reading the menu.

Official Website

Ludia’s Bar

This is an unusual one. Ever play any Dragon Quest games from Square-Enix? If you are from the UK then maybe not, only about 2 have ever been released there. Here in Japan however there have been countless Dragon Quest games and spin-offs made, it is really popular here. Despite never playing the games myself, I ventured in here and they really have gone the whole hog with it.

It is built to resemble a Tavern as seen in about a million fantasy stories but was a bit smaller that I expected and is a standing bar only. The food and drink all are given difficult to translate names and themes based on the video games, I especially liked the slime shaped niku man I ate, a clever little idea. On the bar there are a load of turkey legs and strange looking ball things under a heater, which is the last thing you expect to see when you walk in anywhere. The bar is also decorated with various swords and trinkets which I guess are from the games.

The staff (well the female staff anyway) are dressed like serving ladies from the games and here it all takes a maid café like turn. Maid cafés are hardly my favourite places in the world, the girls are basically paid to make chatter with you, smile and looked nice. One asked me in Japanese if I had played Dragon Quest 4, it has funny and interesting characters apparently.

For what it is worth, the food was rather tasty but I didn’t eat too much, I had just eaten a slap up (regular sized) meal at the F1 café so I was fairly full. I do think the menu is a little pricey though, my beer was 1000 yen. On the way out of the bar I got a loyalty card (hmm) and a slime fan for those hot summer days (yay).

Official Website

So these are just a couple of places of interest in Roppongi, I’m sure there are plenty more, I heard people say Tokyo Midtown is nice but I think it is just a posh shopping centre with a load of expensive shops and a Starbucks. Even though I was wondering around in the middle of the day, I felt I couldn’t quite escape Roppongi’s seedy underbelly, I often saw vans marked Escort Location Service with a seemingly endless number of girls in kimonos exiting them and walking somewhere.

Anyway, where ever you happen to be, go exploring, you just may find something interesting.

I may be a little late with this but what the hey.

Two weeks ago millions of Colombians took part in protest marches against the Marxist Farc rebel movement which were held in many cities around the world. It was quite astounding that these events took place, apparently the idea began when a group of students started a group on Facebook. This speaks volumes about the world today and shows that stuff that starts small in a social networking site like Facebook really can balloon into something amazing. The message was load and clear: “Stop the fighting, we want peace”.

I only heard about about it the day after it happened by reading the report on the BBC news website and was kind of disappointed in myself not to have known about it. Especially as there was even a march here in Tokyo and I would have really liked to have joined it. As there don’t seem to be too many Colombian expats in Japan, another body really would have made a difference.

On a lighter note, all this talk of Colombians in Japan reminds me of perhaps the only Colombian character ever to regularly appear in an anime: Pedro from the downright bizarre Excel Saga. In this anime, Pedro comes to Japan alone and gets a job as a manual labourer to support his unnamed (yet sexy) wife and child back home in Colombia. However he is the unluckiest man alive and a series of catastrophes leads him to return home only to find that his (sexy) wife is having an affair with another man, the evil Gomez. What follows would be considered too crazy for just about every TV show ever made except for Excel Saga, where it is just par for the course. I can’t remember if Pedro’s story ends happily or not but here is video dedicated to him.