Day Thirteen: Nagoya, Ogaki and Gifu

at least I made an effort during the day to visit the office of my old mission.

I failed at that. it was just one of many things that happened during the day that made me wish I could drill a new hole in my head.

but at least the day ended well.

after the money spent riding the subway to the mission home and the thirty minute walk from the station, I come to find out that everyone I wanna see is gone. I walked back towards the station. on the way, I decided to take a different way, always remembering the road less traveled is often the best. I had taken this same route so many times, so I switched it up.

I found myself in a park where some small children were playing with their mothers. I looked around and observed the beautiful colors of the trees .

I took out the one book I brought with me, victor frankl’s “mans search for meaning”, and read this passage.

This young woman knew that she would die in the next few days. But when I talked to her she was cheerful in spite of this knowledge. “I am grateful that fate has hit me so hard,” she told me. “In my former life I was spoiled and did not take spiritual accomplishments seriously.” Pointing through the window of the hut, she said, “This tree here is the only friend I have in my loneliness.” Through that window she could see just one branch of a chestnut tree, and on the branch were two blossoms. “I often talk to this tree,” she said to me. I was startled and didn’t quite know how to take her words. Was she delirious? Did she have occasional hallucinations? Anxiously I asked her if the tree replied. “Yes.” What did it say to her? She answered, “It said to me, ‘I am here – I am here – I am life, eternal life.’”

while this passage could have many different meanings, for me at that time it just meant living for the simple pleasures of life rather than focussing on the constant problems that we face day and and day out that seem to consume all of our happiness.

and im reminded of a time and a place where I did enjoy those simple pleasures.

walking back, I saw the boss himself.


to promote this coffee, they use the classic American tough guy. we could argue that clint eastwood may have been better for this job, but the stern and stalwart face of the man who played Harvey two-face in “batman forever” seems to get the job done.

im on a train from downtown Nagoya to gifu, and then from gifu to ogaki.

ogaki is the place in japan i would consider to be the closest thing to my home in this country. I came to love the area and the people and the time I was able to spend with my friends in this area.


I just stepped off the train and went on another short trip around. looking at shrines built around the station and fell across a few of the rare gems nestled around the station.

I got back into the train and headed on my way to gifu. on my way another edifice created to honor our own commander in chief himself.


that’s where I met richy.

richy is a working stiff in the kid business, like myself. he teaches kindergarten aged kids at a Japanese school.

im about to have a cuteness overload resulting in convulsions just thinking about it.

he has lived in japan for a little over five years and aced the Japanese proficiency exam.

I found myself that night sharing his house along with two cross country bikers travelling from Hiroshima to Tokyo. they were a father and a son named vlad and alex. both of them were fluent in English and ukranian. vlad was a little younger than me and also like me was taking the summer off from school as a time to get out and see the world.

richy is from new Zealand and has one of the coolest and deepest new Zealand accents I have ever heard. aside from being extremely cool and hilariously funny, he showed me and his two other guests one of the main attractions of this part of japan.

its called ukai, cormorant fishing.

when the sun goes down, boats along the nagaragawa river float downstream with huge torches attached to the front. torches are also lit along the shore. they use these torches to attract the fish to the light of the fire during the darkness of the evening.

the boats are manned by two men, the man in the front of the boat, next to the torch, holds a series of about seven or eight ropes in his hands. these ropes are attached around the necks of cormorants, a type of bird that digs on fish.

when the fish comes to the light near the front of the boat, the cormorants dive into the water and pick up a few of the fish in their mouths, after the man holding on to them sees a little of that action, he pulls the bird to him and throws the fish from the mouth of the cormorant towards his partner.

the other guy does whatever from there. in the case of last evening, he started gutting and preparing the fish to be eaten to people in other boats observing what was going on.

this is an old school Japanese way of fishing, and it worked well.

it was remarkable.

after that, richy drove us to a sushi place with each plate costing only 100 yen. we gorged ourselves on so many different kinds of sushi and called it a night. vlads father footed the bill for all of us, I felt the worst of all due to this because I was neither his son nor the man providing him with a place to sleep. but I did the best thing I reckoned I could do.

I said thank you


from then I fell asleep in richys house wondering my fate of during the next trip towards Osaka and imagining where I would eventually end up.

and you could never imagine what happens from here

Day Twelve: Toyohashi

So im on a shinkansen from Tokyo, shin-yokohama station towards Toyohashi. I have plans set up to stay with a guy named makoto for the night. I know him from the mission.

While im sitting at the station waiting for a transfer, there are these signs there. They are kinda like the Japanese version of the American “truth” ad campaign. Anti-smoking in all types of creative and humorous methods.

They make these signs with sayings like “I put my cigarette out, that is to say I hid it in the drain” or other fun and catchy ditties.

and what a better place to put these pearls of wisdom that at the shinkansen platform designated smoking area.


So I eventually meet makoto at the station, he takes me to his house, we hang out, I feast one some quail eggs and rice, and then we hang out with his parents for an hour or so while his father sips on lots and lots of shoochuu.


It was all terribly kind and hospitable.

I prayed to his cat that it would help me eat some of the quail eggs with me, or at least speak to me. Either language would have worked, but the cat wouldn’t budge. she was stunned.she had never seen me before without missionary clothes before and was naturally stunned at my appearance.


And that was the night. Toyohashi as I had come to know it was the kind of dive town in japan where you could easily go hire a prostitute and then go kill someone with her, leave the next day, and never fear a trip to the ol Japanese jail.

It wasn’t totally horrible, but it was a dive.

Makoto put me to bed promptly at 9pm, breaking my normal bedtime by about five hours, but I didn’t mind, I needed sleep. If I had been on my college sleeping schedule, this is about the time iwould go to sleep with the intention of waking up at 2 or 3am and working on homework that I had put off.

So naturally im laying there on the ground next to makoto at 3 in the morning, wide awake, wondering if ill ever sleep again. I eventually find myself asleep but then start having the weirdest dreams and nightmares.

Then im up, its 7am or somewhere around there. His parents treat me to a breakfast of a raw quail egg mixed with fermented soybeans, melon flavored bread, and some delicious toast stuff his mother made out of vegetables I couldn’t recognize.

This fermented soybean concoction, known as natto, was once something feared by me. The first time I tried it, I ended up throwing up most of the stuff in my stomach and maybe even a little from the first little bit of my small intestine.

It has the consistency of snot, although I think it might be a little bit more sticky, the gooey stuff stays in your mouth until you drink lots of water or clear it out with some other food, the way you might try to eat bread to get a spicy flavor out of your mouth.

But I wasn’t going to let natto beat me. I was told by a dear friend, Michael durney, that if you eat natto every day, no matter how hard, if you force yourself to do it, you will love the taste, consistency, and stickiness after one week.

And he was totally right.

Ive come to love the taste of natto. There was actually a time of my life when I would eat five packs a day of this stuff. The natto I had this morning mixed with a raw quail egg was equally as delicious as I have ever tasted.

Once again, it was terribly hospitable and kind.

I was on the shinkansen at 915am heading towards Nagoya city and from then, gifu.

Day Eleven: Tokyo

For a nomadic type traveler, the time when you start to feel like youre getting too comfortable in a place and you no longer feel like youre progressing might be a definite sign that its time to be moving on.

Ive come to know my way around Tokyo very well, and when I started taking trains and walking around realizing there were places I was very accustomed to seeing and people I had already met, I knew it was time for me to move on to something else. So I spent one last day in Tokyo and made some more decisions regarding how I was going to conduct myself during the next thirty or so days of my trip.

I got up today, train from Sagamihara to Machida, Machida to shin-yokohama, shin-yokohama to shinagawa, and from shinagawa, I circled Tokyo, seeing all of the major hotspots before I decided to head on out.

I found a store that sold some particularly amazing things.

They had our own beloved President Barack Obama. reminding us that yes, we can, and giving us change we can believe in.


they had these spooky looking coin banks that might have been cute to give as a gift at some gothic, dark ages birthday party


and of course fun halloween costumes for the special woman in your life, or man. all for a modest price


On my way back I met my friend ben in the chapel of the Sagamihara housing area. He was teaching a yoga class at the time. Ben works as a yoga instructor, and until last night, I didn’t know how legit he was, but let me tell ya, he knows his stuff. He had me and two other folks killing ourselves for about 45 minutes into the session before doing a relaxation and meditation time, all of which was very very cool

As this is a trip made up of a lot of first times and new experiences, I can say now something that I have never said before.

I, Brandon scott riggs, have done yoga.

Yes yes, its true. And I liked it too.

So this means that tomorrow I begin the part of my trip that is somewhat void of the simple comforts of having somewhere legit to stay. From now on it will be a different type of trip.

Some things to consider:

First – I’ve ditched the guitar. I was using it as a crutch to passively find conversations with others I was interested in rather than being active and talking to folks all by my lonesome.

Second – I would like for the remainder of my trip to be made up of meeting new people, learning from others including people from countries other than America and japan, and finding opportunities to perform small acts of service for others.

Third – I intend to do all of these things while seeing all of the sights I planned to see around the country. In the next weeks, I still need to see Osaka, Hiroshima, Sapporo, Fukuoka, and Shikoku, as well as all the places in between. I need to sleep in capsule hotels and swim in the ocean.

So stay tuned as the story continues to unfold, it may be more difficult now for me to do frequent updates with no certain place to use the internet, but I will do the best I can.

Thanks for sticking with me.

More havoc to come.

A Subtle and Insignificant Announcement

A surprise and a shock to many, but an important decision I have had to make.

I have decided to cut my trip short by twenty days in order to save a significant amount on personal expenses and pursue other interests of mine that my four month break from college will offer me.

Having the opportunity to not only visit japan, but to spend a significant time here and see the entire country were only a few of many goals I set for myself during Christmas of last year. I intend to accomplish all of them, and returning home earlier than expected would allow me ample time to do that.

Even though I will be here twenty days shorter than I expected, things will, for the most part, go on as planned. I will travel the entire country, see all the sights I have dreamed of seeing, and of course meet plenty of interesting, intelligent, adventurous and wacky people.

I realized during my days spent in Tokyo that I would not need such a significant amount of time to do those things I had set out to do, so now as opposed to trying to spend sixty days here, I will spend forty.

I will of course see sixty cities. Even in my travels in and around Tokyo, I could possibly say that I have already seen at least thirty over the course of ten days. What I am able to write here is only a small microcosm of the things I see, learn and experience every day.

As far as unexpected events go, I had not anticipated the large amount of extra money I would need for essential things such as train tickets not part of the JR lines. I assumed that by purchasing an unlimited pass for JR trains, I would be able to get anywhere for one solid price.

As it turns out, there are many different train lines operating in japan, and often times, many of the smaller ones are the most important ones that you have to use to get to the places you really want to see.

I had also not anticipated the loneliness of seeing so many beautiful things by myself. The best times I have had so far have been the opportunities I have been able to spend with my friends that I have known for years and the friends I have made in short, chance meetings that I am able to connect with on some base level for only a few minutes or a few short hours.

One of the other important things I had not anticipated was the possibility that I would not receive money for street performing. My guitar has been the thing that has been able to get me into most of the things I write about, it is a great conversation starter and as music is a universal language, it is a fantastic way to connect with others.

But for the most part, people don’t want to pay just to hear music around here. Street performers litter the streets in Tokyo, and they have more than just sound to sell. Folks here want something tangible, something they can take home. This may not be so much the case in America, where tipping is a societal norm, but it is not in japan. This has made things very difficult.

So just for kicks, even though we should technically be calling this 60cities40days, were still gonna call this whole she-bang 60cities60days. the best thing for us to do is suck it up and just roll with the punches.

and i know you can.

Day Ten: Hibiya

Mothers day in japan is very much like mothers day in America.

There are a few things that we as human beings inherently possess regardless of race or culture. Some of these things might be the need for love. Some baser instincts like greed also transcend these cultural barriers and bring the whole world together, which is ironic in that greed is the cause of so much devastation and sadness in the world.

Im just sitting here minding my own business, continuing to play music, maybe even write a song about whats going on in my mind.

A Japanese couple holds hands in the park as they watch a young couple doing the same. They tell one another that they love one another. A father with a Mohawk holds the hand of his young son, just barely learning to walk. Another couple calmly walks by pushing a stroller, smiling so wide at their new baby that it seems as if that is the only expression they could know.

As was the story in hibiya park. As I was sitting and noticing all these things, thinking deeply and beginning to try to write a song, a dude named Jessie came up and started playing some blues songs on the guitar with me.

Then after a while, his friend makoto showed up.


these pictures of course were taken after the two had both arrived on the scene, otherwise their guitars wouldnt be in each others picture.

We eventually found ourselves performing for lots of people in the park. I told some guy to take pictures for me playing, but I reckon he didn’t get the point.

makoto was, for all intents and purposes, just the japanese willie nelson. we played bob dylan songs for a good twenty minutes.

And this is how I spent the most eventful three hours of my mothers day. The rest of the time was spent making balloon creations back at harajuku. For the most part, that was a bust, I didn’t get any tips and the amazingness of the ballooning was drowned out by the usual avant garde harajuku street performers.

i couldnt tell if this beautiful japanese woman was pre-op or post-op.

Which brings me back to my original point about the inherent qualities of human beings.
One of the most important ones of all is the love parents have for their children. It may in fact be the most important one of all. We learn from our parents and we have children of our own, continuing the cycle based upon our own experiences with our parents.

I was personally blessed to have the finest mother in the whole world.

My mother has always been my friend and given me a safe place to go during times of need. She has offered me unconditional love and given me the courage to live my dreams.

Aside from being my mother, she has served as my guidance counselor, shrink, dermatologist and barber.

The love of a mother for her child is a marvelous thing, so perfect while appearing so subtle, it is powerful.

No matter what any other folks think, my mother is in fact the best one in the whole world.

I thank god for such a wonderful mother and love her from the bottom of my heart.

Happy mothers day to all mothers, but especially my own!