 | | SEE ALSO | | The Morris Telford archive. Read about Morris's previous exploits, and find out how the adventure has unfolded.
Follow Morris's journey
Day One
Day Two
Day Three
Day Four
Day Five
Day Six
Day Seven | | | PRINT THIS PAGE | | | | | FACTS | | Name: Morris Telford
Age: 33
DOB: 18/04/70
Occupation:Unemployed
Hobbies: Enlightenment, Philosophy, Bingo Favourite book – Ordnance Survey Map of Shropshire 1999 edition Favourite foods – Pickled Eggs Favourite film – Late For Dinner
Favourite colour – The delicate cyan of the dinnertime sky in Moreton Say.
Favourite British County – Shropshire
Favourite Place – Moreton Say
Favourite Postal Code Area – TF9
Favourite radio
frequency - 96FM
Favourite sound – The gentle breeze rustling through the leafy glades of Moreton Say
Favourite Clive – Clive of India
Favourite Iron Bridge - Ironbridge
Favourite adhesive note size – 75 x 75mm
Favourite Vegetable – Anything grown in the fertile soils of Shropshire
Favourite band – Men From Earth *(shameless plug)
Biggest inspiration – Marlowe Bidforth | |
| | Busy day today.
Flew with Air China overnight to terminal two of Narita Airport. I sat next to a young Japanese boy who did nothing but play on a Gameboy Advance for the entire trip. This was doubly irritating in that he didn’t respond to anything I said to him and he didn’t let me have a go on Mega Man Battle Network 3.
I had the usual hearty welcome at customs. Why is it every time I pass through customs and they ask me my reason for visiting the country they will never accept the truth.
I’m not coming for business reasons or pleasure reasons. I’m visiting the country to try and tell the people all about Shropshire and perhaps convince a few to relocate or at least embrace the Shropshire way of life. It’s not complicated; I just want to make people happy, so why do I always come up against this scepticism with airport security the world over?
I tried to give one of the guards a little A5 brochure I had about Shropshire, nothing divisive just a picture of Moreton Say, a few paragraphs about how nice Shropshire is, my Mother’s home address and a voucher entitling you to 20p off a toasted teacake at a café in Market Drayton and he accused me of offering him a bribe. It’s so hard to convince people that I don’t have any ulterior motive; I do hope the rest of Japan is less cautious in accepting my help.
After some confusion at the check in over why exactly I was in Japan, they did let me go and I managed to get a bus to Tokyo. The bus was very clean and pleasant, without the odour of urine I am accustomed to on British transport.
First impressions of Japan, it’s very nice. I’m staying in a tall, gleaming steel and glass hotel - it looks a bit like my Mother’s old greenhouse, only bigger and with rooms and guests instead of tomatoes and the engine from a 1976 Mini.
There seems to be a lot of American businessmen here, so there’s a lot of speaking slowly and shouting going on in reception.
The Japanese staff are very polite and their English is excellent, I asked one of the women at reception about local Bingo halls and she was most enthusiastic and helpful, giving me a long list of local establishments. I think I’m going to like Japan. Walking round Tokyo today was a revelation. Everyone is so polite - not polite in a "come in and tell us all about Shropshire" kind of way, more in an "avoid eye contact with the odd looking Englishman" type manner. But at least no one has kidnapped me, drugged me, venerated me or strapped me to the top of a Winnebago.
I talked to a group of young men outside an arcade, they seemed disinterested at first while I told them about Shropshire, but when I mentioned I’d spent the last week with Shaolin monks it got their attention.
Apparently they are a street gang called the Yumo-Ka-Tekk-Boyz, which as far as I could tell is like a Japanese equivalent of the Boy Scouts. But instead of knowing hundreds of ways to tie a knot, they pride themselves on their martial arts prowess.
Fresh from my training in China, I may have overstated my own ability and ended up agreeing to take part in a contest of champions in two days. They seemed friendly enough about it though so I’m sure it’s all in good fun, they gave me a blue scarf to wear tied to my arm to signify I was one of their organisation.
I agreed to see them in a couple of days at somewhere called the Tako-Do arena and left them to help old people across the road.
Watched TV in my hotel room. No sign of Countdown or its Japanese equivalent, but I did find a game show where the contestants have to put themselves through all sorts of obscure mental tortures to score points... so I settled for that instead. I saw some Japanese fighting fish in Tokyo today. I used to have a goldfish called Dave Ottley. He was named after Dave Ottley from Telford who won a silver medal for the javelin in the 1985 Olympics. Dave (the man not the fish) is now Sports Development Officer for Wrekin District Council but can still skewer a tangerine from 500 paces.
The Japanese fighting fish made my goldfish Dave look like just a harmless pet, which, of course, he was. The fighting fish were kept one per tank and just hovered in the centre. They didn’t swim around or practice their fighting moves, or leap majestically from the tank or anything; they just floated at a stationary point in the centre of each tank and waited.
There was also a really unpleasant smell around the fish, a stinky, rotten, decaying, fetid smell. It may have been the fish, it may have been the man selling the fish, I’m not sure which.
I asked the man with the fish, who I noticed has plasters on each of his fingers, why they don’t move. He told me, in an authentic accent, "they are preparing for battle". I’m ashamed to say that I laughed at the man when he said this.
The prospect of these little fish doing anything resembling "battle" struck me as absurd. My laughter did not go down well with the little Japanese fish selling man and he started shouting about the ancient art of Japanese fish fighting, the sacred history of fighting fish breeding going back centuries and something about western ignorance. He then dared me to put my hand in the tank.
In retrospect, sitting here at the Tokyo Medical and Surgical Clinic in Kamiya-cho with my hand in tatters, putting it in the tank was a bad idea. It’s the martial arts tournament today and I’m going to the Tako-Do arena to explain I will be unable to represent my Boy Scout friends as a vicious fish attacked me yesterday.
The collection of youths waiting for me at the arena did not seem to be taking my fish wound seriously and I noticed that the majority of them seemed to be wearing red bandanas, headbands, scarves or other garments that clashed quite obviously with my blue scarf.
Also in the background I could see some quite violent confrontations going on, not at all the sort of thing Lord Baden-Powell would have approved of.
When I was a young man in Moreton Say we never had anything like this. We never used to attack each other or feel a need to separate ourselves into gangs.
I say "we", but to be fair the only friends I ever really associated with in Moreton Say that were under 25 were both made of straw. I still have very fond memories of those lazy summer days in the sun-drenched fields with my friends, Tony the scarecrow and wicker Amy, and they both taught me a very important lesson about never playing with matches.
What with all the shouting and fighting and fish bite belittling, I didn’t much like the look of Tako-Do arena so I practiced what I consider to be the foundation teaching of Salopian martial arts, I ran away. It’s often the bravest thing to do. I met a man called Yoshi today in the business district of Tokyo. He was sitting on a metal bench in a smart suit and tie eating a bowl of what looked like, and indeed turned out to be, raw fish.
Yoshi was very receptive to my tales of Shropshire life. I sat next to him on the bench and talked to him for nearly two hours, covering most of the basics about how nice it is in Shropshire and including a few personal anecdotes about amusing country happenings involving tractors, small animals and crop drainage.
It was after talking to him for a couple of hours, I asked him if I was making him late for work. This turned out to be a crucial question. Yoshi broke down - not in great big sobbing floods of tears or anything, like you do when you first find out as a young boy that London is the capital city of Great Britain and not in fact Oswestry like your Mother told you, but a restrained anguish of self-hugging and rocking back and forth.
It turned out that Yoshi lost his job last year. He had been working in some sort of large Japanese corporation sitting in a small cubicle doing small tasks on a small computer. The company expanded but somehow did not have room for Yoshi’s particular brand of smallness and he lost his job.
Yoshi has a wife and a small son and couldn’t face telling them he had lost his job so he went home that day as if nothing had happened, thinking, "I’ll tell them tomorrow". Then he got up the next day, put on his suit and took the train to Tokyo.
He’s been doing this for over a year now, every day he kisses his wife and child goodbye, leaves for work and comes and sits on a bench eating his sushi and watching the world go by. I’m the first person, the very first person in over 400 days, to sit down next to him and offer the olive branch of polite conversation.
I like Yoshi, he’s small, polite, well dressed and he looks like I might in a few years time if I were smaller, more polite, dressed smartly and had a sudden genetic leaning towards the previously unknown Japanese side of my family.
So I agreed to meet him here on his bench at the same time tomorrow. Before I meet Yoshi today I’m arranging a few things for him.
I’ve contacted his former employer in the Shiraishi business complex and found out where his old office was. I’ve arranged to lease a slightly larger office next to his old workplace, one where all his previous employers have to walk past to get to their office. I’ve bought him a big desk, a big computer and a big brass sign for his door. I hope he likes it.
I just left Yoshi in his new job, I’ve paid off his debts, I’ve arranged for a regular salary and I’ve given him, I hope, a new lease of life. I obviously made him promise he and his family will move to Shropshire when he retires, but that’s decades away yet.
The only things he did have reservations about were the brass plaque saying "Japan’s Ambassador to Shropshire" on his door and the life-size portrait of Carol Voderman I had hung behind his desk, but hey, I’m the boss. He really liked his big desk. Walking around Tokyo today, people seem worried about earthquakes, there’s supposed to be a big one coming and they had this massive exercise recently where they practiced what they would do in case of a major tremor, it was sort of like a fire drill, but taken seriously.
I spent some time with a man called Kuroda feeding the birds with a plastic bag of breadcrumbs, who proudly told me that he could predict earthquakes.
He said that whenever a really serious quake is about to happen he feels it in his left leg. Then he rolled up his trousers and his leg looked like Noddy Holders top hat, all down his left leg he had drawing pins stuck into him, not the steel ones that maintain sterility in the packaging either but the cheaper brass ones used for notice boards and posters.
Kuroda told me the pins sing to him as a warning, then just as he was telling me he started humming in a sort of high pitched whine and shouted "It’s coming! It’s coming!" and made me hide under bus shelter. After about half an hour he admitted that the drawing pins were not one hundred percent reliable and it was possibly a false alarm.
He was a very pleasant man though and we had a nice chat about Market Drayton and how there are hardly any earthquakes there. He said he really wanted to go live in Shropshire, but if there were no earthquakes there he would be wasting his gift and all those years sticking drawing pins in his leg would have been wasted.
It was hard to argue with him on that point so I left him, his leg shining in the Tokyo sunlight like a little disco for the birds. |
