"Lynn, you couldn't present a cat."
A series of Alan Partridge clips on You Tube.
In the end, I won't remember much. All that will last will be the grace and brilliance—and superb chest headbutt—of the genius Zidane, and the comic failure of the charlatan Eriksson and his perennially over-hyped English football team. Most lasting of all, though, will be the preconception proved true: like all the rest, it was condemned to live forever in the shadows of May 25, 2005—the day football died.
It didn't help being in Asia. I didn't watch much of the tournament, because of the crazy start times of most of the games if you happen to live here. I've become the eight-hours-sleep-at-all-costs stick-in-the-mud I used to laugh at in my twenties. The early game, which kicked off at 10pm or 11pm, was the only one within my feeble reach, and I don't remember many good games at that time. Japan and Australia was the one that meant most to me, but it was no feast of football. The Spanish turned it on early—before reverting to type. The much-fancied Argentineans gave a couple of masterful displays of total football—before falling foul to the kindergarden conservatism of their manager. The English coughed and spluttered like fat men running up a hill. The Brazilians loped, uninterested. And Zico's Japan just flopped.
It didn't help either that the refereeing was as comical as Mr. Eriksson. Graham Poll, for one, ruined his career and entered the record books at the same time for his post-modern rule interpretations. Three yellow cards. I'd feel sorry for Mr. Poll, but my memory is long. Poll's gaffes were just the most prominent of the kind of farcical refereeing we've come to expect from these tournaments.
It didn't help that the emerging footballing nations rolled over, for the most part, and never put up a fight. One obvious exception, I hear, is Australia, but their games were on too late for me.
It didn't help that diving marred the tournament yet again. Kurt, "flopping cheats" isn't the term you want. I think you'll find it's "diving bastards". In Christiano Ronaldo, we have the embodiment of all that is ugly about the modern game.
It didn't help that I had to listen to the Gulliver's Travels approach to football commentary adopted here in Japan. Every time a tall player gets the ball, the frenzied Japanese commentator screams out his height. Pi-taa Ku-rau-chi, shinchou 201 cen-chi. Over and over again. The Japanese football commentators weren't in the commentary box. They were at the top of the beanstalk.
But there were some good moments. Team England, for one, provided entertainment value beyond their means. And in the sending off of Rooney, they had their traditional big tournament defining cockup—and another name for the list of national scapegoats, alongside Pearce, Neville, Beckham and Seaman. That the sending off was an indirect consequence of the squad Eriksson initially picked—the squad that included an untried 16 year-old as a forward he never intended to use, at a time when his two main strikers were crocked anyway—is beyond reasonable doubt. This was another England sideshow—this time inspired by their manager. Its seems that a national tabloid media get the football—and the manager—they deserve.
Moving from the ridiculous to the sublime, Zidane decided from the Spain game on to show the world why he is still its best footballer, even at 34. This man has a gift for football beyond anything I've ever seen—and in that I include Maradona. The magnetic close-control, the instinctive knowledge of which way to turn, and a vision to pick out passes that makes Jan Molby look like Razor Ruddock. This man is Denis Bergkamp on cocaine.
But even after the joys of Zidane's performance of the tournament against a surprisingly subdued Brazil, I couldn't make myself stay up to watch the final. And it wasn't just the time difference. I had my mind made up about this World Cup from the start. Truth be told, I'm still living in the shadows of eight minutes of football in Istanbul on May 25, 2005. The greatest game of football I will ever watch. There's a sadness in that. A game that came when football was already on its death bed—beset by the illnesses of Abramovich, ridiculous player wages, and cynicism pervading all aspects of the game. The greatest game of our lives was one final death throe foretelling football's inevitable end.
And after highs like that, the rest would always mean nothing. World Cup 2006 was but a symptom—of a game whose final whistle had already been blown.
A Japanese girlfriend or a girlfriend who happens to be Japanese because 99% of the population are, that is the question.
Yes, I'm oversensitive to many aspects of my life in Japan. It's a bad quality in some ways, but I wouldn't trade it for the world.
A while back, I was reluctantly benefiting from a perk of my new job—being taken drinking to a fancy "casual French" restaurant by one of our major clients, one of Japan's more prestigious—and forward-looking—companies.
The food and drink were superb, and after the initial awkwardness, everyone became quite relaxed.
The conversation moved inevitably to the personal, and to the subject of our "Japanese wives or girlfriends."
The view of our generous and intelligent hosts was simple: Japanese girlfriends are unbeatable, because they are Japanese. The underlying assumption is that (a) we were only here to find Japanese girlfriends, and (b) any girlfriends we had were only our girlfriends because they are Japanese.
Rather than playing along with this rather typical take on why people are in Japan, I get naturally argumentative, and my impression of the night becomes tainted. There is a wall of national identity forming awareness on every topic under then sun that you just cannot get by in Japan, even with people who are wonderful in every other way.
Brief respite in the fog covering Kinunuma Marsh.
One day to get there, to the onsen yamagoya Nikkosawa, an offroad wooden throwback to past eras. A place that doesn't whore itself for tourists. A place purely and simply for hikers going up to the marsh. No car will get you there. You have to go on foot.
A storm during the night, sheet lightning and the countdown for thunder. North Kanto taking a blasting from the tsuyu. All night the sound of rain battering down on the wooden roof, crowds of insects pattering outside the window, wanting in.
The intercom wakes us at 5.50 am for breakfast. Best be on the trail by seven the owner warns. Breakfast inedible, even for the adventurous eater I've become. Raw eggs, or half raw eggs, and natto.
Reading the maps, watching the storm through the window, and deciding to go anyway. It is, after all, our second time to try find this marsh. The last time we were thwarted by snow and a toothache-induced fever.
The hike itself less difficult than expected, done in sloppy conditions that remind us of Rishiri last summer. Nice to be back on the trail, breathing real air and forgetting the lives we lead in Tokyo.
Just under two hours to the top, and the first sight of Kinunuma, the mountaintop plateau marsh. It's disappointing. On a clear day it must be beautiful. A very Oze kind of place. Today it's as eerie and threatening as the Yorkshire moors. I think of Myra Hindley and look around for bears. A thick layer of fog at 2,000 metres so low it covers even the 40 marshes. Cold setting in when we sit down to eat our rice balls. A perfunctory walk around the planks, one photograph and back down into the boiling-hot mixed onsen at Nikkosawa again.
A lazy day in a log cabin with the kind of high ceiling you only dream of in Tokyo. Reading Tom Humphries on the 2002 World Cup. In Oku-Kinu, reliving the Keane/McCarthey affair. Humphries annoyingly targeting his audience, never letting himself go to far.
Into the rain early the next morning and home. A three-day washed-out weekend in North Kanto marking a return to blogging and the trail.