Japan Journal

...a continuing journal of Araya-san & Rutland-san's internship at Tokyo Broadcast System's i-Camp.
project-sensitive information is edited from this website.
this is a purely subjective and unofficial account of my experiences here in Japan so please don't take issue with anything i write or the President of TBS will have to resign in shame.

Flight out of LAX was delayed in order to repair a “flight critical” problem. Left an hour later than scheduled but still arrived more or less on time. Swapped seats with a woman so she could sit next to her husband (and smack the back of Brett’s seat when he reclined.) Ended up at window seat looking over the wing. Sat next to an air force combat systems technician for AWACS planes who had a travel tip for every facet of our flight: “ask for an exit row seat”, “open the foil lid on the orange juice away from you.”
1st myth shattered: I thought Japan was entirely paved. Flew over lots of green and at least three golf courses on the approach to Narita. The first thing I noticed was how clean and orderly everything is. The terminal was super quiet and completely spotless. No music. No PA. No talking. Carpet everywhere. Everyone is moving purposefully. If there is an afterlife, the first way point is probably about like this. A thermal imaging camera screened SARS risks with Predator-vision. Fast moving lines through immigration and even faster customs screening.
Tokyo itself is also unbelievably orderly and clean. Small scale: buildings, streets, personal space about 90% the size of stuff in US. Normal size cars seem huge here. Crushed velvet upholstery on the subway cars. Unattended lending library in the station.
Jeffrey met us at Narita. We took the Skyline train to Ueno & a propane- powered cab to the Katsutaro Ryokan in Sendagi. Checked in and the three of us went to meet Norico-san for dinner in Nezu. Tofu here is completely way better. It has texture AND flavor. Probably going to be saying this about a lot of the food. Also had lotus root, little cucumber slices, shitake, Japanese pumpkin, rice w/unari, pickled scallop hinges (really good), and fried chicken.
Stopped on the way back to the Ryokan for some phone cards from 7-11. They don’t work on the room phones. Front desk Mama-san says they won’t work on the house phone or public phones either. (?!?!) Ten minutes to curfew and too worn out to explore for a compatible public phone back on the street. Will meet Jeffrey in the lobby 9:15 tomorrow for 1st day.

Orientation day. Chiyoda line from Sendagi to Akasaka, the high-rent district where TBS HQ is located. i-Camp is in an auxiliary bldg. The main building is enormous. Features a ten-foot tall Ultraman statue on the promenade. Norico-san explained i-Camp. We watched a bit of the new Cat Chat DVD – English language instruction for little kids, including costumed characters dancing around. I got to try on the giant cat head and arms from the suit later in the day.
Fried shrimp curry for lunch was at CoCo Curry. Commodes here have two kinds of flush. Not sure what the difference between them is since both shoot a ton of water into the drain hole. Also saw the traditional old-school toilet. A lot more refined than the open hole I had imagained.We took quick recon trips to Shibuya and Harajuku for the project. Shibuya is like an overgrown Times Square. Nearly-paralyzing amounts of audio & visual stimuli. Walked down Takeshita Street in Harajuku. Hipster shopping drag. Huge Western influence. Then back to i-Camp for the first project meeting. Long work evening and dinner at a Tempura place just up the block. We caught the train back to the ryokan without Jeffrey’s guidance. Today’s highlight: Brett breaking the formality of the endless “Dozo Yoroshiku's and bows with a down-home “How’s it goin’?” Big laughs all around. Maybe it was funnier at the time.

the Mayor of Ultratown

Overcast and drizzly today, a marked difference from the sunny and warm weather yesterday. Umbrellas are put to good use here. Many places have a communal umbrella pool, or at least the office and ryokan do. Drying racks are at almost all building entrances, along with the plastic sheathes. Brett & I got to Sendagi station this morning using the shortcut we discovered last night. Made it to work without a hitch. 10:00 – the first big meeting w/everyone involved in the project. A measure of someone’s importance is how quickly they must excuse themselves from a meeting for other business. One of the TBS highups bailed out promptly after introducing himself. The meeting outlined the project goals, but more tellingly it revealed differences between American and Japanese approaches to using the same technology. A whole lot about the two cultures and how they differ could be inferred form the comparison. Or as Brett whispered to Remy & me during the meeting: “we are so far behind…”
After getting our workstations set up, Jeffrey, Brett & I went to lunch. Western-style fast food at First Kitchen, then subway to Harajuku. Destination:Kiddy Land for more fieldwork and research. Kiddy Land is five floors of Japanese cuteness in all forms of toys, games, dolls, and related neotenica. Assorted highlights included a Flat Eric puppet, the Lego Jabba the Hutt, and a gazillion stuffed animals. For the older kiddies, there are the pornstar action figures and the 1:1 scale replica handguns. After Kiddy Land, we explored Book Off, a used manga and cd/dvd store on what I think was Omotesando Ave. The employees are trained to greet patrons on sight, not just upon entering, but anytime they see one – which is always. So the store has a maddening undertone of “(something something), konichiwa!!” Then it was back to i-Camp to follow up on the recon and to do some drawing. Jeffrey explained the Kanji translation for his name “Cross” works out to be “Black Vinegar.” We tried deciphering my name, but there are so many variants, we’re leaving it up to Norico-san. We clocked out around 20:00 and got dinner at CoCo Curry which is fast becoming our Tokyo comfort food. I shot way too many photos of the countertop in failed attempts to engage the Minilux’s slow exposure mode. After dinner we stopped in the arcade up the street to check out the current state of videogames. Not much to comment on other that the curiosity of strip-mah-jongg on the top floor. We ran into Norico-san at Akasaka station and the four of us took the 2-line back to our appropriate stops. She says among the Kanji translations for “Araya” are “New Valley”, “Dilapidated House”, and possibly “Broken Arrow.”

plushies take note: just a few of the many inhabitants of kiddy land.

No rain as we expected. Got to work on time but the office was locked. Brett & I killed some time at the TBS company store and found out there’s an Ultraman festival coming up. Mostly working in the office today. Making preliminary concept sketches for tomorrow’s meeting. Got lunch at a Bento place in the corridor adjoining the Akasaka station. 1st meal ordered without Jeffrey’s translations. A lot of pointing and nodding. We got it to go so we could eat outside, at the Starbuck’s patio just outside TBS. Just after digging in, a very apologetic Starbuck's employee kicked us out, so we went down to the TBS promenade with the Ultraman statue instead. After work, Brett & I went back to Harajuku to check out Yoyogi Park. There must have been a concert at Yoyogi stadium because we ran into scalpers and a lot of vendors with food carts. Octopus kabobs, anyone? Once Harajuku started shutting down, we figured out how to get to Shibuya via subway. It’s more impressive at night. The Blade Runner comparisons are pretty accurate. Brett was curious about the Sega hi-tech zone. Creepy gambling games: a blackjack table with a video loop of the dealer on a wide screen TV. Her face looked like her jaw had been broken and re-wired into a permanent grin. There was also virtual horse racing. We played a game where you shoot zombies with pump-action shotguns. Looked around for a cheap place for dinner. I reluctantly agreed to try the McDonalds up on the second floor of one of the huge intersections. It is a McDonalds pretty much in name only. I got the “classic tasty.” The dining room has a 1960’s space station lounge décor: low velvet seats and stools, white room separators with odd shapes cut out. Silver pedestal seats. The food is served on plates, drinks in glasses. Waitstaff in aprons bus the tables. After eating, we made for the Tower records but only got as far as Tsutaya, which is more or less the same thing. I got some manga, which is tricky because new manga is sealed, so making a choice as an illiterate is something of a gamble. I went for the cover with the most gore on it. Also checked out the DVDs. They had the entire original Ultraman series, but I figure getting it on DVD would be redundant. Forgot to look for Gigantor – he’s Iron Man 28 over here. We left Shibuya pretty fried. Got back to the ryokan after 23:00 so we had to use the secret side door. Still considering the 1500g challenge at CoCo Curry. Putting away three pounds of curry rice in under an hour rewards you with a not having to pay and you get a Polaroid on the wall of fame. Coincidentally, I learned the Kanji for the two characters on the toilet flush knob. One is “big” or “praiseworthy”; the other is “small” or “insignificant.”

this subway map is unecessary now that i've committed the entire system & schedule to memory.

Afternoon meeting with the entire team seemed to go well. Moving forward with some of the preliminary concepts. It turns out the CoCo Curry challenge is different than I thought. It’s only 1300g, which is just less than 3 pounds. Also, it has to be eaten in under 20 minutes, every grain of rice. And you cannot leave your seat. I’m shooting for doing it next friday at dinner. That way, if my stomach ruptures, at least I’ll have the weekend. Also continuing with the beverage experimentations. I’ve started sampling the amino waters. Kirin Amino Supli = not bad; Calpis = kind of funky; Pocari Sweat = haven’t tried. They have a Gatorade-like zing without the artificial flavor, and a more fructosy tartness. There are also plastic pouches of flavorless amino jellies that you suck through a spout. Real astronaut food. I should be able to pound a few of those for breakfast by early next week. At lunch, Brett mentioned there’s a massive floating island of refuse in the Pacific ocean at the junction of several currents’ boundaries. The wind and water is stagnant, so hundreds of years of human garbage has accumulated there. It is approximately the size of Texas.

at CoCo: "nawww, Jeffrey, 1300g is about this much."

Today at lunchtime we went back to Kiddy Land and Brett picked up a digital camera about the size of a matchbox. Along with his collection of Hang Bears, he now has a sizeable lead on me in the race to acquire choking hazards. We’ve been moving non-stop since we landed on Sunday, adding a week of ten-hour workdays to our jetlag. As a result, I have had a few coffees to stay on top of things. Jeffrey says the energy elixirs in the tiny brown bottles are popular here. I’m not sure I’m ready for that kind of speed yet. We met up with Takako later in the afternoon. She is a set designer at TBS and spent an exchange year in the anim. program at USC, so she knows Brett from before. Takako took Jeffrey, Brett, Remy, and me on a tour of the soundstages. Some are equipped for HDTV, and a few are just blue cycloramas to comp in virtual sets, which are more common here than in the US. We saw a few shows being recorded on the virtual sets and afterwards got to goof around with the cameras and stuff. Exhaustion is giving way to giddiness. On the tour, one of the elevators tried to crush me in its doors. I didn’t see it coming, and it got me pretty good, but being oblivious to it all, I just kept moving. Jeffrey said it looked like it hurt, but I was already spaced out. After that we just started laughing at everything. We left work at 19:30 and took Takako up on her invitation to dinner at her house. She and her husband, also a TBS set designer, live on the outskirts of Tokyo, past Haneda airport. The three of us took a cab to their place. It was our first above-ground transit experience since arriving here. This town has multiple skylines and they extend way out in all directions. Takako and her husband were already entertaining guests. It was a 45-minute cab ride that cost 6500 yen (!) We were treated to some great “home-cooked” sashimi and got our first taste of Shochu. It’s like bourbon but milder and sort of carmelly. Kampai!!

rutland-san's collection of "chokeables."

Saturday morning we left the ryokan around 10:30. It was already warming up and getting humid. We walked south through Nezu to Ueno Park. Lots of museums and a zoo are there. There are huge carp and koi in one of the ponds. Another is completely covered with either lotus blossoms or lilies. We went to the National Museum. Several galleries in the main bldg. were closed until monday, so the displays were limited. Around 14:30 we decided to get some lunch and change some money over. The plan was to walk down to the Ameyoko street district, eat and then walk further down to Akihabara. The heat and the walking scrambled our plans. The banks and post offices were closed, so we were having problems finding somewhere to convert American dollars, but eventually were directed to Matsuzakaya department store. I was S.O.L. for leaving my passport at the ryokan, but Brett was able to get some dough. We continued walking and got to Akihabara before we knew it. By this time we were too worn out from the walking and the heat to make coherent decisions about where to eat. We eventually decided on Freshness Burger because it was cheap and easy to understand the menu. The place was like gaijin (foreigner) city. One thing we noticed about gaijin is they seem to come in two varieties: the “please speak to me, fellow westerner!” kind and the “I came here to get away from all of you” kind. At this particular moment, Freshness Burger was filled with the former. We got some decent but tiny cheeseburgers, and then it was time to hit the streets filled with electrical goods for sale. If Shibuya is sensory overload, then Akihabara is seizure inducing. Strobes, shouting shop proprietors, music, and tons of people all add up to a big bunch of noise. Plus, there are a gazillion gadgets all barking out for attention. We wandered into a seven-story superstore that sold everything including books, manga, videos, music, toys, models, computers, and videogames. There was also an indoor shooting range for the toy replica guns and rifles. My nervous system began shutting down somewhere about the fifth floor. I was in the middle of one of Tokyo’s biggest toy stores and I had the overwhelming desire to hurry back to the ryokan and stare at a blank wall while I waited on a load of laundry in the coin washers. Walking back to catch the Chiyoda line for home, we passed by Smoker’s Choice – a coffee shop for smokers with vending machines in place of human staff and cigarettes instead of coffee. We caught a train at Yushima station and on the brief ride to Sendagi, encountered another Type 1 Gaijin: an exchange high school student who was thrilled to be speaking English to us despite the fact Brett and I were asleep on our feet and hanging from the commuter straps with both hands. Just enough time to get a load in the wash and Norico calls to see if we want to meet her for dinner at her regular place in Nezu. Sure! The table next to us orders a round of snails. I mistakenly say how there is no way I would ever be able to eat a snail. Norico casually says something to the cook and moments later; a round of snails arrives at our table. You have to pick them out of their shells with a short skewery stick. Apparently they are a delicacy. I got mine out in one piece and Brett starts in on the anatomy of the snail, which is starting to unroll down the stick. It’s recommended you eat the whole thing at once. It tasted pretty good, but it’s one of those things that gets weirder the longer you chew on it. I’m just glad I wasn’t joking about never having eaten a squid face before.

First week gone. More impressions of Tokyo: Lots and lots of smoking, not only on the streets, but in restaurants and offices as well. The i-Camp office usually has at least one person lit up at any given moment. Also, Tokyo is very clean but ironically, public waste receptacles are fairly uncommon. This results in the phenomenon of walking around with garbage in your hands for a very long time before finding the appropriate trash bin for it. We don’t know if there is a native term for this, but Brett, Jeffrey, and I have been racking up the miles holding Popsicle sticks, empty bottles, food wrappers, and various other “dead soldiers.” We don’t see any Japanese walking around with the same problem. Maybe we’re just consuming things faster. What else…pop culture seems less inhibited here. There are less or at least different social taboos. There are too many examples to list, but here’s a few: Fashion-wise, everything is fair game. The kids here will wear anything. Punk is everywhere, and Gothic Lolita is another popular look, but the fairy-tale/anime princess get-up is the most elaborate. Attitudes toward gender roles and social values are also obviously different here. Nobody blinks an eye at what might be considered inappropriate or exploitative in the US. The oddest example I’ve come across in the past week is a TV show I would describe only as “schoolgirl humiliation hour.” There was another program, which from what I could tell was like an “am I hot or not” -type show, but was focused completely on asses. My current favorite is a print ad featuring a hand puppet of a horse enjoying a frosty mug of beer. In US this company would be sued by organizations representing children, horses, and puppets.
Today Brett and I went to the flea market at Meiji Shrine in Harajuku. After the sensory assaults at Shibuya and Akihabara, it was a nice change of pace to walk around and see stuff that didn’t honk and flash at you. Some of the vendors had pet monkeys or some weird monkeylike marsupials that were dressed up in little clothes. The monkeys would crawl around on the vendor’s heads and faces. If I had a tiny monkey crawling on my face, I would find it a little distracting, but these folks seemed fine with it. The monkeys were not for sale. We met Jeffrey for lunch and then headed for Ginza, where we stopped to explore the Sony building, which in fact is filled with items that do honk and flash at you. Then we walked to where the Imperial Palace grounds are. They should rename that place the Impossible-To-See Palace. You can't even sneak a glimpse of it through thte trees. I think it’s a hoax. There’s probably nothing inside the moat and walls except for some office furniture and maybe a cooler of party-ice bags. Since the palace is off-limits, we went next door to Hibya Park, home of the cat-guy and his cardboard box full of cats. We got dinner back in Sendagi at a coffee shop. I got a very tiny pizza. After dinner, I decided I had to get more dinner somewhere else, so I picked up some curry rice and chicken from an old man at a take out window on the street corner. Yokata!

japan is so efficient that i had to get my head cubed.
it makes the rush hour commute so much easier if you are modular.

We got to i-Camp at about a quarter to ten. The door was locked and the office was empty (again.) We decided to wait outside the door instead of taking the temperamental elevators back down to go outside. At about ten 'til one of the girls who works on another project arrived. She tried to unlock the door. The lock is a keypad you punch a code into and then you hold the back of your hand up up against a scanner which reads the veins in the back of your hand or something. She wasn't having much luck, but kept trying for several minutes. She finally gave up and the three of us sat and waited for someone else to open the doors. Eventually Naomi the office manager showed up and the back of her hand was good enough to get the doors open. We worked more on character designs, preparing for another team meeting tomorrow morning. Yama, the lead animator in the TBS CG dept. swung by late in the day and offered his insights. Simple and cute are popular. If a child can draw your character, it is a good design. Thanks for the tip Yama, where were you during the last meeting? We clocked out at 19:45 and went looking for a yakitori place for dinner. We kept striking out and gave up. We ended up instead at a place called "Guts" that is a tapas bar. I got the carbonara pizza and black beer. Raw egg is common on pizza here according to Jeffrey, because "salmonella is not a problem." By that do you mean salmonella is no longer a threat or that people don't mind getting it? We settled on the check betsu-betsu style and realized they hit each of us with a 300 yen cover charge - our first taste of the "Akasaka Burn."

Morning meeting with the company we're developing the project for. Not sure if they really like our stuff or are just being polite. For lunch, we went to a do-it-yourself style bento-to-go place we saw on the way to Guts last night. I got rice with chicken and a mostly-cooked egg percolating on top of it all, and a cup of what looked to be flan. Jeffrey's katakana translation of the label was "fleen." I figured 'close enough' and got it anyways. Man,that was the best fleen I ever had in my life! Takako met us at 19:00 to get ramen and see some Kabuki. Yama came too, and so did Zehra, another intern from the states. With student ID's, one act cost 600 yen. We caught the last act of Program B, which started at 20:30. The entire performance began at 11:00 that morning. We sat in the last row of nosebleed seats, but the view was still pretty good. I didn't understand two words of it but neither did any of the native Japanese speakers. The vocalizations were amazing and so were the set designs. One featured falling snow,one had a trap door, and the last scene had a working waterfall. It also proved Kabuki beat cinema's use of ultra-wide screen and surround sound by some three hundred years. Afterwards, the bunch of us went for drinks. It was the first time I encountered restroom signage in Kanji, a minor problem. The place was playing Japanese Muzak of Duran Duran and the Beatles. They closed the place down at 23:00 with Auld Lang Syne, which is also used to close supermarkets and department stores. Takako was laughing at our Japanese because to her ears,our western accent makes us sound drunk. I think her eastern ears were what's drunk - her face turns bright red when she has any alcohol.

blurry people slurping ramen.

This morning we met at Panasonic Center for a tour and some demonstrations. The building is way out in Odiaba on Tokyo Bay, so we had to figure out how to transfer to some different rail lines to get there. Odiaba looks to be a fairly recent development and is unlike the rest of what I've seen of Tokyo. Instead of being overbuilt in dense vertical stacks, the buildings in Odiaba are set on sprawling and highly manicured subdivisions. The roads are all flat, wide, straight, and empty. Each building looks like its designer tried to outdo the guy next door, so there's a lot of post-modern architectural one-upsmanship. The last leg of our commute there was via a driverless elevated train that was three times the price of a subway ride. In spite of all this, the place was a complete ghost town. At least half the buildings are shopping malls or expo centers, but even the offices seemed empty. If Panasonic sponsors a pavillion at Epcot, then Panasonic Center is like the million square-foot version of it. The main part of our tour was a walk through of a "home of tomorrow." It opened up with a movie depicting a typical day in the life of a regular family. The voice-over narration was a hoot. The announcer had perfect english diction and smooth delivery, but a lot of his speech was phrased really awkwardly. And does anybody really want an eight-inch robot who knows all about their personal life to confront them the moment they get home? Oh, wait. I guess I do.

this photo was taken right after i grew 30m and just before i ate those people.

We left for work extra early this morning to take a detour to Asakusa for the Ground Cherry Festival at Sensoji Temple. It was drizzly and early enough that there weren't many people there yet. We passed through the Kaminari-Mon (Thunder Gate) and had the rare opportunity of seeing Nakamise-Dori (the merchant-lined street connecting the gate to the temple) completely deserted. Things picked up by the time we got to the temple entrance. Brett & I got our fortunes at the temple. You draw a long stick from a metal can and read the marking on it. Then you find the same marking from among the many small drawers in a cabinet and your fortune is on a sheet of paper within the drawer. Brett's fortune was very good. My fortune was very bad. It was compounded by the fact that I had to keep it with me until I got back to i-Camp where I could have someone tell me what it said. Our visit to the temple on that particular occasion was equivalent to making forty six thousand visits. So I guess I'm set. At lunch, Jeffrey and I were discussing that we noticed how seriously people take their jobs here. At least in service -type jobs, people will go out of their way to accommodate you. This is especially unsettling when you come across this level of enthusiasm in people working what would be considered unglamorous or downright loathsome jobs in the US. For example, Jeffrey bought a curry rice patty at the AM/PM mini market and the counter girl heated it up in the oven behind the register after she rang it up. And the staff at Coco Curry is consistently amicable despite being Tokyo's closest thing to Waffle House. It's become something of an experiment to go somewhere we would usually avoid back home to see how the Japanese have hopped it up, like the Shibuya McDonald's. Or the project meeting this evening ended with a delivery from Pizza Hut. Once again Pizza Hut Tokyo comes through with Purukogi (Korean BBQ) pizza. Not at all a meat-lover's supreme. This stuff was so good that it transcended Pizza Hut.

tellin' it like it is: now "a pid and high wave is on [my] way"

The first easy day now that the other part of the project team is responding to what we presented last night. After work we were invited to a send-off dinner for someone in the Computer Graphics Dept at TBS. It was also a "meet the USC interns" dinner. It was being talked up like people were going to get us violently drunk, so I was expecting the worst. It turned out to be a well-behaved traditional style Japanese meal. Afterwards, Brett and I joined Yama and some folks at an Akasaka dive bar called "Kenny's." Brett ordered a bottle of Shochu and the two of us polished it off in about an hour. It was equivalent to only fifty proof, so it was more like splitting a tall bottle of cologne. The script on the label translated as "Iyichico" but the Hirogana was so stylized that it looked like it said "Lintz." One of the TBS guys ordered "hot beer" which was one half beer and one half Tabasco sauce. That is a good drink to order if you hate drinking.

chez kenny's: draining the shochu, rutland-san makes a friend.

Finally a break from the gloom and rain. Today was hot and humid pretty much all day long. We met Mie, who works at i-Camp, and her husband Katsuhiko in Asakusa to hang out for the day. We set Asakusa Station as our meeting place. We were waiting under the clock tower at a five-point intersection when a pigeon pooped on Brett. No luck meeting up, so Mie called and we changed our meeting place to a smaller landmark, the KFC on the corner. On our way there, a rickshaw driver stopped us to practice his english. He wanted to clarify the concept of "beer in glass" versus "glass in beer." We assured him that between the two, "beer in glass" is definitely what he should offer his clients. Once we all met up, the four of us went for lunch at a noodle shop. Asakusa ramen is supposed to be the best, so we got our chance to get a taste. We had bazoku tsukemen & bazoku hiyashi chuka. Afterwards, Mie wanted to stop somewhere with a/c so she could write down the names of what we ordered. We ended up at Starbucks, where the serving sizes are skewed one size smaller than in the US. Mie and Katsuhiko both do translation in their work, and Mie gave us the rundown of the english sounds she hates pronouncing. They are: PH, V, B, L, and R. She said that when she was visiting Los Angeles, she would always order vanilla milkshakes at the drive-throughs, but they always gave her banana instead. She also dislikes the word "thriller" because it is unpronounceable. Brett and I both repeated it several times, "thriller", "thriller..", "thriller...", slowing down further with each repetition. Mie said she wanted to slice Brett's head in half while he spoke so she can see what his mouth did to form the sounds. I'd just be curious to see Mie slice Brett's head in half.

makin' noodles in asakusa

Today we went back to Odiaba, to the Tokyo Sea Life Park (the aquarium.) The morning was gray and rainy again, so we figured it would be good to find somewhere indoors to spend the day. When we got there we realized a lot of other people had the same idea. The place was super crowded. Maneuvering among the throngs of people here is a difficult skill to master. In the streets or subways or wherever masses of people are hoofing it, there is a predetermined, almost telepathic flow pattern that Brett and I definitely are not plugged into. Foot traffic lanes borrow rules from the street - which is "drive on the left side of the median." Being American, Brett and I instinctively drift to the right. Very bad. Also, the Japanese are generally not loud and fat like Americans, so they will attempt to squeeze past you without saying anything like "excuse me" or its equivalent "sumimasen." This gets really crazy in the subway stations, where the density of people can be impenetrable. There is part of one of our commutes where we have to get from the top of stairway A to ticket window B. Our path is a straight line, parallel to the length of the platform. The schedule is timed so that we consistently reach point A exactly after a train empties a wave of passengers as wide as the platform and moving exactly perpendicular to our path. Once the floodgates open and everyone starts running, it takes a lot of effort to not get swept away. Rush hour is also something to behold. Our daily commute isn't bad, but a few times we caught a rush-hour JR train at Ueno, a bigger station that was just nuts. Station workers at the entrances to each car help mash the people in. I saw a woman reach an arm into a car that was packed solid, grab the rail just inside the doorway, and wring herself around the doorlip 180 degrees until she disappeared. But anyways, the aquarium was nice. There were giant tuna, sharks, arctic and prehistoric looking critters, and we caught a glimpse of a sea cucumber having a very bad day. At the exit was the sign for "buggy center." I don't know if that meant it was the parking lot or what. It was still miserable outside when we left the aquarium, so we went to the National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation, whose name is obviously contorted to make for a convenient acronym. On our walk to the museum, we saw the aftermath of a bona-fide Japanese auto accident. Based on the pristine condition of all the cars here, I thought nobody got into wrecks. I was about to take a picture of the scene, but right at that moment Jeffrey called to set up meeting plans for dinner, so the camera part of my phone shut down and the phone part started up. "Jeffrey, I was about to take a picture of a car wreck!" We were tipped off to the accident when a tiny ambulance politely squeaked by. Brett joked that it was so small that they'd have to cut your legs off so you could fit in the back and then they would sew them back on once you got to the hospital. The big attraction at the museum was Honda's robot, who after an extended hype-building delay, finally walked out and put on a show. For a country that practically invented putting men in suits, it was pretty weird to see a real live mechanical man do its thing. They sure do like their robots here, and they like 'em young.

more japanese innovations: the virtual horse's ass

We briefly sat in on a morning meeting regarding some technical issues of the project. Brett asked Norico to ask the programmer guy in Japanese for some ballpark figures, or "about what size will we be working at?" Norico's translation of "about" was literally "about." Apparently there is no native Japanese word to express imprecision. It's a western concept, so they had to borrow our word. Ha ha. Another thing Brett and I noticed about working here is that you can seriously derail the flow of a meeting if you can shift the attention to some hi-tech gadgetry, like for example e-mailing a picture to somebody's cell phone. We've seen meetings large and small grind to a halt as people have huddled around and exchanged phones displaying various cool things on them. Brett and I are not certain exactly when we will need to exploit this stratagem, but we do know now that we can use it to our advantage should a crisis situation arise.

we were told to expect unbearable heat, but we're getting clouds and rain instead.

After lunch, we went to the main building to meet Yama in the HD studio. They were gearing up for a show with real-time computer controlled cartoon hosts. It's like operating puppets except the characters exist only on the tv screen. They are operated by Playstation console controllers so it's half videogame half puppet show. We clocked out at 18:50 and went to Shinjuku. Mie suggested we go at night, and for good reason. I retract my earlier statement that Shibuya was like Blade Runner. It's Shinjuku. Very dense, very crowded, and surrounded by narrow canyons of neon-covered building facades. It's also the first place we've been in Tokyo that doesn't feel squeaky clean. Parts of Shinjuku are Tokyo's red light district and the barkers are out soliciting for their establishments in all colors and languages. Getting back to Sendagi was tricky because Tokyo has a bunch of rail and subway lines that operate independently of each other. We figured this out the hard way after noticing the map in the station had absolutely no familiar stations on it. We eventually pieced it all together and made the right connections, so we managed to get back without getting lost.

Another adjustment to daily life here is that Japanese commerce is almost entirely cash-driven. Jeffrey says checking accounts are non-existent over here. People have credit cards, but by and large, cash is king. Considering just how industrialized and technologically advanced the place is, it's surprising to know that everyone is walking around with wads of paper money in their pockets. Using cash for everything changes the psychology of buying stuff. Purchasing things involves a little social ritual of money changing hands with another person, and this exchange between two people makes everything somehow more immediate. Plus you're dealing with known quantities, money and goods - as opposed to the U.S. where between direct deposit and debit and check cards, it's possible to go indefinitely without ever seeing real money. Every place has a little tray you put your money in so the cashier can count it all out. And people present you things with both hands, even tiny things like register receipts.
Something else we've noticed is the paradox of the abundance and sparseness of packaging and merchandise. Packaging is huge. When you buy something, it gets wrapped up - sometimes like a gift, usually over-wrapped. Things come individually wrapped a lot also. Like cookies in a box are all wrapped separately. Kit-Kats: each stick. Fast food take out: big bag containing small bag for burger, small bag for fries, small bag for drink cup. But everything is rationed out, or in tiny allotments. Order large everything. This goes for food and clothes. Brett supersized his meal at KFC and it ended up being regular size. You get 1 (one) pack of ketchup for your fries. I asked Jeffrey how common all-you-can-eat places are. He says they're around, but pretty scarce. They call it "Viking-Style." I'm so hungry I could sack a village.

man's dominion over molondom
this watermelon has eight corners. i wasn't joking about the head-cubing, either.

Morning meeting with the project crew. The tech guys are still hashing out the details of exactly what we should be working on next, so our workload hasn't been so heavy these past few days. No doubt this will bite us back toward the end of the schedule. Today was Yumiko's birthday. She works at i-Camp on another project. Mie snuck out and got a cake and some favors. We got party poppers, which are little cardboard cones and bombs that you pull the string on the back and a gunpowder charge explodes, popping like a firecracker and shooting confetti and streamers out the front. About six of us snuck up behind the little office-divider wall behind where Yumiko was working. We fired a volley of pops and streamers over the wall before charging her with the cake. She was so freaked out by the sudden noise and the flying debris that she just about barfed up her heart and died right there. It almost wasn't even really that funny. After a while Yumiko regained her composure and everyone had a chuckle about it over the cake.
For dinner, Brett and I finally tried out the yakiniku place caddy-corner to the front door of the ryokan. We usually pass by the place at night on the way home and the smoke is pouring out the take-out window, and we always say that we have to give it a try. Sendagi is a less cosmopolitan part of town, so there's not so much english going around. I broke out the phrase book, and with the help of the guy next to us at the counter, we got an assortment of yakitori (meat skewers.) It was all cheap and tasty. Nothing was too weird, although one skewer was heavy on the liver and another was just wads of grilled chicken skin. But everyone knows that's the best part anyways.

brett using his camera-phone on the subway

We noticed a bunch of sirens and about four helicopters hovering around yesterday at lunchtime. It was unusual, but I forgot about it after going back inside. Today, Remy said all the ruckus was because the police found some schoolgirls who had gone missing from Shibuya a few days ago. They were found in an Akasaka apartment all handcuffed together. They found one of the assailants in the next room asphyxiated in plastic wrap. I guess he did himself in rather than face a severe punishment. When we first got here there was a story in the paper about some parents and a teacher being held accountable for a child's death from abuse and neglect. A government official was calling for them to be dragged through the streets and then beheaded. The point of this story was I was going to say how the helicopters reminded me of Los Angeles, but then I got carried away with the asphyxiations and beheadings. By the way, Brett found a news item today where some guy in Germany was soliciting on the internet for someone consenting to be killed and eaten. And he found someone! In this age of degenerate behavior, it's always heartwarming to hear a story of two people perfectly matched for each other getting together and eating one of them.

This morning I stopped at Mister Donut on the way to the subway for some quick and easy breakfast. We are taking the train to Yama's from where he's going to take us to an onsen. Mr. Donut put my cup of OJ in a bag, which I stupidly threw in my bag to get on the train in a hurry. Three stops down the line I discover the cup had ruptured and the two paper bags it was packed in are soaking up the juice. I decide to get off the train at the next stop, toss the bags and cup, and get back onto the train before it leaves again. I exit the train running around the platform with the whole dripping mess, but there's nowhere to throw anything away. The train leaves and I see Brett through the window as it's leaving, pointing "I'll meet you at the last station." I finally find a place to dump the garbage and get on the next train. Brett and I meet up at the last Chiyoda station, where we make our last connection, meet up with Jeffrey, and walk to Yama's house. Yama's going to drive to the onsen in Hakone, about 80km west of Tokyo. He has a brand new Mini Cooper and the four of us climb in for the trip. Yama stops for gas on the way out of town. It shouldn't come as a surprise by now, but the filling stations are full service. Actually, it's more like a formula one pit crew. It all starts with the crew chief waving us in and guiding the car into position using a series of Top Gun hand signals. Three guys go to work on the car and the chief is shouting the fastest most precise Japanese I've ever heard. They even give Yama a cloth to wipe down the dash and console with. When they've finished, they run into the street to escort the car out and bow repeatedly until he drives away. It's the start of a holiday weekend, so traffic is jammed up all the way out of Tokyo. The Mini has a GPS navigation screen which shows the traffic patterns: red lines mean congestion, blue lines are moving. We can look forward to solid red all the way to Hakone. Hakone is a resort town in the same prefecture as Mt. Fuji. Yama takes a winding mountain road up to Hakone National Park. It's a lot like Muir Woods on CA Hwy 1. We get up into the clouds and the rolling fog obscures what would be a great view of the valley. It's also about ten degrees cooler than Tokyo. We stopped for lunch of Udon and Soba and then the last push for the onsen, which we get to around 16:00. An onsen is a Japanese spa. The one we are at is a pretty fancy one, with open air baths and very traditional architecture. There were different baths ranging from shocking cold to simmering broth, and a sauna. I did a lazy circuit until I got tired of going from hot to cold and ended up in warm for a while. It was relaxing in an exhausting way. The three of us fell asleep on the drive back into town, where Yama's navigator detoured him through some tiny crowded back streets that even the Mini had trouble negotiating.

in hakone: giant fearless koi sucking pellets right out of brett's hand

We spent the day back in Shinjuku, tracking down an English-language atlas with train lines and schedules for outside Tokyo. We're planning an excursion to Osaka this weekend for the Tenjin Festival. It's one of the biggest summer festivals in Japan and features a portable shrine procession out on the water. I've determined my stimuli threshold is exposure to about five thousand separate bits of information before I stop functioning in a coherent state. Shinjuku burns that amount off in about one minute. Luckily we spent most of the afternoon in Shinjuku Gyoen National Garden, one of the larger green spaces in Tokyo. It's a great park with sections of some really tall old trees. It's very effective at making you forget you are in the middle of urban chaos. We stayed until closing at 16:30. Thankfully they do not usher you out of the park with Auld Lang Syne. Instead, they play what sounds like a traditional Japanese melody over the sound system. Hearing this soothing lullaby emanating from loudspeakers hidden deep within the more densely wooded areas made the park take on a slightly ominous atmosphere. Especially when dusk brought out the gigantic dragonflies.

Today is Sea Day, a national holiday. We went in to i-Camp for an urgent project meeting to get the ball rolling on production. We learned there is a deadline and progress meeting this friday, which puts the whammy on any plans for Osaka. Too bad. After the meeting, the bunch of us went to lunch and then Jeffrey, Brett and I continued on to Shibuya. We initially planned on seeing a movie, but decided to do something else instead. Movies here are expensive, almost $20 a ticket - even more than L.A. prices - so going to the movies in Japan is not a very popular passtime. Besides, mpegs of several first-run Hollywood blockbusters have "appeared" on the network here. We decided to shoot some pool and had to wait ninety minutes for a table to open up. We played a few rounds of Cutthroats and then killed some time at Tower Records, taking refuge in the oasis of the "import books" section. I wanted to pick up a short story compilation as sort of a force-field against the constant bombardment of Japanese everything we face everyday. I couldn't make any decisions what to get though, the books were on the seventh floor and I reached my stimuli threshold somewhere on the fourth. On the way home, Brett and I de-trained one stop early at Nezu. We were determined to sample the wares at Mos Burger, supposedly the best of the indigenous burger establishments. The burgers here have very little green on them. In fact, the one I got was downright monochromatic. I don't know what it was called, but it had a beef patty topped with what looked like uncooked sloppy joe topped with a fat tomato slice. Brett's burger meat was not in patty form whatsoever. We were both amused by the fact that it really did not matter what we were saying or where we were pointing and that we were not being understood, because no matter what was happening, we could be certain that at the end of it all someone was going to hand us a tray of food.

order whatever you want, you're getting this.

Looking back over this journal, it seems like the bulk of my time is spent indiscriminately eating things. Although that's not entirely true, the ryokan's limited food-preparation facilities necessitate our eating out for every meal. That, combined with not much else for illiterates like us to do with our per-diems except eat, and it's easy to see why food has become a running theme. But what about the hazards of consuming eats and drinks with reckless abandon? So far, I have had only two close calls: One was something I got for breakfast at 7-11. It looked like a shortcake snack, like Twinkie minus the tallow foam injection. It was indeed shortcake, but laced with a severe cheese taste. Not like cheesecake. More like a cheddar cupcake. It wasn't even so bad as much as just a very unpleasant surprise. I thought I was still hungry enough to eat it anyways, but the next bite proved me wrong. Something else you have to watch out for is the red bean paste lurking secretly inside what appear to be harmlessly plain breads and pastries. The second unfortunate encounter was a yogurt drink, that unlike the common plain yogurts, was runny, grayish green, and flavored so unlike anything else I have ever tasted that my brain couldn't process it. I'm sure my face registered a similarly unrecognizable expression. I should have been tipped off by the label which featured a polar bear whose muzzle was stained green from drinking the stuff. Maybe it was leprosy-flavored.

23 July
Wed
to
25 July
Fri

Sick with the flu. I caught a stomach virus that has been going around i-Camp. Wednesday afternoon I went home early to get some rest. Mie and the Cat-Chat crew set me up with soup and crackers to take back to the ryokan. Unfortunately, the microwave is not accessible to guests, so I had to take stuff to the front desk to get it cooked. Lots of time spent sleeping and trying to break the fever. If the empty water bottles are any indication, my futon has absorbed about eight liters of perspiration.

scenes from my fever: "bring me a saucer of milk before i re- re- recon-sti-tute!!"

The fever broke Friday morning. I've been taking it easy all day. Tonight there is a big fireworks display over the Sumida river in Asakusa. Mie and Katsuhiko invited a bunch of folks over to their place to watch. They live on the twenty-ninth floor of a high-rise apartment adjacent to the Asahi Beer offices infamously designed by Philippe Starck. They have a balcony overlooking the river and a sweeping view of the city, so it's as near a perfect vantage point as you can get.
Before the show even started, we were overwhelmed by the panorama from thirty stories up. The city is so dense and sprawling that it just isn't real. It looks like a hurried photo collage of skyscrapers and light towers arranged without any rhythm or flow, just packed solid from one end of the horizon to the other. The Asakusa fireworks went non-stop for over an hour. We were so high up that we could also see fireworks exploding over other wards several miles away.

what a relief!!: looking down upon the architect's golden turd.

Other folks at the office's symptoms lasted four or five days, so if I'm not feeling 100% after today, it's time to see the doctor. So far I feel pretty good, but my stomach's still on the mend. Nothing but crackers, soup, and white rice these past few days. Since getting sick, my sense of smell has mysteriously sharpened. Sadly, this had not helped speed my recovery. The smell of tatami floors makes me feel queasy now, and I'm picking up more on the musty bouquet exhaled buy the a/c unit in the room, along with the stale cigarette smoke smell everywhere. Convenience stores smell particularly unpleasant to me now. The best thing I've gotten a whiff of in along time was when I went into a small produce market today and walked along all the fresh fruit. Lots of window shopping, though. Produce here can be unbelievably expensive. Lots of bionic or otherwise enhanced fruits and vegetables for sale here. Want a cluster of absolutely perfect grapes? That will set you back fifty-one dollars. Not everything is so pricey, though. I got myself a grapefruit for seventy nine cents.

Yama set up a special trip for us to visit Studio Ghibli today. For the unacquainted, Ghibli is a big deal in the animation world. It was founded a while ago by two big-time directors, one being Hayao Miyazaki - best known now in the US for Spirited Away and Princess Mononoke. The studio is tiny by US production standards, especially considering that they're making feature films entirely in-house. It's literally a cottage industry. We got an intimate tour of the facilities, spread out among a few small houses unassumingly hidden away in the residential fringes of Tokyo. They're currently in full production on Miyazaki's next feature and we got unrestricted access to each department as they showed us their work in progress. The old man himself was there, but he was easy to overlook. Unlike a typical director, he was in the artist's common studio quietly working away alongside the rest of the animators. The room had about a dozen people in it and the only sound was from the pages flipping. It was good to learn that places like this have not been completely swept off the planet by the forces of evil.

sensoji vendors
vendors outside sensoji temple

corporate eyes
ugly public sculpture spans the globe

meow hut
kittens shacked up in hibya park

lonely koi
these koi were all decent kissers except one

asimo
robots say "human blood is delicious!"

partial skyline
los angeles, 2019

temple view
shinjuku goen natl garden

KFC of Japan is standing down the inevitable threat to the safety of their franchise-wide collection of Colonel Sanders statues stationed outside each restaurant. The Hanshin Tigers are currently on track to win the baseball championship. Last time that happened, massive rioting claimed one of the statues as a casualty when hordes of lawless revelers tipped the Colonel over into the river. Other hooligans were spotted sorting recyclables and still others fed off the barbaric energy by rising from seated to standing positions. KFC isn't taking any chances this year, so HQ decided all of the Colonels should be brought indoors for safe keeping each night after closing time. I suppose this means they normally leave them outside the rest of the time?

Another project meeting. This one had more people than usual. Among the new faces were Noe, Norico's niece who will be filling in for Remy when she goes on vacation, and two Flash animators from Cat Chat: Ando and Junya (or Andy and Junior to you and me.) Norico volunteered them to help take some of the tedious repetitive work off our hands as the schedule tightens up. After the meeting, Ando and Junya took Brett, Jeffrey, and I out to a Japanese-style pub for dinner. It was nice to be somewhere different with some new people. We exchanged our native languages' more common slang terms and their subtle shades of usage. One handy phrase we learned is "Would you like to go drink some tea?" is the euphemistic pickup line of choice over here.

i'm over the flu, but i still get burning headaches from time to time

This morning we conducted an experiment to determine why every morning train we've taken to i-Camp this week has stopped at Kasumigaseki - two stops short of Akasaka - and declared that all passengers must get off immediately, leaving us to wait for the next train on the line to take us the rest of the way. So back at Sendagi, I got on the first train and Brett waited for the following one. We expected that my train would unload at Kasumigaseki as usual and I would wait and get on Brett's train to go all the way through. The exact opposite happened: I made it all the way and Brett got booted of early. It turns out that at the tail end of rush hour, they take some trains off the line - the exact ones we've been riding all week. So now we know how to determine which trains to avoid taking in the mornings. One more example of illiterate gaijin learning something the hard way.

Okay, it looks like rainy season has finally ended. Today was a steamy bright day. It's getting hot alright. Not Tokyo Furnace hot, but hot enough to make riding the subway an experience in unavoidable communal wetness. We went in to i-Camp today to get a jump on the sizeable amount of work we now have ahead of us. Jeffrey had to come in from his place way out wherever he lives to unlock the office with the veins in his hand - a true company man to wreck his saturday like that for us. Afterwards, the three of us met Takako and her husband to see a French animated feature at an art house theatre in Yebisu Garden place, a very western-style upscale shopping complex. The film was called "Kirikou and the Sorceress", or at least I think it was. I kept dozing off, so I only saw about half the film. Not that it wasn't good, but the lethal combination of being worn out from working plus the deluxe movie theater seats and the darkness were all overwhelmingly sleep inducing. On top of it all, the dialogue was French with Japanese subtitles, so I was completely unable to follow what was happening on two more levels. So the Lucas 108 Effect* kicked in and I was quickly on the nod. (*for you USC folks)

Spent the day looking for souvenirs in Ueno and Asakusa. And soaking in the heat. I shouldn't be complaining because it hasn't even broken ninety yet. I guess my low country humidity tolerance is long gone. If you're looking for sneakers or wristwatches, Ueno is the place to be. I will hazard a guess that the vast majority of shoes being sold are knockoffs because of the sheer variety of what is available. Looking for a pair of Nike Vandals, the canvas high-tops circa 1982? 12000 yen, brand new. "Enameled" leather black on black Converse One-Star mid-tops? On sale for 7000. The real prizes to be collected however, aren't in footwear but Soda Pop bottles. There's a drink here called Lamune that comes in what is arguably the coolest bottle ever made. It's a single piece of heavy clear glass that is sealed with a marble to a washer inside the lip of the bottle. When you order one, and you have to order it from a live person, a special opener is used to push the marble down into the bottle where it rattles around inside a chamber pinched off at the bottle's neck. So far I've only found the original all-glass bottles being served at the various summer festivals around town. The vendors are militant about drinking it all on the spot and giving the bottles right back. There must be a huge deposit. I played the stupid gaijin and walked cluelessly away with the goods, but if I start a proper collection of these things, I'll have to start paying extra to keep the empties.

Judging by the weather reports on TV and the maps in the train stations, the Japanese have no disorientation problems with skewing or spinning maps so that North is pointing any direction except North. If you're inside the subway and the "you are here" spot aligns with where you're facing, the logic makes sense. It's more unsettling to see on TV when they flip and spin the map of Japan everywhichaways and then begin the relentless zooming and trucking to show weather patterns in the different cities. It's like if you were watching the weather report in California and they suddenly spun the state so San Francisco was on the left and Los Angeles was on the right and the whole rest of the USA was piled sideways on top. There must be a reason why I am so fascinated by this.

Last night at i-Camp we felt a tiny earthquake. It was after 22:00 so we three gaijin were almost the only ones still in the office. I've felt a few earthquakes in California but this was the first one that lasted long enough for me to become aware of it while it was happening. An initial lurch got our attention and then some subtle shifting continued on for maybe twenty seconds after. The office is on the ninth floor, so we might have gotten a more exaggerated sensation than if we were on the ground. Nobody else in the office even acknowledged it. Either they are in denial over the imminent earthquake threat or it was small potatoes to them. On an unrelated note, we've discovered through working late that we gaijin cannot be left last to lock up the office. It's an emergency issue. In the event of an office-related catastrophe, we would not be able to communicate to the proper authorities. Brett suggested we keep a sheet of paper with assorted phrases to cover every conceivable situation, but the danger is if that paper were to catch fire somehow and then spread through the office, we'd be doubly screwed.

We worked another long day to prepare for an animation deadline tomorrow evening. Our i-Camp gaijin trio went to a hole-in-the-wall Thai restaurant a few blocks from the office in what would be a back alley if Tokyo hadn't developed all their back alleys into real storefronts. We were talking about some aspects of the reverse-culture shock we'll deal with upon returning to the states. Jeffrey said what took the most getting used to was suddenly being able to understand everything you see and hear. Over here, background noise and visual clutter is easy to tune out because you don't understand it, but once you start getting it in English again, you're no longer brain-starved and all incoming signals get processed. He said going to restaurants will drive us crazy for a while because we will involuntarily be following every conversation in the room. It's also harder to ignore because Americans speak much louder than their Asian counterparts.

Brett and I are still scheming to visit Osaka on our five day break beginning tomorrow. Mie suggested we book reservations on the busses ASAP because this is one of the heaviest travel weekends all summer. Noe went with me to the Yotsuya JR station to do the talking for my last-minute attempt at getting bus tickets. The overnight bus to Osaka cost 5000 to 6500 yen, less than half the price of the sleeper train or the Shinkansen (bullet train.) We got to the ticket window (aka Midori No Madoguchi) and Noe worked on scaring up any remaining seats on any busses. No luck - absolutely everything was booked solid. Since I had nothing to contribute to the conversation, I started goofing with the giant ink stamp chained to the counter. Summer is a big travel season for students and they can collect stamps from every JR station in a book. The stamps are huge (see below.)

representin' yotsuya JR station yeah boyeeeee!

The first day of our break. Brett's buddy James flew in from Texas for the long weekend. We started an abbreviated Tokyo recap for him starting in Asakusa. I went back to Sensoji Temple to see if my fortune has improved. I got Good Fortune this time, so apparently the pid and high wave from #77 never hit me. Or maybe so. In any case, we stopped at i-Camp later in the afternoon to pick up some tickets that Yama left us for the Ghibli Museum tomorrow. Like everything else, museum admission is booked solid through the summer, but Yama pulled some strings at Ghibli studio and was able to get us in. Take that, general population of Japan! We also went to Tokyo station, where this time I did the talking at the Midori No Madoguchi. Armed with a train schedule, a twelve word vocabulary and a faded fake Japan Railways tattoo, I attempted getting us Shinkansen reservations to Osaka. The standard express (Hikari) is around 16700 yen for a one-way second-class ticket. Second class was all booked, which left us choosing between Green Car (first class) for 22700 or the speedy very hurry businessman train (Nozomi) for even more. That's pushing $200 and up each way, which proved a little too rich for our budgets. I didn't think to check if Yama had any connections with JR. Rats.

Typhoon Etau broke over the southern end of Japan thursday night and traveled up the coast as it dissipated, so Tokyo was treated to lots of wind and rain today. This morning we went to the Ghibli Museum in Mitaka, the same town the studio is in. Studio Ghibli is off-limits to visitors, so naturally the museum is the place for folks to go for a glimpse into what the studio does. And it doesn't disappoint. There is a huge three-dimensional zoetrope in the permanent exhibition room. It is a giant spinning diorama populated with hundreds of figures sculpted in incremental stages of repeating motions. It is lit with synchronized strobe lights so that as it turns, it gives the illusion of stop-motion puppet animation happening live before your eyes. If I had seen this a year ago, my thesis project would be entirely different right now. In Shinjuku, we had a close encounter with the Ultra-Right Wing militants driving their convoys of minivans around blaring nationalist propaganda. Most folks ignore them, but we were told they don't take kindly to gaijin, so watch out. They didn't run us over when we crossed the street in front of them so maybe there's some sort of obscure crosswalk amnesty law here. Since the rain wasn't letting up, we decided to go see a movie. We took the subway out to Roppongi, to a giant cineplex in Roppongi Hills, a trendy new shopping and entertainment complex. It is filled with the international crowd of beautiful people spending lots of money. Those Right-Wingers would be better served circling their vans around Roppongi instead of Shinjuku, but that's just the opinion of one gaijin. We got to the theater planning to see the 21:15 show of a Disney pirate movie which shall remain nameless. It was already sold out which meant staying for the 24:05 show. The drawback to that was the entire Tokyo subway system inexplicably stops running right after midnight so doing anything later requires resorting to the very expensive and not very bilingual taxi service. The good news about the movies is despite high admission prices (1500 yen for students) the American privilege of price gouging on concessions hasn't caught on here yet. A giant popcorn and drink set are a measly 600 yen. The unforeseen change of schedule meant we suddenly had three hours to kill before showtime. We eventually found a bar owned by Kirin but masquerading as a microbrewery. They only served one kind of beer, but it was cheap, and the place stays open until the morning trains start running again. Finally, a place that doesn't close at eight o'clock!

Brett, James, and I went back to Tokyo Bay for another fireworks display. If I got my facts straight, this one was to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Japan's capital moving to Edo, now Tokyo. There was a huge turnout and this time we were in the streets among the masses. The show was a much bigger production than the one a few weeks ago in Asakusa. It lasted ninety minutes and literally filled the sky. The only drawback was we had to endure the constant droning of police megaphones. I have no idea what they were saying.

"nothing to see here folks. move along, move along."

11 Aug
Mon
and
12 Aug
Tue

We tackled the Mt. Fuji climb this evening. The Japanese have a saying: "He who climbs Mt. Fuji once is a wise man. He who climbs Mt. Fuji twice is a fool." A more accurate proverb would be "He who climbs Mt. Fuji once is a damn crazy fool. He who climbs Mt. Fuji twice is a freakin' masochist." To be fair, things were okay at the start. Brett, James, and I took the JR trains from Tokyo out to Kawaguchiko station, about three hours ride. It was nice to get out of the city again, even if it wasn't very far.

on the way to fuji-san. note the porfound lack of pavement

Our last connection got us to Kawaguchiko station well before dusk. We got dinner and waited for the 21:05 bus to the 5th station, which is about 7500 feet up. The bus stop is spitting distance from what might be the only musical crosswalk signal in all of Kawaguchiko. It plays two songs, one for "walk" and one for "don't walk" using the ubiquitous ice cream truck electronic musical scale. Since there wasn't much else to do for the hour or so before departure but wait, we were treated to these melodies a couple of thousand times each. I don't know what the songs were, but if you stand close enough to me, you might still be able to hear them echoing inside my head.

next stop, fuji, as seen from the musical crosswalk

The bus let us off at the 5th station at 22:15, the last opportunity to climb the six hours or so to the summit to catch the sunrise. We started off in good spirits, the night was clear and the moon lit our way. The sixth and seventh stations came up pretty quick and nobody fell off the mountain or got eaten by a bear or anything so we pressed on, figuring we'd reach the Main 8th step (last before the summit) with an hour to rest before the final push to the top. We got wise real quick after the 7th station as conditions rapidly deteriorated.

looking back on the ascent trail. just find the chains and stay between them.

It's like this: Imagine walking uphill on big loose rocks in the dark in a wind tunnel for seven hours, plus for the last three and a half hours the wind tunnel is also a car wash and a walk-in freezer. It was miserable, but also really appropriate for being on a mountain, er, volcano. If we were somewhere else riding ponies or something, then yes, the conditions would have been unacceptable, but this was Mount Frickin' Fuji, right?

this was the only time i smiled the entire way.
the two climbers on my right, however, were sobbing inconsolably.

We ascended slower and slower as the wind and the water kept trying to beat us down. I really couldn't see anything through my glasses once my lenses got coated in wet grit. Also, my very fashionable PVC/vinyl hazmat-style raincoat was tearing at the seams, making me increasingly colder and wetter. It's at this point that you realize that although you are among lots of other climbers, everyone's fending for themselves. If I were to slip and impale myself on the walking stick or something, there weren't going to be any medics to notify. The three of us didn't keep together very long. Brett went off ahead because he is completely insane and James lagged behind because he was comically ill-prepared. The guy showed up in shorts and a t-shirt. I was sure he'd be dead by the 8th station, but he bummed some extra gear from Brett eventually. We'd meet up at some of the smaller stations along the way, but once we hit the trail again it was back to man vs. nature.

once we get back to the bottom i'm going to punch you in the head.

pausing for a hot meal two miles up. can you pick out which climber isn't in denial?

It was pitch black at the higher altitudes. The stations have lights, so if you look up ahead, you can determine which way the trail is winding and also how much further up things are. After the last station, we weren't so lucky because the summit lights could not be seen from below. The climbing is slow going at this point and people start to form trains because the trail is difficult to find. At one point I noticed a line of climbers forming behind me while I was trying to pick up the pace. I guess because I was moving fast I gave the impression that I knew where I was going. I stopped abruptly when I realized I was on the outside of the chains. Whoops. Sorry folks. Later on I picked up the tail end of another line of climbers. My flashlight suddenly cut out, which was a surprise because I was expecting it to get gradually dimmer. I didn't want to stop to change batteries since I was too cold and wet to stop moving, so I did it on the fly. Still no light. The bulb was shorted or dead. The climber ahead of me was gracious enough to shine her light back occasionally so I could see where I was putting my feet, but her flashlight died soon after mine did. Luckily, it had just started getting light out, so I wasn't climbing blind for too long. I reached the top shortly after sunrise, though there wasn't much sunrise action to notice as the summit was enshrouded in clouds and howling winds. I got my climbing stick stamped and promptly asked the guy if he knew of any fire. He directed me to the shanty next door which didn't have any fire, but it was filled with rows of soaked climbers trying to dry out and warm up. I got some hot tea and peeled off my wet clothes to change into some slightly less wet clothes from my bag. After drying out as best I could, I located Brett and James, and got a new hazmat suit. We all figured "screw this" and started the descent around 06:00.

look ma, no hypothermia!

Relatively speaking, the descent was much easier than the way up. You could see. It would get warmer as you progressed. It only took two and a half hours. The switchbacks were shorter and more consistent. The only problems were the wind and rain weren't letting up, and it's actually kind of boring. We left the top the same time as some other guy who was ready to get off the mountain, a borderline hypothermic British kid named Tim. About an hour into the descent, he decided he was going to take a leak at the elbow of one of the switchbacks. I thought that was very brave because the wind is strong enough to knock a person over and it changes direction all the time. "He who whizzes into the air on Mt. Fuji is a fool."

hey, this rain is HOT!

When I got back to the ryokan yesterday afternoon, the lady who owns the place had a message for me from the Mizuho bank that I cashed some traveler's checks at on monday. She called the bank for me to see what the story was. "Just please come in tomorrow morning." So this morning I swung by there before going to i-Camp. The teller recognized me immediately and ushered me in. It turned out that I checked the wrong box on the form, "cash" instead of "t/c." I filled out a new form and for all my troubles the teller gave me a Mizuho gift bag. Now I have Mizuho ink pens, lotion and a washcloth.

This evening was the penultimate meeting with the project team before the final big show next wednesday. It was gong to be the last, but they threw in another between now and then, which oddly enough does not increase the amount of time we have to work on the stuff. Afterwards, I ordered Pizza form Pizza Hut instead of Domino's despite Domino's having a better mascot: Armor Man. Armor Man is what in english we would call a 'knight'. As in the Armor Men of the Round Table. I thought I got away with actually paying for it all, but Tom, a suit at TBS, pulled rank and demanded he reimburse me for the pizzas. "It is a Japanese custom," he says. It would be an insult not to let seniority pay. I think they're just making this stuff up. During the meal, it slipped out that the i-Camp staff was distinguishing between us this entire time through the following method: I was the one with the big eyes. Brett was the one with the funny laugh.

After weeks of hype, trash-talking, and staring down the storefront, I finally attempted CoCo's Curry Challenge today. I waited until I was good and hungry before heading across the street and attempting to shovel down 1300g of rice and curry sauce in under twenty minutes without leaving my seat. Noe and Brett came along to document the proceedings, and for the free show. By my calculations, thirteen hundred grams was just over half a pound. It would be like eating two quarter pounders. No sweat.
I was way off. Thirteen hundred grams is more on the order of three pounds. This did not become apparent to me until they served it up. The plate was more than a foot across with, as one observer put it, a mountain of rice rising from an ocean of curry. Thanks for the psych-out. The challenge really lies in the time limit. To be successful, one must do away with time-wasting distractions like chewing, but I was not prepared to cross that line. My plan was to keep a steady pace and focus on the rice first. Brett kept an eye on the clock. I was chewing as fast as I could, though not sucking the rice straight down was hurting my time. My pace had slipped to the point that I had about half the rice remaining with four minutes to go. It would not have been too much rice to eat in four minutes time had I not just spent the past sixteen minutes eating rice. Time soon expired, leaving me staring at six hundred taunting grams of rice. I lost to the clock. I made a sizeable dent in the pile, but was far from finishing every grain. Two days ago I could handle anything Mt. Fuji threw at me, but today I could not conquer CoCo's simple challenge. How humbling.

attacking the plate as noe looks on

Tom-San (not his real name) invited us out to his house in Machita for the afternoon for a barbeque with his family. It rained the entire time, but they had a tent set up over the patio, so the weather didn't threaten things too much. Tom explained that when he was in college, he had a forty-day Greyhound bus pass and toured the U.S., seeing thirty states. At the time, the exchange rate was lousy, so all he could afford to eat were donuts and nabisco crackers. After dinner and being consistently dominated by his son and nephew at Nintendo, we got a brief tour of downtown Machita, featuring the largest 100 Yen store in these parts. I got a pack of replacement bulbs for my flashlight and a set of nubby acupressure insoles. At the time, those insoles were the best 100 yen I ever spent. The sugar had worn off the next day though, because those things started completely shredding my feet.

Today was spent back at i-Camp trying to get everything finished. I returned to Asakusa in the morning for a final round of gift-buying. Akasaka was a ghost town today. Tokyo in general has had a lot less people in it this past week. I guess everyone really is traveling. Last night on the train back to the ryokan, I saw my new favorite english-language t-shirt. "Hard Woker," narrowly beating out my previous top choice "PRTZEL" (above a drawing of a pretzel.) Number three would be "Beef Poke Chicken", a menu subheading at an Akasaka Chinese cafe.

Slogging away at i-Camp to get it all wrapped up in time for wednesday's presentation. Remy is back from her vacation. The bionic grapes have become considerably less expensive at the convenience store across the street, so my snacking habits have switched from Bob Sapp's ice-cream waffle sandwiches to fresh produce.

Everything has been completed in time for the presentation, thanks to Ando and Junya working all last night to turn our raw animation into interactive sequences with sound and stuff. I just got back from a late morning recon mission to find a small suitcase to bring back the extra booty in. No luck. If I were looking to while away some hours playing pachinko or singing karaoke here in Akasaka, I'd be set. Finding a luggagerie, on the other hand, turned up the big goose egg. I fly back to the states in a little over twenty four hours. An unavoidable side effect of the trip is I will arrive six hours before departing Japan. Hopefully they have taken steps to circumvent my becoming trapped in an endless loop in which an infinite number of my individual selfs continues de-planing at LAX. We shall see.