Day Nineteen: Roppongi

tim lin wakes me up at 5am. I stand up in the middle of the room and contemplate whether or not I really want to go to Tokyo at 5am to see the sumo match.

I lay back down and its back to dreamland.

sometime later I get up and its about 11am. I stand up again, except this time I stay standing. tim lin is already up playing video games in the middle of the one room apartment, barely big enough to hold the two of us. at this point hes probably sick of me having me around.

so I pack up my stuff, give him a hearty handshake, and continue on my merry way leaving mr. tim lin from Singapore all by his lonesome.

I make it all the way to the train station, still refusing to wear a mask on my face, literally staring imminent swine flu death in the face and laughing right at it.

i'm on a train bound for Tokyo so I can have my head on straight to see the sumo wrestling matches for the next morning.

in the blog for an englishman in osaka, he recently wrote on there about the phenomenon of the "fuji from the shink" picture.

what happens is that for about ten minutes during the shinkansen trip through shizuoka prefecture, mt. fuji is seen nice and big, so everybody and their mom on that side of the train takes out their camera and takes pictures.

since i'm not better than anyone else, i decided to do a few of my own.


but like the englishman also mentions, you gotta watch out for obstacles. when you're in an object moving over 200 km an hour, there's gonna be stuff fly beside you that you never saw coming. you gotta watch out for poles, power lines, sometimes people. who knows what obstacles lie ahead?


Oh no! a huge set of powerlines! why do bad things have to happen to good people!?

I find my way to the Tokyo terminal and board the subway system towards asakusa, a place i've already been, but didn’t have a chance to experience fully. I wanted to stay in a capsule hotel there. i took some more pictures of the kaminari-mon, this time at night when the giant lanter thing was lowered so you could actually read the kanji on it.

I made my way to the lobby of the hotel and I see that the signs say the rates are something like 3500yen a night. I don’t feel like paying that much money at the time, so I stare square at the old Japanese lady for a little bit after she tells me the price. I could remember the rate being much cheaper on an internet site that I had checked out. it was supposed to be something like 2500yen.

I smile, point to a computer, and I say the word “internet”.

she stares at me for a moment. takes out a piece of paper and writes the numbers 2000 on it, and I give her two 1000yen bills. she gives me a key and walk up to my capsule.

i definitely won that match, she thought she had me.

I hang out in there for a good two hours taking care of some business, trying to figure out where to live for the next couple days, and then take a little nap.

i'm up at about 8:30pm and decide i'm gonna head out and do something.

I had heard that roppongi was the part of Tokyo where foreigners went to hang out. I don’t know why I was in any way at all enticed by this place, because the last group of people I want to be hanging out with when i'm in japan is other Americans.

so for some odd reason, this place was created to give refuge to the poor downtrodden souls looking for strip clubs, bars, and dance clubs to go to with other white skinned folks. honestly, why would any foreigner actually want to come to a foreign country and then go out and do things with its native people? the thought of such things happening make my brain want to explode.

when I got there, it was just as I had heard. it was a bunch of old white guys walking the streets looking for women, and the women there that had men, were wearing next to nothing and smiling like they didn’t really look like total prostitutes. the place was swarming with strip clubs that were made to look somewhat classy, even though classy strip club is probably just an oxymoron anyway. it was also covered in these meet-market type dance clubs.

now I like a good dance club myself, but these joints were different. these clubs are made so that these male anglo-saxon, Abercrombie and Hollister wearing foreigners can get hooked up with some young Japanese chick that wants to giggle with all her co-workers at the fish market tomorrow morning about how she got good romance last night from some guy that doesn’t even speak her own language. the stench of yellow fever and david beckham cologne was everywhere.

they also have these “love hotels” cleverly located nearby so that once you fall in love with that special someone at the meet market, you can take them to one of these hotels for a few hours and tell them how much you love them and maybe watch tv. 2 hours is about 5000yen, and the room comes with useful amenities such as a sink that used to have water in it and a lamp. there really is no better way to say I love you.

it was wretched, I knew I had to escape

the worst part was these black dudes swarming the streets of roppongi. no, they are not African Americans, nor are they African Japanese, they are African Africans. when I asked these dudes where they came from, Nigeria or the like was their usual response. but hey, the fact that they were from Africa has nothing to do with my disgust for them.

these dudes work in the Tokyo streets as busboys, smut peddlers, and low-class pimps to rich old white men. theyre standing on street corners with their own African women trying to sell them off to well…white folks like me

in my country, people of African descent have struggled for decades to try to rid the nation of false stereotypes against its people, the kind of attitude that they can shuck and jive their way into the heart of the rich white man by workin hard and suckin up to him as much as he can. you know what, black folks in America have done a great job at this, a fantastic job really.

but these dudes are in the streets of the biggest city in the world, displaying this for tens of thousands every night, standing on the streets finding any way they can to bring pleasure to these no class white businessmen in the heart of Tokyo. instead of the Japanese getting their own out here to do this dirty work for these white-collar dimwits, they bring in African imports. they reinforce the same stereotypes every night in front of thousands that Africans in America have fought for years to destroy.

is this not disgusting?

the worst part was theyre extreme relentlessness. normally if I don’t want something corny some guy is trying to persuade me to get on the street, I wave my hand at him and hes gone, but no, these guys weren’t gonna do that. they would follow me on and on until eventually I was spitting on their feet and screaming in their faces. I eventually had to tell one of these dimwits that I was gay and even if I wasn’t, I still wouldn’t pay a dime for a second with one of his used tricks.

I don’t think ive ever wanted to punch someone in the face so bad.

the only decent part of this place is the store at the hard rock café. I bought a shirt from a Japanese chick with about six piercings in her nose. she definitely doesn’t have to worry about swine flu.

so roppongi was a bust. I would recommend going there if you fit under two or more of these categories:

1. you have lots of money

2. youre an idiot

3. you have no self respect

4. you desire a venereal disease

I went back to the capsule, barely making the last train at midnight. I got into my capsule.

it was boring, not like the type you would expect to see on a primetime movie or something. it was a little different, rather than get in from one of the ends, you got in from the side and closed yourself into it with a curtain. so, no pictures of this one kids, it was lame anyways.

I got up and took a little walk around the neighborhood at about 1am. when I got back, I saw there was nobody in the bath-house area of the hotel, so I went down there, washed off my dirty body, chilled out in the tub for a good long while and then sat in the sauna till I felt better about life. it was all so very japanesey, the whole bath-house atmosphere. and it was good.

I got into my capsule afterwards and was grateful for the things I had seen and learned that day. I closed the curtain and tried to sleep.

nobody snored that night. nobody made a sound.