So I’m still going through all of my photos, which means I won’t be posting the damned entry all at once and will extend it (possibly with ribs) for your pleasure over the course of three days. First, the obligatory photos outside the cut so you pay attention: 
See, Justin, I do remember this blog exists!
The Sumida River Fireworks Festival (隅田川花火大会 Sumida-gawa Hanabi Taikai) has been around in its present form for about 30 years, and has a history stretching back to after China’s most famous flammable invention crossed into Japan. Its roots come from two competing firework companies playing a game of “can you top this?” as throngs of spectators cheered on their favorite side. More historical info can be found here.
Today, around a million (yes, a 1 followed by six 0s) people gather along the banks of the Sumida river in historic Asakusa to eat and drink with friends and (hopefully) see big things go boom in the sky for an hour. The main gathering points are in heavily-treed parks, which means that you need either a spot in the front (which can only be had by staking your claim up to days in advance) or lots of luck (which I had, as I found a corner on the very edge of the park next to the bridge that was tree-free. In the above-seen map, all of the red areas on the riverbanks are blocked off during the actual show, which greatly limits the amount of space there is. From 6:30 onward, all of the white blocks are closed off to vehicular traffic through about 9:30.
As it’s a festival, many young women take the opportunity to wear kimonos to the festival, with their significant others (if one is present) usually wearing a yukata. I certainly appreciate the eye candy but they all look ungodly hot - then again I’ve noticed Japanese people have a tendency to not sweat at all. Lucky bastards.
Of course, with Sumida, the trick isn’t getting there, but leaving - Asakusa is the terminus of the Ginza line and the Asakusa line (both subway), which means that there’s essentially only two ways out. The police, being veterans of the event, do a pretty good job of managing the exodus - floodlights on major intersections help people see the way, and there are cops at every corner helping people figure out where to go. I, along with many others, chose to walk the 2+ kilometers to Ueno Station rather than take the Ginza line, which was likely packed beyond what I would consider reasonable. Walking over a mile carrying 10+ pounds of camera equipment is a great way to get exercise but I’m not sure if I would do it regularly.
But oh, I seem to have forgotten the most important part of the night:
More here. Enjoy!
So yeah, I’ve totally neglected this blog. Between classes, concerts, soccer matches, baseball games, and all of the other craziness happening around this city, who can blame me? Bad Dan. I do honestly hope to go back to writing here more often.
In the meantime, here’s something I’ve recently noticed. The irregular verb sanka suru (参加する） means to participate in/attend a special event, for example a seminar/conference/concert/sporting event, that sort of thing.
However, I’ve noticed lots of people on Mixi (mostly my generation, about 18 to 28 or so) using sansen suru (参戦する） in the same context.
Sansen means “participation in a war.” Given how insanely energetic live shows here can be (mosh pits, crowd surfing, etc), it certainly seems to be a better fit than the relatively drab sanka.
Anyway, thought that was neat. Now back to replying to messages on Mixi, the current bane of my existence.
So today (or tomorrow) is some sort of election day in Nakano Ward, as far as I can tell.
As a result of this, throughout the entire day (literally, since about 10AM) there have been vans with megaphones driving up and down every side street in my neighborhood, touting its candidates to be the best at fighting giant monsters or whatever. I could obviously give a shit seeing as I doubt I can vote, all I know is that it’s distracting me from my current work: procrastinating on my preparations for Anime Boston. Joy.
It’s April in Japan, which means many things: spring sales (naturally), baseball season (coming in another entry soon!) and, of course, cherry blossom viewing season, otherwise known as o-hanami (お花見）
Hanami is a big deal, because it gives everyone an opportunity to go outside, take a billion pictures, and get nicely toasted off sake - the latter two being activities the Japanese have excelled at for many years.
In the build-up to the cherry blossoms coming into bloom, weather forecasters across the country all try to out-guess each other as to when the peak viewing time will be (mankai, or ‘full bloom’). This year, given that Tokyo suffered a snowless winter, the first blooms started pretty early, with the first being a tree in Yasukuni Shrine of all places in mid-March. By the end of march, Yoyogi Park had several trees in bloom, and by early April most of Ueno has bloomed as well.
Most companies/departments have their own special hanami gatherings, which is why you’ll see blue vinyl sheets spread out at various parks. (or, barring sheets, cardboard, or even newspaper in a pinch). When the gathering is scheduled for a popular area (and I should note that my pictures of Ueno are a trickle compared to the flood of people I’ve seen in the park in the past), this often means sending the most junior employee out on the 5AM train, armed with cardboard, vinyl sheets, markers, and masking tape, to stake a claim. Eventually, backup arrives in the form of people carrying boxes of food, kegs, generators/gas-powered grills, you name it. Then everyone else shows up, and the party begins, often not ending until the evening (or until the booze runs out, whichever comes first).
Personally, my favorite part of Hanami is the food, as all of the roadside vendors set up in the park. Freshly-made yakitori, grilled eel, okonomiyaki, takoyaki, yakisoba - it’s all there, with waiter service to boot. My favorite spot for food is in Ueno park, at a stall-lined path leading up to a small temple.
Two and a half years ago, I described Akihabara as “past/present/futureperfect, the last generation of salaryman walking past today’s generation of cellphones to look at tomorrow’s generation of TVs.” Maybe a little bit of rephrasing, but nothing much has changed except for a few new stores and several sales cycles worth of bleeding-edge technology.
Akihabara’s (or Akiba, to the locals) importance as a place for consumer electronics has diminished in recent years, brought on by the expansion of chains such as Bic Camera, Sakuraya, Yodobashi Camera, etc. In its place, the district has become the gathering place for otaku wanting the latest anime merch, foreigners in need of duty-free purchases, and nihonjin in pursuit of deals - if Akiba offers anything, it’s choice.
One of the first things you notice when you arrive at Electric Town is the strange level of sexuality that pervades everything. Come out of the station and you see several girls in maid costumes offering flyers to maid cafes, where customers are served coffee by ‘cute’ girls in French maid outfits. Some specialty cafes offer other services (no, not that kind of “other” service) like PlayStation 3s. Yes, you too can get your ass kicked by a tiny Japanese girl in Resistance.
The use of women as marketing objects of course extends to the stores themselves - salesladies in jackets, costumes, and vinyl outfits promoting games, cellphones, internet access, and whatever else the stores have to cell.
“Electric Town” is divided into about 3 or 4 “sections” - when one comes out the station, about 90% of Akiba is to the right for about 3 or 4 long blocks. On the main drag, the shift goes from consumer electronics (with many stores boasting of their duty-free and American-compatible lineup) to PC/Media-related stores, to anime/otaku-centric stores, and finally to various odds-and-ends stores (used DVDs, toys/models, random objects, you name it). On the left side of the strip, a block or two away from the drag consists of mostly computer hardware/appliance stores, with a few good game shops (such as Messe Sannoh, which imports the latest from the US; as well as the ever-famous retro-haven Super Potato), pachinko parlors and arcades, and the majority of the maid cafes. The right side of the strip doesn’t extend too far back due to the train lines, but close to the station there’s a few alleyways of cramped booths selling everything from tiny video cameras to old-school vacuum tubes.
Yes, vacuum tubes. Vacuum tubes, LEDs, testing equipment, and god only knows what else. If someone’s building a giant robot, they’re surely buying the entire thing from Akihabara, piece-by-piece).
While I would go to Akiba quite frequently when I was at TUJ, now I don’t quite as much - part of this is because most of what I need can be found in Shibuya, and part of it is because too much of even a good thing can be… well, too much. That said, I certainly have words of sage advice for anyone who wants to explore Electric Town:
-When your visa status is an issue, go to Akiba: Not only can you get duty-free stuff (but check those prices!), but when it comes to things like cellphones, you’ll generally have a less strenuous time buying it in an Akiba shop instead of anywhere else. Bic Camera and Sakuraya wouldn’t accept my ‘temporary alien registration card’ as enough to let me sign up for a new cellphone contract, but the first store I walked into in Akiba did.
-Go on Sunday: The main drag is blocked in both directions to vehicular traffic from about 10AM to 4:30PM, making it much easier to wander around. The availability of standing room on the street also means that more colorful characters will be hanging out - it’s not Harajuku, but certainly entertaining on its own.
-Beware of Flesh Tones! Akiba has three types of stuff: electronic stuff, nerd stuff, and pornography. There’s at least 2 or 3 multi-level adult stores within a 100-meter radius of the station entrance, and as you get closer to the far end you’ll start to see more posters and game/DVD boxes that seem to have pinkish hues. Most of the stuff is hentai, and some of it is quite disturbing. Watch out for the PC Game Soft section in a store, they’re mostly erotic visual novels (because everyone in this country games on consoles). And if you do happen to stumble into the wrong section or the wrong stores, do not panic. See that guy thumbing through the DVDs looking for a copy of Catgirl Love Love Fantasy Vol 7? He doesn’t seem to care who sees him, why should you?
No, this blog is not dead, far from it - however, the software I’ve been using to prepare my photos (the ever-useful Adobe Lightroom) expired, so I need to acquire a new copy of the final release before I can start posting photos again.
Another reason for the lack fo entries is that, well, there hasn’t been much to report. Here’s my day:
8-9AM: Wake up (damned skylight letting the sun in)
9-11:30AM: Watch a TV episode or two, talk to people back in the states, maybe get some World of Warcraft in, review homework or kanji
11:30-12PM: Shower, get dressed, make sure keitai and ipod are charged, pack/unpack bag as needed
12:15PM: Walk down to Numabukuro station. If I have to pray at the shrine I’ll leave a few minutes earlier.
12:34PM: Train to school.
1:10PM: Arrive at school.
1:30PM-5PM: Class.
5PM~: Depends on what my plans are; either coming back to the apartment and cooking dinner, eating in Shibuya, going to a concert… could be anything.
Mostly I’ve been studying, doing the occasional bit of shopping, going to local shows (mostly はちばな - I really need to start seeing other bands, but who has the time?) , and so on and so forth. In other words… living. My Japanese has been getting markedly better, though; despite whatever struggles I may have in class, I’m beginning to understand more and more as the days go by. Earlier today I was on the train listening to my iPod, and the man sitting next to me was reading a sports newspaper. I naturally tried to read what I could see, he noticed, and we ended up having a broken - but vaguely understandable - conversation in Japanese. Then tonight, a friend emailed me inviting me to a gathering on Tuesday - the email was all in Japanese, but I was still able to read and understand it. So, progress.
Right now I’m having another weird moment. On Tuesday there was a Hachibana show at Shimokitazawa GARAGE, one of my favorite old haunts. Surprisingly, there were no ‘pretentious’ bands - all of the acts were about having *fun*, a rare occurrence but one I gladly welcome. In any case, all of the bands were selling EPs, and I naturally bought all of them. Tonight I popped the first one (by a band called Dynamite Orange) into my laptop, and immediately iTunes downloaded the correct track names. Now, this brings me back to 2-3 years ago when I first started going to these shows, and that never happened to any of the discs I bought at the time. I would always have to either find it on the band’s website, email the band and ask if they could give me a tracklist so I could copy and paste, or ask my roommate for help translating it.
The times, they are a’changin’.
Today we officially passed 100 kanji learned. This number should be staggering, in the way that when you’re a kid you learn how many thousands of feet go into a mile, how many Oreo cookies it would take to reach the moon, and how many days of chores were needed to earn enough pocket money for that shiny Game Boy game.
A similar topic came up at an alcohol-soaked JASCer gathering a couple nights ago (which was notable for other reasons, which I refrain from discussing here). The bill was 100 yen/person at the end of the night (this was the after-party party so not too many drinks were ordered), and my friends were taking about how when they were kids, 100 yen was the ultimate amount because they could buy anything in the candy store.
Anyway, back to my point. While I may be able to write (and understand!) words like 飲み物、食べる，お茶、金曜日、明るい、出来ます、社長、入り口、and many, many, many, MANY others, I only know 100 characters.
In two years? I’ll know something close to 2000.
The thought is maddening.
If nothing else, Tokyo is a haven for spending money on just about whatever you feel like - for me, this usually means CDs, DVDs, anime-related stuff, videogame-related stuff, or electronics. Thus, when I have to buy something, it means I’m usually at a Bic Camera, Tsutaya, or Tower Records, with slightly-less-occasional stops at Animate, Gamers, and Mandarake. In spending all that time at Japanese retail locations, I’ve noted quite a few things of interest.
-When one is (as most Americans are) accustomed to mediocre retail service on a daily basis, the level of attention you receive when asking even the simplest of questions can be absolutely mindblowing. This includes having had the following happen to me:
-Receiving small gifts (Pens, fans, keitai screen protectors, etc) after making a reasonably large purchase
-Exchanging what I believed to be a ‘Hello’ nod with a clerk, then having him come up to me 5 seconds later to answer my questions. It turns out that he was fully knowledgeable about the printer I was asking about and even pointed me to a cheaper model that would cover all of my needs. I’m convinced that every employee at Bic Camera can spout off the technical details of everything they sell, no matter what department it’s in. One day I’ll be bored enough to ask the guy selling digital cameras which wine I should buy.
-Upon asking for directions at an internet cafe (I’d stopped there to print out a map as I’d left the original at home), the cute cashier girl decide to take it upon herself to walk with me to the intersection that I had to make my turn at.
-When my furniture and appliances were delivered, the deliverymen actually took off their shoes before coming in. I just found that quaint in a cool kind of way.
-Point Cards are king in Japan: everyone from the big-ticket retailer to the coffee shop around the corner likely has some form of redemption system. Buy enough pairs of shoes and you get 50% off your next pair (ABC Shop). Buy enough cups of coffee and get a free danish (various places). Spend 50,000 yen on CDs, get 4000 yen back in store credit (Tower Records). Two points for every DVD you rent (Tsutaya). Free meal after 10 stamps (Denny’s). Ultimately I’d say Bic Camera probably has the best point system that I’ve encountered: you get points back equivalent to a percent of the item’s price, and you can choose to redeem those points for cash (with one point equaling one yen). That percent can vary from 5% (for mostly expensive items - for instance, plasma TVs or PS3s), to 8% (printer ink), 10% (headphones, small appliances), or even a lucky 20% (I think my refrigerator and my printer both hit this number). As of this writing I’ve accumulated something like 28,000 points (most of them actually stemming from legitimately needed stuff), and I plan to keep saving until I can get something frivolously awesome (like an XBOX360 or PS3, maybe even an HDTV to play them on) with it.
Of course, the catch is that they’re most definitely meant to lull the buyer into a false sense of accomplishment: by the time I’ll have saved up enough points for that 50″ megascreen, I’ll have spent many 10s of thousands of yen there, and one free TV will mean little on the bottom line of the company. Of course, given the
strength of the US Dollar against the Yen as of late, maybe I’m not doing so badly after all.
-An absurd amount of wrapping material gets used every day at retail stores of every kind across the country. And by absurd, I mean absurd - items wrapped in tissue paper, put into smaller bags, and then those bags are put into even bigger bags. Those bags are then stuffed into a chicken, which is then inserted into a duck, which is wrapped and bagged again, and then stuffed into a turkey before being deep fried, put into a fancy box with gold trim, and then bagged again upon being purchased by some housewife from Yokohama.
But seriously. Is the individual wrapping of my Smirnoff Ice bottles with bubble wrap necessary? Are the half-dozen plastic bags absolutely required? Do already shrink-wrapped CDs need an additional layer of easy-to-remove plastic before one reaches the impossible-without-a-chainsaw layer? Image is everything in this country, but at the same time when I’m told to separate my burnables and non-burnables, I wish that I’d be provided a little less of both - I’d like to see a point card at supermarkets for people who bring their own grocery bags, for example.
-Who needs malls when one has 10-floor, multi-building department stores? I keep expecting the Seibu buildings (all three of them) and the Parco buildings (all five of them) to suddenly transform into grotesque Giger-esque robots and slug it out across Shibuya. God willing one of them can fall onto 109 and raise the country’s collective IQ by a few points.
Alright, I’m going to attempt to really quickly go through the almost one dozen (!) bands I’ve seen perform live in the last two weeks or so.
U CAN’T SAY NO - Melodic ska/punk, of the variety that I can tolerate and enjoy on occasion.
The Cherry Coke$ - Think Flogging Molly, The Dresden Dolls, or The Pogues, but Japanese. Surprisingly, it works quite well, as this is a band I intend to keep track of.
FUCK YOU HEROES - Great guitar work, much harsher vocals - definitely not my thing on a normal basis but the energy in the crowd was awesome. Notably, the roadie let me onstage to take photos.
COQUETTISH (feat. Dan from Suicide Machines) - Solid punk showing, ended up buying their CD. Dan was who the crowd was there to see, so naturally they went apeshit. He continued to play through the end of the set even after splitting his thumb open on a broken guitar string.
AIM@Nozagon Project - Cute girl on the mic, producer on the keyboard and various other electronic bits and pieces - half of their performance was a concept piece so I couldn’t quite follow the plot, but she had a great singing voice.
プレシャス - Total concept piece so I didn’t really understand what was going on. Certainly a unique performance compared to all the other livehouse shows I’ve attended.
Atsushi - Two acoustic guitars, mostly downbeat/serious stuff, but technically skilled and Atsushi’s sound is pretty solid.
Apple Pie - They opened with a cover of “Come Together” by The Beatles, which I thought was awesome. Much more solid rock, kind of that serious ‘we’re here to make music’ stage presence.
はちばな - There’s a bit of history between me and these guys so they get a slightly longer note. Back in 2004 when I was going to TUJ, chance brought me to Shimokitazawa GARAGE, where a guy who asked me to call him Tama-san introduced me to his band, ザ☆ムーズムズ. They turned out to be the most energetic and plain old fun band of the night and quickly won me over. In March ‘05, I went to their hosted event, Maido-sai. There, I was lucky to hear a whole slate of fun bands, including スクナギ. The ムーズ guys gave me a free ticket to their next show with スクナギ, at Shin-Okubo Hot Shot. There, I was actually the first person to buy their new album.
Sadly both bands broke up this spring, as I found while checking their websites previous to my trip to Tokyo in June. Then, while doing a bit of Googleing, I found Tama-san’s website, which seemed to indicate that he’d formed a new band, はちばな. It turns out that this band is him, the old Mu-zu bassist, Sukunagi’s old guitarist, and a new drummer. They play both old Mu-zu songs as well as a bunch of new songs and are now concentrated awesome. They were quite shocked to see me when I showed up at Live Freak, but that gave way to much conversation and merriment. They’re all awesome guys, so it’s great to hang with them and see them perform again.
barbar - Laid-back jazz doing covers of various American songs as well as what I believe were original Japanese titles. Different, but worth the listen.