One Saturday Sarah and I were invited to a barbecue in Enoshima, an “island” that is actually reclaimed from the sea and built on landfill. Friends, sunshine, boombox, badminton, grilled salmon and steaks, Chu-hi and Asahi, sake from an enormous bottle… which, after emptied, a bunch of people thrust into my hands while forcing a blindfold over my eyes and convincing me that it was a Japanese tradition to blindly split a watermelon with a sake bottle. Then they pushed me onto the tarp where a watermelon lay, Makoto pleading “Just don’t break the stereo,” while I stumbled around and finally succeeded in cracking open the melon to great applause (and without stopping the reggae thump from the boombox). I think it was all an excuse just to laugh at a blindfolded gaijin, but whatever.
Also there was the scent of eucalyptus permeating the park– a smell I know in my veins from a childhood in the Los Angeles hills, but that most of the Japanese people at the barbecue had never experienced before (I had no idea they had eucalyptus trees in Japan either). I ran up and grabbed a fist of leaves from one of the trees and crushed them in my hands, to share the mentholated koala goodness with everyone, many for the first time.
One sobering moment of the day was when Sarah and I wandered into that big weird upside-down ship thing in the background of some of the photos, and discovered that it was a monument containing the remains of a fishing boat accidentally bombed by the US during the nuclear tests around Bikini atoll… We felt very conspicuously American all of a sudden. But then went back and joined the party.
Later, there was karaoke and a psychedelic bar in Shibuya, and the unfortunate last train home at 12:15… But in the immortal words of fellow Californian Ice Cube, I have to say it was a good day.
(that’s from a flannery o’connor short-story, though i can’t remember which one)
The Akagi-jinja shrine near our apartment in Kagurazaka, where I was walking one day and happened to spy an old man walking his JAPANESE CHIN (that’s a kind of dog). How perfect, desu ne?
Below, the paper fortunes people buy from the temple tied onto tree-branches so they will come true.
Also a temple in Ginza somewhere that looks kind of spooky in the May gloom.
i was in japan for the month of may, living with my friend sarah in a tiny box in shinjuku. it was amazing and crazing and overwhelming, and i took far too many photos. so i will be displaying them in little chunks and droplets, sometimes roughly grouped around a theme. the first is “welcome to the neighborhood.” here are a bunch taken in the neighborhood surrounding our miniscule 4-mat room (almost enough space for two futons to be spread out– but not quite).
-the cemetary our balcony looked out onto (which freaked me out at first, since i have seen too many japanese horror movies and while walking up the stairs on certain nights i really convinced myself i had seen some spectral woman with long black hair over her face standing between the graves… but after a while i really grew to like waking up on sunday mornings to the simple and poignant sound of wooden blocks being clapped together for buddhist funerals)
-bicycles (which i would have considered riding were i not a complete disaster on two wheels)
-the quaint small-town vibe of benten-cho’s mainstreet, which gets collegey-er the closer you walk to the waseda stop (our apato was situated between the uchigome-yanagi-cho stop on the oedo subway line and the kagurazaka stop on the tozai subway line, and about a 20 minute stroll from the takadanobaba yamanote stop; the convenient location is pretty much the only thing that made doll-house life seem livable)
-a local temple with little buddhist and shinto statues wrapped up with miniature cloaks so that their respective deities don’t get cold (*i made a mistake here– in thailand the different coats for the jade buddha are so it doesn’t get cold/hot/humid, but according to the Japan Seldom Asked Questions Page, the bibs on the jizo statues are just to please the spirits, not necessarily keep them warm)
-the place where the taxis sleep at night.
-the morning herds of salarymen and schoolgirls (this subway shot was at takadanobaba yamanote stop i think)
-the vending machine in front of which some total asshole grabbed my crotch when i bent down to get my soda, and then i whirled around and projectile-shoved him with my two fists practically into the street while giving an impromptu lesson in english curse-words.
-a street-fair near the kagurazaka stop on my last day in tokyo– the perfect little send-off party.
two from sarah– me on a cinematically-lit macanese street, and us looking like scary cartoons in the ivan the kossack ice room.
Hello. I have been out of HK and away from a steady internet connection for over 6 weeks now, so here is the first of many catch-up posts.
So. In late April, after I finally finished my first year as a university teacher (that’s me in the back of a group photo on the top right, after the end of my last class with a bunch of students), two of my oldest and bestest buddies Sarah and Jessica came to visit in Hong Kong. We also somehow got hooked-up to stay at the newly-completed (actually still-under-construction) and super-swank Sands Casino in Macau, so we hydro-jetted over there and checked in for two nights of VIP luxury and weird adventures. Our room had three flat-screen TVs (including one visible from the tub) and two bathrooms, both of which included motion-sensor toilets (they could tell when you walked near and considerately raised the toilet lid for you). And this was one of the more “modest” of the Sands’ 51 high-roller suites. We wrecked our be-flip-flopped-feet on Macau’s charming Iberian cobblestone streets, gorged on traditional sesame candy (the shop-ladies kept pressing free samples on us), and strolled the steps of the Ruinas de Sao Paolo (looks even more beautiful lit up by night) before exploring the truly bizarre local nightlife (think casino lobby Portugese/Filipino cover bands, feathered and sequined British dancing girls, adoration from Colombian and West African businessmen, Russian ladies-of-the-night). The next day we cabbed it to Coloane’s Hac Sa (black sand) beach and laid under cloudy skies until we got hungry and headed to the famous Fernando’s for unbelievable garlic shrimp, paella rice, roast chicken and pitchers of sangria. Our last night we took turns in the jacuzzi tub (alright, alright, we all got in together but in our bathing suits) while watching MTV Southeast Asia (which is in English, strangely enough– I guess it would be too much to have individual broadcasts in Bahasa, Tagalog, Malay, and the dialects of whoever else is tuning in). Back in HK, we did the usual–
-vodka shots in the “snow room” at Russian restaurant Ivan the Kossack (that’s why we’re wearing the fur coats and hats)
-taking the antique tram through Wanchai
-an art opening at Para/site
-the launch party for Map-Office’s new book HK Lab 2, which I had reviewed for the South China Morning Post
-the opening of “My Moleskine” project, to which I had contributed a Moleskine filled with my sketches and weird lists (and then covered in the latest issue of SHIFT)
-the much-hyped (and slightly disappointing) opening of Get It Louder in Shenzhen (which I also wrote up for June SHIFT) and then trying to find a restaurant in the housing projects/bridal shop/freeway nexus Lily and I found ourselves in…
-a last day with Jessica in Tai O, among the crumbling ancestral halls, houses on stilts, plastic peacocks, cheap seafood and adorable puppies (that one was named “Bibih-jai”, or “Little Baby”)
(Shift, Jun 2005)
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(Shift, Jun 2005)
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