Typical Japanese bike. You can tell a lot about the owner by the presence of what I can only describe as oven mitts on the handle bars. Oven mitts are popular among older woman who are very sun concious and don't want their hands getting too brown from all the time spent in the sun on their bike. This is a pair of lacey light "summer oven mitts" that breathe in the heat...
6/27/05
Grubby Mitts
Here is a more sinister pair of oven mitts, winter oven mitts, complete with a quilted leather outer coating, just begging for some little hoodlum to fill with shaving cream...
6/6/05
New Viewing
It is officially summer, though school in Japan is still in full swing which has put me into a sort of timeless/seasonless state of mind, but attending BBQ’s is good summer therapy, I think. So this one took place on the roof top of an apartment building in Niimi, a city/town nestled in the valley of lots of modest green mountains.
Roof Top
The BBQ began, unofficially at 5:30 and trailed into the wee early morning hours, and had three grills with meat and chicken on them, lots of beer, about 50 people, including two delightful Brazilians who brought chicken hearts, and two visits from the Japanese police, which is like having your grandpa pop his head in the basement and tell you to keep it down, very menacing...
5/16/05
Turning Japanese
Claire said for us to pull a Japanese face, so here we are at our most Japanese, notice the restraint of our expressions, the exactness in our tea cup holding...
Behold the Glory
Tis the glory of Golden Week and our feverish quest to seek out neon-lit entertainment...
GW ain't just a Bush in Japan
One thing Japan doesn't lack is national holidays. April 29th kicked off the start of Golden Week (aka GW), the longest stretch of holidays during the year. April 29th was Green Day, no relation to the band, it came about from a past Emperor's love of nature, I’m not sure what folks here traditionally do on Green Day, I think I watched a couple movies though. Next comes Constitution Day on May 2nd, with a name that squelches any desire for further investigation, your boring guess is probably right, then May 3rd, which I think is the real jewel of all holiday’s in Japan is unofficially In-Between Day, just a freebie thrown in to connect Constitution Day with Children's Day on May 4th so everyone gets three days off in a row.
Good time for a road trip, so I hopped in my friend Amy's toaster shaped car along with Claire and Jez and we drove five hours to Kyushu, the western island of Japan. The highlight of the car trip was when Claire relented and let me thrown some of her hard boiled eggs out the window at a concrete wall. After one night in a non-descript city called Kokura, we drove down to Beppu a city of about 100,000 known Japan-wide for it's quality hot springs. It hosts two types of hot springs, ones for bathing called onsen and ones purely for watching and unfortunately smelling, called Hells. The Hells emit hellish looking smoke and sulfur smells, but give the city a certain mystical edge when driving into its manicured mountain sides, as if the whole area were resting on top of a bubbling caldron. Beppu is also known for its kitsch tourist value and for a museum devoted solely to sex, which is not listed on any tourist maps in town but in the Lonely Planet for the foreign traveler's amusement. And amused we were by its artifacts from bygone brothels and a down right naughty interpretation of Snow White's stay with the Seven Dwarves. The highlight of Beppu was staying at a traditional Japanese style hotel, called a ryokan, where we had use of a private onsen, and then had a traditional Japanese meal brought to our tatami mat room, to be consumed while wearing mint green and purple yukata (lightweight robes), after which the four of us played various games involving lies, truths, and cards into the wee hours…
Then we headed to Kyushu's largest city, Fukuoka and checked into another ryokan. Philip came to meet us and more drunken card games ensued. After the cards we headed to a dance club called the Happy Cock, whose mascot was a quite sinister looking rooster. There rest of our time spent in Fukuoka was either lazing around the ryokan or traipsing through the mega shopping center called Canal City, which the travel guide described as "verging on the sexy." I think Kyushu is doing its best to try and increase the birthrate in Japan, but it was fraught with sexual innuendos at every turn.
Good time for a road trip, so I hopped in my friend Amy's toaster shaped car along with Claire and Jez and we drove five hours to Kyushu, the western island of Japan. The highlight of the car trip was when Claire relented and let me thrown some of her hard boiled eggs out the window at a concrete wall. After one night in a non-descript city called Kokura, we drove down to Beppu a city of about 100,000 known Japan-wide for it's quality hot springs. It hosts two types of hot springs, ones for bathing called onsen and ones purely for watching and unfortunately smelling, called Hells. The Hells emit hellish looking smoke and sulfur smells, but give the city a certain mystical edge when driving into its manicured mountain sides, as if the whole area were resting on top of a bubbling caldron. Beppu is also known for its kitsch tourist value and for a museum devoted solely to sex, which is not listed on any tourist maps in town but in the Lonely Planet for the foreign traveler's amusement. And amused we were by its artifacts from bygone brothels and a down right naughty interpretation of Snow White's stay with the Seven Dwarves. The highlight of Beppu was staying at a traditional Japanese style hotel, called a ryokan, where we had use of a private onsen, and then had a traditional Japanese meal brought to our tatami mat room, to be consumed while wearing mint green and purple yukata (lightweight robes), after which the four of us played various games involving lies, truths, and cards into the wee hours…
Then we headed to Kyushu's largest city, Fukuoka and checked into another ryokan. Philip came to meet us and more drunken card games ensued. After the cards we headed to a dance club called the Happy Cock, whose mascot was a quite sinister looking rooster. There rest of our time spent in Fukuoka was either lazing around the ryokan or traipsing through the mega shopping center called Canal City, which the travel guide described as "verging on the sexy." I think Kyushu is doing its best to try and increase the birthrate in Japan, but it was fraught with sexual innuendos at every turn.
Cha-Cha Town
Amy's smile is a lie. We all vowed this would be the last time we rode in one of the many lame ferris wheel that every city thats any city seems to have in Japan...
Firey Hell
Here we are in the steamy pits of hell in Beppu... Actually, unless hell is filled with elaborated manicured gardens, clear skys, bright sun, pleasant temperatures and ample amounts of cool refreshing beverage vending machines, then its tough to call this place a hell...
5/15/05
Pocky Mon
Here's Philip next to a giant Pocky stick in a tacky store in Fukuoka's Canal City mega shopping construction...
4/27/05
Sort of Arbitrary Really
To continue on my observations of the more odd culture found in Japan, my next subject is SARs masks. At least that’s what I know them as because other than doctors or dentists I never saw people wearing these white masks in public until the threat of SARs broke out, which was shortly before my first visit to Japan in 2003. In Japan they are just called “masks” or more accurately “masku” and people wear them all the time. Students wear them when they serve school lunch (kids dish out the lunches in Japan, not Lunch Ladies) and adults wear them if they have a cold or the flu or if they don’t want to contract a cold or the flu. I just think it’s creepy. To see so many people looking like they walking into surgery, but really are on their way to teach a class. I even see people wearing them alone, while driving in their cars, protecting themselves from what? They give people an expressionless mute-like quality that reminds me of Hello Kitty, because she too, has no mouth. But there is a sort of sinister element, a sort of obsessive-compulsive germ-a-phobia about the whole thing. But it’s Japan, so they’ve taken some dark and made it cute. I’ve started collecting children’s SARs masks which come in brightly colored packaging, with cute character details, because something about them is uniquely and thoroughly Japanese.
!Outbreak!
My prize collection of SARs masks, ranging from monkey endorsed to Hello Kitty and Winnie the Pooh. It's too cute and weird to resist.
4/13/05
Culture Shmulture
Okay, I vowed this cherry blossom stuff would be my last highlight of traditional Japanese culture for a while. Because what I am equally, if not more so fascinated with is Japanese pop culture or just plain weird stuff. So I'll begin at the beginning. Most people, coming to Japan for the first time will go to Tokyo, and once in Tokyo, after a fitful night of sleep in a hotel, will venture out into the streets. And for most, hoping for a little normalcy and comfort from home, will do what they often do at some point during the day, and that is stop into a convenient store. Convenient stores, or "com-bee-knees" as they are called in Japan, have been just that for me, comforting, if not normal. I’m sure this obsession is just something I inherited from my dad, whose passion and compulsion for convenient stores would be hard for even me to match.
My favorite chain here is Lawson's, which I recently learned is named after a defunct chain that didn't make it in the US. The other top dogs are 7-11 (just like at home), Poplar, Daily Yamazaki, Sunkus, and Family Mart. What makes Lawson's so special in my heart, is for one, its color scheme and employee uniforms. The bubble gum pink, blue, and white stripes smocks and a big milk bottle as it's logo smacks of a seventies revival of the 1930's milkman/ ice cream parlor. I also believe Lawson's to have the highest quality of crust cut off sandwiches in Japan, (A good sandwich is hard to come by here, and it's even harder to find one that doesn't have the crusts cutoff already, but Lawson's does a good egg salad and ham) as well as a superior selection of bottled beverages and chocolate.
My favorite chain here is Lawson's, which I recently learned is named after a defunct chain that didn't make it in the US. The other top dogs are 7-11 (just like at home), Poplar, Daily Yamazaki, Sunkus, and Family Mart. What makes Lawson's so special in my heart, is for one, its color scheme and employee uniforms. The bubble gum pink, blue, and white stripes smocks and a big milk bottle as it's logo smacks of a seventies revival of the 1930's milkman/ ice cream parlor. I also believe Lawson's to have the highest quality of crust cut off sandwiches in Japan, (A good sandwich is hard to come by here, and it's even harder to find one that doesn't have the crusts cutoff already, but Lawson's does a good egg salad and ham) as well as a superior selection of bottled beverages and chocolate.
My Beacon in the Night
Lawson's, recently lovingly portrayed in a New York Times's magazine article.
Lawson's Girl
You can count on Lawson's for a lot of things, including a clerk with elaborately fashioned hair, dyed just the right shade of orange to really set off the lovely blue striped smock they must wear...
Lawson's Kitty
Lawson's is so cool they even have their own Hello Kitty doll, which is the offical seal of cool in Japan. The longer I'm here the harder it becomes to resist Hello Kitty, she taunts me with her patient mouthless persistance, she is everywhere, all the time, watching me with that wide blinkless stare.
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