It’s with great excitement that I release my latest yo-yo video here to you, my Dearest of Readers.
This video was filmed in Kyoto, Takayama, and Tokyo (with a particularly funny scene filmed in Hagiwara-Gero). It was entirely shot, edited, and uploaded through my iPhone 4.
Filmed by: Jason Walters
Music by: DVS NME
Yo-yo used: OneDrop Project Two
FEAST YOUR EYES UPON THIS, ME HEARTIES!
Two nights ago, Cassy, Jason, and I decided to hit up “Womb”, a wildly popular nightclub in Tokyo. For five or so hours, we danced to any number of fairly terrible trance songs with only a smattering of nausea-inducing drum and bass tracks to spoil the otherwise tolerable night of music. Our goal was to hit the club after the subway stopped running (at midnight) and leave the club when the trains started running again (5 AM-ish)…with enough booze and a sense of Asian Adventure (TM) we were able to accomplish this task.
But that isn’t the interesting thing. The interesting thing happened while we were sleeping off our ridiculous night of dancing and drinking.
Around 9 in the morning (give or take a couple of hours…I was dead asleep and I am currently too lazy to Google anything other than “Whimsical Otter Photos”), we were woken up by the rumblings of an off-shore earthquake that, by all reports, measured anywhere between 6.7 and 7.2 on the Richter Scale. Cassy and Jason woke up with a start and started to, reasonably, panic. How did I react?
“You weren’t having it,” Jason said at lunch the next day.
“You just weren’t having it. Any of it,” Cassy agreed.
Apparently, I woke up during the minute-or-so-long-earthquake-and-freak-out-session only to tell Jason and Cassy to, and I quote it as accurately as possible according to their testimonies, “shut the fuck up and fucking go back to sleep.”
That’s right, kids…in the middle of an earthquake in a disaster-shaken country I refuse to allow anyone, ANYONE, to fear the rumblings of the earth. Nay, good people, do not read my above comments as sleep-deprived profanity or Husbandly Neglect, but instead read them as the wizened words of a sage long past fuck-giving regarding the shifting of tectonic plates. Or, if you chose, read it as the comments of a man who stayed up way to late for his age (and past his interest in bad club music) and who refuses to let anything, even the earthiest of quakes, to stand between him and sleep.
It’s fitting, I feel, that I spend my final night in the Land of the Rising Sun staying up way too late writing this blog post. After all, this trip is just the first of two major trips I plan on taking this summer (in case I haven’t bragged enough, London/Paris is on deck for next week) so I should just embrace the fact that I won’t return to anything resembling a proper sleep schedule until sometime in August after the jet lag has shaken itself off like an over-fed tick. In this post, I wanted to relay some sort of story about how Tokyo is everything I love about big cities and so much more, but all you will get is the following few sentences.
Deal with it.
Tokyo a ridiculously easy city to get around in, it’s remarkably safe, has loads of Big Bright Shiny Things, and the people speak a language that makes my head feel like it’s filled with oyster crackers and spare change. So, in the spirit of brevity, here’s an overly-generalized run down of what we’ve done/seen in Tokyo so as not to make this the Longest Blog Post in All of History Ever:
Akihabara: bought this sweet rig. Make fun of me later, but it’s been a shitload of fun to mess around with.
Harajuku: Gwen Stefani, you were not wrong about this place.
Tokyo Tower: ridiculous paint job. Great lens flares.
Imperial Palace: great late-night park in which to get drunk. Deliciously hobo-free.
Some Fish Market: best sushi I’ve ever had. Period.
Lots of other stuff, too, but I’m a bit on a J-Overload at the moment, so I’m sure I’ll relay more of the details later. This blog isn’t meant to be a day-to-day record anyway, but instead a place for reflection and stories about how I couldn’t have cared less about earthquakes and the tsunamis they could potentially generate. Tomorrow at around 4 PM J-Time, we’ll be boarding a plane bound for cheerful Minneapolis and, eventually, Denver. If over the next few days you want a personal photo slide show (do people still do those?) I’ll entertain the possibility of giving you one if I can just press play and sleep on the couch under a fleece throw.
What? If I sleep through and earthquake, I’ll sleep through a slideshow. Just saying.
-B
At this point in time, there are three relatively tall gringos (or gaijin, I believe the term is) stuffed into what is possibly the smallest hotel room in existence. No, we aren’t staying in a capsule hotel, but we might as well be.
On the drive to Tokyo, a six-hour drive filled with hilarious podcasts and countless rounds of Marry/Fuck/Kill, we attempted to visit the Great Sedimentary Pimple that is Mount Fuji, but the torrential rainfall characteristic of summer prevented us from glimpsing it. Sadly, that means that our detour from our Tokyo-bound path was for nothing more than quick bite to eat and a few minutes of me staring at one of the squatting toilets deciding whether or not this was the time I was going to try it out.
It wasn’t. Screw those things.
For the most part, our plans for Tokyo are the exact opposite as our plans in Kyoto and Hida. In Kyoto, we soaked up culture and history in the form of the countless temples and shrines that dot the city like an outbreak of Religious Acne. The food in Kyoto was top-notch and positively brimming with noodles. In Hida, we spent more than a few days sitting around in local hot spring baths called onsen (or as Cassy calls them, “nudie baths”) in order to soak out the pains and sprains earned in the many long, arduous battles with Daytime Drunking. Or Drinking, depending on your point of view. Or the number of chu-hi’s you’ve drank. Google that shit, chu-hi. It’s vicious, cheap, and available at any convenience store (or, as pronounced by everyone I’ve met here, “combeeni”).
Tokyo should be a metropolitan orgy of shopping, eating, and subway-riding. Needless to say, I’m stoked to visit Akihibara for the technological side of things. Cassy? You know she’ll be taking the first train to the Harajuku district for all kinds of strange-ass J-Fashion.
Tonight we’ll be hitting up a club called “Womb” (Jason says it was in the movie “Babel”, but who knows what kind of fresh Hell he’s talking about) from about 12-6 AM due to the fact that THAT’S WHEN THE TRAINS STOP. So, looks like I’ll be sleeping this one off tomorrow.
Oh, I’m almost done with my yo-yo video that I’ve mentioned absolutely nothing about so far. So there’s that.
-B
Things I’ve learned so far:
1. My natural volume is way too high for this place. I should quiet my ass down.
2. Stay on the left. Seriously. Escalators, sidewalks, everywhere.
3. No open container laws means being able to walk around with cheap, sweet boozy-bits.
4. Japan is frenetic, strange, and wholly welcoming.
After arriving in Japan…what, three or four days ago… I’ve done nothing but soak in history, tradition, and noodles. We managed to hit up shrines and temples between visits to noodle shops and shops named (among other things) “Titty”.
If you’ve followed my journey on Instagram (@doctorb42), you have no doubt seen all of the neat photos I’ve been able to catch on my trip out here. I’ll try to collect a few of the best at the bottom of this post.
When my wife and I arrived at our friend’s home, I was quickly introduced to the novel pictured below. As a man with a Hitchhiker’s Guide tattoo, I was excited to see a novel that I have read dozens of times presented in a language that I possess a Remarkably Limited Understanding Of. But, regardless of that fact, I do know exactly what goes on between those inversely-organized pages.
A long time ago, a Frenchman with a magnificent crop of facial hair suggested that the human mind processes symbols and signs through relating the representation and what that sign is interpreted to represent (classically presented as the relationship between the signifier and the signified). Usually, this means that we recognize red traffic signs as instructions to stop (pretty much the same in Japan) on a pretty much universal level. In nearly every case, the only ambiguous component of that relationship is the signifier (this is the genesis for that all-too-frustrating phenomenon known as interpretation.
In the Case of the Familiar Book, I know precisely what this story represents — the signified — but I am currently at a complete loss as to how to process the signifier. As a foreigner in a land with a completely unrelated language in relationship to my own, I find that this experience happens hundreds of times each day. Even without knowing how to consume the local language, most elements of the human experience can be presented and recognized, leading to a more comfortable and familiar experience. Before I saw that book, before I flipped open the thin pages to look at vertical rows if indecipherable code, I consciously felt a linguistic disconnect in Japan.
After the Mustachioed Frenchman came any number of White Haired Frenchmen who recognized experiences like mine as the truth, that sometimes the relationship between signifiers and signifieds can be expanded upon, modified, and even reversed. As any traveller will tell you, this is one of the best parts of visiting a a another country.
Just a thought…
Thus have I heard 