Japan

Arrived in Japan on a Sunday, April 22nd 2008, after a sleepless two years of living between Boston and Montreal.

16 hours traveling with a break in the baby-infested Minneapolis airport (a strange site) and thinking of the three weeks to come. Hoping to detach from all but the present, and, quite importantly, eat some tasty food.

I landed in Tokyo.

First impression: things are clean, organized and people drink a lot of beer on the train – I later realized that there is a rampant abuse of alcohol in this culture that is not acknowledged.

The train took me to the frenzied Shinjuku station (largest in the world), where the track was guarded by rows of suited salarymen, funky styled youth, and women barely clad in knee high sox and booty shorts texting away. This summarizes a big portion of the visible demographic.

I met my lovely friend Piera at the station, she is here teaching and singing English words, killing them softly. We went to eat in her charming neighborhood out of way of glossy guide books and other foreigners who are frowned upon by foreigners.

The city is easy to fall for. It is so manic, intense, stylish, moody, and perverse. It’s too easy to romanticize.

(my favorite photo of the trip. At the end of Omote-Sando, passed the famous prada building: I put the camera on the ground and took a slightly longer exposure, reminds me of imagery from 2046 by Kar Wai Wong)

(Shinjuku station)

There is this great piece by the west exit called: "the eye of Shinjuku"
(Designed by Yoshiko Miyashita and set in 1969)

(the middle kind of spins on the inside having a hypnotic effect, everyone seems too busy to care)

(Piera - having dinner atop a skyscraper while the ground shook and the building swayed)

Piera lived in a pretty cool neighberhood off of the Higashi-Koenji station - not easy to spot on the very developed subway system:


The metro is a very different experience than in most places I’ve been. There is a lot of sleeping going on, especially in the morning, also, there is a lot of phone texting/gaming, and there is the occasional guy reading manga about school girls while standing amidst school girls – twisted. No talking on the phone allowed.

Some words of buildings:

The effort put into iconic architecture for the sake of branding was impressive and slightly disturbing. Some of the buildings are non-functional (Dior) others exemplify utility (Prada). Asia, in general, seemed ultra-brand conscious. However, Japan has this twist of having so many unique things, although it might be just a function of the population density. Below are some pics of certain iconic brand buildings:

















A 4:45 am wake-up after my first Japanese Karaoke experience in an obscure basement bar in the mini-village of Tokyo, followed by 7-eleven rice wraps and such. Tokyo is budding with 7-elevens that have some tasty healthy sushi-like treats making things convenient and cheap. But I digress; we tore ourselves from sleep to visit the Tsukiji fish market with another Montreal Expat, Paula.



Tuna auction. The light here was great.


















We had some great sushi at the market, surely the freshest fish you could have. And the best eel I've had.




I thought this image great: on this lamppost there is this picture of an old man and in the corner is him with two naked girls, the reasons lost in translation.



Bright bright Lights, Big big city: I wandered the streets of Tokyo each night there, always amazed how the place distracted me from the eventual pain in my legs from a day of walking. The energy was viral.

Shibuya

Harajuku

At the park


Stumpy trees


The Tokyo Pond

museum

temple

plastic food

I took the Shinkansen to Nagoya and then a train to Takayama - a city at the feet of the Japanese alps. The town is charming with an old style Japanese architecture a lot of nature's colors, and more importantly it is home of Hida beef, known as the best in Japan (better than Kobe). I savoured some skewers immedietely and was not dissapointed to the delight of the little wrinkled japanese woman who served me.

I spent two nights in Takayama, staying in a traditional Ryoken. I met some local Japanese youths at a recessed dingy little bar over decorated with trinkets of hippy flavor. They thought I was an author as I was penning something in a notebook and so we had a converstion about dissafected Japanese DJs.







I took the train to Osaka, where I was met by the ever-hospitable Paula who let me use her place as a base as I explored the surrounding cities of Kyoto, Nara, Kobe while at night we would visit some of Osaka's night spots.

Kyoto:

Kobe day

Nara

Tottori dunes

In and around Hiroshima

blossoms

favorite sculpture - outdoor sculpture park near fuji

Hanging with Piera in Hiroshima:

usurped camera

282 newbury

a night of drinks, striped sweaters, and spilled wine. some of the players:

New Years Speech by Sash

In this, the two thousand and seventh year of our lord, the earth turned, you bled, sweated, inhaled, exhaled. You found yourself with a great many spectacular and unpleasant events behind you, and a great many equally spectacular and unpleasant events inevitably ahead of you. Let’s recap what you have learnt so far in your life.

You have gained some skill at discerning shape, movement, and color, but you are easily fooled. You have navigated the vagaries of squirming and crawling, then those of the equilibrium and balance necessary for walking. However, often you fall off the sidewalk and collide with objects and people with no discernible explanation.

You have, somewhat, learned to separate the animate from the inanimate, teaching yourself that a chair cannot get up and walk, and purging the beasts and monsters from beneath your bed. But often the closet is ominous in the middle of the night, and the trees lean and claw at you in the woods when you go camping.

You have been struck by the swift brutal blow of puberty, and have unsuccessfully attempted to understand the mechanics of lust, love and desire, both your own and that of everyone else you have wanted to kiss, have sex with. You can perhaps discern the difference between a good wine and a bad one on your palate, and the subtlety between a note correctly struck on an instrument and one that is incorrectly struck. But really what have you learnt that you did not know when you were a child?

You are born, there is a kaleidoscopic streak of color and movement, you are struck, buffeted, taught pain, and there is a fireworks display of electrical explosions in your brain. In this struggle to understand, to organize the chaos that you are confronted with what have you achieved?

When you were a child, navigating the tumult of first being alive, did you wonder what it would be like when the growth of you body had been complete? What you would be like when your limbs were long, thick, when you would be an adult in your late twenties, contending with the world, equipped with all of the wisdom of time spent, discovering, sticking your fingers into unknown places, feeling the shapes of things.

Have you been honest with your ten-year-old self? Have you been as courageous? Is your scar to age ratio as high as it was then? Do you still knock your head against things? Do you leap as indiscriminately, land on your head as often?

You find yourself here now, wondering what it will be like when you are fifty, your face lined, your hair gray, watching your children collide with the world, inexorably grow. Will you be honest to your late-twenties self? What will your fifty year-old self want from you now?