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I will leave Tokyo. I don't remember whether it was me or my wife who decided - leaving is that important to both of us.

We both play with little fictions of where we'll finally end up (but for the real mean time, we'll end up in England). My wife wants to live in Italy, me the south of France - we, at any rate, dream about a life lived on the continent.

Yes, life is better over there. I speak from experience as a European. There's no place for relativism in my view about this, subjectivity is no shield for Japanese narcissism and their sclerotic bureaucratic character to hind behind. Continental countries are as fucked up as any other place; but at least you can finish work at 5 and don't have to settle for the pastiche version of anything foreign.

It's television - that's what has turned me off Japan. The excellent rainbow skittles world of evening television can't make up for the the god-awful rainbow skittles world of morning television. We have no clue about revolution in Iran, body counts in Mesopotamia, or swine-flu in the Americas from the morning news; instead, we find out which fame craving bimbo has changed her hair, and what that implies for her relationship to other fame craving bimbos. We learn about so and so who has apparently asked so and so to marry him, by all accounts, over our morning cereals poured from stingily small boxes, before we're subjected to where so and so and so and so from the previous month went for their honeymoon, and most importantly - how much it cost. The odd report of a Japanese athlete coming 23rd in the golf, or a case of a Japanese man who kidnapped, raped, tortured, and killed a young school girl gets a mention. Then back to the new release of a single from from an actor that can't act, or sing, but looks very good. I'd say I don't expect the World, but I do. And I won't apologize for it.

Sooner or later you see the morning in the night. The game shows and variety shows are populated with the same maddening peacocks as the breakfast shows and gossip corners. Evening dramas have as little sense for drama as the celeb stories of the ante-meridian; late night comedians wear suits but their bargain basement hair dye and cheapo colloquialism start to feel as depressing as the gaudy perspex sets and disney-baroque design of 10a.m. telly. You begin to sense it's all part of the same thing: what Japan thinks the good life is.

It's a hideous vision.

TV is probably as violently bad on the continent too. I actually think not. But, at least in Florence you have the buildings to look at. In Provence the pastoral landscape. In Surrey the rolling hills and the odd silver ghost. There is escape outdoors, or, in the worst case scenario, consolation in properly portioned cereal boxes indoors.

Step outside in Tokyo and find no escape. Yocals in Donald Duck tracksuits walk about with Louis Vuitton hand bags; Legoland residences and machine-made entrances fill up every possible eyeline; the sides of the street are a notice board of dumb smiling models advertising banks, pouting gay-boys advertising manly hair gel, and wordy cartoons ordering some anal civic duty. White car upon white car passes by sun faded advertising from 2 years ago in the empty over made boulevards of the provinces; in the city proper, sports car upon sports car trundles by thick columns of people walking about shopping streets not knowing where the fuck they are going - Ferraris howling at 5mph as their 40 year old Japanese drivers in polo shirts with pleading Italian flags sown on the arm steer them between zippy delivery trucks parked in the road. Trees are a nuisance; cockroaches and rats run riot amongst the prized concrete which store owners water daily in the summer - never even offering a splash for the cleavered curbside bushes. Squads of policemen guard guarded buildings, work-shy gangs of Africans and over dressed low-tier criminals guard busy wank parlors. Supermarkets wrap individual vegetables in plastic. Japan's horrible insides are all over its out.

How can a lasting happiness here be possible...

The good life for Japan is comprised in wearing a pink cotton jerkin over a mall-store golf shirt and owning a fake-leather massage chair. Having a battered wife make you green tea, served in a faux pottery cup on a look-a-like lacquer plastic saucer. Mickey Mouse toilet mats and cookie cutter cars with doors precision engineered to make a nice sound when they whap shut. Perfect handwriting and indecisive words, a degree from the top university and a safe job as an automaton. The idea that Japan is really the best of all nations.

I don't want it. Neither does my wife.