Hajime Chitose is a singer with a really unique voice who’s been getting a lot of attention lately. I went to Shinjuku on the way home from school to pick up her new CD the day it was released, and on my way out of the station to go find a CD store, I heard her song. It was this little stand that had been set up just to sell the new CD. I stood there and watched the video for a few minutes, then bought the CD, which came with 2 postcards. Hey, here’s an idea: the first 2 people to [ask][1] will get a Hajime Chitose postcard. [1]: mailto:jetfuel@metalbat.com
Water in Tokyo is really, really dirty. This is all the crap that has accumulated at a point where the river narrows to pass under a bridge. If you look closely, you can see a mannequin head in there.
L. Ron Hubbard’s wacky, creepy Scientology represents. Japanese people, too, have the opportunity to become [Operating Thetans][1]. I had to do a big project on [Soka Gakkai][2] for Japanese Religions class, and I was tempted to title my paper, “Soka Gakkai: It’s Like Scientology Except You Can’t Fry Bugs With Your Mind”. [1]: http://www.xenu.net [2]: http://www.sgi.org
[Eric][1] conveys… “interest in my phone”. [1]: http://www.emotioneric.com
It’s been weeks since I updated, and this is the best photo I’ve got. Sorry. Peter says raising your hand up in the air keeps gnats away from your head. We were waiting around for Tets to catch some butterflies, and after a while we started having caveman sports. We’d try to throw a big rock as far as possible, try to hit a tree with a rock, or try to throw a rock over a tree. It was pretty primal.
The Japanese are getting pretty excited what with the World Cup going on here now, but the most enthusiastic by far is the giant animatronic crab population.
Down by the river near the place where we stayed for the weekend. Clear water, lots of falls, and plenty of really dangerous rocks to climb around on and fall off. Sorry for ending that sentence with a preposition; I don’t know what state of mind I was in.
Deep down in these caves you find all sorts of little shrines and things. Here’s a spot where people use the mud to stick famously light one-yen coins to the ceiling and walls. Of course, I climbed up and stuck one on there, too. Hiroko was not impressed. There was also another little shrine where some famous monk set up chimes to sound when water dripped on them, and another where people piled up hundreds of flat rocks like the danged are supposedly made to do in Japanese hell.
There was an alarming number of these “missing” signs up in the mountains.
That’s the Japanese Constitution they’re stepping on, there. These guys also have a sign with a big US Army helmet enclosing a tiny Japanese one.
Traditional Japanese culture is disappearing to make way for these guys.
This guy stood on his suitcase and would move only very slowly, and only when someone put some money in his cup. I’ve heard stories about these guys around the world but he is the first I’ve seen.
It was crowded there. The concepts of “watch where you’re going” and “get the heck out of my way” don’t exist in Japan. Instead, people just bump into one another until everyone gets where they need to go.
Every year a bunch of dudes take off their pants and carry this golden god-car around Asakusa. We went to check it out, and it was neat to see the tradition still being carried out. I don’t know if smoking a cig and yelling at people for using your shishkabob stand’s trash can because they hadn’t bought any shishkabobs from you is tradition, as well. Maybe it’s an emerging ritual.
Someone retro-fitted this [SE/30][1] case (circa 1990) with a TFT screen and a G3 mobo of some sort. Now it runs [MacOS X][2]. The existence of this machine reminds me that there are still cool things going on in the world, and that many of them are going on in Akihabara. [1]: http://www.everymac.com/systems/apple/mac_classic/stats/mac_se30.html [2]: http://www.apple.com/macosx
Meet Jake. Jake is an Australian dude studying linguistics, who also happens to be a semi-professional guitarist. This guy is full of facts and personal theories about pretty much anything that you’d care to talk about. He, Jerry, and I shared a really nice sound studio for a few hours and jammed. Here he is trying out my bass. High points of the evening included a rousing rendition of The Beatles’ “Come Together”.
This is the panel on the photo-drying thingie.
One pair of goth-lolis I approached today politely refused to be photographed. Another pair gave me a dirty look and kept walking, which is a shame because they were particularly cute. The whole trip was worth it, though, for this photo. All in a day’s work.
I like how the photographer looks as if he’s trying to convince the model of something.
Today I went into 7-11 and found very, very high quality Evangelion models in these little capsules for 191 yen each. I don’t know if I told you, but, yes, I like Japan.
Here’s Tets’s friend (and now my friend too), Hama-san, hard at work on his tiny little Casio notebook-PC, running a Game Boy Advance emulator.
We went up into the mountains where they had the skiing for the 1998 Nagano Winter Olympics, and Tets chased butterflies around. Here are Tets and Hama enjoying lunch on the deserted ski lift platform.
Tets, Hama, and I ordered too many sandwiches. Tets, inspired by [some lunatic Japanese dude][1] who photographed Big Macs with increasing numbers of patties on them, created this KiloMac from the extras. [1]: http://www.powertoday.com/gedou/megamac/index.html
Tokyo’s homeless are fascinating. They set up entire villages of meticulously crafted cardboard and scrap homes in parks and train stations. They’ve got a pretty famous rivalry with the Tokyo government, which sometimes ignores them, and sometimes forcefully kicks them out of where they’ve set up, knocking over the houses and carting them away. Anyway, I think it says something about Japan that even the bums are relatively hard workers.
I ran across this homeless march on the way to the station this morning.
Little kids’ drawing contests are just as much fun here as anywhere else.
Octopus is on sale. The seafood section of a Japanese supermarket boggles the mind and challenges the stomach. Imagine a free sample tray except instead of little sausages or pineapple or something, it’s whole baby squids. They’re not even tasty.
This is ojiisan’s 91st birthday cake. His name is Ichiro, and when baseball comes on TV he goes, “Ah, Ichiro!” When eating, he’ll bust out with “Ahhh, tastyyy” every 5 minutes or so. Otherwise he’s a pretty quiet guy. He’s been smoking two packs of cigs a day for the past 73 years. He might make a good anti-anti-smoking spokesman. Next to him is obaasan, his arranged wife from back when Japanese wore kimono every day and the USA was still “Beikoku”.
From right to left, because that’s the way they do things here: Tets’s dad, Tets’s mom, Tets’s aunt, Tets’s aunt’s friend, Tets’s mom’s mom, Tets’s dad’s mom, Tets’s dad’s dad. Got that? These are the people with whom I spent my weekend, going shopping a lot and doing chores like cutting down trees. It’s a little different from hanging out with goth-lolis in Harajuku, for sure.
I can’t even tell you how much prettier this is in real life. The petals were all blowing around like in an anime.
I went up in the mountains in Nagano this weekend with Tets’s parents and grandparents. We went up to this shrine where they had some kind of ceremony for the Nagano Olympics a while back and, because it was so high up, the sakura were blooming. I missed Tokyo’s sakura this year by about a week, and was considerably disappointed. It was pretty exciting to find that they’re still going on in full force up there.
Blurry goth-lolis I approached on Tokyo’s famously trendy street.
All right, I knew when I got my digicam that I was going to be taking photos of any goth-lolis I could find. One thing that I was afraid of, though, is that eventually I’d ask someone I’d already asked, and they’d say, “you already took my picture!” and I’d be all embarrassed. Well, This girl is the first I had the courage to ask, and no more than five minutes after taking this photo, I approached her again, thinking she was someone else due to some particular circumstances, and asked if I could take her photo. She was very sweet and polite about telling me that I had just taken her photo, and that, no, she was not a different person. Well, I guess I’m glad I got it out of the way. Here she is, thanks go out to her, the first in what I hope will be a long and glorious tradition of goth-lolis.
Girl wringing her hands on the platform. I think she may have noticed me taking this photo. Heh.
Sampling the new Clammbon re-mix album. Sadly, it’s not as good as I’d hoped.
Probably playing Traffic, the standard Palm-based, in-class time-passer.
Meet Tets. He was my roommate in De Pere, and he’ll be my roommate again in Shinjuku, once our apartment opens up. Until then, I’m staying here with his parents. Tonight he’s staying here, too, because he missed the last train home.
Wow, look, there’s a cat next to my bass. Wow. It’s totally out of context.
