Konnichiwa friends and family and Happy Easter! I hope everyone is doing well wherever you are isolating at the mo! Prime Minister Abe finally announced a state of emergency on Tuesday meaning that I have been off work as of Wednesday (semi-good news as I was meant to have a 7am lesson on Wednesday morning, which I consequently got out of). So I have now been put on leave from work until Thursday 7 May when they will reassess the situation. Although my abilities to explore Tokyo have now significantly reduced, I am really enjoying isolation. As a naturally lazy person, I am revelling in the fact that I have nothing to do all day everyday.

The weather in Tokyo has been in the high teens this week with sunny mornings and cloudier afternoons, which has been very nice. So far on my quarantine mornings, I wake up at about nine and I run (!!) to my local park where they have built a running circuit and an outside gym. My morning routine involves me running a very slow 5K around the running track, constantly checking Strava as I run so that I can stop as soon as I hit the 5K mark. Then I move over to the outdoor gym where I go on the sit-up bench and do 50 whole sit-ups. From my daily experience at Heiwa-no-mori Park, the Japanese do not appear to be socially distancing very effectively. The park is always full of families and large groups of children (most likely not from the same household) running around and catching tadpoles in little buckets by the pond.

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The outdoor gym is also quite a popular place at the moment so I have to fight for the sit-up bench because as soon as one person gets off it, someone else is on it straight away. My sit-ups aren’t very professional but any form of exercise counts as pushing myself so I don’t really care that I’m not doing them properly. Anyway, today I had done 50 lots of heaving myself up and flopping back down again when a Japanese lady, maybe in her fifties, came up to me and held my feet down and started trying to instruct me on how to do crunches. I didn’t want to do crunches and I was done with my exercise for the day but she kept moving my body up and down to demonstrate the motion and then started counting down from ten in an attempt to make me do 10 crunches. It was really embarrassing because everyone around us was watching and laughing at me whilst this lady was forcing me to do crunches. We couldn’t understand each other and she kept telling me to inhale and exhale at certain times. Her face was so close to mine as she was doing this; every time she exhaled she was exhaling almost straight into my mouth. I was really confused why she voluntarily got so close to me seeing as we are in a global pandemic but it seems that a lot of people aren’t currently as concerned by the situation as they should be. Anyway as soon as I had done my ten embarrassingly difficult crunches and the audience had clapped me I went to the water fountain and gargled to reduce chances of catching corona.

So next in my daily routine is walking around the park to cool down whilst listening to a podcast. Then I come home and make myself lunch. I’m trying to cook a different Japanese recipe every other day, which so far has been a really fun isolation challenge. I’ve found a great website called Just One Cookbook, which is full of Japanese recipes. The recipes are easy but use a lot of traditional Japanese ingredients that I would otherwise never buy in the supermarket so I’m trying out a lot of new things. So far I have made miso salmon with edamame fried rice and a vegan curry, which was delicious! By this point in the day, it’s about 2pm so I usually spend some time learning the Japanese alphabet. I haven’t really learned any Japanese since being here so now that I have a lot of time, I’m trying to spend an hour a day on Japanese. I normally get distracted and only do about 20 minutes. The rest of my day is then spent on Netflix, reading or on FaceTime. I go to sleep at about midnight feeling very zen and the next day I repeat!

I’ve also been spending a lot of time with my housemates. We have had quite a few movie nights over the past few weeks and every so often we have a “party” where everyone brings a different plate of food and we all eat together and play cards. Last week, I made brownies, Mami, one of the Japanese girls, made a lot of different Japanese food and the Portuguese cousins, Diogo and Andre, made Portuguese custard tarts, which were delicious. I also have a really mental Japanese flatmate called Reishiro, who always provides a lot of entertainment at the parties. Reishiro can’t cook so his contribution usually comes in the form of two XL Domino’s pizzas.

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Last week we watched the rom-com What To Expect When You’re Expecting. It’s a really good film but it’s not incredible. Anyway, apparently pregnancy is a taboo subject in Japan so after the film finished, Reishiro sat staring at the TV in awe saying the word “sugoi” (which means “incredible”) over and over to himself. Andre told me that ever since he has been telling all the other boys in the house that they need to watch What To Expect When You’re Expecting so they can have the same eye-opening experience. We also watched a film on Netflix called Earthquake Bird, which is a thriller about two girls (from America and Europe) living in Tokyo. I really liked it and I recommend watching it because it is a really good depiction of modern day Tokyo. As it turns out Reishiro wasn’t as thrilled with this movie; we are having another group movie night tomorrow and for some reason it always falls on me to choose the film. Reishiro asked if I could choose a better film for tomorrow because according to him “last time is very sucks”. Any recommendations would be gratefully accepted.

Thanks for reading! More COVID-19 and Japan-themed news to come next week!