On Campus

My classroom's in the basement, between the toilets and a shop selling University-branded souvenirs. It's decorated in the style of an Austrian teenager's bedroom: square and windowless, with strip lights, a whiteboard on wheels and air-conditioning that sounds like a boiling kettle.

I teach one lesson plan six times daily, providing ample opportunity to iron out the kinks from the first class and then cock it all up again by the end. The long day - half eight to half seven - is made up for by the doddle of a commute. One thing for working two stops from the end of the line - it guarantees you a seat on the train.

Today

It started raining. After work I went to the 100 yen shop and bought the cheapest umbrella I could find - a white-handled, transparent plastic-rain-mac number straight out of an early episode of Dr Who.

Funnily enough, it goes rather well with my suit.

In My Street

After a week of unplanned early mornings, I woke at noon and decided to take in those parts of Fuchu that don't sell cheap groceries or advertise beer for 500 yen a glass. I didn't make it much further than either end of the street. That wasn't necessarily a bad thing.


The local baseball stadium. Left out of the flat, on the way to Fuchu Prison, a giant Toshiba factory and Kita-Fuchu station.


In the opposite direction, Tokyo Racecourse is just ten minutes away, a few hundred metres before the Suntory brewery, half a mile from the Tama Gawa river.

The Ito Yokado Incident

I'd left the supermarket and was halfway down the street before the check-out girl caught me up. She bowed, apologised twice, and handed over my change. It was a one yen coin. There are two hundred to the pound.

King Kinnear

My first thought was, isn't he dead? With some of the players in our squad, he might as well be for all he difference he'll make.

Just be grateful it's not Howard Wilkinson.

Training Day

Since arriving in Japan I've done almost nothing but drink beer, cook bad food under the influence of drink and wander aimlessly around town looking for pubs. Today though, the fun stops. Two days of training - or as I remember it from last time, listening to long speeches in a very hot room - and then work starts properly on Monday with six classes and a fifty-minute commute.

I met the people I'm teaching with at the foreigner registration desk yesterday. There's a bloke from Swansea with a collection of creased-up Chinese suits, a serious looking Canadian fresh out of teachers' college, and a woman from Michigan who used to work in Prague. They seemed nice enough - just as well, as we'll be inhabiting the same six inches of floor space on the train five mornings a week.

Business Hotel Cesar

My flat is a two-roomed Bento box on the ninth floor of an apartment building. I have a balcony that looks out on the mountains, a side window with views of the elevated Keisei line, a bathtub long enough to fit both feet in at once, a kettle that looks like a thermos flask and four cupboards (five if you include the kitchen). There's a Hot Pub hostess bar and a Nepalese restaurant downstairs and across the road a multi-storey carpark disguised as a Scalextric track, a corner supermarket where everything costs 50p and a sign posted in a snack pub doorway for "attractive Filipina waitresses".

Oh, and about a hundred million vending machines.

Sunset Over Fuchu

Fuchu It Is

For the next three months home will be here. On the edge of a megalopolis, near a beer factory and an art museum - and the busiest train station on the planet just a 25 minute ride away.

West Ham 3 Newcastle 1

What are the chances of Ashley getting £480 million for a club in the Championship? Because make no mistake about it, if he hasn't sold up by the January transfer window then that's where we're headed.