When X Japan announced their countdown live, it set my thoughts a-whirring. Johnny’s have the Dome with both NEWS and the Johnny’s Countdown. Most of the other large livehouses are occupied so where could X go. I thought the National Stadium near Setagaya would be the ideal choice, even though it is open air and on New Years Eve. Or perhaps the Yoyogi Olympic Stadium, both being huge arenas. Last week the venue was unveiled as….. Akasaka Blitz! Now don’t get me wrong, I love Blitz very much but X at Blitz? X, that tiny band who have played the 67 000 capacity Tokyo Dome 16 times and who earlier this year sold out three nights in a row there playing at Blitz. There were more people at the YOSHIKI fan conference event last week than can be stuffed into Blitz.

According to Yahoo News/Nikkan Sports it is because YOSHIKI wants to return X to their livehouse roots since they started out as such. They had asked the staff if they could do such a live before the Dome concerts in March but it was impossible so instead NYE has been chosen. I can’t help wonder though if the X sound is just too big for Blitz, and they might end up blowing the walls off or turning half the crowd deaf!

The Japanese have a fascination with Chinese paintings and stories when they craft their beautiful gardens. They draw inspiration from the swirling mists seen on countless scrolls and translate it to ornamental features such as a special arrangement of rocks that water falls around with eerie precision. Rikgui-en in Komagome (Northern Tokyo) is one such of these. Rather it is deemed one of Tokyo’s finest gardens.

Landscaped around a large lake, the walk talks visitors clockwise around the gardens admiring the various scenes such as ‘dragon in the water’ or a hill known as Fujisode (for it is thought of as a mini-Fuji-san with sweeping views of the entire garden). Meiji-period teahouses were tucked away in parts, the wood warped into such fantastical shapes by time that it appeared almost Dali-esque. Then there was a pond, a small waterfall that had been designed with carefully placed rocks so it looked like three powerful waterfalls tumbling into the pool.

Unsurprisingly, Rikugi-en was a pleasure garden for the Japanese nobility, having been established in 1702 Yoshiyasu Yanagisawa, a feudal lord of the region. This link with history is particularly noted by a series of maps that greet visitors at the entrance with charts of Tokyo’s urban development from 1683 to the present day. I love such maps, I always try to find my home, which is always off the map in a rice field somewhere.

They had a small teahouse in the gardens serving tsumetai matcha and a small sweet azuki-filled cake. It was a delight to sit there on a sunny day, as the combination of sweet cake and bitter tea became as exciting for the mouth as the 88 scenes of literature in the garden were for the eyes.

During a week of shocking break ups and tumult in the world I would never have expected this one… RENTRER EN SOI are splitting up???? I could have predicted the demise of Lehmans more easily than that shock announcement by Satsuki & co!

The official line is, they seem to have reached the end of their plans for RENTRER EN SOI. From the OHP translations on JaME and “http://www.shattered-tranquility.net” it appears there was no fundamental falling out of musical difference, just simply they felt that they had acheived all they could do and indeed wanted to as RENTRER EN SOI. It was a good 5 years and I’ll miss them a lot. They were just getting really good again too. I can’t feel angry though. It seems sudden yes, and certainly shocking as I felt they were a band with a solid future but sometimes people just want to move on to the next stage in their life and I hope RES will pop up in the music scene very soon.

The final live is on Xmas Day but before that they are embarking on a final tour taking in Meguro Rock May Kan, Osaka, Nagoya, Sapporo and Fukuoka before returning to Tokyo for the Last Live.

Meanwhile in other shocking news, although slightly of the happier kind, Merry are re-releasing Gendai Stoic. They sent it off to London for engineers to play around with resulting in a lovely new remastered version that I cannot wait to hear. According the the Merry site it is being remastered at Metropolis Mastering in the UK by a gentleman named Tim Young. I wonder how the classic crackly tracks will sound…

Countless places write about onsen experience, sushi experience and so on, but behind the simple act of going to the cinema lie further little quirks about the Japanese.

Unless you head to Toho in Roppongi, the most internationalised cinema I know of (they have penny sweets!), Japanese cinemas are an interesting lot.

My first visit was to Q Front, a tiny cinema with little more than a sweet counter and the screen. How economical and yet such a contrast to the reams of merchandise sold in small shops attached to every cinema. Much like going to a theatre at home, you can buy pamphlets and other assorted trinkets such as phonestraps and uchiwa. This merchandise held us up from buying snacks before Batman at the Yurakucho Picadilly as a woman in front spent an inordinate amount of time choosing what plastic Batman toy she wanted to act as her drink lid.

Batman also revealed to me the love of the Japanese to sit through the credits. At Kurosagi and HanaDan I paid this little attention – my friends and I bolted out and I could understand sitting through Japanese credits. At Batman everyone waited and watched patiently until the final reel before quietly standing, gathering their belongings and filing, still silently, out of the cinema. The same then happened at Sex and the City. I have tried to think of a reason why but something I am sure of is that it cannot be for reading purposes. Credits tend to move too fast for even native speakers to read, and they are also quite hideously dull interesting only if your son/daughter was a part of the production. Without even subtitles though… I imagine it is simply considered polite to wait out the entire show until it has finished.

The final small quirk I recently noticed was at the Shinjuku Picadilly yesterday. The Picadilly is of the new breed of Japanese cinemas with it’s sleek modern design of opaque white glass covering the interior, designer snacks and multi-screens. What was quite different though was that people waited patiently and at the time printed on the ticket an announcement came over the tannoy that the screen would now be opening. No laxadaisical hanging around the door but instead clean and smart efficiency.

It’s funny to think something I considered to be a very uniform activity of modern culture could be populated by so many quirks. I never witnessed anything similar in HK or indeed any other city where I have seen a movie, just Japan.

I feel I want to adopt these guys as my band to pimp, 2008.

Anyway, the frankly awesome Deluhi have a PV that accompanies the new single released back in July. I only just discovered it too. It is a live recording (something many bands do for their first PV) but Juri’s voice sounds wonderful as ever.

Tokyo has the most confusing weather right now, so confusing in fact that you cannot find a single weather forecast that agrees wholeheartedly with another. Yahoo Tenki says rain, the BBC rainy showers and weather underground, ‘cloud’. You wake up to discover the true weather is somewhere in between all these, despite the previous day being entirely cloud free. Suddenly a plan to head to the beach on one’s day off starts to look shaky but in an attempt to make the most of the warm weather before Autumn brings back the cold, you go anyway. Tokyo’s weather continued to look moody as I boarded the train at Shinjuku and steamed off in the direction of Yokohama. Moody, until we arrived in Enoshima, a small town on the Kanagawa coastline where brilliant sunshine greeted us. It felt like the popular summer island was forcing the summer feeling on the weather, not that we minded of course.

By this point though, neither of us had brought swimwear – and given a charity party I was attending that evening I did not want to take sand home with me – so we spent a relaxed afternoon exploring Enoshima. The gentle main street of the island was lined with shops filled with the usual tourist tat, of plastic samurai swords and the Hello Kitty of the area that intermingled with small traditional food outlets baking soy-covered dango on barbecues and hawking brightly coloured kakigouri. It rather reminded me of Kyoto and the approach to Kiyomizu-dera.

The shrine at the head of the path stood at the top of some steep stairs with an imposing white gate – one that seemed rather Chinese in its grand immenseness – confronting new visitors to the shrine. To the side was an escalator, to transport the lazy up the hill although for this first stint we climbed it: a hard job in the heat. As we made our way into the island interior the humidity sharply climbed as the foliage around us became denser and more jungle like. Little time was spent at the shrine, we merely followed a good luck path creating an invisible knot around a strange ring made of reed and straw – confusedly as even our combined japanese knowledge could not read the sign – and then onwards to the top.

Around the corner the area opened out with a viewing platform and a stunning vista of the entire Enoshima-Kamakura-Zushi area. We paused briefly to admire it before continuing for an even better view. My friend was unsure of how far it would be to this elusive top and so we paid for the escalator. It turned out that the top was no distance at all. We strolled around this parkland area near the lighthouse for a while, looking for the best place for a good view – we found one that looked out to the Pacific, a vast expanse that glimmered under the hot rays of the sun. It looked so very inviting! I am continually amazed at the power of both ocean and a forested mountain to calm the senses and looking out over tropical vegetation and then the Pacific was a delightful way to spend a day far from the stressful architecture of Tokyo.

Not wanting to leave too soon, we went on a walk along the top, through a small town that sits isolated on the back of the mountain. It was a step back in time as the pathway wound past old wooden facades that hid tatami mat dining rooms and plates of soba with a view. Initially we thought this path was a way down but when we wound up at another temple with seemingly no further path to anywhere we realised our error and retraced every step back eventually heading down past the escalators once more.

Back down by the bridge that links Enoshima with mainland Japan, we mused on the beauty of the island and of the ocean and our luck in finding a sunny day. This was accompanied by some tasty and interesting sofuto kurimu in a mix of vanilla and apple mango flavours. On the horizon though, in the direction of Tokyo a very angry cloud hovered pitch black against the blue of Enoshima. It was time to leave; maybe after all that then the BBC was right.