Most days I go walking I take an ipod and listen to podcasts. Today I took my old G2 ipod, one of the larger white monsters with a directional wheel on the front. I bought it over 10 years ago at Yodobashi Camera in Umeda, Osaka, when owning such a device was still quite an exotic thing. It has over 700 songs on it, a small proportion of what the hard drive can hold, and all of them date from that period or earlier.

So it is kind of like time-travelling for me. If I play my older device these days I get that strange moment of recognition, a shiver of recollection, for a time when that song denoted a very particular moment and place for me. It might be a pathway through a housing estate, a wide expanse of park, a shopping centre, even a stairwell. The melody plays, a fleeting image from Japan intrudes, with all its associations and memories. I will never be able to listen to Alanis Morissette's Doth I Protest Too Much again, for example, without being transported to the interior of a JR train pulling out from Sanda station as I headed up-country for work in Kaibara.

Yodobashi Camera (pictured below) is an experience in itself. Next to a Pachinko Parlour, it is one of the noisiest environments I have encountered, with media of all sorts spruiking for your attention.