The Spraycap Incident and Vegetable Kindness of Strangers: My Year in ReviewHannah Wu(DS2020)
I wanted to try out my neighbourhood ‘Manuscript Writing Cafe’ to write this long-overdue blog post.
Basically, they don’t let you leave until you’ve achieved your writing goal, which you have to write down
on a card upon entering, and then endure hourly enquiries into your progress from the manager.
They’re shut today disappointingly, so I’ve made my way through the packed streets of Koenji (it’s thelast day of Koenji Awa-Odori, one of Tokyo’s largest street dance festivals) to get writing in a different
cafe.
It’s been almost exactly a year since I moved here, along with sixteen other scholars. How to sum it allup? Unknowns, adventures, misunderstandings, matcha lattes, mayonnaise, persimmon crumble, thesmell of roasting sweet potato, chestnuts, rabbits, laundry, 4am earthquakes, conbini desserts (far toomany), self-introductions using a microphone (far too many), ever-warm toilet seats, bathroom slippers,
unfortunate bean-filled pillows, taiyaki (a revelation), yoghurt-repelling lids (it’s a thing, look it up), latenight sentos, the first October morning waking up to a snow-covered Fuji…

trusty taiyaki

distributing WANTED posters for mynightshirt, lost to the seventh-floor wind.
Hope somebody’s wearing itsomewhere…

view from my balcony (hello Fuji)

I hope this gives a sense of the randomness of it all. And the wonderfulness. It’s not all great though,obviously. I’ve missed the UK more than I thought I would, with days spent holed up watching MerchantIvory films and listening to Desert Island Discs on repeat, trying to get close to a sense of ‘Britishness’,
whatever that is. (I didn’t know I could miss cheddar so much.) And my brain feels fried half the timefrom the effort of trying to communicate in Japanese. Rather than trying to paint the last year into a
deceptively coherent whole, I’d like to talk about two experiences, one strange low and one unexpectedhigh.
THE SPRAYCAP INCIDENT
The final part of the Daiwa Scholarship entails a six-month work placement, and for the last year, manyof us have been jumping through hoops trying to secure this. After some disappointing dead-ends, I
decided to try the old-fashioned way and walked into a nearby animation studio with my CV in hand.
Friendly but bemused faces greeted me, and after a stumbling self-introduction and responding to somequestions, things seemed vaguely positive and I was invited to join an animation workshop the followingweek.
The workshop seemed to go fine; the young employees (all women, early to mid-20s) and I were mainly
left to our own devices, and we played around with whatever was on hand in the studio to make somestop-motion animations. Someone suggested we animate a little film by drawing faces on some plastic
lids we found nearby; it seemed as good an idea as any, so we went along with it.

Fast forward a week and I was feeling positive. I couldn’t believe my luck really, that I seemed on thepoint of securing the ideal opportunity, working on a stop-motion animation project that was just in its
gestation, developing all the skills I’d wanted to, and being welcomed into a quirky-seeming organisationwith employees I really got along with.
That Friday happened to be my birthday, and I was at a bar with some friends. Suddenly, around 9pm, Igot a call from one of the employees I’d become close to. ‘You have to come in now,’ she said, ‘or you’ll
be fired.’ I wasn’t aware I’d been hired yet, but, panicking, I asked what was wrong. ‘It’s about thesupureikyapu.’ It took me a while to realise she meant ‘spraycap’, the lids we’d drawn on at theworkshop.
The spraycaps, it turned out, belonged to one of the senior animators, who was greatly angered by what
he saw as a blatant act of vandalism. ‘Can’t we email him to apologise, and promise to buy him somenew lids,’ I asked. No, each of us had to draft and then memorise a minute-long apology, which wewould later deliver to him in-person, besuited and bowing.
None of my Waseda language classes hadcovered the formal Japanese needed for thiskind of situation, and I had no idea where tostart. When I asked one of the Japaneseemployees for help, I was rebuked and told that
this apology had to come solely from me. She
eventually supplied me with one useful phrase,
which translates roughly to ‘bring everything toruin’. When, later, we each had to go round andrehearse our apologies, I contorted my body
into the deeply unfamiliar 70° saikeirei bow
indicating profound regret. ‘Lower…longer...’the others said.
I never got to do the apology in the end. The
animator didn’t show up, and a few days later, I
found out some things that revealed a darker
underside to the organisation, involving
misogyny and abuse. I scarpered. But the wholething got me thinking about what we were
doing out here, our role as outsiders, the desire
to assimilate, the intoxication of being accepted,
but also the point of being in too deep, or of notknowing what it is you’ve signed up for, and all
the judgement calls involved in between.

scavenging for an apology-appropriate suit from Daiwa
friends

VEGETABLE KINDNESS OF STRANGERS
Now for something cheerier. At the end of January, a friend and I decided to go skiing in Hokkaido. To
try to minimise the cost of what was going to be a very expensive holiday, the week before going I
scoured Jimoty.com, Japan’s Craiglist, for all things ski-wear.
I arranged to cycle to a neighbourhood parking lot to buy a pair of snowboots (for £2.50) off a certain
Kyoko san. We met (she turned out to be a woman about my mum’s age) and completed the exchange,
but when she found out that I was still on the hunt for other ski-wear, she immediately invited me backto her house to try on her own ski-suit, like it was no big deal. I was offered tea and a steamed red-beanbun, met the rest of her family, and left her house with two full sets of skiwear, one for me and one formy friend, all for free, on the condition that I would return after my holiday for a bejitaburu paatii, or‘vegetable party’ (I’d mentioned I didn’t eat meat).
I’ve been back to her house three times now. The last couple of times, we harvested vegetables on her
allotment and then feasted on them for lunch with the whole family. Both times, Kyoko, her daughterKei and I have spent a few hours after lunch around the dining table drawing up respective family trees
in a mixture of Japanese and English.

daikon and corn harvest

pages from ‘Vegetable Party’, an assignment for my Japanese Picture-Book classfamily trees

The tangents we get caught up in (Kyoko suddenly transcribes from Google Translate the question, ‘Domany of your friends live with a purpose?’); the random Japanese I learn (like ‘welfare equipment
rental’, Kyoko’s husband’s line of work); the natural exchange that occurs (when Kei admonishes hermum for interfering in my romantic life, introducing me to the word osekkai, or nosy busybody, I tellthem to watch the new Emma, Jane Austen’s archetypal meddler) - this feels like what I’m meant to be
doing and seems to get to the heart of what the Daiwa Scholarship programme is about.
The family trees aren’t finished yet; we’ve agreed to continue with them the next time I go over. Unlike
the abrupt, hot potato-like estrangement from the animation studio, this relationship feels familial, likesomething that will grow, and not once when I’m with Kyoko and her family do I question what the hell
I’m doing here.