A married man

Three weeks ago yesterday, I became a married man, a husband. The dust is finally settling enough on the day for me to mention it here, before it passes into memory.

I proposed way back on Christmas Eve 2006 and it took until now for us to get to the wedding day. Naturally, all weddings take a lot of care and planning but this one was quite a big job - most of it having to be organised and arranged long distance, from Tokyo. Truly a marriage of the internet era!

All the essential elements were in place before I arrived back in Britain, but the fine tuning had yet to be completed. These are the seemingly smaller details that should be just a little 'icing on the cake' but are actually far more time consuming. While this was going on and I was reintegrating myself back into UK life, my fiance was still on the other side of the world, finishing off her job contract, so it proved quite a challenge to get things right.

A key lesson learned (and passed on to me by my best man) was 'Whatever you do on the day, make sure you keep your bride happy', something I think I mostly achieved. Another one that I picked up myself was the importance of an Event Manager or someone who can deal with the big picture on such a big day. I wouldn't recommend moving continents, job hunting and organising a wedding at roughly the same time, but I think I just about pulled it off!


The event itself was in Brighton, on the last day of the Brighton Festival. Always a risk in Britain, but part of the thinking was that there'd be a good chance of decent weather, which we were fortunately blessed by a good run of it. The ceremony itself was at the Royal Pavilion (pictured above). I had a small studio flat opposite this building back in 1995 and was confronted by this grand vision every time I opened the front door. Given that it was to be an Anglo-Japanese marriage, it seemed only appropriate to let it take place in one of Britain's buildings that most symbolise the coming together of East and West!

Indian exteriors, Chinese interiors, and slap bang in the middle of a British Victorian seaside resort. As could be expected, there's a certain ostentatiousness to the building that makes it feel a rather grand place to be getting married in. We were pretty lucky to bag a booking during the Brighton Festival too.

I'd been denied a look at the dress until she actually walked into the room and I have to say that I'm glad I was - she looked quite breathtaking when she walked into the room. The ceremony was an enjoyable and good-natured one, with many people who'd not seen each other in years and some who'd never met each other all coming together for our big day, something I felt quite honoured by.

We took a little 'victory lap' through town once the rings were on our fingers, with photographer in tow (an uncle of mine, over from Germany) and it was a most amusing sensation to stroll through the streets I'd wiled away my twenties in, with a beautiful bride from the other side of the world in tow. How far I'd come since those times, I thought to myself.

People were out on the streets, soaking up the performers and entertainers that were rounding up the festival, and many offered us their congratulations - another enjoyably unusual sensation.

The evening event was held at a venue called The Old Market, a grand place often used for classical concerts on the other side of town. Most of my friends and family managed to make it there on time (hers were smaller in number and the Japanese are very good on timing anyway), but I had a little more of an element of desperation as I tried to pull everything together that I'd not been able to sort out in time. Another big lesson learned - there are some things in any event that you just can't control, no matter how hard you try!


Anyway, all-in-all it was a great party in the evening too. We had guests from eight different countries, which is probably the broadest range of nationalities I've encountered at any wedding. I began my groom's speech with a 'Good evening' in English, Japanese, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Welsh and Romanian, being languages spoken by those present.

One of my mates that came to it described it afterwards to me as 'very cosmopolitan', which was an interesting comment. It's not a word I would generally use to describe the circles I move in, which culturally tend to be very broad these days, but I suppose that if the company one keeps is less culturally mixed, it's a natural adjective to use. Either way, I'm happy to have been able to put on a 'cosmopolitan wedding'.

I embark now on a bold new adventure and am thinking for two rather than one (though I've actually been doing that for quite some time now anyway). This blog will contain the writings of a man with another perspective on which to look at life - that of a husband. I don't know how different that will make things or whether it'll encourage me to post more often than I currently do, but here's where it'll be happening...

'McCain Vows To Replace Secret Service With His Own Bare Fists' (WN0010)

McCain Vows To Replace Secret Service With His Own Bare Fists

I was delighted to stumble across 'America's finest news source' The Onion recently. Last time I went anywhere near the online version, it was running on a subscriber-only basis so wasn't particularly open for browsing. This was quite some time ago and upon returning I find their site being all things Web 2.0 and open, thus more accessible. Guess that online advertising must be paying that much more than when I last looked.

Anyway, The Onion shows that America does satire in its own way and just as well as Britain. I really enjoyed 'The Day Today' (1 2) when the BBC ran it and it seems that The Onion is now running video reports reminiscent of that, updated for a more contemporary audience.

Here, in 'The War For The White House', Republican contender John McCain shows off his credentials as a 'tough man', vital positioning for any US Presidential candidate!

Dropping Knowledge

After leaving them loitering on my desktop for months, I've finally managed to upload a couple of new videos to my YouTube channel.

I came across the Dropping Knowledge (dk) organisation through a filmmaker friend in Tokyo that did some work for them. I'm always on the lookout for ventures that aim to enhance international understanding and am particularly interested in ones that embrace the technology of our age in order to do that, so they were a great find.

The first film lays out their aims of asking questions as a means of encouraging social change, while the second is of one is of dk's activities, the Table of Free Voices. This event, held in 2006, brought together leading thinkers from around the world and posed a series of questions to them set by citizens from across the planet.

The films themselves are issued under the concept of 'copyleft', where a user is 'free to copy, use, modify, publish, broadcast or otherwise redistribute any portion of these films, and (is) actively encourage(d)...to do so.' This is a relatively new concept to me and could be a fantastic means of building a contemporary global cultural commons.

I have always questioned the world around me. What's your question?

British Summer Time begins

So, as it probably always was going to do anyway, the Japan adventure has come to an end. Six weeks ago, I left the city that had been my home for four and a half crazy years and came 'back home', to Britain. Although it had all seemed so alien to me when I first arrived, I had made Tokyo into my home, having done and experienced things there that I would never have dreamed of five or more years ago. It changed me in countless ways, mostly all positive (I think) and made me into a different man from the one that stepped onto a Japan Airlines flight in September 2003, bound for the other side of the world.

In October of last year, whilst I was actually in Buenos Aires taking in my first spring in the Global South, I was one of the roughly half a million people that fell foul of the biggest consumer collapse in Japanese post-war history. The company that I had been working for, a vast corporation with about a 60% share of its market that was spread all over the country and symbolised by a peculiar pink cartoon rabbit with a yellow beak, a giant that had been teetering on the brink of collapse all year, finally fell with an almighty crash.

This was unfortunate enough to say the least, but given that my fiance and I were intending to relocate to the 'green and pleasant land' from whence I'd come and our pending nuptuals were looming ever closer, it necessitated an early return to Blighty for me - 'man goes ahead to lay the foundations before being joined by the missus at a later date' sort of thing.

January in Tokyo was spectacularly cold and we had a fair amount of snow, unusual for that city these days in our times of shifting climate patterns and rising global temperatures. I felt somewhat cold inside as well as outside, for I had grown to love the place and in my heart wasn't fully ready to go. Still, when a man has finally found his perfect women he must do all that he can to hold on to her and there was to be no future for us in Japan, other than visits to the in-laws and to show the kids the other side of themselves, when they finally come along.

I wrapped up my activities, played a final farewell show with the band, bid farewell to close friends and business partners and set off to hand my ID card in to the customs official at the airport, promising to all that I would be back and that it was not the end but merely the end of the beginning.

That heavy heart sank a little further upon alighting at the other end, as the reality of three months away from my beau spread and I was once again faced with probably my least favourite of all airports - London Heathrow. With hindsight, I got in just in time given the recent debacle of the much trumpted and then heavily maligned opening of the new Terminal 5. Touted by The Queen as 'a 21st-century gateway to Britain' yet described in The Guardian as 'more like a 19th-century doorway to Calcutta', I did at least manage to avoid that level of misery. Still, none of the tubes were working when I got out of the terminal that I did land at, so at least I got a little bit of business as usual.

After the slick, machine-like efficiency of Japan in general and Tokyo in particular, to describe it as a shambles doesn't quite come close to an understatement. I wonder how on earth this country is going to cope with having the Olympics in 2012, knowing too that the Chinese will be setting the bar very high for this one.

Dropping my suitcases at a parental loft on the edge of the North Yorkshire Moors, I spent my first month back running around the country, crashing on floors and grabbing job interviews whenever I could. The picture above was taken a couple of days after arrival, when I discovered a nearby mere coated in ice and shrouded in mist, making for a slightly eerie but essentially English looking scene - the likes of which I'm much more alert to these days.

Not having a base anywhere in particular was pretty unsettling as in my mind I was pretty much still in Tokyo anyway, yet my eyes and tastebuds were deceiving me. I took a pair of chopsticks with me everywhere, maintained the good habit of taking shoes off in the house (which makes for dirty socks in England, though I keep this custom up in any country I visit now) and marvelled at how much bigger everybody looked. Still, it was probably a useful exercise in reaquaintance with my old country as I fitted in a number of visits to London, plus Brighton, Wales and swathes of Northern England, which must have grounded me in the reality of being back.

There have, however, been many very pleasant surprises too. The new St. Pancras International terminal in London, depicted above, proves that Britain can sometimes get a major engineering project just right. The concepts of 'green living' and 'ethical consumption' have become completely mainstream now, with organic food, carbon concerns and fair trade initiatives having become as British as rain. 'Reverse culture shock' and no longer being considered 'exotic' aside, it does also have to be said that the British are essentially very nice people too. Even in London, I got smiles from strangers - a rare sight indeed in pressure cooker Tokyo.

Traipsing across the sprawl of London for an interview or a floor to sleep on, I was also able to take in some of the wonders of the place. A look at 'The Gherkin', an amble around St. Paul's, a stroll over Millennium Bridge, a potter through the Tate Modern, all of which served to remind me what a wonderful city London is in so many ways, despite the frustrations of the tube or the cluttered rush of it all. It's actually quite a beautiful place really. Where Tokyo screams vibrant youth at you, London kicks back and wears its old age gracefully. Mind you, it's still got its troubles too, as the poor fellow in the picture below demonstrates. Some things are unlikely to ever change that much.

Last night, the clocks went forward by an hour, thus heralding the official beginning of British Summer Time. After a foul and wintry Easter, it finally feels like spring is in the air. The daffodils are in bloom and a light breeze ruffled my hair today instead of the howling gales that first greeted me.

I have now got used to being back here again and although it looks like it might go right up to the wire in terms of landing that 'back on my feet again' job just before the wedding kicks in, I feel positive that it's all going to turn out for the best.

And that's got to be a good thing!