Day Two: Machida and Tokyo Tower

machida is a city i both love and hate. i spent four and a half months there on my mission and experienced some of my most challenging times.

but like ive mentioned before, it wasnt all bad. machida is a city that serves as a shopping area for southwestern tokyoites. it is a city full of stores, shops and eating type joints. many of the city-esque pictures i used for the headers on this site came from machida. i basically went to this city to reconcile with myself and allow myself to feel some sort of peace after the trials i experienced there.

and i did. i found it was so much the same as i remembered it. the stores were the same, the pimps still walked the streets looking for new clients and it was still rocking and rolling with thousands of people crowding into the miles of streets and back alley shops.

there is a store there that sells all the same type of trash that hot topic might sell in america, except the stuff they have is cooler and every single item in the store is only 390 yen, about the same at $4.

Think that for only $4 you can get...

a michael jackson keychain

a large assortment of trucker hats, legit shirts and kanye wests pointless style shades

and alabama license plates

i remembered specific instances where i felt so much fear and sadness and loneliness in the city, but it was all gone. i have overcome those things and can walk through the city, even though it still carries with it those old school memories that never can quite go away. sometimes there are memories that never go away no matter how long it has been since we had them.

from that point i went to the tokyo tower with my friend ben and his friend takeshi.


there have been specific moments since ive been here where i realize that i wish that the moment im living in would last forever-- the type of time where the beauty i see is so great that i just want to freeze it or never even have to leave the place at all.

this is what i felt while i was in the observation deck of the tokyo tower. i thought for a moment that the city at night was the most beautiful thing i had ever seen, or wondered if it was even real at all.

tokyo from the sky at night is so beautiful with all of its organized chaos. it is a huge city that is held together with millions of people sharing the same sorrows and trials as any city--just like anywhere else i would be familiar with in america. still it seems to be so very well organized.

before we got into the tower, there was a guy that looked something like a...well he looked like something, youll have to judge for yourself. he looks like the offspring of a crayon and something pink, but hes got real swagger you have to admit.

i think he might be something like the tokyo tower mascot. i wonder what kind of response he would get being the mascot of an american major league team.

we can only hope for such a day to come.

anyway, he waited in line there to go to the observation deck of the tower for a good long while, helped some people from another country cut in line and finally made it to the doors.

as it turns out, theres lots of fun stuff to do up in the tokyo tower: theres a cafe, little screens that show you various shots of tokyo throughout the day that you can look through using this slider bar thing, and plenty of other goodies.

there are also these little screens that they show you on your way up with this mascot guy, i think his name is noppon, doing lots of stuff.

for example, he uses binoculars and says "what a view"


he tries to sell himself...


and he lets us know that looking through the windows on the floor is like walking on air.


so i followed his advice and tried it myself. it was terrifying.

all in all it was a fantastic day. im grateful to my friend for letting me know how to get there and being a for-sure help.

and back at the base, before we left i took one last shot of the tower. i figured that even with the technology of today, there is no camera powerful enough to even give us the feeling of being there in a certain time and place. pictures are only small representations. ive seen so many pictures of this tower and never quite felt the beauty of it until i saw it for myself with my own eyes and not through some picture. yet another reason i am so grateful to be here seeing all of these things i have dreamed of eventually seeing.


tomorrow will be harajuku.

more havoc to come.