As far as I’m concerned, Tokyo is the most exciting city in the World.

Why? Is it because of the wonderfully crazy mix of old and new? The technology? The population? The fashion? The music (come on, who doesn’t love SMAP?) The food? The fact the place never, ever sleeps?

No. It’s because the free-to-air television is just so plain awful, thereby forcing people to devise ingenious ways of avoiding it. If you look up “huh?” in the dictionary, a selection of “Nihon no terebi” highlights will be flickering up at you in glaring colours.

Every show seemed to involve either cooking or comedy. Or, if you were very lucky – “comedy cooking”.

It was like watching “Ready, Steady, Cook”, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week on 10 channels.

I have always championed the genius of Ainsley Harriet (even if it is deeply buried in a quagmire of dullness and wrapped in a thick gauze of stupidity). But even I couldn’t stand Ainsley’s brand of hilarity for more than 30 minutes a day. Japanese television has Harriet to the power of a thousand!

Despite the language barrier, there appeared to be only be 2 words you needed to know to get the most out of your viewing pleasure: “oishi” and “sugoi”. The former word means “delicious”, the latter means “amazing”. Apparently, everything was either delicious or amazing, or a combination of both. This would refer to anything from a bowl of plain rice to road kill.

Occassionally, we were given a reprieve with K1 fighting, which pits large, powerful men against other large powerful men with the victor being the last large powerful man standing. But they took it to the extreme by taking Akebono out of mothballs. He is a former Yokozuna – a Sumo grand master, part of a proud sporting tradition. However, this lumbering giant was reduced to slapping at the air while his lithe opponents fancy stepped around him. His only hope was if they tripped on their own fancy footwork, and he pinned them with the belly flop of doom.

Actually, I really miss it:(

I’ve been fortunate enough to live in a lot of countries over the last decade. The one place that makes me gush with glee the most is Japan. However, it wasn’t always so grand …

Back in 2003, I was a fresh-faced, wide-eyed boy from Adelaide, suddenly standing in the land of ninjas, high quality mass produced consumables, and Godzilla.

After years of drooling over the work of Osamu Tezuka, Hayao Miyazaki, Katsuhiro Otomo and their ilk, I decided that I had to be there. The easiest way was to teach the Queen’s English.

I soon realised that the job was not as good as I hoped for But, not nearly as bad as I expected.

I had been living in London for years, and somehow got myself into a dreary rut and, consequently, wanted to get myself on a better wicket. Instead of being on a better wicket, I ended up fielding around the boundary. Because I wasn’t actually in Tokyo to start with (I later moved to Akabane, which is on the cusp of Tokyo), but in a prefecture just north called Saitama.

At the start, I taught at 5 different schools: Takenotsuka (Saturday), Soka (Monday), Akabane (Tuesday), Kawaguchi (Wednesday), Warabi (Thursday) and wherever my Overlords wanted to place me on my “days-off”.

The hours were often quite silly – my students never got much Present Perfect out of a bleary eyed yawning Mike whose Past Simple involved 5 hours of “Head, Shoulder, Knees and Toes” with screaming children (or the spawn of Beelzebub)... I apologize for the lame grammar joke.

Talking of demon spawn. There is a sport amongst Japanese children called “kancho”, which roughly translates to stick your finger up teacher’s bum. Believe me, after you have experienced this a few times you never turn your back on some angelic looking child in a sailor’s outfit.

Uniforms run rampant over there. Even parking attendants are decked out like Napoleon. They have these great big pink truncheons always at hand. They light up to an eye-achingly lurid neon pink to beckon the seemingly blind drivers to a car’s resting place.

On a linguistic note, it wasn’t long before I discovered my favourite Japanese word ever: “hanamizu”. “Hana” means nose, and “mizu” means water: nose water. Or, as we say, snot!

My first CG portfolio blog is a sorry affair indeed, because here it ends