lazysupper

In terms of modern media and internet bullshit, at two weeks this story’s on the verge of being paleolithic. But a friend just sent me a link to a website that freaked him out: thisman.org. It’s a simple black & white site headlined with “EVER DREAM THIS MAN?” in 36pt Arial with a halved-font-size subtitle offering the ominous revelation that “every night throughout the world hundreds of people dream about this face“. It then goes on to describe the story of some unnamed psychologist in New York who had discovered that since 2006 over two thousand people from around the globe had seen This Man in their dreams. Except in Japan. Or I assume as much, because out of the 20 PDF flyers they have for download (and obvious distribution) in 20 different languages, not one of them is in Japanese.

Continue reading the rest of this post.

The idea of counting to a billion recently came up in conversation, which naturally led to Googling “how long does it take to count to one billion?” And that has obviously resulted in what is clearly the nerdiest thing I’ve ever written.

A lot of people seemed to say it would take a billion seconds – attributing one second to each number. I’m no mathematician, but right away I can see there’s something flawed with that reasoning. After all, it takes a lot longer to say “nine-hundred-ninety-nine-million-nine-hundred-ninety-nine-thousand-nine-hundred-ninety-nine” than it does to say “one”.

Continued in Counting to one billion

Soul Code

A friend’s sister and husband finished off their whirlwind week in Japan last night. They wanted to check out a live house and what better place to do so than Koenji? We met up at Miyagawa yakitori shop but unfortunately they were over an hour late and didn’t show up until just before 9pm. I guess they thought that because it’s easy to stay out until first train in Tokyo, 9pm was relatively early. For a live house it’s not.

Most live house shows start between 6-7pm and finish around 10 or 11pm. This can be so people can make the last train home and also because they may be located near residential buildings and don’t want to get noise complaints. However, you can still hear drunk salarymen belting out bad karaoke in hostess bars well into the wee hours.

We first tried Show Boat, which was hosting an Indian Summer CD release party. It was about 10pm and they were on the last act of the night — and sounded a bit too mellow. So we decided to try elsewhere.

Just before 10:30pm we managed to catch the final band of the night, Soul Code at Koenji’s landmark live house Penguin House. They had not yet started their set and we were able to get the cover charge reduced from 1,800 down 1,000 yen with little effort. I think the master was actually going to let us in for free but we had no qualms about getting some cash to the bands — especially after the awesome set (and additional 30 minutes) they played. It was a tight, hour-long set of psychedelic rock funk fusion that was well worth ten bucks.

The lesson learned for anyone not familiar to Japan’s live house scene is: go early, it’s not an all-night rave. That’s the next club.

Not fakin' still shakin'

With another sibling from overseas crew, the live house action continued Saturday night in my favorite Tokyo basement – Koenji’s 20,000 Volt. The event billed Not Fakin’ Still Shakin’ Vol. 3 included some wicked sets:

Nanox
See Her Tonite
Back to Basics
Outnauts
Circle Flex
The Sprouts

Nanox started out the night with a tight performance and were followed by a flat, uninspired set by See Her Tonite who were technically good, but just had no life in their songs. Maybe they had H1N1. The Back to Basics frontman put on a manic show with an awesome straight-edge female bassist at his side. The Outnauts from Kyoto were next and the best of the night but unfortunately had no CDs for sale. Shikoku’s Circle Flex came up from Ehime to put on one of the hardest sets of the night with their 80s hardcore sound. The hardcore continued as The Sprouts finished off the night with a set just as hard. Circle Flex and The Sprouts are on a 4-way split available on Go Forward Keep Records for 1,575 yen.

Tokyo Game Show Girl

The Tokyo Game show is on for four days this week and I had the good fortune to check it out on the second of the two “Business Days”. Last year I went on a public day and it was packed like a mosh pit. The sparse crowd of industry people and press allowed for no waiting to try out the countless games available for pre-release play. These included the impossibly hard prequel Halo 3: ODST on the Xbox 360, portable zombie slaying in Undead Knights on the PSP, the incredibly lifelike FIFA 10 on the PS3 and the amazingly ultraviolent slashfest Ninety-Nine Nights II on a 50″ high def flat screen. See more photos here.

Soup prep

Last weekend was the start of the first real Silver Week in Japan – a five-day long weekend akin to Golden Week. Apparently Japanese law dictates that if there is only one non-holiday in between two holidays, that in between day (Kokumin no kyujitsu) should also become a holiday. Not a bad idea at all.

Respect for the Aged Day falls on the third Monday in September and the Autumnal Equinox Day usually on September 23, which this year was the third Wednesday of the month. Unfortunately there won’t be a Silver Week next year. There won’t be another until 2015.

While the five-day weekend was a good opportunity to get out of Tokyo, we stayed put. Saturday morning we arrived in Akihabara at the Second Harvest office and warehouse to help prepare lunch for the hundreds of people waiting in Ueno Park. A soup kitchen, a bread line or takidashi in Japanese. However, the Japanese term doesn’t infer any social status or economic predicament on those being served. It translates as “emergency rice feeding” and can be applied to any large scale (usually outdoor) serving of food.

The first two hours were spent prepping the food – opening hundreds of Campbell’s clam chowder cans, washing drying cutlery, dishes and pots and packing the food and gear into their vans. We arrived at Ueno Park by train around noon to find over 670 people sitting and waiting patiently in a long winding line. We set up the tents, serving tables and food and volunteered for our assigned stations. I was on soup.

The menu was a bento of rice, veggies and eggs as well as doughnuts, bagels, a fish-filled clam chowder, and raspberry iced tea with fresh fruit. We served over 675 first-run lunches in about an hour then served seconds until we ran out of food which brought the total to just under 900 if I remember correctly.

I was not only amazed to see the turnout, I was also a little surprised by who turned up. I guess that was due to my ignorance about the homeless, the needy, and the economically marginalized. The crowd was by far and large composed of men with only a few women, and mostly 40 years of age and up. Most everyone appeared well-groomed, sober and appreciative. And in good spirits. I saw a lot of nice shoes and some guys looked as if they had just gotten off work. While I still found it sad and everyone wasn’t all cheerful and rosy, it wasn’t the atmosphere I was expecting. The line was orderly, moved quickly and everyone went off into their groups for lunch and conversation.

As soon as we were done serving the last bagel and the final ladle of soup we deconstructed the tents and tables, packed up the gear and headed back to Akihabara for the cleanup shift. Not all of the volunteers went back for the third shift, but most of the crew of FedEx volunteers showed up and it didn’t take more than an hour.

The permanent staff and organizers clearly put in a lot of work to deliver this lunch every Saturday. And Costco is awesome for providing so much free food. But it all just makes me wonder what all those people do for the other 20 meals of the week.

While last weekend’s Awaodori Festival in Koenji is one of the biggest in Tokyo, September is still chock-full of festivals. Yoyogi Park celebrates the diversity of Japan the world with food & culture festivals each weekend of the month. The Brazilian Festival is by far the biggest turnout, and hence the biggest party. And hence the most fun. Hence:

Sept. 5-6: Festival Brasil in Yoyogi Park
Sept. 12-13: Sri Lankan Festival in Yoyogi Park
Sept. 19-20: Vietnam Festival in Yoyogi Park
Sept. 26-27: Namaste India in Yoyogi Park

Original post: Festive September

Last weekend well over a million people came and partied outside my front door. Every year throughout the last weekend in August Koenji is host to the Awaodori Matsuri (Awa Dance Festival), the second largest in Japan after Tokushima. Things kick off Saturday morning with some indoor performances but the real party is the procession of street dancers from 6pm to 9pm.

This was my third consecutive Koenji Awaodori, but it was the first I actually put some planning into. Previously I’d just walked around, but this year I’d decided to get some seating space. Living at one of the main intersections of the parade route I didn’t think it would be a problem getting there before the crowds and getting a good spot. Then I saw this as I was walking home on Friday night: there was tape on the curb all along the entire length of Konan-Dori (the street from Koenji JR Station to my place). People had laid down packing tape and written their names on it — effectively “reserving” front-row spaces for their groups all along the parade route. Undeterred, we still went down to the street around noon on Saturday scope out a good spot for our own group, which we expected to be about 12 people (it ended up being 16). After a walk down the Look shotengai revealed no worthy real estate, we crossed over to head back up the length of Konan-Dori. After much consideration we settled on little patch of sidewalk, asphalt and dirt about 100 meters from my front door.

We set up our Coleman chairs and laid out the mats over as much property as we could. The five-hour wait until our friends began to arrive went by easily enough — thanks to a Nintendo DS, an iPhone, and the fact that my fridge and bathroom were a block away. The crowd grew slowly between noon and four, and got thick around 5pm. At 5:15pm they close off Konan-Dori to traffic and allow all the “reservation tape people” to set up camp, rolling out tarps from the curb onto the street. What was interesting is that the festival organizers provided them — distributing tarps from a truck and collecting them afterward.

By six o’clock the sidewalks were packed. Most of our group had arrived but it was still a battle to maintain our borders. People kept encroaching inch by inch throughout the night — one woman was even standing a good foot-length-and-a-half on our mat. Others were leaning on ours chairs. But for the most part we managed to hang on to most of our territory and have a fairly unobstructed view of the dancers. The main lessons I learned from this year’s Awaodori:

• If you want a seat, lay some tape down the night before.
• If you can’t make it out the night before, mark your territory as early as possible the day of.
• It will rain on Sunday. (It did in 2008 & 2009.)

More photos can be found in my Flickr set.

Original post: Koenji Awaodori Festival

There’s a lineup of 15 bands today at Koenji’s 20000volt, an event dubbed “Street Heroes” presented by Akutare and 00SQUAD. Doors open at 14:30, starts at 13:00. Entrance is 2,300 yen. Map is on the Koenji page.

AKUTARE
00SQUAD
HAT TRICKERS
KRIEGS HOG
CROSS FACE
F.L.Y
ISTERISMO
SKIZOPHRENIA (Tsuyama)
DEATH DUST EXTRACTOR( Tsuyama)
REALITY CRISIS (Aichi)
ORDER (Aichi)
??? (Aichi)
SYSTEM FUCKER (Aichi)
ORGANISM (Osaka)
VEKTOR (Hamamatsu)

Giving Vox a test run. Thought there might be more cross-posting options than just Typepad and LiveJournal, seeing as my blog runs on Wordpress. The manual import option is simple enough, but it's not importing photos, links, or the tags properly from other blog. It's also not importing the entire post... just the first few lines.

Also, I can't seem to change my "Country" in my profile. I'm not in the United States and have never lived there. I'm Japan.