Naoya Okamoto and comrades hunger strike in Tokyo

Protesting is no longer an unusual sight in Tokyo, which might be why the small sit-in outside exit 12 of Kasumigaseki Station attracts scant enquiry. It’s a common enough scene: a small gaggle of local university students, an array of brightly coloured, homemade placards, a guitar and… pouches of salt. It’s the constant dabbing at salt that seems to draw attention, in fact. One protestor is dipping into it so frequently, he looks like a kid on a sherbet trip. What to make of this, I wonder? How to reconcile this image with the fact that what I’m witnessing is a hunger strike?

The one and only...

QR codes have been around for yonks. I remember putting them into the artwork for our Cut Flowers posters (a band I played with years back), and thinking they were the very height of modernity. They’ve never had quite the same level of success abroad that they’ve had in Japan; the reason for their appeal here apparently has a lot to do with spelling (the average Japanese net user might be able to remember the phonetics of a URL, but can they still spell it once they get home?), so it’s not much of a surprise to see that QR codes are still around and slowly continuing to evolve.

Get the answer in Delayed Gratification

The answer to this question isn’t easily come by, of course, but I’ve given it a decent bash in the latest edition of Delayed Gratification, a very new and very handsome quarterly that proudly boasts being “last to the news”. As you’d expect from a project with such a future-minded manifesto, they don’t have much by way of an online presence, and there’s certainly no OS app in the offing. However, I’d urge anyone in the UK to pick up a copy. DG, as it’s known to its friends and admirers, is a gorgeous and lovingly-put-together journal. And besides, delayed gratification is often the very best kind.

March 11 started fairly normally. An editorial meeting, a longish Friday afternoon lunch, a comfortable run in to the weekend. And then capital shook, the sea swallowed Tohoku, and Japan changed for good. Almost 6 months later, the country is preparing itself for a rice harvest that many expect to be dangerously contaminated, and the inept government has just accepted the resignation of the 6th prime minister in 5 years.

Millions of column inches have been filled contemplating the catastrophic effect the Great East Japan Earthquake has had on the country, but – given that we blogged through the first major aftershock, minutes after the initial quake – Time Out Tokyo‘s response must have been one of the first. Not that we predicted the financial and political fallout, of course, but we did what we could to help the confused foreigners stranded in Tokyo at the time, an effort that ultimately landed us a Time Out International award.

Japan's 'apathetic' youth take to the streets. Picture by James Hadfield

As Hajime Matsumoto, organizer of today’s demo, admitted last week, there was simply no way of knowing how the protest was likely to turn out. Japan’s youth had long been considered too apathetic – too politically disinclined – to get worked up about anything, let alone take to the streets. Not that they lacked any precedent, of course. Students across the country united in vast numbers to march during the late ’60s and early ’70s, and there are anti-nuclear demonstrations in the capital every month, though the numbers are in the tens rather than the hundreds. While the figures for today have yet to be officially announced (the organizers are currently claiming 15,000; more conservative guestimates are around 5,000), one thing is certain: this was the biggest march Tokyo has seen in decades. 

Hatsune Miku, live in concert

Before you read on, I should clear something up. I’m not the kind of person you’d expect to find at a Hatsune Miku concert. I don’t own any kind of games console, and I spent most of the journey to Zepp Tokyo reading the recent Keith Richards autobiography. I stepped onto the platform at Tokyo Teleport wearing rolled up blue jeans, desert boots, a parka and a Fred Perry bag. I’m the kind of person you’d expect to find on a London street corner circa 1964; the kind of person who would dismiss the idea of a hologram concert as futuristic witchcraft.