“I want to live my life taking the risk all the time that I don’t know anything like enough yet, that I haven’t understood enough, that I can’t know enough, that I’m always hungrily operating on the margins of a potentially great harvest of future knowledge and wisdom. I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

At the age of 10, I discovered The Beatles. At the age of 20, I discovered Bob Dylan. At the age of 30, I discovered Christopher Hitchens. There are few people that have had the kind of influence on me that this writer had, and I shall miss eagerly searching for his latest feature (whether I agreed with what he had to say or not) immensely. An incredibly brave man. The world shall be a much duller place without him.

If the death of Gary Speed can be said to have led to anything positive whatsoever, it’s that it has dragged depression back out into the open. Admittedly, early responses from family and friends suggest Speed was not known to be a man troubled by depression, and it may yet come to light that his apparent suicide had nothing to do with the illness at all. However, it would be entirely in keeping with my own experience, as someone who has lived with clinical depression for a decade, for his friends to have been as in the dark as he may have been.

I was inspired to write this blogpost for two reasons. Firstly, James Olley’s piece in yesterday’s Evening Standard, which highlights the problem of depression still going unnoticed in communities where it might be viewed as a weakness, and secondly, an apology I recently received from a GP – an apology made “on behalf of the medical profession” for the six-or-more years I’ve spent taking the notoriously addictive antidepressant, Paroxetine. Having spent a little over 10 years visiting more mental health specialists than I can honestly remember (certainly more than this post will detail), I continue to be amazed by how little people seem to know.

My depression first moped into view when I was 23. Living in Japan at the time, I remember walking across a car park beneath a broad blue sky and thinking something didn’t feel right with it. It was almost as if I could see that the edges were crumpled just beyond the horizon; that it was all surface polish and little else. I can see how simplistic that sounds, but I remember that while I gave it very little thought at the time, it built up. The following day the idea returned, and this time it came with a mild sense of anxiety. It came again increasingly over the next few days, all the while the anxiety building steadily. I felt a nasty sense that I was becoming trapped in a thought cycle, that I couldn’t walk across that area without feeling deeply uncomfortable.

A week or so later – September 29, 2000 – the whole thing crashed. I was hungover at a conference in Fukuoka, south Japan, listening to someone talking about their cross-cultural experience. I suddenly became aware that the speaker’s lips seemed out of sync with their words, probably a result of my pounding headache and usually something I’d not even notice, but I became transfixed and increasingly worried. Try as I might, I couldn’t make what I was seeing stop, and before I knew what was happening I was shoving chairs out of the way, desperately trying to get out of the room. Once I was in the corridor, I began to run, and I didn’t stop running for about 15 minutes (in circles, as it happens – I never made it out of the conference centre car park). Eventually I managed to calm my breathing, but the sense that I wasn’t actually there, almost that I was watching the world around me on somebody else’s television screen, didn’t leave me for about three years.

Interestingly, my exit from the room had gone unnoticed. While it felt as though the world had crashed onto its side with a calamitous thud, my friends told me afterwards that I’d very politely taken my leave without drawing attention to myself. This would be a recurring theme throughout subsequent panic attacks, and seems to be common to many who suffer from anxiety disorder and clinical depression. It goes unnoticed. It’s not that easily detected. People often suffer silently for years, unable to explain what’s going on in their head.

If you think about it, reasons for why this happens make sense. A depressed or anxious person often needs to voice their problems before they can be identified and treated, but it takes a brave person to say, “in my head, the sky has crumpled edges and your voice no longer syncs with your mouth”, because that doesn’t sound like depression to anybody. That sounds like the first step towards getting yourself committed.

This also highlights a semantic problem. I had no idea that my depression might be depression at all, because very few people get through their teenage years without, at one time or another, claiming to be “depressed”. I remember chatting with a friend of mine about five years ago, an intelligent fellow who told me, “I don’t think depression really exists. I know a doctor who doesn’t believe in it.” I can fully imagine that the second sentence might be true (I have a friend who suffers from Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, known commonly as M.E., who tells me she has seen doctors who are similarly disbelieving), but I’ve often wondered whether my buddy might have confused “I have depression” with “I’m depressed”. Very different things, obviously, though it may be where some of the stigma comes from. The response to the “depressed” teenager is usually something along the lines of “pull your socks up”, whereas the response to someone displaying signs of depression is always “go and talk to your GP, and do it quickly. You need help.”

It took me a long time to find my way to my current GP, and to tell the truth, it’ll take some time before I’m convinced I’ve found the right one. Here’s why.

Immediately after my initial fight-or-flight experience, back at the conference centre, I called a friend who helped me part of the way home. She was clearly worried, but had no reason to think I might be a danger to myself. Thankfully, I never have been (unless you count the years I spent trying to drown out the confusion with very cheap Japanese lager), but I do remember cowering back into the corner of my apartment, convinced that something had altered permanently. It had, of course – the illness has had an effect on my everyday life ever since, mostly for the good – but at the time, I couldn’t see how that could be a positive thing in any way. I remember thinking that I had to stop thinking, that that was the only way to calm my incessantly galloping heart. But how do you stop thinking, beyond stopping all together? I was petrified.

The first doctor I met told me I was suffering from exhaustion. He hooked me up to a drip for three hours, then sent me home. The next day, I had another panic attack. So I went to another doctor who promptly put me on a heavy dose of something-or-other (the name escapes me) that slowed me so thoroughly that I don’t have any decent memory of that particular fortnight. I do remember having panic attacks but feeling too exhausted to go anywhere. Panic attacks whilst virtually immobile aren’t much fun either, so I stopped taking the pills and didn’t visit that doctor again either.

For three years, I suffered incessant panic attacks and what I assume now must’ve been minor delusions (I remember lying in bed with a hangover and being so convinced that I was still on the train, lolling about embarrassingly, that I felt I ought to be apologising – to nobody). Back in the UK, I went to a local GP who said he didn’t believe in tackling panic attacks with pills, so he sent me to a counselor who was so obsessed with picturing calm brooks and palm trees that I pretty much left her to it. It seemed to do her immense good to natter her way through forests and around foothills, and who was I to stop her? After my sixth session, she pronounced me cured and said she didn’t need to see me anymore. I was glad she seemed to be feeling better. I had a panic attack as soon as I stepped out of the door.

At the age of 25, my girlfriend discovered she was pregnant. I was delighted by the news, hoping it’d give me something to devote my thoughts to other than my ever-circling confusion. As part of her pre-natal care, it was suggested that we both have a checkup at the local clinic. We were living in Muswell Hill at the time, North London, and the GP made history (in my own troubled world) for being the first person to put a name on my illness that made any sense to me. I hadn’t told anyone about the crumpled sky or the bizarre bed/train incident until that point, always having stayed away from detailing symptoms that I felt might impact on how tightly my straitjacket would be fastened, but with fatherhood looming I thought it best to get it all out in the open.

I’d barely finished my crumpled sky monologue before she said the words “clinical depression”. She tapped a prescription into the computer while explaining briskly that I was too far gone to know whether the depression was causing the anxiety disorder or vice versa, but that the drugs promised by this bit of paper would have it sorted in a matter of weeks. 20mg of Seroxat per day and it’d be like the last three years had never happened. I’ve never looked forward to taking medicine so eagerly.

I’ve often wondered if putting a name to it was all I really needed. Like so many other people who suffer from the illness, the confirmation that you’re not mad, and perhaps a little explanation of the science behind why your brain feels so ridiculous goes a long way towards capping the fear. For me though, the Seroxat, the trade name of a locally available product made with the notoriously addictive Paroxetine, seemed to put a little bonnet on it and see it cheerily out the door. For a year or two, I lived as happily as I ever had – probably more so, what with my gorgeous son, my newly-wed wife and my morning happy dose. I even managed to wean myself off them, ever-so slowly, fraction by fraction, until I appeared capable to live without their support at all.

It should be noted that my weaning was not taken under advisement. I made that decision all by myself, foolishly I now realise, and just stopped showing up at the doctors. By this point, aged 28, we’d moved back to Japan, and the doctor – who spoke very little English and seemed to find my monthly visits uncomfortable enough that hastily filling my prescription was all she ever got round to doing – seemed sufficiently unconcerned to never contact me and find out what on earth I thought I was doing.

Three months later, I crashed again, right in the middle of a wedding ceremony (I used to be a fake priest, but that’s another story entirely). Stood in front of 200 paying guests, with 10 minutes left on the clock, I gripped as tightly to the altar as possible, in the hope that my finger muscles could overpower the ever-growing fight-or-flight syndrome threatening to overpower my racing brain. As usual, I made it to the end, and – as usual – nobody watching had a clue that anything was up. But the damage was done. For three more years I continued to do that ridiculous job, and not a single ceremony passed without a sense of unavoidable doom. In truth, I think I survived those three years without suffering a major attack again, but the fear of it happening was miserable. It permeated into the rest of my life and I dealt with it by drinking a considerable amount.

Of course, drink and depression aren’t merry bedfellows, and the combination of the two led to a third complication: a mild but disturbing heart arrhythmia that forced me back to the embarrassed doctor more times than either of us enjoyed in the two years leading up to my thirtieth birthday. Everybody suffers the occasional arrhythmia, of course – I’m told that’s what jolts you awake occasionally when you’re on the verge of sleep. Imagine that almost constantly, and you’ll have some idea of what it does to your nerves. To say it has you worrying about your health is an understatement. Finally, inevitably, they brought the pills out again, this time a daily 20mg dose of Paxil – the trade name of a locally available product made with (you guessed it) the notoriously addictive drug Paroxetine.

This time, I didn’t stop. I took them daily for years. As a thirtieth birthday present to myself, I gave up drinking (it took a few months, but I got there in the end), which I doubt I could’ve done without my trusty pills, but I found that in the meantime, without knowing it, I’d developed a new dependency. It took only a few forgetful days without the Paxil for the chills, the dizziness and the electric shocks to set in. Yes, the electric shocks. Remove the Paroxetine for five days and nights, and it feels as though you’ve been plugged into the National Grid. The zaps leap from the tops of your limbs to your very extremities, and they don’t let up for several days. Withdrawal symptoms – nothing less – to add to your returning anxiety. It’s not a drug you want to give up in a hurry.

To bring this rambling discourse back to the present, it was only when I arrived back in the UK and went looking for my fix from the village GP that I realised what a fix I was actually in. The GP, quite possibly the first I’ve visited who has any real experience of treating clinical depression on a regular basis, listened to my tale with a sheepish, somewhat guilty look on her face. Apologising for her predecessors, she explained that Paroxetine products are no longer the reach-for antidepressant of choice. While its ability to tackle clinical depression and anxiety disorder are well recognised, she told me, the dependency Paroxetine fosters is not worth the trouble. She modestly claimed an 80% success rate transferring strung-out Paroxetine junkies to Fluoxetine (Prosac to the rest of us), which she tells me is easier to reduce should counselling be effective in combating the underlying depression. Once again, I only have the GP’s word to go on here, so forgive me if I don’t accept it without reservation. But that’s where I’m at now – spaced out as the transfer of drugs works its way through my system, but hopeful of a relief from the immediate threat of electrocution.

Of course, I’m not nearly as troubled as I might have been. I know people who suffered with the illness to a debilitating level by comparison. At the age of 34, I’m successful in what I do for a living, and I’m the proud father of two lovely, healthy kids. I dare say I’d even be capable of functioning without antidepressants – 20mg a day is not a high dose, after all – though I’d prefer not to give it a go just yet, and certainly not without supervision. On the occasions that I’ve skipped my pills for longer than is advisable, I’ve found that a combination of eating my greens and walking for a few miles a day has kept me feeling as balanced as I suspect I ever was, and I’m certainly more determined to get things done than I was in my “normal” years. All of the interviews and published articles you’ll find elsewhere on this blog I did during my “depressed” years, so it certainly hasn’t hindered my career or sense of ambition.

I don’t want to round this post off with some pithy remark. I want to point out, simply, that once I finally managed to spill the contents of my confused mind across the desk of a clued-up doctor, things happened very quickly. No, a cure wasn’t forthcoming, but help was at hand, as was a plausible explanation.

A combination of poor understanding, on the patient’s part, on the part of some GPs, and on the part of the public at large, means that the illness goes undetected, unspoken and unsupported all too often. Whether any of this was the case for poor Gary Speed may well remain a point of conjecture, but depression is a real and very powerful illness indeed, and, statistically, it will trouble someone sitting within spitting distance of where you’re reading this right now, at some point in their lives. It may even trouble you, though with a little help and perseverance, hopefully not for long.

For more information on coping with depression, see the Depression Alliance UK homepage.

I spent this morning reviewing the world’s first pee-powered games machine, a hands-free device launched at The Exhibit bar, Balham, South London. Sent by Time Out to blog the experience, my word count limit meant that I didn’t have the opportunity to report on some of the more geeky aspects of the launch. So, for the really interested urine-driven gamers out there, here’s the full transcript of my interview with developers Gordon MacSween and Mark Melford, dealing with questions like, “Wasn’t the world’s first pee-powered games machine released in Japan in January?” and “What’s in it for the women?” For the complete lowdown, read on.

Who came up with the idea?

Mark Melford: I think Gordon did.

Gordon MacSween: And it’s probably not unique. Do you know the story of the little fly in Schiphol airport in Amsterdam? It was a little social study that they did. They had these urinals with a little fly on, and they found that they didn’t have to clean up as much. People just couldn’t help but aiming for the fly. That’s been pretty much borne out, although we’re encouraging people to steer left and right. I just thought the fly was ok, but a bit boring; wouldn’t it be better if it was moving? That stayed as a discussion topic for quite a while until I saw that two guys from MIT had actually done this as a final year project. It was fine – it worked, and they got their degree, but it was pretty complicated, and it was a one-off. It had wires coming down and a big plastic molding, but it was enough to spark my interest. I thought that if there was a product that you could just fit to the wall, power up the internet, switch it on and start playing, then that would be saleable. So I pitched it to Mark, who picked up on the potential for entertainment advertising.

MM: I had a media consultancy business, so I was working with a lot of broadcasters and newspapers on strategy and driving more revenue through ad sales, so this apparently whacky idea, when you think about it… You’ve got an audience with a man for one minute.

GM: My wife would kill for that!

MM: The average “dwell time” length, we discovered, is 55 seconds for a man in the UK. Slightly longer for a man who is smiling, because it’s a funny thing. I thought there might be some media value in that. There are quite a few trends, particularly in out-of-home media, that make this quite timely. Spending on the digital signs around London that you see is growing at around 30% a year. More specifically, the location-based signs that you see, like the screens in taxis, hair salons – if you can capture someone when they’re still, and they have a dwell time of a few seconds, you can see that there’s a lot of interest in that field. Captive Media has a good heritage. Then there’s the executive channel, putting screens in elevators in the City, and there are a lot more very interesting concepts out there ­– putting big plasma screens on waste bins across London. It’s a crazy idea, recycling bins across London with a plasma screen on the side. It’s all because people respond much more to a moving image than a static one, according to the research. It shows that the recall rates are anything up to 8 times higher. So a digital screen in a place where people look at it struck me as a really interesting idea.

GM: The company that makes our product also made the ones at Liverpool Street Station, along the escalator. Our criteria [for producing the product] was that it had to be beautiful, so it’s attractive to the venue, but it also had to be rugged and 100% waterproof. But those ones at Liverpool Street ­– in order to keep your attention for the 50 seconds you’re on it, they’ve had to put in 60 screens.

Have you had any ideas about how to develop the pee-controlled games console for women yet?

MM: Yes we have. We are product designers, but we have to recognize our limitations, so anatomically speaking, there cannot be something like this for the ladies. But girls have a different problem: they have to queue at busy venues. So we have been trialing a simple screen that looks like these and carries a lot of the same content as these, either just showing the content or we’re experimenting with very simple forms of gesture recognition, so they can swipe, with a screen next to the hand-dryer or the mirror, but most importantly visible from the queue. Upstairs here [at The Exhibit], in the ladies bathroom we have a screen with a ladies’ channel showing specifically things that women have told us they’d like to see – celebrity gossip, fashion and make-up tips.

GM: What we have now that we didn’t when we started thinking about this is the software to manage thousands of screens if you need to. So we can say we want this stuff only to go into the ladies’, then we tag it for the ladies; if we want it only to go to London, we tag it for screens in London. So the bar owner can choose exactly what he wants, and he can say, “I want this only to go out after the watershed,” or “this is only for the weekend”, and we can schedule that in for them.

You’re saying this is the world’s first, but we saw something similar from SEGA in Tokyo in January (the Toylet). How do the two products differ?

GM: There were two aspects to it for us. On the one hand we thought someone’s doing the same thing; on the other hand, we looked at their product and, in a sense, it was the same as the MIT product I mentioned earlier. If you’ve got to take the product off the wall and drill it and put cables up, it’s going to be very difficult to make it vandal-proof. So we set out and developed and patented contactless sensors.

MM: I think [Sega] are trialing it. We’ve been reading that there’s an official launch coming up. In fact, it was publicized as being November 21, but it doesn’t seem to have happened.

GM: They definitely haven’t done what we set out to do. Theirs has a target and it measures how long you pee on it, and then at the end of the game it does things that we might regard as being in poor taste – but that’s a cultural thing. Whereas, we’ve done something where you can drive something left and right and you can play games on it. In the end, our bigger impression was that if someone as big as SEGA are looking at the same area, then it has probably got legs. It’d be daft to say we’re not worried about SEGA, because they’re massive, but we’re certainly not concerned about their initial product.

It sounds like SEGA’s has to do with pee power and pressure, which makes me worry about giving myself a hernia.

GM: Well, quite! Ours is much more to do with good aim. During our trials in Cambridge, what happened was that the first night we put it in, I was wondering what would happen, and I heard this group of Americans coming in and this one guy was high-fiving his mates, shouting “24!” [his score on the On the Piste game], and I thought, “this is good…”. And so I went back in the following week and asked the owner how it was going, and he’d say “40″, and then “60″. And I’m thinking, how are people doing that? And it turns out people are learning how to stop and start [their pee flow] to get higher scores. We’ve got 3 scores so far over 100.

GM: So I don’t think ours will give you a hernia; rather it’d give you the sort of exercise your doctor might give you!

So far I’ve found that I’d need to drink a lot to get the score up to anything respectable. A couple of cups of coffee doesn’t really cut it.

GM: Volume is good! First thing in the morning is tough, but once you break the seal at night… We tend to drink a lot of water so that we can test it out more often.

How many venues have taken it up so far?

GM: Well, we’ve been trying to keep it under the radar, so the plan was always to have this one and then the one in Cambridge. But in the meantime, one way or another, we’ve been approached by a company ­– a big mall in Bristol – and we’re now doing the installation surveys for them. We’ve had quite a lot of interest from the States, but we’ve had to say we’ll come back to them. The plan is, after today, we’ll start to talk to bar chains and exhibition centres. The nice thing about this is it’s quite easy to get people to talk about it.

What games do you currently operate on the system?

MM: On the Piste is, by design, about as simple a game as you can imagine. It has to be. And then there’s my personal favourite [a version of the classic Atari wall-smashing game, Breakout], which we wanted to be as retro as it possible, so that we could demonstrate the concept. Clever Dick is our quiz game: very simple multiple-choice questions and answers. It’s so simple – in fact, we started with three options, but that was too much processing for a man with his willy in his hands. If you have a look at the Clever Dick game, [reading the questions from the screen]: “Two pints of lager would put you over the limit, true or false? Alcohol is a depressant, true or false?” We’re working with Drinkaware. This is an example of gameification, and we’re using that format where the guy is trying for a high score, while we’re putting across a serious message.

What’s the future for this platform?

GM: It’s a little bit further away, but because all the units are linked to the internet, you could have multiplayer games.

What, with men heading to the toilet together for a game?

GM: Well, that already happens. The idea of the “Toilet Party” is something we’ve seen in Cambridge.

Sorry, the “Toilet Party”? 

GM: Well, that’s a phrase I use for when girls all go off together to the toilet in a huddle. It turns out that men were starting to go off in pairs! And the whole urinal etiquette, where men just don’t talk to each other at urinals…we’ve see men queuing up and then looking over each others’ shoulders and saying, “You’ve gotta hit the target!” So the chatter starts there. It’s been interesting.

And people are actually managing to stay within the urinal? The first thing that struck me were potential cleaning costs…

GM: In Cambridge, they’ve told us that there are two things they’ve found there are less of: less mess, which we sort of expected because we tried to design the game so you’re not splashing about, and less vandalism. When we put it in, people thought it’d be [ripped] off the wall within a week, and it’s still there after 4 months. But because people are having a laugh, there’s a lot less vandalism. People tend to get less angry. So, if you put a little bit of thought into the way you design the game, people get better. It rewards aim. And of course you don’t go too far right because you know any minute you’ll have to swing left.

Fake priesting seems to be getting some attention again, thanks largely to On the Virgin Road, or iamafakepriestinjapan, as its URL prefers it. What interests me most about this is that it hasn’t been picked up as a decent blog topic before – I certainly wish I’d thought of it back in my stole-wearing days.

Yes, that’s right. I was a fake priest in Japan. Not that it’s much of a secret; I must’ve told the stories more times than I actually performed weddings – 1,092 weddings all told, between the years of 2003 and 2009. I got pretty good at it, too; so good in fact that there was a point during my peak years (yes, I had peak years) that a “chapel” in Kitakyushu secured my services long-term, as newly-weds-to-be were apparently asking specifically for me. I’d like to humbly admit that I have no idea how they’d even heard of me, but that wouldn’t be true. 2005 was the year, after all, that I began appearing in fake priest commercials. 

It’s true that I never saw one of these, though a number of my friends told me they’d seen me reading from Corinthians in Japanese during a JAL flight between Tokyo and Fukuoka. It didn’t surprise me at all. During “the peak years” I’d occasionally be flown out to the Goto Islands in Nagasaki (which, incidentally, already had a history of religious invasion), and sometimes be requested to perform dog weddings.

A dog wedding does exactly as you’re hoping it does: two dogs, one in a gown and one in a tuxedo, walking down the aisle and signing singledom away with one mucky paw print (the owners would dip the mutts’ paws into a bejewelled tub of paint). I even went so far as to star in a commercial for a dog wedding, though it was a service that never really caught on. I’ve always hoped this was because Japanese people are not as easily fooled out of their cash as the bandits who dream up things like dog weddings think they are, but the company that hired me explained that it had more to do with a lack of extra advertising funds. What some people will do with their money during a recession beggars belief.

The peak years lasted between 2005 and 2007, a time when I could rattle off the scripts in my sleep, although I always kept them glued inside my copy of the King James Bible to be on the safe side. I was good at my job, I was being paid ridiculously well (15,000 yen per 15-minute wedding; approximately 6-8 weddings per weekend, and 3 or 4 during the week) and I had a huge amount of free time with which to pursue my writing career. Had I not been a fake priest in Japan, I’d never have found the time to freelance, or the money to support my family. No two ways about it, fake priesting served me well.

In 2008, I was approached by a literary agent in New York who had heard my odd tale and asked me to write it up as a book proposal. I spent a few months trying, but quickly found that it had very little substance – much the way I felt about the job itself by this point. It was great for a few anecdotes, but ultimately soulless – and I use that word with caution. Not in the slightest bit religious, I spent years dismissing the god fearing folk who told me I was destined to burn. What ultimately got to me was the fact that I was, quite literally, living a lie.

While these weddings took place in establishments that screamed fakery, the amount of people who appeared to have had the wool pulled over their eyes unnerved me. Nobody seemed to question why “Chester Cathedral“, a vast gray monstrosity that sat 250 people and had bigger stained glass window than the church in the village I grew up in, sat on a nondescript road in Fukuoka’s Kasuga district. If they did, they seemed to dismiss it easily enough.

Maybe I shouldn’t have allowed it to get to me so much, but the idea of a such as myself performing pre-wedding counselling sessions, as I was occasionally asked to do, really began to make me feel deeply uncomfortable. The standard line used by most members of the fake priest community was that we were just actors, but I occasionally found that the people I worked with closely – the choirgirls and ushers – were under the impression that we were the real deal. If they weren’t in on it, the chances were that the bride and groom weren’t either.

The last 12 months were unpleasant. I started having severe panic attacks in the middle of ceremonies – white knuckle rides that, by all accounts, I did an impressive job of covering up. Somehow I was able to get to the end of each wedding without collapsing, though my heart was pounding, my fingers were locked around the edges of the altar, and my mind was swimming in the absolute surreality of it all – “what the fuck am I doing here in front of 300 Japanese people, dressed in a smock, reading scripture I don’t believe in a language I don’t fully understand?” I still dream I’m doing it, but never during a comfortable sleep.

In a way it helped me forward. I used any energy that I could find in my subsequent depression to work harder at my other job, my writing and editing, and eventually I managed to claw my way out of the pulpit. If I’m surprised by anything now, it’s only how quickly I managed to forget the script, words I used to read so well that they’d regularly summon me for a performance in small towns in the Honshu hills. Forgive me the cliché, but it seems like a story from another lifetime. And thank the good lord for that.

During a brief stopover in Kyushu in the early 1990s, British broadcaster and former Monty Python Michael Palin stopped in at Huis Ten Bosch, a faithful recreation of a Dutch town, replete with gouda, tulips, windmills and a clock tower built out of bricks shipped from Holland. Not sure what to make of it all, he dubbed it ’cultural karaoke’ and quickly moved on. It’s a phrase that I’ve had reason to recall many times, albeit never before when discussing a mountain range.

But it’s in the heart of the Japan Alps that the phrase fits once again. I’m on a fraying bus, rattling along the road between Shin-Shimashima Station and Kamikochi, trying hard to ignore the taped, shrill voice of a woman that loops on the bus Tannoy. She’s imploring me to enjoy the views of the astounding countryside, and to be fair, she has her work cut out: of the five or six passengers, I’m the only one still awake. It’s not so much the beautiful views that hold my rapt attention, however. It’s the abundance of cookie cutter Alpine restaurants and lodges that line the roadside, each looking as though the blueprints were copied from a Heidi picture book, not one demonstrating any architectural familiarity with the country we’re in.

It’s a phenomena that continues the next day when my guide begins to speak proudly of Walter Weston, ’the grandfather of Japanese mountaineering’. Weston was a British missionary who spent years wandering around the Honshu mountains during the Meiji period, often attributed (mistakenly) with having given the Japan Alps their name. He’s referred to here with the same reverence most mountaineers might reserve for Hilary and Tenzing, so when I wonder out loud if his pedestal might not be doing a disservice to the thousands of Japanese folk whose lives were spent hobbling around the upper echelons of this spectacular region prior to Weston’s arrival, my deliberations are met with a kind of disbelief. Clearly this is not the place to ponder the philosophies of Michael Palin.

That said, there’s precious little else to do in Kamikochi beyond pondering and wandering, which is precisely what makes it the perfect weekend escape from Tokyo. Not that this is a groundbreaking revelation; Tokyoites have been coming here for the best part of a century, at one point arriving in such heavy numbers that most of their weekend was spent in the car, sitting in a traffic jam (photos from the Showa era make it look like hell on a mountainside). It’s still busy, of course – arriving and departing require careful planning – but the mid-’90s decision to make Kamikochi car-free means that the area has flourished in a far more attractive way. During our hike, our guide explains that he carries a Japanese machete as protection against bears, an indigenous population that is pleasingly on the up.

These days, visitors to Kamikochi tend to arrive on the rickety bus. Leaving their cars at Sawando, the nearest settlement, they line up in vast numbers to be transported to the village centre where, it must be said, the local architecture takes on a more Japanese aspect. Calling it a village might be too much, in fact – it’s little more than a collection of hotels and souvenir shops huddled around a particularly popular rope bridge (Kappa Bashi) – but its location is mesmeric. Seated at the foot of the Hotaka mountain range, it is naturally protected from human interference (its designation as a national park in 1916 helped fend off would-be developers) and summer typhoons (they don’t tend to scale the 3,000m summits successfully).

That’s not to say the area doesn’t suffer from extreme weather; between November 15 and April 27, the roads and hotels are closed in anticipation of heavy snow. ‘I came up here once at the dead of winter,’ a young worker at my lodge told me. ‘It was amazing. Nobody was here, just me and the mountains…and the snow. It was so deep, the taxi driver wouldn’t come much closer than Sawando. I had to hike the rest of the way.’ If he hadn’t actually seen The Shining, this guy had at least partially lived it.

Travellers to Kamikochi can expect a good selection of hikes, varying between the simple to challenging, each guaranteed a breathtaking series of views that change according to the season. By the time the area shuts down in November, it has already become a snow-lover’s ideal vacation, while the summer season is attended by glorious azure skies. Whichever time of the year you choose to visit, it’s well worth contacting the local travel bureau (see the Sacred Kamikochi link below) and trying to arrange a hike with Kazunari Ohukara, a septuagenerian who has been hopping around in the Kamikochi hills since he was 18. As mountain men go, he’s a peach, albeit one with sun-bruised skin and a tendency to chase wild monkeys mid-sentence.

With Okuhara-San as your guide, every tree has a story. He wears his deep love for the area on his sleeve, and no bridge is crossed without the old man turning and promising it a return visit, bidding it a fond farewell as he would any old friend. Sounds mad? Eccentric, certainly. When I ask him which his favourite peak is, he tells anyone who’ll listen that he has climbed Mt Roppyaku 220 times. Then he turns towards the peak and breaks into a loud serenade, ending with what may be a failed attempt to get a decent echo going. Suffice to say, he leaves an impression.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1dpzLARx0A]

Returning to the real world from all this would be a shock to the system, were it not for the Tokyo-esque bus queues that great you at Kamikochi bus station. These can last for hours on end, so the best thing to do is head over there after breakfast (or as soon as you arrive, if you’re on a day trip), and get a ticket for a specific bus. You’ll need the ticket itself plus a numbered boarding ticket to ensure you’re booked youself a seat. Once this is done, make the most of the time you have in the area. From the active volcano, Mount Yakedake, right along the river to the Kamonji-Goya hut, where fresh iwana (river trout) are prepared in the traditional fashion, it’s easy to see why Kamikochi has become so beloved of Japanese holidaymakers. If only Michael Palin had stopped off here instead.

Travel tips

Where to stay

Kamikochi has accommodation for all budgets. With rates starting from ¥8,000 (per person) per night, Kamikochi Nishi-Itoya Sanso is a very reasonable deal indeed. The inclusive meal is excellent (Kamikochi does very well generally in the culinary department, making good use of the fresh ingredients found in the region) and the staff are friendly. The shared bathtubs may prove overwhelming for many foreign visitors, but they are segregated and have decent instructions on bathing etiquette in English. Elsewhere, the Kamikochi Gosenjaku Hotel offers a slightly more refined stay, with rates starting from ¥28,000 per person. If these prices seem steep, the camp site offers decent facilities. Special offers, booking in English and general visitor information can be found at the Sacred Kamikochi website.

What to eat

While your hotel will most likely provide you with a decent dinner and breakfast, the river trout at Kamonji-Goya (about an hour’s hike from Kappa Bashi) is not to be missed. The fish is prepared over the flames of a traditional irori fireplace, and visitors get the chance to peruse Walter Weston’s remaining effects – specifically his ice pick and rifle, both of which hang from the wall.

How to get there

Kamikochi is not accessible by car, though it is a relatively easy (if not overlong) trip from the capital. The Tokyo to Kamikochi trek starts at Shinjuku, where the Azusa trains run through to Matsumoto in Nagano Prefecture – the journey is a little shy of three hours long. From Matsumoto, take the Dentetsu Kamikochi line through to its terminus at Shin-Shimashima Station (approximately 30 minutes), before changing to the Kamikochi bus, which takes a fairly spectacular hour-long route around (and even through) some of Japan’s highest peaks. Ahead of your return journey, be sure to collect a numbered boarding ticket several hours before you plan to depart.

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?

Think hunger strikes and, inevitably, you think Gandhi and Bobby Sands. Quite clearly, Naoya Okamoto (20) and his fellow strikers are in a less desperate situation, this being a kind of scheduled strike that will last only 10 days – enough to severely weaken the participants, but not bring them to death’s door. Okamoto responds only vaguely when Sands’ name is mentioned, pointing out that the hunger strike is such a rare form of protest here that few Japanese know much about it. ‘The word doesn’t even exist in Japanese,’ he says. ‘The nearest might be danjiki [fasting], so “danjiki sutoraiki” [fasting strike] could work.’

‘But it’s not like Ramadan,’ his comrade, Shiori Sekiguchi (19), is quick to interject. ‘We’re not eating anything for ten days, 24 hours per day.’ Shiori, speaking a smattering of English, explains that they’re allowing themselves only water and salt (which explains the dabbing), and that the strike will end on September 20. They’re currently into their fourth day. ‘It’s not too bad,’ says Shiori, ‘although standing up and sitting down is getting difficult.’

Naoya admits to feeling a little anaemic, but he’s something of an old hand at this, having previously been involved in a 10-day hunger strike outside Yamaguchi Prefectural Hall. The protest is essentially the same, the continuation of a struggle well documented in Hiroko Tabuchi’s recent New York Times article, Japanese Island’s Activists Resist Nuclear Industry’s Allure. The inhabitants of Iwaishima, Yamaguchi Prefecture, have been attempting to block plans for the development of a nuclear power station on their small island since 1982. Shiori says that they were relatively successful until two years ago, when the boats carrying building materials put out to sea again. ‘They didn’t have permission from the islanders, and they hadn’t even done an environmental assessment of the area,’ she says, exasperated. Naoya and his co-campaigners sat hungry outside the Prefectural Building, lending support to a campaign now in its 30th year, and to campaigners tiring as they enter old age.

Aside from drawing attention to the Iwaishima developments, the Tokyo hunger strike participants wish to make a wider appeal. As representatives of a generation that will have to bear the brunt of decisions made by Prime Minister Noda’s new cabinet, their message is directed at both the government and people of their own age. ‘For the young generation and generations to come, we see no bonus in having nuclear power plants,’ explains Naoya. ‘It’s a poor legacy to be left with. We don’t want to live with these plants, we don’t want to live with the contamination they leave behind, and we don’t want to live with the risks. For my part, I feel like our generation’s voice needs to be heard, and it needs to be taken into account. I want everyone, especially people of my own age, to think about the cost of all this in terms of people’s lives.’

The young striker may be knocking together a hardy CV of protests, but I’m struck by how uncomfortably he fits with the rallying stereotype. He looks considerably younger than his 20 years, and is dressed much like any other young Japanese guy might on a stifling late-summer’s day. However, my colleague later points out that meeting Shiroto no Ran’s Hajime Matsumoto, the leader of the group behind many of the anti-nuclear protests of the last six months, was similarly anti-climactic. These are not men chained to trees or holding out in fox holes beneath partially built runways. Although Matsumoto was jailed as a student for throwing paint at his university president, his more recent actions have been less flamboyant. His large-scale demos have been brought about by the influence he wields – leadership that has come through the respect that experience brings.

Talking to Naoya Okamoto, I get the sense that I could be meeting an embryonic Matsumoto, someone perhaps to watch in years to come. That said, I can’t escape the nagging feeling that, by pre-scheduling the end of the hunger strike, he has removed the necessary do-or-die drama that would catch the headlines he hopes for. Not that I’d encourage anyone into that position; it’s just that what is taking place outside Kasumigaseki Station feels brave but restrained. Maybe that’s why the last six months of anti-nuclear protests have, at times, felt like little more than a sideshow.

Click here to follow the progress of the Tokyo hunger strike. The strikers also have a Facebook page, and Naoya Okamoto can be reached on his Twitter account, @HungryKinchan. You can visit the strikers in person outside exit 12, Kasumigaseki Station (Chiyoda, Hibiya lines). This article was originally blogged on Time Out Tokyo

Everyone knows Booker T. Jones, though not everyone realises it. Despite being one of the most influential musicians of the last half century, he is best known as a session man and songwriter, plying his trade in the background, producing tunes that have been in the foreground more times than you could ever recall.

Booker T. was there when you began raiding your parents’ vinyl collection in your teens, blazing loud behind Wilson Pickett on ‘In the Midnight Hour‘. He was there when you fumbled around on the dance floor, wracking up the emotion as Otis hammered home ‘Try a Little Tenderness‘ (yes, that’s him on keyboards in the video). Heck, he was even there when you learnt what soul music meant, defining a genre on the seminal Sam & Dave track, ‘Soul Man‘ (although not at his usual Hammond B3, as we shall see). As a member of the MG’s, the house band at hit-producing Stax Records, Booker T. pumped out classic upon classic throughout the ’60s and ’70s, and in their downtime the band recorded eternal slices of soulful funk – you probably know and adore ‘Green Onions‘, ‘Hip Hug Her‘ and ‘Soul Limbo’ (the latter better known to Brits as ‘Test Match Special‘).

The man himself is taller than expected (early footage makes him look so boyish, you’d almost think he was five foot nothing), and has the manners of a southern gent well into his sixties. He’s almost apologetic when I wonder aloud how I might go about asking questions that he hasn’t been asked before, and he’s unfailingly polite in discussing the music that made him famous 50 years ago, a subject he must have to deal with on a daily basis. In more recent years, Booker T. Jones has been in the studio with the likes of Drive By Truckers and The Roots, laying down two of the most acclaimed albums of his long career, Potato Hole (2009) and The Road to Memphis(2011), and it’s with these recordings fresh in his mind that we sit down in a quiet room beneath Blue Note Tokyo to discuss a career that has, even in some small way, affected most of us.

There can’t be many artists who pick up a Lifetime Achievement Grammy [in 2007] and then go on to make two of the most acclaimed albums of their career. What happened there?
I think I would’ve wanted to record [Potato Hole] had I not gotten that award. It’s always been there – the spark never went out. Fortunately it never left. I shut myself down at night, as far as imagining music and creating new songs and themes. I have a method of shutting myself down so I can live in the normal world.

What is your method?
I meditate and I work on absolutely controlling my mind. It’s totally impossible to be a creative musician in the real world – it just doesn’t make any sense at all. You need to know where your car is! You can’t write down a melody when you’re in Sears with your kid. It’s just totally impractical. So you have to be able to create when it’s the correct time to create. You have to somehow be able to control your mind and corral those musings. You have to be able to remember, have a hell of a memory, or some way of making it come at an opportune time.

You’re a rarity amongst 1960s musicians in that you can actually write music…
Yeah, I scribble. I have a little moleskin notebook with a stave on it that I try to jot notes down on. More recently, I have my iPad, and I can make notes on that. I keep a little Roland recorder, and that makes it easy. But if you’re truly prolific, you have to come up with a discipline whereby maybe you’re the only one who’s going to experience this idea, so you have to have the confidence and discipline to wait for the next one. That’s the kind of process I go through.

You’ve been on thousands of sessions, from stuff specifically with the MG’s to classics like ‘Soul Man’. Were they just work? Are there any sessions that stand out for you?
Well the process of getting there and doing them was just like work, just the same as being a street cleaner or anything – you get there at a certain time, you have your materials and you’re ready to go. But, you know, because it’s music there’s always the potential for a special thing to happen. And there were many, many special moments that happened. So, no, it wasn’t just work in that respect. It was very pleasurable. It was a real privilege to do that and to be able to make a living doing that.

But, for example, with a track like ‘Soul Man’, are you still able to put yourself in that session again, or do the vast number of sessions merge together in your memory?
Yeah, well, for me ‘Soul Man’ was just tambourine. That’s the only thing I played on that song. (Laughs) I was listening to them create the whole thing, kinda standing in the back of the room by the door, and they felt they needed a little pop for the backbeat. So I walked in with the tambourine and went over to one of the drum mics and played a mallet on a tambourine. And that’s all I did with that.

But still, what a track to have played tambourine on!
Well, thanks. Yeah.

To bring it forward a little, how did you go about picking bands like the Drive By Truckers and The Roots to play on your last two albums?
Drive By Truckers are a southern soul-rock band, but I was mostly enticed by the fact that they have been faithful to the three guitars. For the particular music that I was writing at that time, they were the band who most personified the sound that I wanted. But it had to be more than just the instrumentation. The people were wonderful. The people gave themselves over to my music, and that’s what made it happen. It was a great human experience working with them. And that’s just a chance you take: you never know what’s going to happen there. But they brought food, they brought their entire selves, each and every one of them, and they were dedicated. And that’s why that music turned out the way it did.

And with The Roots?
The Roots was a similar experience, but this was New York City and these were people who have worked with some of the best artists to come through the city. They work quickly, they are extremely talented, but they had a deep respect for the music I had made in the past. Actually, I think they were students in a lot of ways. So this was an opportunity to do some soul music with a hip hop band that actually used traditional instruments, which is a rare thing. I don’t know of any other band that does that. So, once again, it was good fortune. I had my eye on them even before any of this happened. I have to give a lot of credit to Jimmy Fallon, who is just a big music fan. He wanted it to happen. But the expertise – the chops, as musicians like to call a musician’s ability to play – was over the top. Questlove’s drumming, Owen Biddle’s bass playing, Captain Kirk’s guitar playing were just what I needed at that time.

Have there been instances in the past when tracks of yours have been sampled into hip hop in a way that has impressed you?
You know, that has many, many times been a mind-opening experience for me, the latest instance being Kanye West and Jay-Z doing Otis’s ‘Try a Little Tenderness’, which was a track we recorded just before we went to England. That little walk up thing that they used – I would never have considered it in the way they did. Hip hop music turns me on in a way that no other music does. The creativity and the imagination is surprising to me – it’s great! Yes, that happens very often. I’ll hear a song I conceived one way and they use it in a different way because they have the use of the technology. It’s an eye opener.

When you first heard samples coming into music, perhaps back in the early to mid-’80s, was that something you were open to or were you initially standoffish about it?
I was open to it. It was a little strange for me at first, and I wasn’t sure what to make of it, but they quickly got it together business-wise, which helps. But it’s being done by musicians and producers who give it a new twist. I mean, I remember when I first heard ‘Green Onions’ re-used, and it was cool!

How many times has that track been covered?
[Slowly, emphasising each word] I have no idea. A lot.

There’s an irony in that track’s history, as I understand it, in that your producer was far more into it than you were…
There was no producer. There was just unused studio time and four studio musicians left with a session that didn’t happen. We just had an open afternoon with nothing to do, so I just started playing that little riff that I’d been playing on piano, and I just tried it on the Hammond organ and it sounded like that, it sounded so cool. Actually, it was just a blues, but that little organ sounded so cool. It was what Ray Charles had used and it was something I had always had eyes for. So I took some lessons on a Hammond B3, and it was just providence, I guess. But there was no producer. Nobody saying, ‘hey, we’ve gotta record that song.’

Was it a one-take job?
I think so. I don’t remember.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U-7QSMyz5rg]
Would you say it has become an albatross in some way? Artists are known for certain tracks, right? So how do you respond to it?
No, it hasn’t been that. You know, the business is so crazy, I don’t know if I’d be in the business if it wasn’t for ‘Green Onions’. I’m from Memphis, Tennesse, and Memphis would’ve been on the map without ‘Green Onions’… It’s hard to say. Everybody who gets into the industry from a small town has to have something of an albatross, I think, or how do you do it? It’s an impossible task! There weren’t no American Idol in 1962! But I love the song. I love to hear it and I love to play it. I don’t get tired of it.

But can you fully comprehend the influence that it has had? I mean, you’re talking to someone now who, at the age of 17, heard ‘Green Onions’ and was prompted to delve into a new area of musical history, into the mod culture…
The what culture?

The mod culture. Do you know about the mods? The UK? [Booker T. looks like he's listening to a raving loon] The 1960s?Quadrophenia…?
Ah, okay. Errm… yeah, I know…

I mean, I just wonder if you can comprehend how far that little track has travelled?
Okay, well that’s all good information. I’m glad you told me. I’m beginning to comprehend it. I’m just glad to have been involved. It’s amazing. Music is a powerful thing. It’s unbelievable.

How do you go about selecting your setlist when you have so many tracks to choose from?
That has become a battle. The more I live, the more music I become involved in; the more music I love and like, the more music I want to share with the audience. It’s been a discussion we’ve had since we’ve been here [in Tokyo], because I’m having trouble sticking to the setlist. I’ll get up there and I’ll look at people and I’ll start playing one thing or the other, and what I’m hearing in my mind and what I’m feeling isn’t the next song on the setlist. So I just go ahead and do what feels comfortable, and I’m off the list. But there’s so much music in my past that I really love and really want to share. I mean, I have songs that I recorded with Bob Dylan, Otis Redding, Albert King, Barbara Streisand. All this music has meaning to me, and I balance all this with the new music… and it’s just too much. There’s not enough time in the show to do what I want to do. So I try and get right into the moment and play what’s in my head.

You must have an incredibly tight band to follow you wherever you want to go.
Oh, they’re amazing. Amazing! I love those guys, and they’re willing to do that… they actually enjoy it. The other thing is, I have trouble sticking with playing songs in the same key. I was just dealing with that last night. We played ‘Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door’ in E, and I was fantasising about playing it in A. But they quickly know what to do; they know what key I’m playing it in and they play it in that key. So that’s fortunate.

Are you a strict band leader?
In those ways, yes I am. But the guys don’t complain about it too much. I give them the freedom to play what they want to play, it just has to be in the key that I dictate and the tempo that I dictate. But they can play what they want to play.

What’s the status of the MG’s at the moment?
We still play some. It’s been about a year since we played; last time was up in Rochester, near New York. Duck [Donald 'Duck' Dunn, bass player] has since had surgery on his hands. He has a hereditary problem with his hands – he, his brother and his father had the curling of the fingers – and it got progressively worse. But that wasn’t the main problem. The main problem was that we lost Al Jackson Jr [Stax drummer, shot dead at home after disturbing intruders in October 1975], who was a huge musical force for Booker T. & the MG’s. That whole section of Memphis was influenced by him – record labels, all the clubs; the push was to get Al. Take ‘Let’s Stay Together’ – the beat on that, you couldn’t get that anywhere else other than Al Jackson. And that’s what I grew up on. That was the guy that was playing drums while I was learning to play bass at the Flamingo [legendary Memphis soul club]. It was more than a loss, and that’s what happened to Booker T. & the MG’s. We’ve played with other great drummers but, not to take anything away from them, the essence of the band was created with him. But we’ve had some great times since then.

So the MG’s will ride again?
Yeah. Duck is starting to play again. His operation was successful, so that’s good. We’ll just wait and see. But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve taken so many restrictions off myself musically, and there are so many great musicians. My experience with the Truckers and Neil Young was unbelievable, as it was with Questlove and The Roots.

Who’s next then? Have you got a list?
No, no I don’t. I just try and follow this path that I’m on and it leads me to these people. It just kinda happens. I’m learning how to let it take over, just let it do that. Instead of trying to guide myself, I’m learning how to follow.

Booker T. Jones is at Blue Note Tokyo until September 13, shows at 7pm and 9.30pm. His latest album, The Road from Memphis, is out now. This interview was originally published on Time Out Tokyo

It’s a peculiarity of this job that I’ll occasionally interview someone who means zip to me, yet everything to a crowd of other people. In Aamir Khan’s case, we’re talking several hundred million people. He’s the star of Bollywood’s latest blockbuster – heck, he’s the star of the two top-grossing Bollywood films of all time – but the truth is he only popped up on my personal radar a month ago, around the time I dropped into an Indian cinema, handed over my 30 dirhams, and sat down to watch 3 Idiots.

I’m not unusual in my ignorance. Bollywood – Hindi cinema, to give it its more acceptable moniker – has, so far, failed to cross over to a Western audience in any meaningful manner. It’s fascinating that at one point during our conversation, Khan – an ‘A’ lister with a face recognisable to more than a billion people – cheerfully gives me a potted rundown of his CV (‘I’ve directed one film, I’ve produced three films, and as an actor I’ve done roughly 40 films’). It’s hard to imagine Brad Pitt doing a similar thing. That may have something to do with the fact that Aamir Khan is unfailingly polite, of course, but the fact remains that the nearest thing to Bollywood most Western audiences have experienced is Slumdog Millionaire.

His views on that film’s success make for an easy opening gambit. I wonder how a filmmaker and actor synonymous with Indian cinema felt watching Danny Boyle’s tribute to the genre. Again, he’s unfailingly polite, though forthright in his opinion. ‘I suppose I’m too well aware of how things are here in Bombay; the lead kid who is supposed to be from the slums talking in a British accent, in English, kind of throws me off. But I don’t view Slumdog Millionaire as an Indian film. For me it’s a film that was made by Danny, who has an international perspective.’

‘International perspective’ is key to the crossover. As the world’s population becomes increasingly homogenous in its tastes, it’s peculiar that Hindi film has trouble finding a significant audience outside of its home country. Khan’s latest film, 3 Idiots, has gone some way towards correcting this, with a continuous presence in the UK top 10 this winter, but he’s certainly not hurrying to ride 3 Idiots to Hollywood. ‘For me the criteria of a film, whether it’s Indian or made outside, is the same. I mean, the script has to excite me; the director has to be someone who I trust and have faith in. Nothing really exciting has come my way so far.’

Khan’s rise to fame is the stuff of legend. ‘I’m not a trained actor. I’ve never been to acting school, so I have no knowledge of the theory of acting.’ He also riles at the popular notion that he began as a child actor. ‘It wasn’t that I was a child actor in the acting profession,’ he explains. ‘It was essentially because my uncle [Nasir Hussain] was a film maker. He was making a film [Yaadon Ki Baaraat] and he said, “Why don’t you do this part that I have for a kid?” That was a one-off for me. I had nothing to do with films thereafter.’

It’s at this point that things start to mirror 3 Idiots, a character-led caper that implores viewers to pursue what they’re good at, not what others believe to be good for them. At the age of 16, Khan was asked to work on a home-made film by a high-school classmate (‘I was the actor, the spot boy, the assistant director, the production assistant – everything rolled into one’). The experience grabbed him, and in a moment of clarity he realised that he’d found his calling. ‘All hell broke loose,’ he remembers, laughing. ‘My family were dead against it. They wanted me to be in a steady profession, like a doctor or an engineer or something. They were protective, but I was very clear about what I wanted, and I stuck fast to my guns.’

Leaving his college education behind, he found a job in the local film industry and from there his rise to the top was swift. Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak (1988) made him a household name and his ‘chocolate-boy good looks’ (Bollywood’s phrase, not mine) prompted Indian women to write love letters to him in blood. These days, he’s one of the most powerful men in Indian cinema. During his promotion for 3 Idiots, he came up with a ruse that saw him don disguises and disappear into the country, leaving clues for fans to track him down. He admits that the opportunity to interact with people ‘without them knowing who I am… was something I haven’t experienced in my own country in 20 years.’

With 3 Idiots now behind him, he’s working on a project with a personal twist, under the direction of his wife, Kiran Rao, in Dhobi Ghaat. ‘She’s a part of all the films that our company produces,’ he explains, ‘but with me as an actor and her as a director, it’s the first time we’ve been put together.’ Our allotted time is quickly running out, so I ask him, simply, how the experience has been. ‘Shooting is complete now,’ he laughs, ‘and we’re still married, so I think it’s okay.’ With two of the world’s biggest films under his belt, it’s hard to see how he could put a foot wrong.

Originally published on Time Out Bahrain, February 2010

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.

A website doing the Japanese Twitter rounds this morning offers readers the chance to personalize their QR codes, for free, by embedding names and other text. Moji-Q isn’t the only place offering this personalized QR service, of course – there are apps that can do similar tricks (Alexandr Balyberdin’s QR+, for example) – but I’ve yet to see a similar version in Japanese. I fully expect the country to go QR crazy a second time around – whether I’ll be able to read the embedded kanji is another matter altogether.

Late last week, the Japanese government lifted a ban on shipments of beef from Fukushima, Iwate and Tochigi Prefectures, bringing minor relief to farmers whose livelihoods had been threatened by the discovery in late July that over 4,000 kilograms of cesium-contaminated beef had hit the shelves at Aeon, one of Japan’s biggest supermarkets. Not that the pressure has been entirely lifted, of course. Amongst everyday folk as much as the farmers themselves, confusion is rife.

Unsurprisingly, few can tell a becquerel from a sievert, and plenty feel that this lack of knowledge has allowed the government and nuclear industry to patronise and mislead them. Couple that with the perception that the country’s leaders have no real idea themselves (Japan just lost its sixth prime minister in five years in a mess of backstabbing and ineptitude), and the current sense of mistrust is wholly justifiable.

For Toshiko Yasuda, a housewife from Yokohama, the only way forward has been to take action herself. Like many others, she watched the explosions at Fukushima Daiichi from the apparent safety of her home, 260 kilometres southwest of the reactors. ‘At first, I was scared,’ she recalls. ‘I couldn’t let my little girl out of the house. During the spring break, she didn’t go outside once.’ Her response, she quickly realised, was ill-informed. ‘It was wrong of me to let my imagination take control of my actions, so I focused on learning the facts.’

Admitting that she knew next to nothing, Toshiko began studying all she could about the Chernobyl incident, and about the known effects of radiation on the human body, expending as much effort as possible on balancing fact against hearsay. It quickly became clear that external radiation probably had very little effect on daily life in Yokohama. The question that she continued to come up against, however, concerned internal radiation. With Fukushima produce freely available in the local supermarket, how could she protect herself and her family against that?

While this was relatively easy to do at home, where she bought produce from as far west as possible, Toshiko had her doubts about what her young daughter was being fed at the local elementary school. Surely counter measures had been employed to ensure the kids weren’t eating contaminated produce? To her horror, no such efforts were being made.

‘They told us they had no plans to change how they prepared the meals,’ she says, the smirk of disbelief still there on her lips; ‘that the products they used were “distributed in the market, therefore they’re safe”.’

In late March, as the rest of the country reacted to the disasters and rumours with understandable incredulity, Toshiko took it upon herself to act. ‘I went to the school and questioned them about the origin of the products they were using,’ she explains. ‘I demanded they use products from as far west as possible, but they told me there was nothing the school could do. “All right then,” I said,’ and she laughs here at the memory. ‘”You people obviously aren’t who I need to be speaking to. I’ll go to the Board of Education.”‘

To be fair to the school, it’s easy to see how Toshiko could be mistaken at this point for a pushy, slightly deranged character – a lone mother on a mission, apparently armed with little more than pop science and personal conviction. She says she was fully aware of how she appeared. ‘I couldn’t just take on the Board of Education alone like this,’ she reflects. ‘I knew I’d be seen as an oversensitive mother, so I came up with the idea of starting a petition. I made a flyer containing all the information I could get my hands on. That was April 20.’

The petition that she eventually submitted contained 2,500 signatures. However, it was rejected – by the school, the assembly, and eventually the Mayor of Yokohama. Toshiko had come to a crossroads. ‘I thought, do I stop here or do I not give up and continue this mission?’ With the support of the people that had been involved in the petition, she decided to form Yokohama no Kodomotachi wo Hoshano kara Mamorukai (‘Group to Protect the Children of Yokohama from Radiation’), with the aim of spreading the word and exerting continued pressure on the local government. At the time of writing, the group has around 700 members – ‘some fathers,’ notes Toshiko, ‘but mostly mothers’.

Back on the home front, of course, she had a decision to make. Now convinced that the food her daughter was being fed was likely to contain radioactive materials, there was no way she could allow her to continue eating it. Taking her off the school dinners register, she began sending her to school with a homemade bento lunchbox. So as not to make the child feel out of place, she was careful to prepare food that was similar to the school’s daily menu, something she is still doing almost five months on.

‘On the first day she took her bento, everyone made fun of her,’ she says. ‘I expected that would happen, so I started making the lunches entertaining by introducing “kyara ben” [bentos decorated to look like famous manga and anime characters]. Other kids love them now, too, so my daughter is happy. You see, kids are simple. It’s up to us adults to use our knowledge to solve their little problems.’

While some parents followed suit, many saw little reason to change their children’s diets. After all, what reason did they have not to trust what the school was telling them? For Toshiko, it was obvious that an itemized menu was needed: something to show exactly where the produce was coming from.

Weeks before the Aeon beef announcement, she received a tip-off from a politician who supported her group, telling her that Fukushima beef was being used in school meals. ‘At around the same time, more and more Yokohama residents began asking questions, demanding that all food products should be labeled with the place of growth or production. As a result, the School Meals Committee began publishing product information. When people saw the list of ingredients, there was an uproar.’ The publication, which Toshiko received in May, showed that the school meals had contained cabbage, asparagus, beef, beans and cucumbers from Fukushima.

Yet this publication altered nothing. Toshiko explains, ‘The Board of Education and the School Meals Committee said that, because they had always used Fukushima produce in school meals, they had no intention of stopping now.’ Their reasons, she says, were purely financial, citing the economic damage that the Fukushima region could suffer if they altered their policy. Indeed, she has been shocked to hear of families feeding their children Fukushima produce out of similar concerns. ‘One of my friends had been spreading the word, and she was cornered by a mother who said that we should willingly buy produce from Fukushima to help the industries there. She was deliberately feeding it to her kids.’

‘I think it’s an awful national habit that we Japanese have,’ she continues. ‘During the war, Japanese people would willingly sacrifice themselves if it was beneficial for the country. That was the norm, the virtue.’ She stops, wide-eyed again, as if she can’t quite fathom what she’s saying. ‘That mentality lives on. The government has passed the buck to the people of Japan, saying, “Please eat the Fukushima vegetables. Poor Fukushima people. They need your help.” Yes, of course we have to help the industries and economy of Fukushima, but is it okay for our children to eat that produce, get sick and die young? Should we let them develop cancer? That’s a completely different argument.’

It should be noted that Toshiko and her group aren’t purely critical in their outlook: she praises Yokohama for being the first city in the country to disclose information regarding the origins of produce. However, she still feels that things should go an extra step. ‘The uncertainty is what made us anxious,’ she explains. ‘The Board of Education and the government alike often said that the fact that we parents worry so much has a negative effect on the physical and mental health of our children… But we just want to know what to do… We don’t want the heartache of worrying about what we’re feeding our kids.’ Ideally, she said, she’d like to see the food labelled with radiation readings, so that parents could decide what to buy and what to avoid.

Of course, Toshiko’s group aren’t the only ones protesting the food situation. She knows of many others (‘one in Sendai, Chiba has three, and there are Tokyo groups in Setagaya, Katsushika, Minato-ku, Koto-ku, Fuchu…’), and they each do what they can to support one another. Special mention is reserved for the groups that have been set up in Fukushima Prefecture itself: ‘When I started the petition, I feared that I may hurt the feelings of people in the quake stricken regions. But in reality, there are still so many families living in Fukushima, crying their hearts out, wanting to leave even though they can’t. These people want people from other parts of Japan – Yokohama or wherever – to make an issue of the dangers of radiation, so everybody realises how dangerous Fukushima actually is. They plead with us to kick up a fuss: if we don’t speak out, we won’t be helping those in Fukushima. When they told me that, I realised I was doing the right thing.’

At the time of writing, her group were preparing a third petition to the Board of Education in Yokohama, a list of signatures that they hope will top 10,000. The petition, once again, calls for clarity: for evidence that the food being fed to the children of the city does not contain unusual levels of radiation. It’s an astonishing request for any parent to have to make.

Read more about Toshiko’s mission on the official homepage of Yokohama no Kodomotachi wo Hoshano kara Mamorukai. This article originally appeared on Time Out Tokyo