Adventures in Japan

Think of a Witty Title

It's all, like, Halloween and stuff. I managed to make it through my Halloween week at work, with hardly any injuries. As a reward I get all next week off. Woot. I plan on getting my voice back. Maybe play some video games. Study! I meant STUDY!

Since Halloween falls on a Monday this year, this whole weekend is a spook fest. Even though neither of us are even near 100%, Carla and I joined Ben in some festivities. We forgot the camera. Which sucks, cuz last night was interesting.

It was also fun, due in large part to Ben. He lent each of us a costume. Carla dressed up as Godzilla, I dressed up as Son Goku (a beloved character from some show I ain't never seen, but everybody knew who I was), and Ben was Jigen (a character from Lupin the 3rd, his costume was awesome). We hit a few different bars to get our free drinks. Free drinks rule! We also got on the loop line. The loop line is a train that loops around the city. On Halloween, tonnes of costume bedecked citizens descend upon it and make all sorts of craziness. It was crazy.

The train was packed. There were lots of really good costumes and lots of really bad costumes. There was a carton of milk, a pack of smokes, and some losers in garbage bags, to give you an idea of the range. And fat Elvis! Fat Elvis rules! And the robot ranger space fighter super uber cool costume dudes. They must have been sweltering inside their get ups. At every stop, everyone got of the train and then poured back on. If I could only use one word to describe the experience, I would use: crushing. It was unpleasant. Yet fun.

After we got our fill of being squooshed, we popped in to Rock Rock. It wasn't all that hoppin' yet, so we hit Balabushka (the pool hall type place). It was nuts. Packed with party people.

We didn't get to stay all that long, as we had to catch the last train home. No all-nighter for us please, we're sick.

Man, I wish we had brought the camera!

The one where the show turns to crap

I was just thinking that it had been far too long since the last time we posted, but the comfy bed had me in its cuddly grasp and every time I thought about getting up I fell back asleep. And then Tyler went and beat me to it. Posting, I mean. Good for him.

Two other things I'll mention:

The building next door is finally, pretty much, almost done. People are living there now, but there are still a lot of construction guys hanging around. Mostly standing on the street and smoking. The building's got its own website www.tachibana111.com. We've been looking at floor plans and peeking in the windows and I totally want to move in there. I think the rent might even be less than what we're paying right now. Except that moving in Japan is stupidly expensive, even if you're just moving next door.

Also stupid: 24. Not season four like everyone else is watching. Season one. We were in Australia when it first aired in Canada, so we've never seen it. Until now. We were enjoying it. We continued to watch it on a regular basis. Until about episode 16. The one that ends with a car exploding in a massive fireball and amnesia. This show didn't just jump the shark. It punched the shark in the nose, rode it to the surface, then jumped over it and fourteen of its closest friends. Whilst on fire. We are now convinced that the series will end with someone waking up relieved that it was all only a dream. Probably some incidental character that we haven't even thought of. Or maybe Bob Newhart.

Plus the cable's been cutting out a lot again lately and that always makes us mad.

Vikingland

Our new bed is just too comfy. For an example: I wanted to use the word luscious in that first sentence. I wanted to write "Our luscious new bed..." Who uses the word luscious when describing a bed? Answer: anyone who has slept on our bed. Yet another reason why y'all should come visit us. We'll let you have the bed and we'll go back to sleeping on the shedding futon of doom.

But maybe you shouldn't visit us this week. Carla is still sick, I've been fighting a loosing battle against the sick all week and it's Halloween week at my school. I have to dress up in a superhero costume everyday. Let me tell you something: capes and children don't mix. Man is my throat sore. And full of gross green stuff that flies out when I cough. Hmm, maybe shouldn't have mentioned that.

I'll just go now.

New Bed Get!!

Our bed has been delivered. Soon we are to sleep on it. And all will be right with the world. In other news: we saw a North Korean Godzilla ripoff movie called Pulgasari. It wasn't very good. I've seen Sin City twice now in the theatres. It is very good. There are at least 3 Bar Moonwalks in Osaka now. This is very good. 200 yen drinks is faboo no matter which way you slice it.

The Catch Uppening, Part Deux Squared: Really Late (Now With Spell-Checkening!!!)

Day 2 wasn't nearly as packed, music wise. We didn't really have a lot of hard choices to make. Plus I got to spend the whole of the day with Carla, with one exception. There wasn't anyone we really wanted to see for the first few hours so we poked our heads in to all sorts of bands. The Subways, The Little Flames, and Louis XIV were all unremarkable, save for the fact that I am now remarking upon them.

Do you smell chocolate? We returned to the scene of yesterday's longest line. The line was somewhat shorter so we thought we'd give it a boo. The line was for the Sponsors' tent. Bank cards and booze companies and MTV and such. And Concert Merchandise. Except not so much of that last thing. This was the morning of the second day of the concert and there was literally nothing good to buy. Nothing. All that was left was overpriced polo shirts. Nothing says Rock like a polo shirt.


What really sucks about the lack of cool stuff is that I saw people wearing a really groovy concert T. It had the Virgin Mary on the front. And a prayer and blessing for all the bands and volunteers and fans who make Summer Sonic such a special occasion. Sacrilicious. So we were none too pleased with the lack of merch.


The plan had been to take in a bit of Bennie K before heading over to Orange Range. That plan changed when we saw the massive line of people waiting to see Bennie K. They were playing in one of the smallest venues at the Festival. Not a smart move by the organizers. Carla went off to see all of Orange Range's set and I remained in line. I really like Bennie K. Their music is just so dang happy! I waited in line at least half an hour, slowly making my way forward. It drizzled a bit. As I got closer and closer, the music became more and more clear. So that was nice. Finally, after they had been playing for quite a while, I got in! I walked through the door and into a singing, jumping, screaming mob. The music was way too loud, and I couldn't really see the stage, but the energy in that place, the VIBE man, was just unreal. It was overwhelming. It was fantastic. It was my favourite song. And it was the last song of their set. Best two thirds of a song I heard all weekend.


Orange Range was also a very good Japanese rock band. Maybe slightly less rocky and more urban. The kind of band who has both a singer and a guy who talks in a way that suggests rap but isn't quite rap. They were better than I make them sound. Best part of their set, though, was the little girl who sat up on her dad's shoulders the whole time. She tried to rock out like everyone else around her. That was SO CUTE!


Boy? They're from Canada.


The main reason we watched Boy was because The Arcade Fire played after them. I mentioned before how we listened to some of the music of some of the bands playing here. Well I just could not get enough of The Arcade Fire songs that I managed to find. It appeared that I was not alone. Right after Boy finished the place started to really fill up. Mainly with white people. Day 2, y'see, was a Sunday. Way less working to be done on a Sunday. One of the white people in the crowd was a very nice lady from Seattle. I call her a lady, because she was (and is) but she looked to me to be younger than I. That was (and is) SO not the case. She taught in Japan ten years ago. See now, I actually think she might have said twenty but there is no way that could be true. Anyhoo, she was back in Japan visiting her husband's family. And attending Summer Sonic. For free. In Seattle, she works for KEXP radio. Check them out at KEXP.org.


Maybe I should get around to talking about the show. It was very, very good. The lady from KEXP told me before the show began that this would be the best show at the Festival. She was not wrong. First of all, there are a fair few members in the band. Not as many as Aka Inu, but still a bunch. More than the liner notes to the CD would lead you to believe. The KEXP lady told us that that is because Arcade Fire keeps adding members. They let their friends join. Even if they ain't so good at the music and/or the playing of it. That? Thas cool.


Wow, I still haven't gotten around to talking about the show. It was amazing. But that might have had something to do with the audience. Everyone was really excited to be there, at least everyone near us was. We all applauded after the violinists tuned their instruments. We were ready to rock. Do you know the music of The Arcade Fire? Of course you do. Well, they started with Wake Up. On the album, there is a little bit of a build up and then just joyous yelling. They skipped the build up, all the members just yelling at the top of their lungs. And we, the audience were yelling along with them. Yelling is good, it's cathartic and communal. Not Screaming, not screeching, that would come later, during Slipknot.


But yeah: yelling. Every member put everything they could into every song. They didn't sing real close to the mic so they didn't have to sing all that loud. Hells no! They stood well back and just F'n gave 'er! They didn't just play their instruments, they punished them. There were at least three broken drumsticks during the first song alone. And I don't think it was just the drummer who broke them. The thing about having so many people onstage is that they aren't always all needed for every song. Oh yeah, most of the members can play multiple instruments, so they would often change up in between songs. That was neat. But sometimes there was not much for this one guy to do. I shall call this man Crazy. During the second song of the set he started climbing the scaffolding alongside the set and smashing it with drumsticks. While wearing a motorcycle helmet.


During the second last song he started destroying stuff, he totally took out a high hat. You know, that thing that soups up the tempo. He was on a roll. He tried to go solo. At least I think that's what he was trying, he had half the high hat tied to a cloth and was swinging it around like a crazy man. I think he was trying to kill his bandmates. It was all a tad surreal. After the last song, the lead singer just kinda walked off the front of the stage. There was a massive blare of feedback. All sorts of stagehands ran to see what the hell happened. No one in the band seemed all that concerned. I could have reached out and touched the lead singer. I didn't. He was very sweaty looking.


Instead, I took a picture. I could have just taken a normal picture, but that ain't the way I roll.

In the interest of non interesting stuff, here are my original notes for the show:
Arcade Fire YES!! Crazy dude who liked to climb and hit things YES! I was absolutely nuts about their music before, listened to it all the time. Now that I legally own their CD, I listen to it less. Because I've seen them live man, it's just so much better. Yell along.


Oh yeah, we also saw TV on the Radio. They were way better live. I was unimpressed with the songs I heard from their CD, but it was a totally different experience live. It was like a completely different band was playing their songs. Really good. And this dude had awesome hair.


Echo and the Bunnymen was just sad. They were all old and fat and complaining that the lights were too bright.


Slipknot: kinda cute. The songs were just craggy walls of angry noise, but it was the banter in between the songs that did it for me. The lead singer would start out with "my friends..." then swear for two uninterrupted minutes, flip everyone off and they'd start the next song. At the end of the last song, he fell over and the audience revived him with their clapping. Like a fairy, a rotted, dead fairy. With a potty mouth.




NIN got better as you got closer. Well, to be more true to what happened, they seemed to get less compelling the farther we got away from them. We wanted to get a slight lead on the mass of people that would inevitably rush for the train, so we watched the last half of the show from right near the exits. The first half was better. Plus they played a fair bit of new stuff during the second half. I don't know the new stuff. But I screamed along to the stuff I knew. I once was an angry young man.



After the show Ben asked us if we wanted to hit Rock Rock. Carla had to work the next day, I did not. Ben had been a trooper all weekend, as had his sis. They had gone to Rock Rock every night. That blows my mind. We couldn't actually get in to Rock Rock when we got there. It was too full of band members. So we and a bunch of other regulars just hung out on the street below, drinking beers bought at nearby combinis. We were all having a grand time.

Mayhaps too grand a time. I kinda forget what all I drank but I do remember that I drank something different each time. Not that smart an idea. I remember that a lot of band folk split from Rock Rock cuz it was too crowded. Ben tells me I met the manager of the band Boy (from Canada) and held an intelligent conversation with him. I, and you, will have to take Ben's word for that. I don't remember that at all. I remember that we finally made it in to Rock Rock at around 4:30 in the morning and that I woke up on the street outside Rock Rock at a little before 6.



The end.

Oops!

I said I was coming to Regina December 1st, but what I meant was the 2nd...

Oh yeah...

I'll be back in Regina December 1 to 15th. Mostly shopping for clothes and doing wedding stuff. But if someone were to offer to feed me, or maybe buy me a drink, I'm sure I could find some time to socialize.

Bloody Vikings!

We've been seeing a lot more comment spam on the site lately. We went from 'none' to 'some' practically overnight. We're getting a bit tired of deleting them everyday, so we've turned on word verification for our comment pages. That means that any time you wish to lavish us with extravagant praise for one of our many brilliant posts, you'll have to retype a string of characters from a distorted image on the page so that the site knows you're a real person and not some sort of evil spam bot. I'll admit, the Captcha isn't terribly complex, and probably ridiculously easy to circumvent, but hopefully it's enough to keep the spam volume down to less than one a day. Hopefully.

We did keep this comment simply because, for no apparent reason, it's in French. It's still spam, but French spam. Oh la la!

Beer and Meat

We've been here over a year. So now things are starting to repeat. For the second year in a row, we went off to the International Beer Festival.


But first we bought a bed. The futon just isn't cutting it anymore. I haven't had a full night's sleep in a couple months now. Carla tells me I've been kinda cranky lately. That's because I've been very cranky for a while now. Hopefully the new bed we bought will fix all that. It's nice. We don't have a frame yet, cuz we bought tickets to Canada. So: new bed!

On our way to and from the store where we bought the mattress, we saw small parades. Each time it was a single, smallish wooden float pulled by a not all that large group of people. With the requisite drumming and clanging. It was interesting to watch. Especially the first float, as it was pulled mainly by small children. Small, chanting children. It was SO CUTE!


The Beer Festival was fun. We drank lots of beer from lots of countries. Some of it was good. Some of it was bad. Some of it was really bad. The banana beer was bad. The beer that tasted like a smokey in a bottle was... it took me a while to finish. But then I kept on drinking. I'm a trooper.


A stupid trooper. I say stupid, you see, because I sometimes do stupid things all the time. Like after the beer festival? We went out for yakiniku. We ordered lots and lots and LOTS of meat. So much meat. There is still a substantial amount of meat in my system. It was good. There was a fair amount of pork cooked. That left a lot of fat on the bottom of the grill. Somehow, all that fat caught on fire. Somehow, that fire got a little out of control. Maybe David and I should not have blown on it repeatedly and giggled. I think it was the giggling that did it. In our defense, we were trying to burn the hair off our knuckles.


Man. That was a lot of smoke. My eyes hurt.

Irish Pee Teevee

We went to an almost authentic Irish pub just the other day. It was a very nice change. Not that we don't like izakayas, far from it, I'll probably miss them the most. But man, having nachos as an option on a bar menu is just really nice. We did not order the nachos. We got a few rounds of Kilkenny and a Shepherd's Pie and Chicken, Fish and Chips. It was all good, baby! Especially the fish. The batter was just excellent. But only when on the fish. On it's own, suprisingly bland. Maybe we could have paid less, but who really cares? The decor was decent, the service was good and there was live Irish music. Okay, it was played by Japanese people but it was still good.

Woot.

On our way back home we observed two Japanese guys. They were urinating. They were urinating loudly. They urinated on the signs that obscured their urinating bits from us. They urinated on the bikes and scooters parked in front of said signs. They urinated on each other. They seemed to be having a grand ole time.

Also: Carla and I were in Australia when 24 first started. So we haven't seen any 24. None. Even when I was being paid to watch it, I didn't watch it. The Fox Channel here has started to replay 24 from the first series so we decided to tune in and see what all the hooplah was about. As far as we can tell, the hooplah was about frequent dips to black.

Our cable service sucks is what I'm trying to say. Our cable box craps out at least four times every episode. That makes following the various plot threads difficult.

And since we got the cable (which isn't really cable, it comes in over the phone line) our internet connection has been less than stellar. Not slow so much as intermittent. Like the TV. Sucks. We're gettin' a dish.

Back to 24, as a former television proffesional, I am confused by the Japanese broadcast of 24. It is obvious that they have butted segments together and inserted breaks willy nilly. That makes no sense. Why do that? The show is already formatted. You can tell it's time for a break when you hear that ticking noise. Not here in Japan. It really disrupts the flow. Not as much as when the box craps out, but still. Plus, the whole gimick of 24 is that it takes place in real time over the course of an hour. That illusion is kinda ruined when the credits roll a good fifteen minutes before the top of the clock.

And whoever works their traffic department is getting a sweet deal. We're pretty sure the commercials have been exactly the same, in every break, for the last couple weeks. They are plugging the heck out of Dharma and Greg. We should just rent the DVDs. Not the Dharma ones, the 24 ones.

Aka Inu Again.

Good old Red Dog. They can be relied on to put on a good show. I really hope that the next time any of our friends visit us here in Japan (Come visit us here in Japan, we totally have a spare room!) I will be able to take them to see an Aka Inu show. It is an experience.

So I saw Aka Inu again last night. It was an experience. Carla did not make it out this time, she was a bit under the weather. So it was me, Ben and Jon. Wanna here a really gross story about Jon?


Kay! So one night Jon was out with Ben at Rock Rock. Since it was summer, Jon was wearing sandals. And since this is Japan, a lot of the girls at Rock Rock were wearing high heeled shoes. Nothing says "Rock!" like high heeled shoes. Do you see where this is going? The girls with the high heeled shoes stepped on Jon's exposed big toe and ripped the nail right off.

Yeah.

Luckily, Jon was very drunk. He said his goodbyes to Ben, caught the first train he could and bled all the way home.

Why do I mention this story, which happened only a scant few weeks ago? Because it's gross, sure, but maybe also because he wore sandals to last night's Aka Inu concert. The last time I went to an Aka Inu concert I wore sandals, and I came home bleeding from the toes. What will become of Jon's mangled big right toe?

We caught a few drinks at the Hub beforehand, seeing as the show started just as Hub's happy hour ended. We also stopped to grab a quick bite to eat. By the time we made it into the club, we had already missed one of the opening bands and the second support act was just winding up. I don't think we missed much. The people onstage were all dressed up and "extreme" looking. Meh.


The next act was... I don't know how to describe them. A cute Japanese girl who struck up a conversation with me helped translate some of the band's between song banter. This was their first ever gig, their first ever time playing in front of an audience. That explained a lot. There was a guy who played the cello, a cute girl who played the oboe, a guy who played the trumpet and fiddled with various feedback and reverb knobs, a dude who plonked at his guitar and two women who played on one drumset without the use of drumsticks.


Yeah.

Sometimes it almost sounded like they were playing the same song.


I would never, ever say they were a good band, but I had a fantastic time. The cute girl seemed very moved by their music. Then she fell asleep. I think Ben said it best when he remarked, "This band reminds you which country Yoko Ono came from."


Aka Inu was just as crazy as last time. Lots of costume changes. Lots of incomprehensible banter. Lots and lots of fun. But this time there was the added bonus of seeing some white Australian dude getting up onstage with them. Again, by the end of the show, almost everyone ended up in their undies. Even the potbellied Aussie.


I don't know what more to add. I blogged a lot about Aka Inu last time and I'm still in the middle of writing up Day Two of Summer Sonic, so I'm pretty much tired of writing about bands.


So here's a picture.

Same as the first

I don't know how many of you have noticed, but we've been in Japan for over a year now. It doesn't feel that long to me. Probably because we spent more than half that time living like transients at Orange House and we've only been in our new apartment for a few months.

Life in Japan is starting to feel a bit déjà vu-y, though. Annual events we encountered when we first got here are popping up again. Same festivals. Same seasonal products. Same special menu at McDonald's. This year there seems to be more baseball fever (the local team is doing well) and the weather doesn't seem so hot, humid & typhoon-y. That, and we spend most of our time working instead of touring around. Sigh.

Finally, if any of you are looking for a way to improve the grammar of your spoken English, Japan is full of books that can help you.