The usual absurd line outside of Jirō Rāmen in Mita (right outside of campus), despite the rain. It's quite good... but... chalk this phenomenon up to unreasonable Japanese enthusiasm.
The horrific spider-god of Roppongi Hills, poised in perpetuity to unleash her deadly egg-brood on Tokyo's gentle upper crust.
One of the central performing spaces in Roppongi Hills, probably the highest-class neighborhood in Tokyo. The crowd is here for a free jazz concert (Japan is nuts about jazz by the way), as were I and a few of my friends.
I saw these guys in Tamachi station. My apologies for the pink fuzz in bottom-right of the screen; I'm fairly certain it was a streaker or some sort of albino bear. Anyone care to forward a guess as to why these two dark-suited men are doing chained to one-another with wires, or what the heck is in the one guy's backpack?
"ALL GOOD FRIEND / I AM VERY HAPPY / WE ACT TOGETHER ANYTIME / A PLEASANT THING WAITS FROM NOW ON / WE DO ANY KIND OF THING / AND DO PLAY?"
I was a bit early in my commute to school, and I spied the cat guy again! He seems to take the same walk every morning around 7:30-7:45, with a smile on his face and that placid grey cat on his left shoulder.
From left- Monika, Maya, and Yuffie. This is at the awesome Fuji-Q Highland amusement park, and yes, that's Mt. Fuji clearly visible in the background. Awesome.
I don't even know...
how to begin to explain this...
This is the wall above the urinals...
in one of Fuji-Q's restrooms..."Wao! So big! Unbelievable! .....She loves it."
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My life took a sharp turn for awesomeness and madness last Saturday, when I hopped on a speeding train bound for Fuji-Q Highland with Maya and her friends Yuffie and Monika. It was a beautiful morning, and my light hangover lent the daylight a pleasing sharpness. The train was packed with day-hikers (and their gear) breaking free of the urban crush of Tokyo for the mountains and the swaths of rich green forest that lie to the west. We, however, were not to wander sun-mottled mountain paths: our destination was Fuji-Q, a massive amusement park in Yamanashi Prefecture, in the very shadow of Mt. Fuji. I would have slept on the train (it was a three hour ride) but I was far too excited about the park. Yuffie and Monika sat behind Maya and me, chatting in Japanese. In my state of hungover sleep-deprivation, the last thing I wanted to do was wrack my brain for long-buried Japanese words, so I was grateful to be able to speak with Maya in English. Unable to sleep, I flipped through a book of elementary French and watched a group of deaf people four rows ahead conversing in sign language. Every once in a while one of them would sign something funny and their faces would crinkle with laughter and one of them might slap his knee. Their laughter was... uncanny (more like 'bleating' than laughter). I suppose people learn "how to laugh" through imitating those around them, just like any other part of spoken language...
The hills, and then forested mountains, rolled past the windows lush and lovely with late-spring growth. Then the train rounded a bend and Mt. Fuji appeared painted in white and black against the crisp late-morning horizon. A few minutes later the twisted, colossal frames of Fuji-Q's world-class roller coasters, etched in white and red against the clear blue mountain sky, came into view.
Fuji-Q is a very serious park, on the scale of Six-Flags but much better. Three of their coasters hold or have held world records at some point- I think the "Dodonpa" coaster still holds the record for fastest acceleration (4.25 Gs), something like 0-170km/h in 3 seconds (yeah, it took a few seconds for my eyes to find their way out of my cranium after that). There's also a demented 160-ft take on rotating swings- a tower of steel called "鉄骨番長” ("tekkotsu banchō"- "Captain Ironbones") in classic construction black-and-yellow.
There's also a water ride complete with ridiculously flimsy ¥100 yellow ponchos. Poor Yuffie tore several gaping holes in hers, trying to fit her arms through, and got drenched. Somehow, I managed to tear a hole in mine with my nose while cringing upon impact with the water's surface (the ride is just a single amphibious car taking a steep drop into a large pond). I ended up wearing that tattered poncho for most of the rest of the day, because sometimes I do crazy stuff like that.
The first ride we rode is the newest in the park, called "ええじゃないか” or "Eejanaika," which I guess I would translate to "Ain't That Fine?" It's one of only a handful of so-called "4D" coasters in the world, meaning each row of seats can rotate 360 degrees irrespective of the motion of the cars. For the initial 250 ft. rise to the peak of the first hideous drop, we the passengers (victims) lie face up, suspended over a vast pool of cloudless blue sky. The only sounds, aside from occasional screams, are the cranking of the lift chain and a tense whistle of wind around the frame of the coaster. A turn of the head to either side reveals the vast downward slope of the mountain the park is built on, and the little valley towns that surround it, so impossibly far below and getting farther and farther...
And then suddenly I'm hurtling belly-up and head-first down an almost vertical drop, my stomach is in my pants, and before I can figure out what's happening I find myself spinning and tumbling downwards in a full zero-G roll as the hideous thing rotates the seats back and forth. I feel like a leaf in a labyrinthine jet-stream hurtling along at positively fatal velocities, utterly without bearing and completely unable to predict or understand the ludicrous inversions and loops and spins my body is being put through. After one last full backwards spin at the sharp peak of a last arc, the seats align into a relatively tame foot-first dive into the clamps and the cars and their traumatized cargo are wrenched to a halt. Best coaster I've ever experienced? You bet.
Another great thing about Japanese amusement parks (and Japan in general): people in costumes. Men in pink spandex or red silken robes, roving troupes of girls in bright yellow pikachu cosplay outfits, old ladies with bright purple hair (oh wait- that was on the metro this morning)... And pizza, sweet sweet pizza.
I have one more story to tell before this post crosses the tl;dr (Internet for "too long; didn't read") boundary: how I learned to tie a tie.
It all began innocently enough. I was sauntering to school, probably a few minutes late, with my usual grim face and thinking my usual grim thoughts, when who should intrude upon my melancholic, morbid musings but my friend Ai Roth, the improbably sexy half-Japanese half-Russian full-time-student-part-time wedding model whom I met for the first time at Daniel's farewell / birthday party, the night Jack and Daniel split a whole bottle of Jack Daniels and Jack took a bite out of the stairs in the Shibuya McDonald's, destroying his right maxillary central incisor.
Well, I have called her improbably sexy, and that is true, but that doesn't mean I remembered her name or how I knew her, so I was confused and surprised when she, gorgeous and vaguely familiar, came up to chat with me on my way to school. I must have played off my bewilderment fairly well, because I got myself invited to her birthday party. I managed to remain relatively cool for the rest of the conversation- at least I managed to avoid revealing to her that I didn't know who she was. I had now, however, a different problem: I was invited to a birthday party, furthermore a girl's birthday party, furtherfurthermore an attractive girl's birthday party, and I didn't know her name or how to contact her.
The answer to that question came quickly enough- I picked up from our brief conversation that she was an acquaintance of Maya's, and Maya has a far better memory than I do when it comes to people... and events... also facts... and most other things... : /
I had been explicitly instructed to dress up for the party, so Maya and I hit the H&M in Shibuya looking for some sexy garb. I picked up a slick green button-down and... a black silk tie. Maya got some girl pants and a short jacket.
Flash forward to the day of Ai's party: I've done a little research on tying ties, and I've chosen my knot and loaded an instructional video on Youtube. I'm tired, because I don't go to bed when I should, so I set an alarm for 6-something. The party is at 7-something, meeting slightly earlier at Shinjuku Station, which allows me ample time to nap, master the gentleman's art of tie-tying, and walk at a relaxed pace to Hiyoshi Station to catch the Tōkyū Tōyoko line to Shibuya... anyway, I sink gratefully into my delectably soft, freshly laundered sheets, and sleep... and sleep...
I am vaguely conscious that my nap has gone past its allotted time. I open my eyes, switch on the light, and realize that it's already half an hour past the time I was planning on leaving my apartment, fully dressed and groomed. I had set my alarm to am, not pm. Cue panic- I text Maya, leap into the shower, leap out of the shower, throw on my black slacks and my new green shirt and a black vest, and then I see the tie hanging like a noose from the clotheshorse. I hesitate. The tie hangs there nonchalantly. It mocks me, challenges me, flaunts its silky black sophistication and gracefully tapered maturity. I snatch it from its perch and throw myself into my desk chair. For the next ten minutes, I make failure after vexing failure while attempting to follow the seemingly simple instructional video for tying a Shelby Knot ("[...]tidy and fairly wide, well-suited for any dress shirt and somewhat wider ties made from light to medium fabrics[...]"). I am sweating. I cross ends, pull fabric through loops, and finally I manage to mangle the damned thing into an acceptable shape. I fly out the door in my cheap, heavily scuffed black leather shoes, tie fluttering in my wake. Within an hour I'm fashionably late to the party, slightly moist but reeking of confidence and style.
And it was a damn good thing I went the distance with the tie- I have never been to a fancier party in all my life. This was the closest I have yet come to something that could be called "high society." The venue was a large be-frescoed and thoroughly chandaliered chamber at the end of a long redbrick tunnel with incandescent glass panels in the floor. A steady stream of wine and beer and salads and hors d'oeuvres trickled into the room over the course of the evening. The room was full of people I recognized from the exchange program, as well as the sort of people you can only get to know through the modeling business (namely, models), many in evening gowns and suits. In a sentence, it was a most agreeable collision of coarse drunken youth and vague pretensions to wealth and style and loose cash and decent food and attractive but unreachable but then again drunk girls...
Long live youth and beauty~
