Back in Black

Back in Black

Hullo everyone, It's been a while. Since my last blog I've finished my stay in Osaka and I'm on my last night in Kyoto. I enjoy blogging loads, and I feel something's missing when I go a few days without doing one but they take time and the mental concentration required to put words together to make sentences with real worlds and grammar, things I've been without the last week. But I'm back, and this will be a long one.

So I'm thinking of joining a far-right Japanese nationalist party. Japan's got some weird electoral campaigning laws. One can not hand out flyers or go door to door canvassing but they can rent a large van and drive around shouting political slogans. I want to be one of the guys shouting 'expel the foreigners'. Now this surely goes against my leftist inclinations, but considering the foreigners you meet in Japan, they have a point. You get many foreigners who's primary interest in Japan is anime and manga, they often call themselves 'otaku', which they think is something like 'geek', in a charming cheeky way, but to the Japanese conjures up the image of an anti-social psychopath. Everyone of course speaks 'a bit' of Japanese. Meaning they can say 'konnichiwa', 'arigato' and add the word 'ne' to the end of otherwise English sentences. In Japanese 'ne' makes a sentence light-hearted or rhetorical, 'the weather's nice isn't it?' etc. Adding 'ne' to the end of an English sentence, however makes the sentence mean 'my parents made a terrible mistake'. A separate but occasionally connected group are the 'I want a Japanese girl because no one in my own country will take me' group. They ask people the time/for directions when they know already and do not know when to take no for an answer. The problem with this is that the Japanese have a fairly unnuanced view of the world. They do not discriminate between a sleazy French guy and a sleazy American guy, they see a sleazy foreigner. And then you just get the foriengers, they're not even doing anything wrong, but they're there at the temples, and you don't want them to be at the temples, because you want the temples to yourself. Travelling around, you meet a lot of people from a lot of different places, as you can tell from my rant, many of these people are rubbish. The Australians aren't. They're the best. Really. I'm going to Fuji Rock Festival with some :D But, Australians aside, I enjoy myself most when I'm meeting locals, beyond the achievement of utilising my so-so language skills they are often really, really great.

So a recap of my Osaka experience. I'm a big fan of Osaka. It's considered Tokyo's edgier rival and have a really fun, slang filled dialect that enforces this image. As a city though, it's far more about good food, good shopping, good night life and good people than good tourism. The one really touristy thing I did feel was worth doing this year was a visit to Umeda Sky Tower, Osaka's tallest architectural oddity:


From which you get a really good view:





Yes, this was an excuse to post shiny happy pictures.

I had one uncharacteristic monday night where me and some guys from the hostel, a rather brash American, an assortment of Europeans, and a meek Ghanian, went to Osaka's premier hip-hop club. It literally could have been from any bad Usher/R Kelly/P Diddy video but for the fact that everyone was Asian. That was fairly ridiculous but good fun.

A few nights after I returned to King Cobra, a cool 'live house' (I've obviously been here too long, beyond sometimes confusing my Ls and Rs when I type I was about to use the term without ex planation, forgetting that it's Japanese English: A live house is any bar, club that hosts live bands.) in America Mura that I went to last year. Hoping for some interesting Japanese underground music I was assaulted by punk and heavy metal. Misc venue pictures:






This guy played first. He had these amazing leather flares, must have been at least 45 (it's very difficult to guess Japanese people's age...) and played solo with a very distorted guitar:


Don't mess.

These guys sounded a lot like the Offspring and had silly t-shirts:

That doesn't make sense.

No Mr. Citizen of the constitutional monarchy of Japan, George W. Bush is not in fact your president. Not so much counter-cultural as simply factual.

These guys were very, very heavy:


As was their incredible drummer, who happened to be an adorable 11 year old girl!?


I don't know what to say about these guys, their manager wanted me to send her the pictures I took BUT MY LAPTOP COMPLETELY DIED COMPLETELY AND CEASED TO WORK THE DAY AFTER I DELETED THE PICTURES FROM MY CAMERA ;_________;
This is all I still have D:




So that night was full of joviality.

My first night in Kyoto, I arrived for the dregs of the massive Gion festival:






Most temples shut around 5 o'clock, and I wake up at 1 o clock, so my time here has not been particularly productive.
I went to Ryoanji, a Zen temple famous for it's beautiful stone garden:

And bored of trying to be photographically disingenuous in my attempts to crop tourists out of my shots I decided to reverse tactics:

She was Russian and was with a guy with a REALLY BAD mullet and they took lots of pictures of each other in front of things. Enlightened, surely.

Despite Kyoto being known as Japan's most beautiful and ancient cities it is not safe from the monsters that plague other towns:

OH NO GIANT CRAB!!!
This has very little relevance to anything, but he seemed cheeky:


Today I went to Inari shrine, a huge mountain complex and trail of thousands and thousands of Shinto 'tori' (gates), I spent hours walking up this mountain in the amazonian Japanese summer heat and humidity. I suppose it worked off a bowl of eel or two and it was most certainly worth it, not even the tourists could detract from the experience:










I then went to the little festival happening at the bottom of the mountain and proceeded to undo any of the physical good of the hike with overpriced and yummy food on sticks:




Indie fashion:



I feel that this is the second blog with little insight and rather too many pictures, let me know if this is the case. I suppose the one thing that's been on my mind a fair amount is, not home sickness, but travel weariness. Japan's a country with a lot to see, and there are still many places (Sapporo, Okinawa, Sendai, Nikko, to name a few) that I would love to visit. For this reason, my busy itinerary made/makes a lot of sense. Still, it's been three weeks now, and I have less energy now than when I started. Some people spend months at a time living out of a backpack on their years abroad. I think I've learned that this is not something I could do. Every city I go to I feel I could spend months and months there, I walk past restaurants and bars I want to visit but don't have time, I wonder how the vibe varies throughout the week and throughout the year. It's in large part do to with simply how much there is to do, but some of this feeling may be a desire for grounding. Basically, I've had a lot of fun, I should have a nice time in Takayama, where I go tomorrow, Kanazawa, where I go in three days, and I'm becoming more and more excited for Fuji Rock, this Friday, with every conversation about it that passes, but next Monday I move into my room in Tokyo where I will stay for a month, and I am really, really looking forward to it.

Anyway, lovely to write to you, keep in touch, and I hope to write to you from the beautiful town of Hida-Takayama.
Until then, keep it magic~
x