Come On England!! Japan Is Huge!!

Good luck tonight (it's on here at 1am; matches are 10pm, 1am and 4am!!). One of the girls downstairs is from Trinidad. How often is it that you meet someone from Trinidad AND England play them in the World Cup!? It's very tense, something about the loser swimming naked across the river. So England have to win.

Everyone was pretty disappointed here with the Japan-Australia match the other night, although the Japanese are all so high-spirited and good-natured that they say they don't mind. Still, I can see it in their eyes when we talk about it.

The nation is football crazy - 90% watched the match. One student has (and is planning to) watch every single match!! In fact, TV sales increased by 60% last month. They don't really have bars or pubs here in the same style as England, and coupled with the bad times the matches are on, everyone's watching at home.

Watching football here is strange - most TV's have bilingual buttons and many programmes can be dubbed in English, such as the News or movies. But the World Cup is purely in Japanese. It's funny, because in the middle of the incomprehensible commentary, you suddenly hear 'offside-o' or 'yellow-cardo'.

Monday night was crazy coming home. The trains are so busy that they usualy stagger the shift times. There are three evening rush hours (starting at 7, 9 and 11)- but no-one worked late that night so the 9pm rush hour to get home for the 10pm kick-off was ridiculous. I've never felt more like a sardine in my life.

The city is unbelievably overcrowded. It's the biggest in the world - with 30 million people.

To put it into a crazy perspective, there are 23 main areas/wards of Tokyo. Shibuya, one of them, has double the number of people living in Amsterdam, and Shinjuku has twice the population of Dublin. And there are 23 areas!!! HUGE!

Enjoy the match. And that mind-blowing statistic.