It turns out more people than I realised read this journal about life in Japan. One of those people must control my sense of “oh really, we’ll see about that” because since writing about how I’d managed to get into a better sleeping routine yesterday, that theory has gone what is scientifically referred to as Tits-Up. Instead of sleeping last night I once again had a night where I just didn’t feel the need to. That is until about 10 o’clock this morning when I crashed onto the bed, not emerging until about half past 8 tonight. I’m back at uni this week, hopefully that can sort me back out.

With this being the case, my new discovery of the day was limited to another walk around my local area and the Tenjimbashisuji Shotengai, the world largest covered shopping street. As it was late most of the stores had already closed for the day, though many still remained open. Cutting in and out of side entrances and back-alleys meant that I could see a lot of the smaller shops, restaurants, fetish bars and pet shops, though I didn’t go into most of them. I did stop by a couple of UFO Catcher (arm-grabber) arcades, including one that seemed incredibly posh. It was so fancy not only were it’s prizes things like gourmet cakes and chocolates, it had a dance floor on a mezanine!

To be honest that’s where this entry ends, for today, but I do want to ask you to open your minds to the fact that although Japan is probably very different to the country you live in, don’t believe in all that you hear from movies and so on. Not only is the number of people who have asked me if “every Japanese person is tiny” getting pretty bad, but one person even asked me if the monks I saw were awesome because they “knew thousands of kinds of martial arts”. Now, I don’t even know if 1000 kinds of martial arts exist, that’s not my specialist field (like I even have one), but they had watched Bulletproof Monk and succombed to that idea.

For the record, the “Nameless Monk” was not even Japanese, but a Tibetan Buddhist.