60cities 60days

The Chronicles of Nara: Chapter Five - Toji and Kinkakuji

2009-06-22T09:20:00.000-07:00

It was another trip to Kyoto.

Amadeus was there trying to get his travel on, and I was looking to get out of nara so i decided i would hit one of the places i had missed during my first time through the country.

it is a golden temple that is located by a small lake. i had seen it years and years ago in a book in my high school japanese class, and i have wanted to see it since then. when i ended up in nara after a bulk of my nomadic traveling was over, i was like...wtf mate? why did i not see that cool golden building?

turns out it was in kyoto, and it was not recommended to me as a "must see" place by the tourist office i visited when i first got there. just goes to show you that when youre trying to have a real foreign adventure, not like one of the stupid fake ones where you spend all your time in western style hotels and eating at restaurants with american style food, you never trust the tourist office.

i guess tourist offices are decent to a certain extent, but the problem is that theyre full of tourists. cities like kyoto, tokyo, hiroshima and osaka are chock full of them. for the most part, about 25% of the travelers are decent, well-rounded travelers looking for a unique cultural experience, a chance to dip their feet into a pool of learning and developing symbiotic and positive relations with people all over the world, but the rest, oh friends, the rest are different. the rest of them are crazy european lesbians with fanny packs looking for a two week escape from reality in their dark, cold and oppressive eastern european countries, or college party boys looking to score with lots of japanese chicks all over the country. i know, ive seen it.

since i havent come anywhere close to japanese chick hook ups, and im not a lesbian and dont own a fanny pack, hopefully i dont fall into either of those categories.

so me and amadeus start at a flea market located at what was described to us as being the tallest pagoda on the entire country.

you have to remember that kyoto is a city full of amazing ancient wonders. when america was firebombing the crap out of this country, they decided to spare most of the kansai area, including nara. the bombs took out a good part of osaka though, which isnt too far away. stuff like this pagoda still remain here, untouched by the war.

we looked around the flea market area, which reminded me of good old ladonia in alabama, the best flea market ive seen in the columbus georgia area. it had food vendors, plenty of old junk, some crazy people, and a few rare and marvelous finds. one time at the ladonia flea market, i bought a pair of ray-ban sunglasses for a dollar. can you believe that? a freaking dollar.

i ate some of my favorite japanese foods, taiyaki and kakigoori, and then me and amadeus walked out of the temple area and saw a guy playing a shamisen on a street corner like a madman. he was so incredible, ive never seen a street performer like it.

btw in this picture, the thing hanging from my mouth is NOT a cigarette, it is a kakigoori straw and the cup i am holding, even though it is a goblet, does NOT contain alcohol, although it did once help the precious iciness of kakigoori.

and then we were on to kinkakuji, the golden temple. we took a good long bus ride there and made our way towards the temple. it was very beautiful.

i couldnt tell of the kids there speaking spanish and japanese were calling the temple "gorudo", which is the word for gold in the japanese version of english, or if they were calling me "gordo", the spanish word for fat. i was happy with either one of the uses of the word. i just know one of the chicks kept looking at me and smiling and laughing. i didnt like her though. she was wearing too much make up and looked like a latina miss piggy. bless her heart.

so we checked that area out for a while, ran into some annoying american high school kids, and then me and amadeus had some ice cream goodness. we made our way back to kyoto station and lamented the loss of amadeus' two lost australian loves and my future with them staying at the nara tree guest house the next day.

more havoc to come.

The Chronicles of Nara: Chapter Four - Hasedera and Omiwa

2009-06-22T08:23:00.000-07:00

My sincere apologies to the 60c60d faithful out there for neglecting updates for the last ten days. Just to let you know, I am still alive and so is 60c60d. while i am still lodging in nara, i still get out to see the surrounding areas and make more havoc.

Amadeus is still chilling around town, so we reckon it might be a good idea to go out and tour one of the working temples around the area.

But as it turns out, it isnt even close at all. It takes us about an hour by train to get there. We were excited though, cause it was decent to get out of nara for a while and check out some more sites.

The road to hasedera was long and hot and sweaty. Its built into the side of a mountain range, so you gotta walk all the way there from the station, it was a long and grueling 20 minutes trip, and by the end of it, we were thanking our lucky stars that we had packed our shamwow to catch all the sweat from our perspirating brows.

The temple was cool, there were monks wandering around, driving in cars and smoking cigarettes, the kind of stuff i hadnt pictured monks doing. The times they are a changin though.

I got some decent pictures by this long stairway. It turns out japanese folks dont like the number 4, so as opposed to building the stairs with 400 steps, they only made 399. good news for us. we made it to the top of the stairs to the temple area, which had lots of these cool cloth things hanging on the outer area of the temple. the inside was full of all these gold statues. me and amadeus lit some candles and said a couple little prayers there, cause seriously, i know gods already got my back, but nothing wrong with getting on buddhas side too.

we took some adventurous and contemplative shots off the side of this veranda like place in front of the temple.

we wanted to go inside and get a closer look at some of the stuff, but they were charging like 1000yen to get into the inner areas of the temple, plus the monk got mad at me for wearing shoes on his little wooden area where i reckon you were supposed to change your shoes. psh, seriously gimme a break. i thought you were supposed to stand on the wood while you changed, but i guess i was wrong, and i was yelled at by a monk.

me and amadeus walked away, feeling like we had been wronged and then talked crap about the monk behind his back for about five minutes until we felt better about the whole situation.

we went on down a path that was covered in all these old graveyards for former priests and monks. for some reason, sometimes people put things like sake or coke cans on top of the markers, i guess to make an offering to the dead or something. anyway, amadeus ended up stealing a can of something before he knew it was meant to be there for a reason, and now he is haunted eternally by the spirit of a dead priest.

also, during the day, i picked up a bamboo stick, and became a spiritual leader called bura-dashi. some of my teachings include avoiding the wearing of surfer clothing, the everyday eating of hamburgers and hotdogs, and abstinence from listening to music classified under the genre "indie"

bura-dashi believes in an existence of mostly eating, sleeping, and drinking lots of coke zero. its appropriate for male followers of bura-dashi to be afraid of females, but only the ones they like.

your devotion to bura-dashi will lead to a lifetime of happiness and harmony with those around you.

on the way back to nara, amadeus and the newly dicovered priest within brandon, bura-dashi, stopped by another temple in omiwa. they enjoyed their time there greatly and bura-dashi was greatly impressed with the beauty of the "shrine maids" there.

but seriously, they had the coolest outfits i had ever seen.

The Chronicles of Nara: Chapter Three - Deer Meat

2009-06-12T01:36:00.001-07:00

All these dear running around acting like they own the place made me wonder if they would eat anything, even meat.

So me and amadeus, an irish guy currently residing at the nara tree, went out on an adventure to see if the deer had the guts to eat more than just crackers and other folks maps.

our first stop was at the huge buddha hall, where we were downright bombarded by groups of school kids wanting their picture taken with two guys from foreign countries. at one point, i started asking all of the kids what country they thought i was from, just by looking at my face, and every time i asked, they said france.

so what is it that french folks and i have in common? the world may never know, other than i like french fries. what do they call french fries in france? here in japan, french fries are called fried potatoes.

but whats even wackier...corn dogs...are called...

american dogs

did anybody know that the most popular treat in japan named after the country of america is the corn dog? corn dogs can be bought at many convenience stores, and since they are one of my favorite treats, i always find myself asking one of the workers there to pull me an american dog hot off the grill.

and boy they sure are tasty.

me and amadeus stopped my mcdonalds on the way to meet some of the deer, and i bought two burgers to try out on them. first was a regular hamburger, made with two buns, a pickle, some small shreds of onion, mustard, tomato, and something that looks and tastes like it might be cow meat. second was something called the mcpork, big in japan, made with lettuce, two buns, some weird pseudo-barbeque sauce, and something that looks and tastes like it might be pig meat. the mcpork is one food that i would never pay to eat, and thats saying a lot, because i eat AND like almost anything.

so we tried to give the deer this hamburger, and it worked. out of a small posse of about eight deer, one came up and started chowing down on it. the rest were not at all interested in the burger. it was a happy time for me and amadeus when that deer ate our hamburger.

later we tried the mcpork, and just like i hate it, the deer hate it too. one of the deer took one bite and walked away angrily, forcing me to throw the rest of it into a nearby lake the next day after it was too rotten for even a deer to eat. the turtles enjoyed it.

makes me wonder if the meat might be made of deer and the one that totally woofed down the burger might be a cannibal. im gonna go out and check outside to see if any deer are hanging from nearby trees with the words "traitor" written above them on a cardboard sign.

more havoc to come

The Chronicles of Nara: Chapter Two - The Tambo

2009-06-08T23:05:00.000-07:00

I was riding on a train with yuki, who I had just met five minutes before on our way to a city that I am still not sure of the name of. yuki was the funniest Japanese person I have met. he carried around with him a doll of a snowman, telling people it was his friend, and pointing to everyone that, near the crotch of the snowman, there was a stain where the snowman had peed his pants.

we got along great

bob and mayumi told me that there were a group of people that meet together occasionally for the purposes of planting rice the old fashioned way. I had never done this type of thing myself, but had heard about people doing it before and seen it plenty of times during my stay here.

so why not go out and try it.

bottom line is that planting rice the old fashioned way sucks

there are fields covered in mud, knee deep, that you wade it laying out huge rolls of this construction paper, which you pole holes in and lay down these small rice shoots into. hundreds and hundreds of times. there were bugs everywhere, it was hot, and many of the people I was working with were crazy.

this guy here was one of the wild fellows. there was a wild snake just slithering around doing his own thing, and this kid walks over and picks it up and starts playing with it. he sat there working with the snake for about five minutes before he found a lizard and started playing with that instead.

the night before was fun though. me and yuki rode the train to the city and were picked up by the guy in charge of the whole deal. he drove us to the rice field where me met some of the workers there and introduced ourselves. they had already finished for the day and were preparing to go up into a lodge in the mountains and hang out until work the next day.

before we went though, the whole group of us when out to fields where we watched fireflies for about an hour. it was a great experience to be there with them enjoying fireflies over rice fields under a full moon. it reminded me of the movie i had seen just a couple nights before, the grave of the fireflies, which may be one of the best movies i have ever seen.

then we were on to the lodge.

I was glad I had my guitar, cause it made the party much more fun. it was a big giant sleepover with plenty of cool guys and cute girls. I taught them my favorite game, big booty, which I often used at the girls home where I worked before I came to japan, and the Japanese folks seemed to like the game. we sat around eating rice and all types of goodies before we all went to bed sometime around 3am. I was the only foreigner there.

the next day these freakin crazy Asians have me waking up at 7am ready to go out and work in the rice fields. I wasn’t ready after only sleeping for our hours, but because I wasn’t ready to fight, I gave in peacefully and we all went to the field where we worked for about eight hours.

trying to plant rice seeds in two feet of solid mud was one of the dirtiest and most painful jobs I have ever done, but at least I can tell people now that I have actually planted rice in japan.

during the day, I thought about something that my first mission companion told me when I lived with him in a city called yamato.

I was complaining to him about how much I hated the rain while we were doing a study session together, and then he looked at me and said

“but elder riggs, I love the rain, it is what makes the rice grow”

and that has always stuck with me. these muddy rice fields that become flooded during the rainy season are what feeds a nation, and the people of this country are so grateful for the blessings that nature provides for them.

after working for those hours, I was hungry, and incredibly burned by the sun.

all the folks went to a bath house from that point, I didn’t mention this yet, but I went to the same one before we went up into the cabin in the mountains. so, it was my second time going to this bath house.

and let me just reiterate to everyone out there, I love Japanese bath houses. there is one half of the place for women and one for men, and you all get in there, totally naked, and have a party like youre in a big giant naked waterpark, with only dudes of course, unless youre a lady, then you go with all your girl friends to the other side of the bath house, which has girl things like cosmopolitan magazine and mascara I guess. I have never been to the girls side myself, and could never imagine a woman not fully clothed, so I will only assume that those types of things happen there.

my friend yuki was hanging out with me in the bath and he told me that I needed to jump into the tub next to us, so without thinking, I did. after that I freaked out. the tub I was in was sending out pulses of electricity, which I guess some people like, but I was not up for it, so I jumped out of the electric bath screaming like a naked chubby American mad man.

the next shock was even greater. the attendant that works at the bath house has a clear view of both sides of the locker rooms, and because there are only two genders of homo-sapiens, that means that at any given time, a dude can see all the naked chicks or a chick can see all the naked guys…if they want to.

I had just figured based on the night before that only a male worked at this one, but when I walked into the locker room in my birthday suit, there was an old woman staring at me. yeah, so I freaked out a little, but I guess after you see hundreds of naked people every day for years and years, its no big deal. and even though she was old, I know she still thought I was a stud.

so another bath house adventure, complete with rice. it was a great time and even though it was hard, im glad I did it. it was worse that the paint business with bossman ira but better than the pool business with bug eiland. which is funny because the guy that worked as the boss reminded me of a Japanese bug eiland. his personality was the exact same in my opinion, he just wasn’t as generous as bug. when we were in the locker room of the bath house, he stood in the corner for five minutes blow-drying his hair while standing totally naked next to a picture of a woman modeling by mount fuji.

if bug eiland had been born a Japanese man with no reservations of going to a bath house, I could see him doing something like that.

he was my hero.

The Chronicles of Nara: Chapter One - Civil War

2009-06-08T09:50:00.000-07:00

the people of nara are at civil war.

there are those who feel that sento-kun is the one that should be the town mascot and others feel that the title belongs to manto-kun.

but seriously, for the most part people want manto-kun to represent them.

in order to celebrate the 1300th anniversary of this city, they hired a man out of Tokyo to create a mascot for the celebration, spending big money in the process, something to the tune of 50000 american dollars.

after spending all that time and money developing a good mascot, they came up with this.

he is an ugly demonic like creature made to look like a baby Buddha with deer antlers. this seems appropriate as nara is associated with that old time Japanese religion and the city is famous for at least 1000 deer that live here and roam around uncontrollably.

but many people, including myself, think this thing is hideous and would like nothing to do with it.

so they created a rival. spending a significantly less amount of time and money, a designer out of saitama, the city above Tokyo, created this.

this is manto-kun. he is like a brown marshmallow with a temple roof and antlers for a hat. much more cute and much less blasphemous to Buddhism, he seems to be the perfect choice to represent the city.

manto-kun is the kind of guy that, just by looking at him, you would feel proud of having marry your sister. he is the kind of guy that looks like you could eat and would taste something like peanut butter. his white cape makes him look like he would fight crime using his horns and his deer hoof hands and feet. he has the smile and demeanor to break a lot of hearts.

because I love manto-kun so much, I was able to attend his birthday party. there was music, poetry reading, and some guys talking about a jail. I didn’t know what all that was about, but the poetry reading was just as boring, so the best part about going was being able to listen to an old woman sing enka music.

I got bored with the poetry reading and was heading out when I got the surprise of my life.

there he was…

it was the creator of manto-kun. he had come all the way from saitama to celebrate in the first birthday of his beautiful creation.

I told him how much I loved manto-kun and how sento-kun sucks and I hate him. then just got kicks, I made a birthday card for manto-kun.

then me and the father of manto-kun held up our own individual creations together. he said my art skills were very good, but I think he was just saying that. even though I know my art skills are great, he seems much better.

I never got the chance to talk to manto-kun in person, but being able to meet the creator himself was the next best thing.

the civil war continues here in nara, and with definite bloodshed in the future, I can only urge the disciples of sento-kun to lay down their guns and raise their flag of surrender, allowing manto-kun to take his rightful place as nara city mascot

The Chronicles of Nara

2009-06-08T08:41:00.000-07:00

Thank you everyone for sticking with me on the journey of 60 cities in 60 days until now!

I am very happy to let you know again that I will be living in nara and working at the nara tree guesthouse until my return to America on july 2nd.

during my journey so far, I have seen twice the amount of things that I had planned to see in a single month, so it is in my humble opinion that I have seen at least 60 cities, I estimate that over the course of my daily travelling, I have seen at least a hundred.

which brings me here to nara.

I am beginning the next part of my trip which is based less on travelling and more on living the life of a Japanese person. I will still travel often and see nearby sites, and I will be visiting Tokyo in the days before I go to narita airport to return to America, but for now, I will be staying in nara, continuing to learn new things, meet many new people, and have a place to call home for a few weeks.

from this point, the blog will not be a record of the things that happen daily, it will be more based on highlighting many things that are happening while I live here. which may be good for people because it will be less of a travelogue and more of a look at daily life in a small Japanese city.

im excited. are you?

so welcome to the chronicles of nara

Day Thirty Five: Sobudai, Shin-Yokohama, Kyoto and Nara

2009-06-08T08:22:00.000-07:00

I was up at about 10. the whole family was gone and I was there at lodging by myself. I just spent some time pondering on things before the horlacher family came back and met me there.

they had been gone doing the final preparations for the inspection of the house they were moving out of. I kind of felt bad that I didn’t go with them to do it, but honestly I didn’t know that they were going to be doing in the morning.

so I spent some more time with them in the morning and with ben before me and ben left at 1 to go to the train station where I would be riding the japan rail system to nara.

the pass I had to stay on the zama base was only good until 1pm or something stupid like that. so when I got to the gate to get out of the freakin place, the Japanese folks acted like they weren’t going to let me leave or I was going to get punished for exceeding the time limit or something. it was pretty ridiculous for a while and me and ben had to stand there waiting for Japanese army folks to make some trivial back and forth phone calls asking their higher authorities if it was okay for me to leave the place.

eventually they let me out of there and I was out of the clutches of the American military, which was good, even though it made me sad to have to say goodbye to the horlachers.

and then me and ben made our way to the station, said our goodbyes, and I was gone.

five hours of train rides later and I was in nara. I was carrying a rolling suitcase, a 50lb packpack, and a guitar around the whole day, and stopped in a restaurant nearby the station with all of my goodies. they were glad to see me and my money when I ordered what could possibly be my favorite Japanese food, coco’s curry.

I was out of there and went and met bob and mayumi at their house after the sun set. they welcomed me and showed me where I would be sleeping. I have a room upstairs where I will be able to sleep, by myself for the most part except when there are guests in the house, then ill get to share with who knows who else!

the thought of it is terribly exciting.

also, I live just about an hour by train from Osaka, so I can go play there sometimes, and they are even going to be doing a Japanese version of jesus christ superstar all this month, definitely something not to miss!

but of course the end of the huge bulk of constant travel is over, and that has me feeling sad. I have never been in a situation in my life where I didn’t know where I would sleep night after night until the last month. it has been an incredible experience that I have absolutely loved.

when youre living in such a way, your lifestyle is based on constant schedule changes, desperation and all types of surprises. almost every situation I experienced was never planned, it all just came to me as I went along. I had a goal to see every major city in the country, and I was able to.

you feel different when you live as a traveler with no real plan. while some senses are dulled and not utilized entirely, others are amplified to some extreme and basic instinctual level that we rarely realize we still have in our mostly civilized circumstances. a person living the traveling life with little money begins to learn how to live by using every single resource and hand and waste nothing.

I have never felt in my life so poor and so tired, but I have also never felt so free and so in-tune with what was going on around me.

this trip has been incredible and I have had the best experience of my life and I am truly grateful that I am able to stay longer thanks to my friends in nara

and even though I have been wet, hot, cold, hungry, fatigued, sick, anxious, and felt so often like I am in a place I don’t know well enough to feel comfortable in anywhere at any time, constantly moving with no nearby support or place to hang my hat…

I have loved every second of it

Day Thirty Four: Zama

2009-06-08T08:13:00.000-07:00

then it’s the shinkansen from sendai to Tokyo.

im on the shinkansen for about three hours I guess, much better in comparison to the eight hour trip I took from Sapporo to sendai. but because the trip from Sapporo to sendai included a trip in a tube below the ocean floor, it seems like everything balanced out in the end.

I got into Tokyo about noon and I do another stop at shibuya and hiro-o. I try to meet up with my old mission president again, but he isn’t there, so I just visit the temple, try to call another one of my old mission presidents, without luck, and I movie more around the city.

I have a meeting that night with the man I met on the plane flying to narita when I first came to japan. his name is okimasa okada, and as a special gift to me, he took me out to dinner in shinyurigaoka.

it was great to see him again and the dinner was quite exquisite.

it was also decent to get back to shinyurigaoka. I had already stayed there one night during my trip when I visited laura and got to spend the evening with her splendid friend joseph.

shinyurigaoka is also very close to one of the cities when I lived while I was a missionary, Machida. most of the pictures I used for the city pictures in the headers for this blog were taken from Machida, including this one.

I visited the dog art wall, a few of my other favorite places and then went to donkihote and bought a jacket there. come to think of it, im wearing that jacket right now. see…

pretty cool huh?

so I went to dinner with okada. it was a rollicking good time, and after it was over, he dropped me off at the zama army camp nearby where I was going to stay once again with the horlacher family.

again, that family is amazing. they were living in lodging quarters for people preparing to leave out of the country, and still they allowed me to stay with them for one night and then they gave me a whole bunch of hot dogs the next day.

thanks so much horlacher family

so I slept that night on the couch of the horlacher family in lodging at camp zama, thinking that this might be, for the most part, the last night of my vagabond travels.

the next day would be the last day I could use my rail pass to get anywhere, and I would be spending the rest of my trip working in nara. the most adventurous part was over.

but maybe it really isn’t over, it just keeps going on and on as I continue my stay here.

I can only hope that the adventure isn’t over, because up to this point, I have had the absolute time of my life and just hope that it can keep going. I have learned more than I could have ever imagined and experienced things I would have guessed I would ever get myself into.

so, 60cities 60days lives on.

Day Thirty Three: Sendai

2009-06-08T00:12:00.000-07:00

it took me about eight hours by train, the trip from Sapporo to sendai

i began in sapporo city, rode on a train to the city at the base of Hokkaido island, hakodate.

from that point, I changed trains and boarded the underwater train. as opposed to having a train that goes in bridges and whatnot, there are two options for getting from Hokkaido to mainland Honshu, you can take a ferry, or take a train that travels in an underground tunnel, something like the English channel train, only better.

so the train went into the long tube from Hokkaido to Honshu. I was glad after I made it out alive. I had never been on a train before that went not only under the ocean, but underneath the ground at the ocean floor. I was a little terrified during the trip that something weird might happen and I wouldn’t be able to live to tell the tale of how I made it out alive.

I arrive in Hachinohe and ride on the shinkansen bound for Tokyo with a stop eventually in sendai

I was in sendai city at sometime around 8pm.

I got out and did a little sightseeing. not much to see when its 8pm at night, so I went to the place where I knew all the folks would be, the entertainment district.

entertainment districts are just smaller versions of las vegas in the middle of larger Japanese cities. its where all the clubs and bars and all that fantastic stuff seems to be, and at night its entertaining to walk around the places and see what kind of things you can see.

in japan, people will randomly come up to you and speak English, I guess trying to practice with you or something. its even more fun when a drunk guy comes up to you, trying to speak English, and half of the words he says, you have never heard before, he is just speaking some hybrid language made of Japanese, greek, with English thrown in to keep you on your toes.

a guy comes up to me and says hello. I ask him whats up and im just looking around to see whats going on in the town. we talk for a while and it was entertaining while it lasted. he seemed like he was weaving a pretty big yarn of crazy mixed up stories.

he claimed he owned five businesses that provided people with massages, of the exotic type. he also said he was forty years old and had a wife in Thailand.

he told me one of his dreams was to eventually open up a guest house or a hostel for world travelers in his wifes city in Thailand. he could tell this would get me going due to the 50lb backpack I was carrying around with me.

I suppose I believed him, what reason would I have had not to?

he told me i could spend the night at his house, which i didnt. he was pretty drunk at the time i met him and eventually after we had been talking for about an hour, he just walked away. i have his phone number though, unless the one he gave me is some weird sensual massage place

from then I walked from the crazy part of town to the front of the station where I slept in an internet café for about six hours and boarded the first train in the morning to Tokyo.

the rising sun was so beautiful.

Day Thirty Two: Sapporo

2009-06-08T00:00:00.000-07:00

the day begins and im out the door.

if anyone has ever lived in japan, visited, or noticed the signs and billboards in any film in or around modern japan, you might know about Sapporo beer.

the three people who were able to see or listen to me open my mission call can also testify that i predicted that this place was where i would become a missionary, the beer capital of japan.

even a non-drinker would have an interest in the beer of Sapporo. I didn’t even realize that japans Sapporo beer came from Sapporo until today. I could have only guessed. while I was on my mission, I never really was able to get a confirmation as to whether or not Sapporo beer comes from Sapporo. Japanese members of the mormon church start convulsing at even the thought of beer, nicotine, caffeine or mtv. subsequently, I never got the opportunity to ask about it, or maybe I never really cared until today.

anyways, I was walking around the town asking folks what Sapporo was all about, and what it was famous for, and I finally found out it was all about the booze. its the great stuff that makes calm and collected businessmen vomit on train platforms late at night.

Sapporo even has a beer museum, which was originally one of the first places to produce japans famous Sapporo beer.

I didn’t feel too bad about going to the museum, and even paying to get in. of all the good mormons out there, please raise your hand if you have ever been to busch gardens and payed at least 30 bucks to get in.

see? there. I only had to pay 100yen. don’t be all judgin your brother.

it was an interesting place. but I didn’t know anything that was happening cause it was all in Japanese, no English subtitles in this museum, so I just kinda had to guess what was going on.

I found some delightful little models that make the production of beer in northern japan look something like how presents are made by elves in the north pole. there was even beautiful and delightful music that played along with these moving and grooving models.

it reminded me so much of duff land from the Simpsons, a place meant to glorify and make beer look like some sort of theme park attraction.

there are some things in life that will make a man tear up a little. hearing lee greenwood sing "god bless the usa" live is one of them.

i could imagine my grandfather witnessing this place and having a tear come to his eye. the grandfather on my mothers side of course.

after I had left the museum, I was feeling a little hung-over with fun, so the next best thing to do would be to go and check out a little of the Sapporo downtown area.

so I was on my way.

watabe mai told me that Hokkaido was all about flowers, and there were beautiful ones here, even in the park area of downtown Sapporo. it was one of the more beautiful city parks I had seen since coming to japan. it was well kept, had lots of beautiful flowers, and this Eiffel tower thing at the end of the park that I reckon was supposed to send out tv signals or something.

after I left the park, I went looking for the Sapporo botanical gardens. people had told me that when I went to the city, the two things I needed to see were the beer museum and the botanical gardens.

beer museum? check.

botanical gardens? soon enough.

it took me about an hour to walk there. and alas…

it was closed.

on monday, the only day of the week its closed. it sure did look beautiful from the outside though.

in some other life ill see those botanical gardens in the place known for its beautiful flowers

but not yet, not yet.

Day Thirty One: Fukuzumi

2009-06-05T06:43:00.000-07:00

it's 7am and Marcelo knocks on my door.

my original plan was to take trains all the way to the largest city on the northern island of Japan, Sapporo. the trip would have taken around eight hours. i've become so accustomed to trains, that it wouldn't have really mattered to me. that stale beer and cigarette smell is like home now in a strange way, only because i sleep on trains, or i write.

but as always, plans change. Marcelo bought me a one way ticket to the city on an airplane. he drives me to the airport in the morning and drops me off after feeding me some curry and rice, eggs and toast.

that man is as good as gold.

he drops me off there and i'm sitting in the airport in Toyama, waiting for my plane to Sapporo. i board the plane. it probably is only holding 15% of its available capacity, so everyone changes their seats so they sit by a window.

it's an hour flight and i'm on the ground in Sapporo. it's cold and wet, but i'm not sick anymore. i make my way to the place where i will stay. Marcelo gave me money for a place to stay, so i picked a guesthouse in a southern part of the city.

as i'm on a train there, i see people wearing outfits like they're going to a huge sporting event.

i ask around and as it turns out, the Hokkaido Nippon Ham Fighters and the Hiroshima Hanshin Tigers will be playing a game at 2pm in the Sapporo Dome, a huge stadium that doubles as a baseball field and football stadium.

i check into my place after a short trip on the subway. i ask the woman working there how to get to the game. she tells me, and i'm off like its springtime on the farm.

for 1500yen, i get into the game at the Sapporo Dome, but of course, just like in american baseball, nobody stays in the seats they buy tickets for, so i get into the place and kinda look around for a better place to sit. i meander around the lower bowl sections for a while and try to sneak into where the band is playing.

allow me to explain for a moment.

Japanese baseball is unlike anything i have ever seen at an American baseball game. the stadium was divided into two halves, one half rooting for the Ham Fighters and the other for the Hanshin Tigers. each section had their own band that played in the upper area of the seating, and when their team was up to bat, it was a constant, nonstop cacophony of cheers and songs. people with megaphones seated at the lower parts of the dome screamed up to everyone what they would cheer, and people held up big signs showing what the next cheer would be.

everyone was incredibly spirited and showed more enthusiasm at that game than i have ever seen at any sporting event in America.

the Japanese love their baseball. there was not an empty seat in the entire place.

except one.

i eventually found my way into one of these lower sections, past two levels of security, before sitting down and enjoying the game for five minutes before being yelled at and escorted out of the section by the stadium guards.

as i was on my way, everyone was yelling, smiling, and giving me high fives for the courage i had to at least make it that far.

they let me stay in the place, so i walked up into the upper levels, where i was really supposed to be, and was pleasantly surprised that my spot was next to the official game organist. do they still even have those in America or has everything been replaced with recordings?

i arrived at the game in the second inning, and stayed until the eleventh. i started to feel like my stomach was going to eat itself, and rather than stay and spend 1500yen on a hot dog or something, i figured it would be best to just head on home. the game was tied, and i didn't see an end in sight.

so i headed on out--i saw that it was still raining through the windows of the dome. i snapped a picture of these two spirited young Hanshin Tigers fans and wondered to myself, why would anyone want to fight a ham anyway? why would anyone name their team the Ham Fighters?

i found out later that the actual name of the team is just the Fighters, and they are owned by the company Nippon Ham. so, the full name of their team is the Hokkaido Nippon Ham Fighters.

i was happy i was able to leave without being in an all out, old-fashioned shake down with a ham.

in the end, after the twelfth inning, the teams called it a draw. if only they hadn't settled with the draw and instead gone into sudden death-- it would have involved the wrestling of a ham.

only in my dreams.

Another Subtle and Insignificant Announcement

2009-05-31T07:20:00.000-07:00

we can now officially call 60c60d 60c60d again!

thats right.

we may even be able to be called something even bigger, like 60c65d or something

the adventure goes on with unexpected twists every day, and the latest plot twist goes something like this:

the day my rail pass finally runs out, i will be taking the last train to the city of nara, where i previously stayed with bob and mayumi at their guest house, the nara tree. it was a wonderful and peaceful place and i really enjoyed my time there.

they have given me the opportunity to live there at their guest house, watching over the place and doing other little jobs, and in return they are offering me lodging there.

during that time, i will be working on some of the projects i have previously mentioned i was planning on returning to america to complete.

i have found a great sense of solitude and peace here in this country as i have been on my trip and especially in nara, so it will be a pleasure for me to live there for the last 25 or so days of my journey.

so i will take up there on the evening of june 4th and head back to america through narita in tokyo on july 2nd, finally ending my journey of seeing 60 cities in 60 days and having the adventure of a lifetime.

i will still be making blog updates occasionally letting everyone know what is going on as i spend my days in nara, living as simply as i can for the remainder of my stay in japan.

and im sure it will be good.

youll just have to wait and see.

Day Thirty: Kanazawa and Toyama

2009-05-31T06:38:00.000-07:00

still feeling sick, even after my great experiences with the toilet, i slept til about noon and left marcelos to go on another adventure.

takaoka is located between to larger cities Kanazawa and Toyama, so i walked from his home to the station. it took about an hour. it was only raining a little bit.

i got off at the train stations and walked around parks in the area. looked at trees, streams, and of course the inevitable shrine and castle. it was good to get out and get some fresh air that day.

its good to get out and look for the small things. i have mentioned before about finding meaning in life by the small and often fleeting moments of happiness. we often have to fall back on those things to get us through the most difficult moments of life.

for me, today was a day of looking for beauty in small things. as i have been going along, i realized i have come halfway through my journey and had a lifetime of significant and special experiences. i have been running out of gas as of late and am looking for some time to rest and simply sit back, relax, and enjoy the simple things of this world.

the leaves on the trees, the rain, the wind, the love of a parent for a child and the feeling of love in general.

the animals, the insects, the rocks and the sky.

the japanese are very nature oriented, it comes with the territory of being a japanese person i guess. its rooted in the religions of so many generations past, and even if some dont necessarily follow those beliefs down to the same details, they still live to honor and uphold those same ideals of their ancestors.

many of the names and places of the country are named for things in nature, which i reckon might be the same as people in america. names like brooks or field or stone, we have mel brooks, sally field and stone cold steve austin.

so as much as i would have loved to have a truly adventurous day, this one was less than what i have been able to tell of previously. this was more of a day to refuel and begin the next part of my trip, the final half, which may come as a more difficult ordeal than i had expected.

we never really know.

Day Twenty Nine: Takaoka

2009-05-31T05:53:00.001-07:00

A lot of the day was spent with me sleeping.

Marcelo went to work and left me all alone at his house, something that people dont usually do that know me too well. For all he knew, he could have come home and i might have turned everything upside down and created my own backwards world within his home. sometimes when youre sick, things like that have a way of just happening

but i didnt do that

i didnt really do much of anything until he came home from work, aside from sleeping and occasionally eating. i was like being back at byu all over again.

when he came back at about 6 that evening, he was kind enough to drive me around the town for a little bit. i get kinda crazy these days if i stay in one place for too long, so the opportunity to get out and do something was a real gem.

that evening, i saw something that i rarely see, but apparently its catching on in the country, and i dont know why.

you may or may not be familiar with the japanese bidet style toilets.

these are magical toilets that, prior to doing your business on the toilet, send a straight stream of warm water towards your nether-regions, giving a first-timer the most awkward feeling of their life.

now that i have become used to it, its no big deal, but let me give you a quick run down of one of our more basic models.

here is our toilet. its pretty normal, looks mostly like a toilet, not at all like a robot, except it does have an arm and a big pad behind it like you might see on the wall in gym class.

but when you sit on it, you notice something...the seat...its already warm. this cant be right, nobody has sat on this seat for the last three hours!? but its true, first of all, there is an automatic warming feature that keeps the seat at a warm temperature at any hour of the day.

so after you sit down, you notice some buttons on the panel to your right. what do they mean?

well anyone may know that the one on the far left means stop because of the little square and the word "stop" written in not just one but two languages, so it will stop the stream of water in its tracks. the next one over...hmmmm.

it looks like a curvy W with a dotten Y underneath, but that is only to the untrained eye. this image is actually a bottom with a stream of water being sprayed towards its cheeks. press this button with caution.

next button over, now this one is a doozy. it is a picture of a female with a stream of water sprayed towards her bottom, but no, this stream of water is aimed just a little bit further forward. what happens from there is left for you to piece together, but google "bidet" if you must, just dont include an image search.

this may be decent for females to use, but i would strongly not recommend it for males

all of these spray options have the thing underneath to change the amount of pressure exerted.

now the final button, which is the one i dont understand that seems to be catching on, even though it is popular already. it is the button you push that makes the sound of a toilet flushing, complete with a toggle underneath to decrease or increase the volume of the toilet flushing sound. if anyone knows the purpose behind the toilet flishing sound button, please tell me so one of the greatest mysteries and conflicts of my life can see some closure.

the toilet is armed with a sensor so it knows when someone is actually sitting on it, so when you sit down, all of the sudden all these gadgets and gizmos start going and you feel like youre using the toilet of the millenium falcon. unless the sensor is being triggered by someone sitting on the toilet, it wont squirt a single drop. its just smart like that.

now i may not be the most clever person in the whole world, but with my mischievious mind, i realized if you just cover the sensor with your hand...and touch the squirt button...water still comes out...

just please dont do this, expecially in the handicapped bathroom, or the old woman going in the bathroom after you will think you urinated all over the wall in front of the toilet and she will press the bathroom alarm button and have you arrested.

luckily nobody has this problem because of this sign above the toilet explaning how girls and boys have different parts, and therefore should conduct themselves differently when using the toilet.

Day Twenty Eight: Hiro-o

2009-05-31T04:58:00.000-07:00

after the things i have felt and seen in the last three days, i was feeling it was time for a break

it’s the morning that I am set to go to the temple in hiro-o, and im really not feeling so hot

maybe its because its 7am and my body doesnt like this? normal brandon wake up time happens normally between when the sun is up and when it is down when i am taking classes at college.

but luckily for me, the sun rises at about 5am in this country

BUT...

that is not why they call it the land of the rising sun.

but back to my original point, i was up and i was feeling under the weather.

as a matter of fact, there hadn’t been a moment of the entire trip when I felt so fatigued. but it really wasn’t so big of a deal, cause I joined Marcelo to the temple in Tokyo anyways.

for any member of the church of jesus Christ of latter day saints, it is a great privilege to be able to go to the temple. for me, it was an even greater privilege not only to be able to go into the temple, but to be able to go into the temple in the center of Tokyo.

the funny thing about the Tokyo temple is that it is located one subway stop down from roppongi, the ward in Tokyo I spoke about before that I found so incredibly disgusting. when I asked Marcelo where his favorite spot in Tokyo was, he said roppongi, but apparently there are actually places that aren’t all that bad.

as a matter of fact, there may even be places there that aren’t that bad at all. after all, when you walk just a while down from the streets of roppongi, you are able to stand not only by the mormon temple, but also at the main offices for the church in japan.

it took u about 3 or 4 hours to make it there by train. it was raining outside so it wasn’t the best day to be riding in a car.

so me and Marcelo hang out at the temple for a while, we do a session there and are on our way out. as were walking back to the station, I remember that this is also the place where my second mission president lives. His name is Gary Stevenson, and for the members of the church out there that were able to watch the last general conference, President Stevenson, now a member of the first quorum of the seventy, spoke on temples during the final session on sunday afternoon.

so me and Marcelo went on a hunt looking for him. we searched far and wide the areas around hiro-o, until we finally tracked him and his wife down at the offices of the church. his receptionist called him down and I was able to have a great talk with him and his wife both about how their lives have been now that he has been given one of the highest callings in the church, and also about my life as a vagabond traveler.

all in all it was a great day. we walked back in the rain towards the train station and got back on the trains for the 4 hour trip back to takaoka. during the trip, Marcelo said I was looking sicker than I had in the morning and that I should take a good respite for the next couple of days and explore the areas of takaoka.

I was feeling sick, very sick, and knew that it might be best to follow his advice.

so when I got back to his home, I passed out on the bed in the guest room.

after the things i have felt and seen in the last four days, i was feeling it was time for a break

Day Twenty Seven: Hiroshima

2009-05-28T09:19:00.000-07:00

I was up and out of the internet place sometime around 7am. I asked again where my hat had gone, and nobody knew.

in order to grieve the lost of my beloved fidel castro hat, I walked back to the gembaku dome, the atomic bomb dome. on my way, I walked by a memorial that looked like it had been created for the children victims of Hiroshima. there was a small group of elementary school students who had created a thing made of a thousand cranes to have placed in these plexi-glass cases behind the statue. they reverently sang a song and presented the cranes to a woman working at the memorial.

A word to the 60c60d faithful:

All images on the blog can be blown up with a simple mouse click. I try hard to capture a few minor details in the photographs I decide to post, so if youre interested in the intricate details of these images, theyre only a click away.

I went and sat on a bench that overlooked the river that it sat beside and fell asleep for about three hours.

an old Japanese lady came over and started raking leaves where I was sitting and I woke up and scared her half to death. she said she was sorry for waking me up cause she could tell I was enjoying myself. she was a pretty decent old lady. I asked her if she knew where my hat was and she didn’t.

places like Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Kyoto and nara are literal gathering places of groups of school kids. at the place where I was sitting, when I woke up, I found I was surrounded by these kids who all gather around this certain marker to have their pictures taken as a group.

I took the opportunity to have fun with the kids, I made balloon animals, showed them up with a rubiks cube, and taught them animal names in English. it was great fun and it was all smiles, but after all this is Hiroshima, and as much as I wanted to smile, the thoughts of what happened at the very spot where I was sitting sometimes made it difficult, especially with all these kids around.

I just sat there and played with the groups of kids as they would pass through, making balloon flowers for the boys to give to their “girlfriends” and all sorts of things.

about noon I walked around some more, took in the sights and sounds of the Hiroshima peace park and then went into the museum.

it was much like the museum at Nagasaki, the first part dedicated to the bombing of the city itself and then the second devoted to the history of the atomic bomb.

the things in the museum were also just as devastating. I found myself crying more and more as I would walk through the corridors, listening to testimonies of survivors of the bombings, looking at old charred or melted artifacts and seeing the remarkable stories of those people who survived the bombing only to die years later from the radiation.

one particularly graphic image was a photograph taken of three people, it looked like a mother and two children, their faces had been burned and their hair sat bushy on their heads. their skin was melting and hanging off of their hands and arms as they walked towards the photographer.

the final story in the museum was the story of sadako sasaki, who had barely survived the bombings at the age of two, but at the age of ten, about seven or eight years after the bombing, was diagnosed with leukemia. she is credited as being the girl who began the paper crane phenomenon. although the legend has been around hundreds of years, she was the girl who spent months while in treatment, meticulously folding cranes hoping that it would heal her. she was only able to make it to a thousand, and continued to make more cranes.

at the age of twelve, she died.

she was buried with her thousand cranes. the final image i saw walking from the museum was this girl shortly before her burial, surrounded in her coffin by heaps of flowers and a thousand cranes.

the memorial that I had seen in the morning where the children were singing was the one that was created to honor her memory and the memory of all the bombings lost children. people now create these weaves made of a thousand cranes hoping for a wish to come true.

I did more walking around the area and recognized that based on the facts and figures, around 140,000 died at Hiroshima and 70,000 died at Nagasaki, bringing the dead of two bombings to 200,000, with hundreds of thousands severely injured.

aside from the thousands killed by these bombs, many more were killed by fire bomb attacks from the allies and some cities were almost completely burned. 500,000 perished being burned to death with millions left homeless in cities all over this country.

these are levels of death and destruction that I still find barely comprehensible. but events like these bombings, the mass slaying of six-million in the holocaust, and many other tragedies remind us of the need for peace in this world.

I left Hiroshima after more balloon animals and another walk around peace park.

for me, hiroshima had a completely different feel from nagasaki. there wasnt the same intensity for me. as opposed to creating a special spot for a marker for the hypocenter of the bomb, they just put a post on the side of a road that said "the first atomic bomb explosion in the history of mankind happened 500 meters above this spot"

it seemed that while the citizens of nagasaki were striving to create almost a spiritual atmosphere, the people of nagasaki almost felt an obligaition to remind people of the bombing rather than a duty.

this of course is probably far from the real intention of the people of hiroshima, but it is what i felt.

I was on shinkansen for about three hours and then a connecting train towards kanazawa and a city called takaoka where I would be staying.

the first treat I had was to be able to meet some missionaries when I got there, and don’t that beat all, they were Nagoya missionaries. my own mission turf.

the man letting me spend the night was named Marcelo arisawa, a guy known for being good with hooking up the missionaries. he has a really nice place and as we talked over dinner. he offered to take me to the mormon temple in Tokyo the next day.

there was an offer I definitely could not turn down.

so I went to bed in the guest room thinking about the next days four hour trip to the temple in Tokyo.

Day Twenty Six: Ioujima Island

2009-05-28T08:28:00.000-07:00

I got up that morning and went on a sort of side-trip that was provided for free by the hostel I was staying at. Me and my friend Daniel, a Sri Lankan, raised in France and living in Japan, Roppongi actually, were the only ones to go.

We were with a guy who simply referred to himself as Kazu. He was a great guy and was a father of three. He took us around to some local monuments and shrines and told us a little more about the history of Nagasaki.

After walking around with him for a good thirty minutes or so, he just looked at ther two of us and said, “How would you like to see the dark side of Nagasaki”

i gulped and then was like “heck yeah I do!”

So he took us up the side of a hill which had been turned into a bunker for the Nagasaki elite during the time of the bombings. we were able to walk inside and see the place where government officials and few others were able to hide for the days following the bombing of Hiroshima. The people hiding there had not expected to be bombed though, but they were expecting air raids of firebombs, similar to the ones that burned Tokyo.

the final room we saw was the one where the telegraphs were that sent out the message to Tokyo that Nagasaki had been bombed. The people in the shelter felt a huge rumble and loud boom and then stepped outside to see the mushroom cloud and the city burning.

We thanked Kazu for the great tour and Daniel went out to explore the same things I had seen the day before.

My next thing I went to visit was the site of the martyrdom of the 26 saints of japan. in 1597 following the ban of Christianity in japan, twenty Japanese Christians and six foreign missionaries were crucified in this spot by the Japanese government after being arrested and tried in Tokyo and Osaka.

They were canonized by pope pius IX in the mid 1800’s and now this site stands as a monument and prayer spot to pay tribute to their heroism and bravery in the fight for their faith.

my good friend derek zohner told me years ago on our mission together that martin scorsese was set to direct a movie about these christian missionaries. my dad also sent me a newspaper clipping related to it.

and as it turns out, of course derek and my father were right. martin scorsese will direct the film "silence" starring benicio del toro, and the film will focus on the persecution against christian missionaries in japan during the 17th century.

because there is harldy any of japan left without a karaoke box or a pachinko parlor, the film will be produced in new zealand, like "the last samurai" was.

which...BY THE WAY, was based all on a battle that took place in the same area where i worked as a missionary with derek.

I stood there and did some contemplating, then fell asleep on a bench for about a half hour.

from then, I was back on a boat

I had heard of an island called iwo-jima that was just off the coast of Nagasaki.

Yeah, I know what youre thinking, this must be the iwo jima made famous by clint eastwood and his marvelous films.

but no, youre wrong, this place has nothing to do with clint eastwood.

even though it has the same name as the place where that battle in the pacific too place, this is just a resort that old people and sometimes young people with nothing better to do go to spend lots of money. but since I have no money, I went on a budget.

I got a ticket for 980yen that got me a round trip boat ride ticket and a free trip to the bathhouse on the island. how could I turn down such an offer!?

so I was on a boat heading towards iwo-jima.

during the trip, I noticed there was a beach there where people could probably go swimming, so when I reached the island, I went walking towards the beach. it took me about 45 minutes and when I got there I was sorely disappointed.

regardless of the promotional shots on the boat showing all the people having fun at the beach, there wasn’t a lot of fun there. mostly it was just garbage and dead jellyfish on the shore. there were some just chilling out in the water too. I wasn’t scared of them though, I eat things like them with peanut butter on bread.

I was also the only soul on the entire beach, which made me think it might be slightly dangerous to go swimming or maybe it had just become deserted because of all the gross trash. maybe it had something to do with all them jellyfish? I thought it might be pretty dangerous and that this beach wasn’t very much fun after all.

my other mission friend john logdson is a huge promoter of creating fun in very un-fun situations. his philosophy is "if its not fun, you gotta make it fun!" so shoot, I made it fun.

I stripped down in my shorts and took a dip.

heres one for all the ladies in the room.

then I walked back in my wet shorts to where I had heard there was an onsen, a bath house. I had never been in a bathhouse before, so I was extremely excited after hearing about it for most of my life, seeing movies about it, you know the whole deal.

I got to the place and gave the lady my ticket, she guided me to the men only door and gave me two towels before I walked in. I looked around and saw a locker room full of naked guys.

I figured, when in rome right?

so I joined them in the locker room nudity before entering into the main area of the bath house. let me just tell you folks, bath houses in this country are incredible.

there were tubs in there, and spas, and saunas, and showers, and all kinds of goodies, all containing different kinds of water made out of minerals that are made to heal ailments.

as is customary, first you go to this shower area and totally clean yourself up, nobody wants to be sitting next to another guy in a tub and see all these grodags coming off of his body and floating around. so folks clean off before entering into the baths full of magic juice water.

all of those different tubs full of stuff made me feel like I was in a big naked water park. I tried all the tubs, even the ones that were sitting on balconies outside overlooking the coast, all while shooting the breeze with more totally naked Japanese guys just chillin out all around.

I would highly recommend any foreigner coming to visit look for one of these bath houses and see what its all about. anyone who has seen the movie “spirited away” might get a good idea of a magical bathhouse, but this one was even better. like I said, a naked theme park.

the womens room was on the opposite side and was separated by a big wooden wall. we could still hear all those chicks over there having a grand old time cause it was completely open at the top.

this isn’t the kind of place you take a lot of pictures, so I left the camera in the locker room. but you can read about the spa and even look at pictures here. bonus points for ya if you can read the japanese, and if you cant, there is a cool page in english here to kind of explain this place, just not as many fun pictures.

I spent about an hour in there, and made my way back towards the boat after I dried my socks off with the locker room hair dryer.

I got on the boat, made my way back to Nagasaki and boarded the shinkansen for Hiroshima. I made it there at about midnight and took a stroll through the town, past the atomic bomb dome, and to where I would spend the night at an internet café. the hiroshima lightlife was apparently pretty bouncin.

due to all trains stopping at midnight, aside from the occasional sleeping car, there are almost nothing but taxis on the roads from 12 to 5am.

and sometime between when I arrived at the train station and when I found the internet place, I lost my hat.

and you know what, I really liked that hat

Day Twenty Five: Nagasaki

2009-05-27T07:51:00.000-07:00

the Nagasaki detour may be one of my best decisions of this trip

I woke up in the morning and went out on a little side trip, looking for the things the city had to offer. I climed up a staircase in the side of a mountain where there was a cemetery built into it. it seemed to go on for miles up the mountain. I finally reached the top after climbing the stairs for about an hour.

the mountain was covered in graves not only of those who had recently died, but it was also covered in graves that looked ancient. some cemetery plots remained there of whole families dead for many many years.

in japan, it is required that all of the dead be cremated. these graves are often simply monuments to those who have died.

I walked down the stairs passing through more and more of these monuments.

I knew what was most famous to me about this city. I knew the reason I had come here and why it attracted me above anywhere else in this area of japan.

on august 9th, during the second world war, the second of two atomic bombs was dropped on this city by the allied forces. it was an American plane called “bockscar”. it flew past its original target, an industrial city called kokura, before flying to the new destination and dropping the bomb in the early afternoon.

what happened then is really just history.

since I heard about these bombs and what they did in Hiroshima and nagasaki, I have felt my whole life a sincere desire to see these places. after years and years of wanting to visit, I finally have my opportunity to see Nagasaki, the second city.

I thought that in some way it might bring some type of peace to my heart to see this place. it has bothered me for as long as I can remember that so many innocent people died to end that war, and at the hand of my home country.

what I felt and saw there moved me beyond words.

I had already started dwelling on it during the bus ride to the monument at the epicenter of the bomb blast. I started crying on the bus, but since I was wearing big sunglasses, nobody really noticed. I just couldn’t get over it.

many of us can not truly understand the atrocities and suffering of war until we have experienced it firsthand. there have been memorials placed here urging everyone, even those whose lives have not been affected by the bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to constantly strive for peace in the world. the people of this city want those who are apathy towards the events that happened over 60 years ago to never forget the suffering and endeavor to bring peace to the world.

I made it to the place where the bomb exploded, the bomb hypocenter. there is a marker there, a big black column with an altar sitting in front, sitting on a small mound. it was a clear and beautiful day, and aside from groups of school kids, there were not too many people there at the park.

the bomb exploded 500 meters above this spot at 11:02 am on august 9, 1945. it was the second of the only two weapons of mass destruction used for war in the history of mankind.

i stood there in front of the altar and cried like I haven’t in years. all the school kids there just watched me as I tried so hard to hold back the tears

at the time I wasn’t focused so much on looking like a fool. looking at those children made things worse for me.

the bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki claimed the lives of not only japanese men in the military, it claimed the lives of innocent women, children and the elderly who had never even had a thought of being involved in a war. the kids around me kept reminding me of the thousands of dead and injured children.

and I just kept crying. I was sobbing. I felt like I could barely breathe.

that feeling came to me many times throughout the day. I just saw something, and it was hard to breathe for a moment or two.

I just stood at the altar there picturing in my mind the bombs and the destruction they caused.

we can never forget what happened at Nagasaki. we can lie to ourselves and pretend that what happened there is just a small part of history, but to this day, the echoes of that event still influence the lives of everyone on this planet and the administrations that govern them.

after that, I visited the museum there dedicated to not only the bombing of Nagasaki, but also to the history of atomic bombs. it was one of the better museums I have seen in japan, and everything was written in both Japanese and English, so I was able to read everything.

the pictures showing the aftermath of the bombing were just as anyone would expect. dead bodies covering the streets, mother carrying their dead children, people crawling around begging for water.

I sobbed more and more.

in the event of the explosion of that type of weapon, the blast is so powerful that people at the center of the explosion are completely vaporized. nothing is left behind except in a few cases where the body of someone has been burned into the wall of a building, vaguely resembling a shadow.

in the museum there, there was a video of a woman telling the story of her mother.

following the explosion, this girl, four years old at the time, was stuck under a heap of bent metal, too heavy for even six men to pick up. the men decided that they would leave the girl and go look for other survivors. as the men left, the mother of the girl ran towards the site, naked with her body covered in burns. she was screaming and crying hysterically trying by herself to rescue her daughter. she climbed under the heaviest of the metal beams and with all of her strength was able to pick up the beam long enough for her daughter to be released. all of the skin on the mothers shoulders had ripped off as she picked up the beam, too heavy for even six men.

the mother died that night.

this monument built near the bomb hypocenter was my favorite.

the plaque beside the monument contains the following paragraph:

Created by Nagasaki-born sculptor Naoki Tominaga, this monument expresses the horror of the atomic bombing, prays for the repose of the souls of the victims whose noble sacrifice the buds of peace grew, and – through the form of a stricken child sleeping in her mother’s warm embrace – reaches with great motherly compassion and pleas for eternal peace towards a prosperous Japan in the 21st century.

from then I went on to the peace park where the main memorial to the bomb victims has been built. the park there has been created as a huge prayer area for visitors from all over the world. Monuments donated from many countries are scattered around the park. there is one however that serves as the main statue lying in the very center of the park.

it may not look big from here, but this thing was humongous.

these are the words written by the creator of this statue.

After experiencing that nightmarish war,
that blood-curdling carnage,
that unendurable horror,
Who could walk away without praying for peace?
This statue was created as a signpost
in the struggle for global harmony.
Standing ten meters tall,
it conveys the profundity of knowledge and
the beauty of health and virility.
The right hand points to the atomic bomb,
the left hand points to peace,
and the face prays deeply for the victims of war.
Transcending the barriers of race,
and evoking the qualities of both Buddha and God,
it is a symbol of the greatest determination
ever known in the history of Nagasaki
and of the highest hope of all mankind.

Seibo Kitamura Spring 1955

human beings are intelligent enough to build bombs to kill hundreds of thousands, but they aren’t smart enough to know that they should never use them.

a call for peace means more than being a hippy. the power of the government in America is in the hands of its people, and bringing peace can often mean fighting for it, and fighting for a way to stop this kind of a disaster goes beyond labels like “hippy”.

these are causes that many have fought and died for, and as Americans, we celebrate those who have fought to bring world peace on memorial day.

fighting for peace of course doesn’t seem logical, but when the evil people in the world continue to kill to bring themselves power, someone has to be there to stop it.

and I have to also remember that it was my country that dropped that bomb. it was the second bomb at Nagasaki that ended that war that could have gone on for who knows how longer, but it did end the war, even if at great cost.

if the memory of what happened in this city so many years ago is not good enough to stop the greedy and power-hungry warmongers of this world, I don’t know what would be.

god bless America, god bless japan, god bless all of the world.

god grant us peace.

Day Twenty Four: Yawatahama, Usuki and Fukuoka

2009-05-24T20:03:00.000-07:00

never thought i'd be on a boat.

it’s a big blue watery road.

Poseidon.

as the story goes, I head out of Matsuyama that morning towards the port of Yawatahama.

this is the day I would take the ferry from Shikoku island to Kyushu.

so i'm on the trains heading there when I finally make it. I run to the port because the man at the train station tells me the next ferry is set to leave at any minute...and when I get there I find out i've already missed it by at least a half an hour and the next one won't be there for another hour.

that liar!

I sit around the ferry station and wait for my boat. eventually the boat shows up and I jump on.

it wasn’t what I was expecting. for a ferry that is used to carry cars and other gigantic goodies across the big blue watery road, it was nice.

the ferry was basically something like a small cruise ship. it had rooms for people to sleep, a room with famous Japanese massage chairs, a pachinko parlor, internet café, a restaurant, shower rooms for the rich folks, and plenty of other assorted goodies.

I had a reservation made to be a part of this big room where you all crowd in with other people and possibly try to find somewhere to take a nap. it was like being in a big playpen or something, so I hoofed it outta there and went for one of the suites.

I found a room that wasn’t being used and ended up actually becoming a stowaway in the rich area of the boat. I felt so naughty.

so I slept on the bed for a while, got up and took a shower, even though I ended up putting on dirty clothes after. but hey, gimme a break, I cant find anywhere to wash them right now.

then I went and explored more of the boat before I took another nap.

I woke up to the sound of this loud music telling people the boat was about to reach the port of Usuki. I got up and tried to cover my tracks. it worked out okay.

it was weird though, it seemed like all of the people on the boat had disappeared before the boat even docked. there was only me and about four other men that got off the boat when they issued the call that it was safe to disembark.

there must have been at least a hundred people on that boat, I honestly don’t know where they all went.

maybe they got stuck in naptime and just couldn’t leave? maybe they were enchanted by a wizard because they weren’t clever enough to sneak into one of the suites? maybe they were just enchanted by the magical properties of the boat itself.

nobody knows.

I waited at the station in Usuki and eventually was on a train headed for Hakata, part of Fukuoka. I talked to a man on the train for about three hours on the way there and tried to convince him to let me stay at his place for the night, 'cause I had talked to the guy earlier that I had originally planned to stay with--- and he ended up backing out. the man on the train just wouldn’t have it, but I found out later he was going to a city called Okayama anyway, and why the heck would I wanna follow some guy there that I had just met?

I wouldn’t want to, so I didn’t.

but anyway, my man that I had set up to stay with in Kumamoto backed out on me.

how lame is that huh?

but I make it to Hakata and eat some rice, I call my kid again that I might stay with and he says for sure I cant sleep at his place. I tell him it is kind of a bummer, but a have an insatiable appetite for things that go wrong, because for the most part, it ends up turning into something incredibly worthwhile.

and here I am. I caught the last train of the day for Nagasaki. I didn’t realize I would end up coming here, but for some reason, when I was at the station and I didn’t know where to go or what to do, something told me to get on the train headed for Nagasaki, even with no plan, nowhere to stay, and nothing but dirty, sweaty clothes.

when I was with Noelle in Kyoto, we were using a sink together at our hostel and she wanted to make sure there was a hair dryer there. It was obvious to me that she just wanted to use it to dry her hair.

and then she said something I will never forget...

"I need to make sure there is a hair dryer here so I can have something to dry my socks with after I wash them in the sink."

Day Twenty Three: Okayama and Matsuyama

2009-05-24T09:32:00.000-07:00

i'm on the shinkansen that goes to Okayama then south to Shikoku Island.

Shikoku is one of the four main islands that make up Japan, this one was very beautiful, or at least it was from the train.

I had been on the trains for a good six hours before I finally made it to Matsuyama.

a girl named Sara was going to be getting me a room for the night, so I called her and tried to meet up with her at her house. I got lost along the way and ended up walking around in the burning hot sun for an hour before I finally figured out where to go.

Sara was very nice and was quick to introduce me to her retarded cat, Jack, and tell me the story of how he did become retarded. Jack fell down seven stories from the balcony and landed on his head.

that’s how cats become retarded.

I tried to talk to Jack a little, but he wasn’t too up for it. Next I went upstairs and took a little nap while I waited for Sara to prepare to head out for the night.

she was going to meet up with a couple of her friends and party it up like it was goin outta style. they went to the beer garden and got their buzzes on, while I opted to take a different route and met them after they were done.

in the meantime, I did some sightseeing-- just walking around looking at some stuff.

it's difficult sometimes for me to take pictures of these things that I think are so fascinating. regardless of how great and camera is, they can never catch the true splendor of a mountain, the beauty of a lake or the majesty of a castle sitting on the top of a mountain.

sometimes just seeing things and allowing them to become a part of me is the best way I can preserve the beauty of the things I see around me.

we can never know the experiences of others truly unless we go through the same things ourselves. people who have never been to Japan will never understand how much it means to me to talk about the beauty of this country and its people and the kindness I am shown every day.

as I said before, I just have to let some things become a part of my heart and my mind and be happy with that.

I end up doing some karaoke with her friends, Bob from Canada...

and Chris from Scotland.

then I got a shot of me and Sara--yes I was covered in sweat, that’s how intense I get at karaoke in this place.

and then I went back to my room and slept while, of course, thinking about what was to come next.

Day Twenty Two: Horyouji

2009-05-24T09:23:00.000-07:00

and I wake up.

its probably about 11am.

the official check out time at the Nara Tree is 11am. my plan is to head out of there and look for somewhere to stay for the night. I have someone in a city called Kanonji that will let me stay the night, but in the end they back out.

so i'm just hanging out for a while with Bob and Mayumi--putting on a sick mask fashion show, and then they take me out to eat some Indian-style curry--no no, not the Indians that will scalp you and have names like Sitting Duck and Brother Bear, we mean the Indians that live in the slums of Mumbai and win game shows.

yeah, those Indians. it had been a couple years since I had the stuff, and it was just as good as I remember it being.

so what do I do? I reckon I oughtta spend some more time in Nara, or at least the surrounding areas.

I head towards a city called Horyoji known for its temples and more old school Japanese stuff, and I make it there and get a good look at many of the goodies they have to offer.

on the way back to Nara I decide to take some shots of some of the more interesting signs i've been seeing around.

anybody with the internet knows something extra special about the Japanese, they like to put crazy stuff on signs and they love English. whether or not the words make sense at all makes no difference.

this delight reminded me of Kanye West before his head got too big.

i'm not sure how appropriate this one would be for a young girl to wear around, but it is made for someone measuring 120cm, however big that is-- heck if I know.

this was an aesthetic salon down the road.

this one here has a saying on it that looks strangely familiar…

oh that’s right, it's the slogan for my own beloved BYU. this just goes to show you that even on the opposite side of the world, you can't escape the Provo scenesters, as has already been proven by my one night stay with my friend Joseph in Shinyurigaoka

let's hope the honor code office doesn’t find out another school has plagiarized byu’s slogan or else it could mean certain probation, or even worse, someone might have to shave their beard to take a test.

and last, but not least. was my favorite one of all I saw.

this strange gem has a father sitting in a bathtub with a naked child standing next to him holding a shower nozzle in his left hand, and definitely a gun in his right. even though he is facing certain death at the hand of his naked son, dad is still cool as a cucumber.

and just for kicks we'll throw in this sumo character wearing his swine flu mask.

when I got back that night, me and this Australian man staying at the guest house went to a Japanese music show that Mayumi had talked to us about earlier in the day. it was this old timey temple music put on by three different people.

the show was scheduled to last an hour, but halfway during the set, the old man started convulsing and apparently had just suffered a set of seizures.

I really do hope he is all right.

so I went back to the house, hoping to do some laundry--which I didn't get to, watched Spirited Away on the guest house tv, and tried to figure out what was gonna come next.

and as always there is more havoc to come.

Day Twenty One: Nara

2009-05-24T09:04:00.000-07:00

nara is a city known for many different things.

along with Kyoto and the other cities of the kansai area, it was preserved from being blown up or burned by folks during the second world war. most of the temples that have been there for hundreds of years still stand and the city is a plethora of old architecture, monuments and artifacts.

I loved it from the moment I saw it.

I ate some food in the café next door to the guest house. mayumi owns the café and makes great food.

nara is also known for having deer that just walk around like they own the place, and I pretty much reckon they do.

they're everywhere. they roam the streets, they steal peoples food, they carry guns and knives and steal women's purses. there have even been reports of deer splinter groups that have become pirates and attack ships.

I had my own encounter with one of these deer.

I was just walking through the park minding my own business, shooting the breeze, ya know?

then this deer walks up to me, of course acting like hes got no hidden agenda.

we get to talking a little bit. I tell him i'm just visiting the area, looking at the sights.

he asks for some food, I tell him I don’t have any but if I did I would probably let him share some of mine.

that wasn’t a good enough answer for him.

this deer reaches into my back pocket while i'm turned around walking away and pulls out my map of nara and starts eating it. I try to pull it out of his mouth but he wont let go. I kept yelling at him to give it back.

all these little kids are laughing at the foreigner who is being antagonized by this deer, and eventually this old lady comes over with a metal stick and started hitting it until it finally gave me back my map. the deer ate the bottom part of the map, but luckily it wasn’t a big deal. he had eaten the Kyoto section and not the nara one.

but I bet he got away thinking he had really shown me up, he was wrong.

all I could say was “oh dear, oh deer, oh dear, oh deer.”

there are cars that roam around making sure nobody is bothering the deer. they make sure people give the deer lots of food to keep them strong.

I found my way to the building that houses the daibutsu, the big Buddha, or nara.

you may remember that there is one of these sitting around in kamakura that everybody decides to go to because its so conveniently located south of Tokyo.

what they don’t realize is that there is a much cooler one sitting in nara, in a big beautiful shrine.

I got lots of pictures of this guy, after all, he is Buddha, a very important part of lots of peoples spiritual beliefs.

as it turns out, you can't walk inside this Buddha. the daibutsu in kamakura is hollow, and for about 30yen you can walk inside, take pictures, or hide from your teacher while you kiss the cute girl in your fourth grade class on a school field trip.

I know…because I saw it. I was there man, I was there.

but the daibustu here, in my opinion, was much better than the other. it was big....real big.

as was the case with many things in nara. they seemed to be more beautiful in some kind of a way. maybe the deer had something to do with it.

there were also groups of school kids that were there. lots and lots of them. one group in particular had it written into their assignment for the day to practice English phrases on someone who spoke it.

so they came to me in swarms. sixth grade Japanese children with yellow hats everywhere, asking me questions in English and sometimes not understanding the answers I gave back. then the best part was they had to get the foreigner to sign this page in the book proving they had actually talked to me.

it was pretty cool.

after spending the day seeing the sights, I went to a store and bought some senbei, Japanese crackers made from rice, and sat outside the store at a table.

this old man came up and started talking with me, sometimes in English, sometimes in Japanese, and he kept telling me he was a “hen na nohonjin” and he was still ”sukebe” even after all these years. we got to talking for a while until a 25-year-old girl showed up. she was pregnant and claimed she had a husband, somewhere, but this old guy kept referring to her as “my young”.

it was kind of weird, but he bought me takoyaki and we sat there and ate it together.

I asked him if he thought the girl that worked at the takoyaki stand was cute. he looked at me for a couple seconds, got up and walked over to the stand to tell her I was in love with her, which at the time was not true.

his “young” told me that he was just over there cause he thought I liked her and he didn’t want me to steal the takoyaki girl from him.

after a couple minutes, I got up and left him and his young to the takoyaki girl.

Day Twenty: Ryogoku

2009-05-23T22:07:00.000-07:00

im up that day and feeling slightly disgusted at the foreigners living in Tokyo. I ended up smacking myself with my umbrella all the way to to the subway station which connected me to ryogoku, the location of kokugi-kan.

now it just so happens I picked the right time to come to this country, cause the sumo tournament is going on right now, maybe not at this very moment, but It was going on when I was there in Tokyo for that couple of days.

I made my way towards the sumo arena and waited in line with the rest of the foreigners who had not bought tickets previously and were hoping for a shot at the nosebleeds or the standing room only tickets. I was able to get myself a ticket in the nosebleeds for 2100yen, and felt pretty good about it.

that was sometime around 8 in the morning. the dudes got all greased up and ready to go at about 9am. during the first half of the day, it’s the lightweights and the up and comers facing against each other for the chance to be ranked among the greats.

lightweight, here being a very loose term not to be taken too literally, every single one of the sumo had to weigh in at least 50lbs more than me, and even though I think I have a big head, these guys heads were something like watermelons set on top of a mound of wet blankets about to be put into the dryer.

I haven’t been this excited to see men wrestle in thongs since my high school days.

sumo seemed to have many spiritual and ritualistic practices involved. before they squared off, they would throw salt into the ring as a way of purifying it for the new matches. the ring is made of this thatched barley I reckon. the ring creates a perfect circle.

so the guys wait for the instruction of the other man that’s in the ring-- kind of the referee, the mills lane of sumo. mills lane looks great in not only his referee clothes and his judge robe, but hes got nothing on these guys.

when the guy says its time to go, the wrestlers go at it, loud and proud, pounding into each other with loud grunts. sometimes they slap each other before grabbing each others diaper and trying to throw one another out of the ring.

the matches seemed to last, on average, about thirty seconds. some of the better ones went on for over a minute.

there were times when they would throw one another out with such force that they would cause their opponent to fall out of the raised area in the center of the arena altogether. he would fall to the side and land among the crowd, and in one case, he ran square into one of the judges. he ended up being okay though, he acted as if it happened all the time, only because it probably did.

I looked around the arena, checked out the museums and whatnot, and eventually found my way downstairs to an area that was selling sumo wrestler kibble.

I reckon it’s the stuff that they give the sumo seven or eight times a day to bulk them up. it was called “chanko”.

how could you not be as happy as this man here while eating chanko.

it is a physical impossibility.

I bought myself a bowl of this stuff and sat down with two new Japanese friends. they of course were very nice like most Japanese folks, and the food was amazingly good. apparently it was also supposed to be very high in calories and would turn me into a sumo wrestler if I kept eating it.

which wouldn’t be a bad thing.

every time I scoped out a honey walking around, the first man she went up and talked to was a sumo. these sumo wrestlers have, by far, the best looking wives and lady-friends. even though they were usually about double the size of these women, they were still being spoon fed chanko by them and the women were laughing at the sumo wrestlers corny jokes.

being a sumo wrestler might not be so bad, I thought.

you have to live your life with a constant difficulty to breathe as well as having a very high chance of dying much younger than everyone else.

but on the upside you get to eat chanko everyday and have Japanese women laugh at your lame jokes.

but my friends my friends, don’t get me wrong, every single one of those sumo wrestlers was a stud. I went around and talked to a few of them and tried to make friends. they were nice and even let me take some pictures of them.

this one is one that can be added to the great awkward pictures list of 60cities60days. the dumb American and the dumbfounded sumo, living together as one. something about that seems like it would make a great sitcom.

and this man here was maybe the largest sumo I saw that day.

if you are ever in the area during the month of may, I would strongly suggest you go check out this sumo tournament. it was something unlike anything I have ever seen, it was just as amazing as so many of the other things I have wanted to see in this country for years.

I left and rode the shinkansen toward a city called nara.

on the way, I felt an obligation to take more pictures of mount fuji as we went through shizuoka prefecture.

here is a good one

and another one

and

drat! and double drat! sweet irony how could I let this happen again!

I arrived in nara about the time the sun was going down. I had to go through Osaka, home of the swine flu, but luckily I was able to escape again and make it out of there with most of my body still intact.

I checked into the nara tree guest house, owned by a man from Nashville named bob and his girlfriend, a down home kansai girl named mayumi.

they were two very nice and wonderful folks.

I slept the night in a room by myself looking out onto a street in the center of the town

Day Nineteen: Roppongi

2009-05-20T09:05:00.000-07:00

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.

Day Eighteen: Umeda and Osaka

2009-05-20T06:56:00.000-07:00

tim kicked me out of his house at about 8 in the morning. I walked around trying to find something to do.

why not hit up the downtown area?

while on the way there, I saw everyone was wearing those cool masks to cover up diseases and whatnot. I just figured there were probably a lot of sick people walking around.

I took a train from Osaka station to umeda. in umeda, there is a big building there where you can go to the top onto an observation deck and get a view of the entire city and the surrounding area. they of course charged me a good price to get into that to enjoy the splendid beauty of the city from the sky.

if you look at this building, you can see two sets of escalators suspended in the air going from a lower floor of the building to the observation deck.

im pretty sure that every single one of japans large cities has one of these types of deals. they build a big tower, fill it with offices for businesses and whatnot, and they include a special thing on the top floor specifically to be an attraction to suckers, like me, who are visiting and simply cant resist the opportunity to sit on the top of a tall building and take pictures, lots and lots and lots of pictures.

so I was sitting at the top of this building, called the sky-biru, and I take lots and lots of pictures. for some reason, this area has some kind of a lovers theme.

I was there by myself, so I sat in the seats meant for two lovers all by myself, except for my imaginary girlfriend of course.

and that was that, on to bigger and better things.

Osaka castle is the biggest one I have ever seen in japan. it is surrounded by a big moat, like the castles in the old school knight stories and stuff. it was serious stuff.

of course when I got here I had to take a lot of pictures of it as well, but here are just a few for your viewing enjoyment.

and another

when I got to the side of the castle, I got to stand on the edge of this Cliffside type area and look down. hundreds of feet to a watery grave, or at least that’s what it seemed like, it was pretty high up there.

this couple here actually took his dog and held it over the edge the same way Michael Jackson might do one of his children.

I was horrified at this mans lack of consideration for this poor animal, but there was nothing I could do, the man spoke Japanese, I spoke English, and the dog did not speak at all.

more and more often, I kept seeing people wearing these masks. it seemed to me now that there were more people wearing them than not. I had no idea what was up but was guessing maybe it had to do with how I smelled or something. It couldn’t have been that I thought, ive showered most days and I usually use soap when I do it, and sometimes water.

I found a takoyaki man at the front of the castle. my chance had finally arrived to eat my favorite Japanese food from a legit takoyaki vendor.

he was totally legitimate. he asked me how I wanted my takoyaki, what toppings I desired, and even let me take pictures of him making those delicious little balls with octopus tentacles in the middle.

they were a work or art and I was incredibly excited when he called my name. I went and grabbed my takoyaki, payed the man, and sat down.

Immediately following, a crazy bum came up and started talking to me. he was one of the grosser people I have seen during my trip and subsequently made me not want to eat my octopus balls. I got up and ran away from him, holding on tight to my balls as I ran as to not hurt them.

I found a safe spot and chowed down. oh they were good. they were better than good, they were great.

anyway, from there, I made my way back to old tim lins house, I was gonna take a nap before the fun of the evening. it was beginning to get dark.

then I noticed almost everyone was wearing a mask but me.

i got lost, but tim lin found me. he told me that there was an intense alert out because there had been an outbreak of swine flu, and just to make it better, it had been in the area I was hanging out in all day.

he also told me he hd the week of school off because of the swine flu outbreak, so he could stay up late and play with me when we got back to the house. we could even have a slumber party and sleep in if we wanted.

he forced me to wear a mask, we went and got some food and went to hide at his house until the whole thing would blow over.

we just sat around his house for the next five or six hours eating and dressing up and sleeping and doing our hair and talking about girls, you know, man stuff.

I talked to moniek on facebook and she mentioned that there was a sumo tournament going on in Tokyo and that I should go check it out. how could I possibly say no to that kind of an offer, so I told her I would be up at 5am to catch the shinkansen back to Tokyo, again, and meet her and some folks at the sumo arena at 9:30am.

seriously, sumo in Tokyo…how incredible is that stuff?

I told tim to wake me up at 5.

then we went to bed, just narrowly escaping the clutches of the swine flu.

Day Seventeen: Namba, Tennoji, Shinsaibashi

2009-05-20T05:18:00.000-07:00

from then its just Osaka city.

Osaka is known for a lot of its fine restaurants and has been given the nickname “The town of overeating” in Japan. Im currently working on finding the city in japan known as “the city of oversleeping” and from there I can plan my next vacation.

Osaka was lined with the homeless it seemed. maybe it was just a sunday night or something, but it also seemed like it was a lot dirtier than anywhere else in japan I had been. the rules that were usually very strict on recycling your garbage seemed completely non-existent.

the sections of the city we were in seemed just as bright as Tokyo. as Osaka is japans second largest city, and something like the 7th largest in the world or something like that, I reckon I had expected that kind of thing.

Osaka is also the home of my favorite Japanese food, takoyaki, fried octopus dumplings.

I didn’t find a joint that sold them that night, but rest assured tomorrow is a brighter day.

so tim shows me the namba, shinsaibashi, tennoji, and amerika-mura areas of the city.

on the way back, just for kicks, tim lin takes me through the red-light district of the city, which basically looks like everywhere else, except for one minor difference.

down this road, each special shop has a white, lit-up sign above it. im not sure what each sign says, maybe a name of a person or a business.

below each sign there was a lobby that you could see the inside of. it was brightly lit, has lots of little flowers and other rubbish, and an adorable pink pillow where a lovely woman of the night was sitting, smiling.

an old woman was sitting beside each young woman, shouting for us to come in. I politely declined each time this happened, which was very very very frequent. there was an entire neighborhood made up of these small openings where old women sat trying to get guys to hook up with their women.

it was wild, and crazy, and pretty sick

at the last door, I was just curious how much it would cost to go out for a coke or some ice cream with one of these women, so I asked the old woman at sitting in the house

10000yen, equal to about $100 gets you 15 minutes, 20000yen, $200 gets you 30.

and you guessed it, for 40000yen, about $400, you can spend an hour with one of these classy young women! thats just enough time to watch “piglets big movie” with them from start to finish

I researched this after we got back to tims house cause I didn’t see any cops, and firefighters, or many guys walking around aside from me and tim.

apparently this is the only legalized red light district in the country. the police ignore it like it doesn’t exist, and you apparently aren’t supposed to take pictures anywhere on the road

but of course I did

I figure if these Japanese ladies are gonna be tricks for a living, they can at least let me take pictures of their neighborhood, and if they don’t like it, that’s fine, I don’t like what they do either.

me and tim walked further towards his house, as it turns out, he lived literally about 45 seconds away from the end of the red light district.

I slept a little more soundly that night knowing this.

Day Sixteen: The Sagamihara Housing Area

2009-05-17T22:29:00.000-07:00

up at 3pm, everyone is frantic and getting ready for joe horlachers eagle court of honor. I feel like a bum sitting at my computer trying to secure somewhere for me to sleep on sunday night instead of helping out.

everyone heads out at about 530 and im there by myself. I tool around on the internet some more and find some possibilities of where to stay in Osaka. I leave the house and walk down the road to where the court of honor will be.

ben and takeshi and bens sister meet me on the way. they drive me back to the house.

so the news is that apparently there was going to be a religious revival scheduled in the same place where the court of honor was supposed to be held. they were all going back to get some necessary provisions for the night since some of the other goodies were taken up by the pickin and a singin of the revival that was set to happen in the room right next to the room we would be in.

things went on as planned. the whole she-bang started at 7, there were plenty of people, plenty of food and plenty of good times.

the music next door was so loud that through the entire eagle scout court of honor, we had a soundtrack of gospel music and old timey “hallelujahs” coming to us straight from our friends next door. it rang throughout the whole building.

it was a lot of fun and it was for sure good times.

that night we cleaned up and brought all the stuff back to bens house. I spent the evening from there trying to figure out how I could be able to return back home sometime in the first week of june. as it turns out, the airline people are claiming I cant change my flight plan no matter what I do, so I have to buy another ticket for a one way road back to America. a one way ticket right now to Atlanta now would run about $2400

can anyone else feel my frustration here? is this not ridiculous?

so I got my folks workin on this as well as bens father who seems knowledgeable on this type of thing. hopefully I can go back home early for a price significantly lower and not the same amount of money that I could use to buy a car or about 15 nintendo wii’s

on to osaka

Day Fifteen: Gion and Shinyurigaoka

2009-05-17T21:58:00.000-07:00

got up at 8am and headed out with Noelle, moniek and that Swedish guy, man I cant remember his name, so ill just call him mr. b.

we were off to a set of shrines in the southeastern area of Kyoto. this shrine is known for having these sets of archways lined up one after another along these paths lasting several hundred meters at a time. the entire mountain path contained over four kilometers of these archways lined up so close to one another that very little light was let in.

we were surprised and astounded after we arrived to find the most adorable little kids posing for some pictures there at the temple. one was a little girl and one was a little boy.

we went around taking pictures of all the marvelous things we found and after we had walked a good long way, took a break at a small lake. we headed back to the downtown area where a large festival was taking place, the final day of the aoi festival in Kyoto.

we waited there in the hot sun for a good half an hour and then I left to find a bathroom. I skipped the convenience store cause there were about eighteen-thousand people in line, and kept walking until I found a mormon church not very far at all from where the other folks I was with were waiting.

I went up the the door, It was unlocked, so I opened it up and went inside.

I remember church bathrooms well as being places I could always go hide to avoid companions that I wanted to kill in the middle of the night but was always too tired to do so. those mission comps have to be with you every freaking place you go…except the bathroom and the shower. so I felt a great sense of comfortability on this particular toilet. along with the Japanese style bidet, it brought me great joy.

on the way trying to scram outta there, I ran into the missionaries. they were hiding in the sacrament hall, joseph smith pamphlets in hand, ready to attack me as I left cause they thought I was a potential church investigator. I had to let them know I was a member already, I had already been on a mission in japan, and I was mostly there to use the toilet before I went out and joined the rest of the secular world.

but they were some pretty alright cats, so I chilled out with them for about 30 minutes, told them about my own mission, assured them that it would under no circumstances be the best two years of their lives, but would be the two years that would be the most challenging, strengthening and worthwhile years that they would have a huge amount of pride in.

then I was out of there, I had missed the parade, but my pals said it was lame anyway, they did take a lot of pictures though considering they thought it was lame.

me and Noelle went back and picked up our stuff from the hostel and I accompanied her back to Tokyo. she would be going home the next day. so we rode the shinkansen together. I left her at shin-yokohama station south of Tokyo, leaving her with a nice handshake and the best farewell of all, a high five.

It was nice to know her and she was a true sweetheart. it has been a long time since I have felt the sense of love I have felt for people I know so little, male or female, from anywhere in the world. there are many people I have met here that I can say that I have loved simply because they give of themselves and live to help others and not necessarily because they only help me.

people find it so frightening to tell others that they love them. its really kind of disappointing.

I loved her not because she was cute or made me laugh or bought me gyoza, I mostly loved her for being my friend.

I have mostly loved so many for this same reason.

the small acts of service are the ones that truly matter. there are so many small ways we can offer something simple to others, and those things could turn a persons life around for an hour, a day, or a lifetime.

so I was back in Tokyo, it was about nine at night, and I had nowhere to go.

I had intended to sleep in a nook somewhere for the night and catch the first train in the morning to bens house at about 5am.

I was set to meet my former co-worker and friend laura in a city called shinyurigaoka, so I made my way there, made it to her hotel somewhere around 10pm and then went and did some karaoke with her. she was nice enough to foot the bill of the 2400 yen bill, which was extremely overpriced and I have absolutely no idea how that ended up happening, but I was pretty out of it at the time and didn’t ask the chicks working there what was up. I assumed it was because of the late hour that the prices were jacked up.

anyway, before we left for karaoke, laura called a kid that was in her group from college visiting Tokyo, I don’t know if they were from byu or university of Utah or where, but anyway, they agreed to let me sleep in their room for the night. I walked in and put my stuff on the floor and went and did karaoke.

when I got back they were both in bed half asleep. I got directions from one of the kids that “its fine with me, you do whatever you want”. so I kinda just layed on the ground and went to sleep in the corner of the room using my left arm as a pillow.

laying there I thought “dang, what (for lack of a better word) jerks”. I would have maybe expected better from some guys about my own age going to school in the same country as me, but obviously beggars cant be choosers, so I was there for the night and didn’t have much room to complain, but still…I mean come on!

anyway, since I basically felt more welcome sleeping in a street corner, I got outta there at about 4am when the sun came up and went to the train station waiting for the first train. boarded that and made my way to bens house in Sagamihara where I slept til 3pm.

now let me tell ya, ben may not be perfect it everyones eyes, but I LOVE that guy, AND his whole family. they might be the textbook definition of kindness and graciousness to others. They have been extremely helpful to me during this trip and have shown me kindness that I could have never imagined or anticipated.

bens brother was having his eagle court of honor the next night, so I was glad to make it there for that.

Day Fourteen: Kyoto

2009-05-17T08:04:00.000-07:00

during the mid 1940s, when folks from all over the world were killing and blowing each other up, the US was doing its part in the war by sending folks to the fighting lines of Europe and the pacific

one of the united states favorite places to bomb stuff was japan. as it turns out, prior to the devastating bombs that leveled Hiroshima and Nagasaki that finally ending the war, there were also firebombs dropped on Tokyo leaving the city in ruins, destroying a good part of many ancient temples and shrines, and eventually killing about 100,000 civilians.

one area of Tokyo that sustained little damage from bombing was the kansai area, and one of its most beautiful cities, Kyoto, still has many of these ancient wonders still intact.

I started by landing in Kyoto station somewhere around 10am. richey had taken me to the station in gifu and I took the shinkansen to Kyoto.

I got off the train and wandered hopelessly around, I had no idea where I was or where I was going to stay, which is obviously something I deal with every day, but I also had nowhere to get on the internet and find somewhere to stay and no guitar to attract anyone my way that could give me somewhere to sleep.

I found my way to the ninth floor of the station where the foreign people go that don’t know what the heck is going on, got on the internet for a while, found out my last resort place to stay was dropped, and then I got off the internet and picked up a magazine hoping to find something around.

there was a young woman standing at the counter looking for a place to stay. at first I noticed she was looking for somewhere to stay, like me, then I noticed she spoke English really well, like me, and then I noticed she was very cute, of course like me.

so I went up to the counter after she was done and looked for a hostel. she was standing a few feet away and urged me to stay at the same place as her, a hostel in gion, the heart of Kyoto, known for the nightlife and geisha. so I did, I was booked to stay at a hostel in a room with seven other people.

we took a bus to the hostel and made it there in about 30 minutes. during the ride, she told me a little bit about herself.

she was Noelle lee from Singapore. she was all alone traveling japan for about ten days. I asked her if she ever felt lonely being by herself and she said not really. she made friends at hostels and just talked to people.

judging by her looks I could imagine she could probably be befriended by guys from all over the world anywhere she went.

it was nice to have a friend though, and it made me so happy to have someone else to see the city with that was in a somewhat similar situation as me.

we got to the hostel and got our room assignments. I would be on a bed made close to the floor and she would be sleeping in the one about two feet above me.

she was in bed seven, i was in eight

after we got our goodies squared away, she took a balloon I had and made a flower and attached it to her beltloop. as it turned out, her job in Singapore was to work as an entertainer for kids, so she knew the balloon animal deal well.

we were off to see some of the sights.

first was this place.

I don’t recall the name, but I know it had something to do with water.

then we took a break and ate some sushi and rice in an alleyway.

after some more sightseeing we were determined to find geisha walking around. as this is Kyoto, this is where the real, genuine, 100% for freakin real geisha hang out.

the hunt began.

we asked around and tried to figure out where we could hire a geisha. some guy sitting outside a store told us that they hung out on a street called pontochou-doori and in gion, the district where our hostel was. he also told us they didn’t come out until the sun went down.

the sun was still up slightly, so we took a bus to another temple that was supposed to be legit, once again, I forgot the name but it had something to do with silver.

when we got there, it turns out it was closed. it sucked pretty bad cause it took us forever to find it.

we ran into some new animal friends on the way

we took some pictures pretending we were really inside, even though as it turns out, we werent.

but then we returned back to pontochou-doori, the geishas stomping ground.

we walked around and didn’t find a single one, like they might be hiding from us or something cause they knew we were close, kinda like how when youre not in your room, your dolls come to life and have parties and stuff, but when you come around they become lifeless again. that’s about what the geisha were like.

I took some old school pimp pictures of myself in the alley before meeting some new friends. one of them was named moniek from Holland and the other was Michael from Ireland. we talked to them for a while about what was going on. Michael was doing the same thing as me, seeing the country with no real plan and just a bag of goodies and moniek was a writer seeing all of asia over about 8 months. she was a good lookin gal herself.

we had talked to them for about 15 minutes, and then, like a miracle out of the blue…

I saw her…

a real geisha. the kind you see in movies, except seeing one in person was so much better. I can only imagine running into Michael Jackson in person would have been cooler. they do look somewhat alike.

we all eventually realized that we were standing outside the very set of buildings in the alleyway where all of the geisha came out before they eventually went to their appointments, entertaining drunk businessmen by pouring tea and doing stylized dances among other things.

so everytime we saw one, we took pictures. some of the geisha were pissed when we tried to take pictures, but some of them were very very kind. we liked the kind ones a lot better.

before we went back to the hostel, we all went to a rice place and got some food. the rest of the night was spent in the hostel preparing for sleep, trying to sleep, waking up from sleep, and eventually sleeping.

we had made plans to see another temple the next day. Noelle, moniek, myself, and a Swedish guy name bjorn that told me how to hook up with Japanese girls in clubs in the most explicit way possible. I figured the whole “meet a Japanese girl that’s in heat and then 30 minutes take her to a love hotel for a couple hours and then go back home” idea was very much the opposite of what I would like in a relationship, so ill avoid it.

I went to bed at about 2am, Noelle slept above me and snored louder than any female I have ever heard, which might be more common that not since I don’t often find myself sleeping in the same room with one or more girls.

there were four guys and four girls in the room.

it was a fantastic day.

Day Thirteen: Nagoya, Ogaki and Gifu

2009-05-14T11:21:00.000-07:00

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

2009-05-14T11:06:00.000-07:00

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

2009-05-12T15:45:00.000-07:00

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

2009-05-11T09:50:00.001-07:00

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

2009-05-11T09:29:00.000-07:00

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!

Day Nine: Yoyogi

2009-05-09T10:37:00.000-07:00

days like today go on forever and seem so perfect for stories to eventually tell your own kids.

i start with a little trip back to shinjuku to scope out potential spots to play for a bit, it seems to me like everywhere decent has already been taken by the tokyo musical scenesters. one band was called scattered sheep or something along those lines.

i promptly left, it was too crowded for my feelings at the moment.

i head heard from a friend i met in shibuya that he plays guitar in yoyogi park on saturdays.

yoyogi park has nothing to do with how to greet a bear from jellystone park or his friend booboo. it is a huge park in the center of tokyo between the shinjuku and shibuya wards. i went there looking for tetsu.

the park was huge and loaded with people. hundreds of folks were out and about, playing music, drinking with friends, playing sports, all types of assorted nosh.

i didn’t find tetsu, but what i did eventually find was like gold.

i sat down next to a small pond after a deep sense of being lonely came to me. i had just started writing a song when all of the sudden, three japanese lesbians walked up to me, cigs and beers in hand. one of them sat down next to me and kept trying to touch me and asking me to play songs for her, eventually she took the guitar and also started playing music.

in an uncomfortable way it was so comforting.

they were the lost children of some new generation of tokyo hipsters. lost in being genuine and true to themselves while everyone else seems so fake, constantly trying to emulate the fashion and lifestyle of pop icons and rock stars.

the girl next to me kept asking me to play sad songs, because i felt sad. it was funny to me that this kid wouldn’t speak japanese to me even though i told her i could understand everything she said. she just kept hugging and kissing the guitar and all the while, asking me to play sad songs to express the feeling of loneliness.

eventually the incidents described earlier took place, and she and the kids were gone. it was dark outside now, i had been hanging out with them for almost an hour.

i got up and walked towards where i could hear loud music, like an outdoor concert.

As it turns out, It was a rastafarian festival in harajuku. I walked around a bit, took in some of the night air. Meantime the scent of rum and tobacco burned my nostrils, and I went on my merry way towards shibuya--I was interested in meeting more folks.

So I played there for about two hours, I talked to about five large groups of people, one of them was a group of late teen-somethings heading to some kind of weird slumber party. One of the kids gave me 500 yen, the first cash moneys I have received so far during my trip.

Another was a Japanese man that asked me lots of in-depth questions about how to win the heart of an American girl. He said he really liked a girl he knew that worked here as an English teacher. What could I tell him?

I told him the truth.

To win the heart of an American girl, you take her to mcdonalds, buy her a six piece chicken nugget meal, maybe a side salad with light dressing, tell her you like the movie “the notebook” or any other movie adapted from a nicholas sparks book and then feed her the chicken nuggets while telling her you love her, all in the same night.

Easy as pie, and you don’t even have to buy flowers.

And if youre mormon, tell them how much you enjoyed the five sessions of the last general conference, throw in that youre an rm even if you arent.

Also use a jack weyland movie instead of a nicholas sparks one.

Tomorrow will be a balloon fashion statement in harajuku.

New balloon styles fused with goth-lolita and neo new wave?

More havoc to come.

brandons guide to picking up japanese women

2009-05-09T10:17:00.000-07:00

(based on actual events)

step one: find a safe and open spot in your local park. preferably one with a beautiful view of a fountain or some type of body of water

step two: take out a guitar. play any song. It doesn’t have to even be an actual song, you could just play gibberish and pluck various strings, as long as it is audible, you will be fine

step three: wait for three cigarette smoking lesbians to show up with cans of lemon sake in their hands. they will probably come and sit by you. one of them might talk to you very close to your face while her two friends make out with each other a couple feet away.

step four: wait for the girl close to you to start trying to make out with you. she will probably start by trying to touch you a lot, trying to hug you and trying to rub her hands through your hair. her english might not be very good, and she might not even speak english at all, but if youre a former japan missionary, that should not be a problem.

step five: choose from one of two options

one – keep making out with her. buddy youre mackin with a japanese chick and she claims shes 20 years old (almost a definite lie). 98% of the missionaries in japan and all the desperate american guys in this country are wishing for this very thing right this very second. some crude men pay thousands of dollars, lie to their wives about going on a business trip, and search the streets day and night for such an underage girl.

two – realize shes probably on acid and drunk as well as probably tasting like an ashtray, call the whole thing off, keep playing guitar and keep it cool. she likes avril lavigne songs, so play those to keep her busy while her two other friends french each other. even if you don’t know how to play the songs on guitar, just make something up and try to remember the words to the song as best you can.

step six – wait for the entire crew of ten or so japanese lesbians to come and pick up this poor, coked out young woman. say goodbye many times in over six different languages. blow kisses.

her name was pe-chan, and she really wasn’t that crazy, just under the influence of one, two, or seven separate substances.

if you ever read this pe-chan…just let me say youre one in a million, god bless ya

Day Eight: Shimokitazawa

2009-05-08T19:08:00.001-07:00

i spent the first couple hours of the day lost on some trains.

luckily i wasnt alone.

a guy was standing on the other side of the platform while i was waiting for a train in yokohama. i had kind of become lost there and was heading for a city called shimokitazawa, apparently famous for its nightlife.

he looked like a thug. he had a shaved head and was smoking a cigarette while wearing these huge black shades. he definitely wasnt japanese, but i also knew he didnt speak english cause he was talking on a phone in some incomprehensible language, at least for me. i couldnt recognize any bit of it at all.

he also looked like he was lost.

he eventually walked up to me and asked me if i spoke english, and i said yes. we talked more.

he worked in a shipping and exports business whos main offices were located in belgium. he spoke five different languages. he would be spending the next eight days in tokyo working in the tokyo offices for his company. when i asked him about his hobbies, he just told me that in belgium, people go to work and then they go to the pubs and then they go home for the night.

i told him things were a lot like that even in america, even in japan, even in the rest of the world.

he was surprised to hear that i was a vagabond like traveller, seeing the whole country by train and said he would never have the kind of courage to do that. i just told him i was crazy.

the train hit the emergency brakes just outside of shibuya station, the lights went out, and we were stuck on a hot train in the middle of the city. i told the man, antonio was his name, how to get where he was going, eventually the train started moving again and i was on my way.

all trains i have been on have signs posted letting everyone know where priority seats are located. for people who dont read japanese, they have these illustrations to let everyone know who exactly is allowed to sit in these special priority areas.

starting from left to right:

1. conjoined twins

2. the beer bellied or morbidly obese with shining stomachs

3. males with crooked genitalia

4. those with large socks

in shimokitazawa

i was looking for a music venue somewhere in the city. i couldnt read a map very well, so i just started asking around. i saw a man carrying a bass guitar, followed him, and he took he straight where i needed to go.

the problem with this city is that everyone tries to dress like a rock star, so its hard to distinguish the posers from the real deal. like the girls and boys of harajuku, everyone wants to dress to impress, and they do, all over tokyo.

it is considered to be one of the fashion capitals of the world, and you take a 15 minute walk in the inner city and you will see why.

the rock shows in japan are very much similar to the ones ive been to in america.

it was an extremely small venue, maybe big enough for a maximum of 50 people, but oh it was glorious.

i was able to see six bands for 2400yen. because the trains stop running in this city at midnight, things like this start and end early. while you might expect a show in america to end at 11 or 1130, this one ended promptly at 10 so that anyone that needs to get anywhere in the city on a train has a good two hour buffer built right in.

it was so loud i thought my ear drums would rupture, but for me this didnt matter. i was experiencing something i have waited years for.

this was the tokyo music underground.

these guys were my favorite band i saw. they bass player looked like some kind of beatles and pee wee herman hybrid. i talked to them for just a bit on my way out and they helped me take one of the most awkward band pictures i have ever seen.

two of them have their eyes closed and the guy next to me looks like he wants to have me murdered.

on the train after the show, i met a man who worked as a scout master in minnesota for six years. ive been considering lately dropping the guitar gimmick and doing something more worthwhile and fulfilling, so i talked to him about doing service work in the country while im not sightseeing.

yeah yeah, ill be honest, japanese people arent about tipping street guitarists, so that has been a bust for me. but also i didnt plan on making lots of cash either, im mostly here for the love of music and performance, but since the guitar is big and bulky and im not getting much fulfillment out of it, it might be time for a change.

when youre on an adventure like this kind of deal, youre allowed to do that kind of stuff.

the guy on the train gave me some simple instructions for carrying out volunteer things around the country and ill probably try to change things up a little bit.

ill be sure to keep you posted.

and stay cool.

Day Seven: Yokohama

2009-05-07T21:47:00.000-07:00

what can we expect from japans second largest city?

its the city that is just south of tokyo, and i reckon that if you were to look at a map, it would look like it was only a part of tokyo.

im having serious problems realizing where the cities here begin and end. it seems like tokyo is a neverending city and yokohama is only a part of it.

yokohama is famous for having a special area dedicated to all things chinese.

yep, thats right, chinese food, chinese music, chinese womens, chinese decorations, chinese toys and of course...

chinese turkey.

fa ra ra ra raaaaaaa ra ra ra ra!!!

we also have this wonderful chinese temple built in the middle of the area. it would appear like it was built in some ancient time, but no, it was actually built recently, i heard in the last 30 years or something, but im not really sure.

this is just the outer gate to get into the temple.

i wasnt able to get too many decent pics of the temple, but i got this one of the inside.

it was quite nice.

from that point, i played a little bit alongside the downtown station and stopped when it became dark.

me and my friend went to the top of the tallest tower in yokohama where an observatory is built and took some pictures.

it was extremely foggy at the time, so a lot of the pictures look terrible, but i was able to snap some decent shots of the area of yokohama where a huge ferris wheel stands, next to some other attractions.

and before i left china town that evening, i was even able to eat a dumpling thinger that was shaped like a panda.

ive never felt so happy in my life until that moment, the thought of devouring an endangered species was something rare and magical.

i slept well that night knowing i had done my part for the environment.

Day Six: Kamakura

2009-05-07T20:27:00.000-07:00

what are these marvelous and curious things

i eventually end up in the home of a man i met teaching english in a city called shonandai, in the yokohama prefecture.

i shot the pictures above from a photo album he had full of pictures from pre-world war II japan. most of the pictures were of family. his father was a soldier in the japanese army fighting for the axis powers. the pictures i saw that werent of family were of soldiers training for war and in some cases showed combat pictures.

he is a record collector. his home contains over 3000 vinyl records and 4000 cds', most of them being bluegrass or country western styles of music. he loves for country music. he has a record player built in the turn of the century that plays vintage 78 records. this machine has to have the needle changed every time a new record is played and each record contains only two songs, one on each side.

we spent a few hours listening to old vinyl records. bob dylan and the beatles and all sorts of stuff. bluegrass has been the music that has stuck with me my whole life and indeed is the music that is part of my familial heritage. he has thousands of vinly records with this style of music, so we listened and listened and listened.

his record collection also contained a player that was one of the first models of music player invented by thomas edison. it plays cyllindrical shaped discs and was built also in the early 1900's.

my travels today were to a city called kamakura, which is also an old school japanese kind of town. its the home of many shrines, temples and the daibutsu, the biggest buddha...ive ever seen.

maybe theres another one somewhere in the world, but i dont know...ill have to keep looking.

it was raining most of the day, which made for things to contain a marginal amount of suckage. i wasnt able to playe my guitar for fear that it would become wet and furry balls would start to pop out of its back and create an epidemic of gremlins, which we all know are even worse than the swine flu.

or whats worse, the guitar could have melted.

apparently there was a typhoon that just came through this part of the world. im not sure though.

one of our stops was at a beautiful shrine that contained within it a garden. there was a turtle in this garden. i said hello to him and because he didnt speak japanese or english, he didnt understand. i later had a translator come and tell me that he was actually from france, and nobody in the vicinity knew how to speak a lick of french.

anyone looking at the shape of this small pond mind think it would be more appropriate to use for someone in the third reich, but no my friends, no. no nazi sympathizers in this country. this is not the old timey german swastika we have all learned to dislike, this is a symbol still commonly used today in buddhism and hinduism.

the germans, being buttmunchers, merely stole it from the decent religions that build beautiful places like this and used it for themselves.

the swastika the nazi party used was also a mirror of the one used in buddhism, its backwards.

because it was raining so much, during the day, it made things appear beautiful in a dreary kind of way. when youre out looking at things like shrines or temples, the sun doesnt have to be shining bright for us to see how beautiful they are. the spirit of these places alone is what makes them so beautiful.

we came to place where a fountain had formed in the side of a hill. you had to go through a tunnel carved in rock to get to it.

one of the legends of this place was that if you put your money into a little basket and washed it in some of this water, your money would grow and you would prosper.

so i took all my money out and i washed it, all the coin money at least. i asked if it was ok for me to was my paper money, and apparently paper money isnt meant to get wet. wet paper money is like wet underwear, it just doesnt feel right.

i honestly was hoping that i could strip down and take a dive in this pool so i could have my whole body become prosperous, but i held back. there were too many women around and i know if they had seen me, i would be in trouble.

im simply that good looking.

a glimpse of another small shrine built next to a small natural waterfall

and then i saw something else in that cave that i thought was amazing. there were huge origami creations hanging from the ceiling. they look like they had been made from hundreds and hundreds of paper cranes.

and as it turns out, they were. they were made from a thousand paper cranes.

an ancient japanese legend says that by making a thousand of these origami cranes, a wish of yours will be granted, hopefully by a crane, i mean, if youre lucky. for someone wishing for long life or a cure for a sickness of disease, this is a one way ticket to health. if a thousand cranes doesnt work for ya, youve always got the swine flu to fall back on, which cant be any worse than some stuff you might have to deal with.

the story of the thousand paper cranes became popularized from a story and play which was created about a girl trying to recover from radiation poisoning she had received from the detonation of the atomic bomb at hiroshima.

some illnesses just cant be overcome, even by the construction of a thousand cranes.

Day Five: Asakusa and Akihabara

2009-05-05T06:49:00.001-07:00

the days seem longer as they go by. i feel like ive been here for weeks.

i guess when our lives become so based on regular routine, the days become shorter. my life is the opposite. with no set plan or schedule, my days are free to do as i choose. because i am free to choose, i choose to stay busy.

like my parents always said, being busy keeps you out of trouble. i guess though that depends on what youre busy doing.

im amazed at how i can keep going regardless of the intense pain in my feet from the hours of walking, or how i can even stay awake at all to keep roaming around. i knew that when i came here, i would have to become accustomed to the huge amounts of walking, but i didnt expect that by day five my feet would still be hurting so bad.

but lets end the pity party right here and get down to brass tacks.

since i am officially on an good-will adventure, a new friend let me stay in one of his groups unoccupied-for-the-night-rooms, so i woke up in this unknown-to-me-girls-room. she wasnt there, which was good because if she had been there with me when i woke up, it would have made things awkward and been pretty weird.

i got my stuff together and headed outta there to asakusa, part of old school tokyo. famous for the kaminari-mon, or i guess what some folks would call the thunder gate, or maybe lightning gate.

i had met my friend jason there the night before, so i had seen it in the evening, and to be honest i think it looked better in the night. not to be cute or trite by saying that something looks better in the dark because it isnt beautiful, because the kaminari-mon was very beautiful, but i noticed a difference between now and last night.

the giant lantern thing that hangs down from the center had been rolled up for people to pass through the gate. you could not even read the kanji for kaminari-mon to let you know what was up. it was super ghetto, but it was still enjoyable to take pictures with the hundreds of other folks doing the same thing.

there were rickshaw folks all over the place riding people around. i saw something i had never seen before, which was a woman being the rickshaw...ist. it was good to see a woman doing a traditionally mans job in old japan.

past the entrance there was a street made up of shops and stores that had to stretch out for at least half a mile. each one had outside of it a japanese flag. i looked through the shops and finally found a cat coin purse to keep my change in. i was proud of that thing. i bought a taiyaki and headed more towards the main temple and park.

when i finally made it to the end of the row of shops, there were more shops, but they were all selling traditional japanese foods.

past the food places was the entrance to the tample. i opted not to take too many pictures on the inside considering i wouldnt like people taking pictures inside of my temple or place of worship for their own personal amusement.

there was a big beautiful park there just past the temple. it was full of shrines and other assorted goodies, like this big pagoda.

i looked around there for a little bit and eventually found my way to the outside of a small amusement park in the middle of tokyo, complete with these japanese clowns ushering folks in.

they might have just been a little bit spooky by american standards, but in my standards, which are rather american, they werent too extremely spooky.

i enjoyed them nonetheless. they made me really want to go into the amusement park, but money is short so i had to stay out. the folks inside looked like they were having a good old time though.

it was rough.

i then made my way to akihabara, the place know for being full or electronic goodies. it was full of electronic goodies, but it wasnt enough to keep my interest too high, so i took muh ol guitar out and tried to get myself feeling more energized for the day. it didnt work too well even though i was able to talk to some more folks.

i ate at a lot of different places, visited harajuku, shinjuku and shibuya again. i saw marybeth lathen, one of the sister missionaries from the tokyo south mission there, and it was joyous indeed.

i eventually made my way back to the train station where i would try to sleep for the night. i realized while i was about to use the phone that my friends phone number was in the cell phone, so i took it out only to find it was broken.

yeah, life just sucks sometimes. i had a broken cell phone, no way to get to my place of refuge and to make it better, it was raining kitties and doggies. i waited at the station for the rain to stop so i could walk to bens house, and as i was about to buy some bread to eat i discovered my cat that i bought to keep my money in was gone. id lost it somewhere while fiddling with my broken phone. so my cat was gone.

i went on a search for it. first i tried the train station, they had nothin, then i went to the building staff guys at the shopping center next to the station, they laughed at me because when i was in the bathroom, instead of pushing the flush button, i pushed the emergency "help me get off the toilet" button. i tried to keep it secret...but they knew. they didnt seem to mad about it though, actually they were really nice but could not find my lost cat.

they did an impression of a cat before i left though.

i apologized for pushing the wrong toilet button, i simply could not read the kanji.

i eventually walked back to bens house, it wasnt raining too much.

and that ended my day for the most part.

more havoc to come

Day Four: Shibuya

2009-05-04T09:10:00.000-07:00

its funny how things work out.

Twenty minutes ago i was convinced i would be sleeping in a box for the night somewhere on the streets of downtown tokyo. and i was almost right.

i left for shibuya at about 1pm today. i went to the train station and decided to take a different route through yokohama that would get me to tokyo using the shinkansen. so it was legit. i rode the shink for about 10 or 15 km.

i eventually found my way to shibuya center street. thousands of people lined the streets outside the train station. masses of people like i dont even remember ever seeing in my life, even though im sure i have.

i photographed a picture of hachiko the dog, who is so famous that an exit at the train station has been named after him. hachiko is a true symbol of dedication and devotion.

from what i hear, theres even a movie about this special guy in the works featuring the acting talents of such greats as richard gere and rosie o donnell-- so look out.

shibuya is just another one of the wards of tokyo. it contains multiple areas for all types of things. there is a section for restaurants, a section for clothes, entertainment and prostitutes (all of this is part of the entertainment district). i definitely wasnt all about the red light, so i hightailed it out of there and made my way towards the station to make music shortly after i started exploring the area.

the crowds of people were almost too overwhelming, but i loved every second of it.

here is a view of the famous shibuya intersection

i met some really great people as well throughout the day. i met two guys from saitama-ken that were interested in rock music, a man that told me he loved georgia so much that he had an old school style georgian house built in tokyo, and a kid named tetsu that played the drums and was also really great. come to think of it, he wasnt a kid at all, he was a few months older than me.

and this has to be my favorite couple i met during the day--the suave akihiro and his beautiful girlfriend asuka.

we talked for a good long while about all types of random stuff. he said he liked motorbikes and she liked fashion. decent hobbies i thought. they asked me to play a song for them, so i busted out "brown eyed girl" and during the song this creepy old guy came up to asuka and started whispering stuff into her ear. im not sure what it was, maybe that i was a foreigner trying to take over the country with music or something to that effect.

anyway, akihiro saw what was going on IN THE MIDDLE OF THE SONG mind you, and grabbed asuka and shooed the scary old man away.

akihiro, if you ever get to read this, youre a good man and i appreciate you!

then they both signed my guitar and akihiro put a heart between their names. it was mega kawaii.

i met my friend jason from the mission at about 7pm at the statue of hachiko and went on a trip around shibuya. i showed him the magic i found in the entertainment and red light sections of the town and we went and ate some rice. i thoroughly enjoyed myself.

then we went and did an hours worth of karaoke. jason being such an incredibly decent man footed the bill for that. we met tetsu again on the way to the train station and he introduced us to his bands guitarist. it was cool, just wish i had got a picture of him tho.

anyway, jason did more than just foot the bill for karaoke and be my three hour travel companion.

im on my way back to where i have been staying when i realize something. all trains stop at midnight and i will never have time to make it back. so what do i do?

i dont know, i had to come up with a plan. i called jason and headed back to tokyo. i was planning on finding a nice nook in the city and sleeping til 5am when the trains would begin running again, but i made it to asakusa, making the final subway car by only a few seconds. after searching for jason for almost an hour, we found each other at the kaminari-mon, a huge sight here in asakusa tokyo.

he told me that by some mere chance, one of the girls living at the hotel where he is-that is involved in the same english teaching program- didnt need to use her room tonight, so i would have a place to stay.

so here i am now, sitting in a room of someone ive never met, in the middle of tokyo, feeling so grateful from the kindness of strangers and friends and acknowledging the importance of both. i also have to admit that its a miracle i was able to find my way here because i get this sinking feeling that some nights on this trip i wont pull out of my problems so lucky.

but you really never know.

more havoc to come.

Day Three: Harajuku

2009-05-03T17:57:00.000-07:00

there was some type of tour going on there for some musical artist or tv personality or something. im not sure, but all i know is that there were traffic law violations and pushing and shoving all the way from here to cape canaveral.

this is harajuku

and this is even more harajuku

this cat made the observation that the shirt i was wearing actually had two hearts on it. he kept touching my chest.

the eki (train) was too small for the number of people going in and out of that place, and as it is the eki that falls between shibuya and shinjuku, i would have expected it to be bigger-- but it wasnt.

no matter. harajuku is where the neokids come out on sundays to showcase fashion, style and talent. it was like a street freakshow. you have people dressing like goths, ravers, new wavers, all kinds of stuff, but my favorite of all that day was this guy.

and i of course liked him so much that i got some pictures with him.

and there were lots of more wacky people. not to say that anyone there was brain damaged or otherwise mentally ill, but theyre just ballsy to do what they do, and in the city on the absolute cutting edge of fashion, this road is their catwalk.

so i got pretty mad cause for some reason some "just-dressed-in-a-cowboy-outfit guy" was guarding all the super weird looking neokids. maybe MY camera wasnt big enough or something? i couldnt understand it at all, but there were flashbulbs everywhere and people taking hundreds of pictures of these kids.

i eventually found myself at the center of the photography when i took out my guitar and
started to play. it was great to become another one of the freaks of harajuku.

about this time was when people started taking plenty of pictures-- and im not gonna lie-- it was pretty sweet! i let the pink man strum the guitar while i fingered the chords on the fretboard and sang, and boy the folks sure did like that.

i made friends with a legit israeli guy and some other neat japanese kids there. they all signed my guitar before i left and the pink man even stole one of my pics and ran away with it.

he apologized later and asked me to autograph it for him.

some pictures i promised some folks i would post...

more havoc to come

Day Two: Machida and Tokyo Tower

2009-05-03T05:00:00.000-07:00

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.

Day One: Shinjuku

2009-05-02T16:51:00.000-07:00

Todays Japanese Word: Kawaii - Cute

a simple word with uses all over japan

I'd been off the plane for something like an hour and I was on my way to shinjuku with ben.

Known for being one of the largest train staitons in tokyo and a hub for all the major railway lines, i was excited to see it. i hadnt remembered ever seeing it before.

it was a huge area. so many people and so many different lights and sounds.

i had taken my guitar out to play for about five minutes when a young japanese guy came up and started talking to me.

i dont remember this kids name, but he definitely was not from around here. he said he was from shizuoka and his favorite band was bon jovi.

it seems like every japanese person likes bon jovi in some form or another. i guess bon jovi is pretty legit.

we talked for a while, then i went and ate some tempura before being hoisted back to the american housing area at camp zama.

i spent the next night there.

it was kawaii. I woke up the next morning to the screeching sound of crows. i remember it so well from my first mission area, yamato. they screech so loud.

another thing i am reminded of so well here is the smell of this country. its not a bad smell, but more of a unique something or another. i cant exactly put my finger on it right now.

but ill try later.

best wishes and stay kawaii.

Swine Flu

2009-05-01T19:00:00.000-07:00

you step on a plane in atlanta, or i do at least

youre in washington dc. you wake up and youre sitting on a plane to tokyo. its a 13 hour flight. the stewardesses wear cute little scarves and hats. they look way too cute and way too japanese for what youre really used to.

it might be the most cramped youve ever been. everyone around you is sipping wine slowly or reading a newspaper in some incomprehensible language. these languages arent japanese. some are going to china, some to vietnam and some to korea.

it wouldnt have been too badly cramped if the trip had been about four hours, like a domestic flight or something, but 13 hours is overkill for the seat i was in. i could totally understand now how i ended up with such a cheap ticket.

i was bamboozled.

I met a really cool guy from tokyo on the plane and we talked it up for a good long while. sometimes in english, sometimes in japanese. he told me my japanese was good by using the words "nihongo ga ojyouzu desu ne" which means something like "your japanese is bombin."

but i know the truth. when japanese folks say this to you, they really mean something like "way to try" or "A for effort."

the best part of the plane trip was the giant drinking of alcohol ceremony followed by an immediate naptime. the stewardesses walked around with trays loaded with all different types of beer, wine and maybe even a little warm sake to appease the older crowd. since i am a non-drinker, i sat twiddling my thumbs as everyone around me drank and drank and drank some more. there was singing and loud conversations. the guy in the row in front of me kept shouting for about ten minutes about how happy he was.

after the alcohol had been consumed, they dimmed the cabin lights, the stewardesses sat down in their seats which of course faced the opposite of all the passengers in the plane, and everyone took a nap.

this was a great naptime. i guess it is just part of standard policy on the plane to have naptime following the meal and consumption of large amounts of alcohol. after all the boisterous cacophony, all was silent. we all went to sleep.

but anyway, were on the flight for 13 hours, then they come on the PA after we land and tell us that there are doctors that will be entering the plane and we have to wait for them to show up and do whatever.

so they show up in about 30 minutes.

these guys come in and theyre dressed up like astronauts. they look like the government guys at the end of ET or something. way too cool to be true. then they start to examine everyone with a futuristic video camera that i reckon was supposed to pick up swine flue vibes or something.

i passed, but one around me was not so lucky.

they came on the PA and made another announcement that someone close to me had traces of what could POSSIBLY, just MAYBE be something like the swine flu. So then they sent in the big guns. Doctors dressed in blue like this sucker in this picture right here.

i took lots of pictures of this, which apparently started a trend. everyone around me started taking pictures until eventually they had to tell everyone to stop.

they gave us cute masks to wear that made us all look like sub zero from mortal kombat.

Then they came on and made an even better announcement. Everyone sitting in a 2 meter area of this poor infected kid had to stay on the plane longer for more tests. of course i was one of the hundreds on the plane with this honor.

So I stayed and stayed...and then i stayed a little more.

They finally let me outta there about 3 hours after the plane landed. i go through the motions, jump through the hoops.

and im in japan.

i meet my frind ben at the baggage claim, pick up my bag that was sitting there for 2 and a half hours. i go out to the train station, meet my same friend i had met on the plane, who in turn followed me and took care of me as i went through customs and all, and we were on a train for shinjuku, the heart of tokyo.

B Riggs: Going Home

2009-04-30T01:35:00.001-07:00

only slightly different from a music special on the disney channel. this is mostly the real deal.

columbus georgia is my true home

and probably always will be

so being able to come home has been a wonderful experience for me. i dont remember the last time i felt as excited as i did that morning three days ago when i pulled into my home after a 17 hour drive. i felt like i had returned after being gone for years even though it has only been four months.

i wasnt able to enjoy being home as much as i would have liked. ive spent a large amount of my time preparing for this trip, which has made me happy but i feel like i have missed a lot of chances to spend time with my parents. oh well i guess. there is always the rest of the summer.

i had delayed coming home days and days from when i had originally anticipated after finishing my school finals. speaking of which, i received my grades today, and they were crap. BUT im grateful those classes are over cause they were the most extremely dull and frustrating set of classes i believe i have ever had during my already mostly dull college experience. not to say my life is dull, cause it isnt, but in my humble opinion, my college can be dull in the affirmative.

because i put things off, it just made my time here more constrained. which is fine. ive worked hard and feel like i am ready to go.

most of the days have been buying things. some trips to wal-mart, greatest store on the planet, the army surplus store and some occasional trips to columbus high school. i was able to speak for two japanese classes taught by my high school japanese teacher, who is of course great.

she kept reiterating to the class that i was one of the students in the class with a constant attitude of hopelessness. i had vowed after completing my high school foreign language requirement that i would never speak japanese again.

but oh my friends, the joke was so on me.

i ended up living in japan for two years, and even though a lot of the time was spent with me still convincing myself it was impossible for two languages to fit into my one huge head, i was able to eventually do it.

my teacher is proud of me for being able to do that but maybe not as proud as myself. ive learned the importance of not putting down or willfully restricting your own potential. i believe that regardless of who we are or where we came from, this potential is constant and neverending.

im just as sad as i have ever been to leave my home. i grew up here and had some of the best times of my life here. the people here made me who i am.

even though i often think columbus doesnt have that pizzazz of big city living or hustle and bustle, this is my home. i thank god every day im from this town, this state and this country.

so i leave columbus at 6am to head for atlanta. from atlanta to washington dc. from washington dc to tokyo. arriving in tokyo at 3pm and from then...?

i love you all and will see you there.

60cities 2days - day two

2009-04-30T00:00:00.000-07:00

I wake up in the downstairs bedroom of a home in glenwood iowa.

and it is glorious.

Mike gives me a huge spoon and i eat a big bowl of raisin bran. i never liked raisin bran before about three years ago, but let me tell you, theres something delicious and amazing about that stuff. its kinda gross though if you think about it.

i chill out in glenwood for about two hours, watch some cartoons, swing by the cemetery and then im on my way to kansas city.

kansas city, hey hey hey. what a great city to travel through. i mean, its part of missouri even though you might expect it to even be a part of kansas, but it isnt, its kansas CITY.

there was a rollercoaster along the road i saw as i was driving, and that was about the most fun i had there.

ok, so as i was going along the road to st. louis, i noticed that for some reason, that stretch of road is loaded with all these adult superstores. there are signs everywhere. i remember a specific instance i saw a long group of them as i was listening to a fiona apple record.

i wonder...what are these adult superstores? why do they call them superstores? what kind of fun things must be inside.

i can only assume that because it has the word "adult" in the name, it has to be something only adults would like. maybe it was loaded with diet cokes and vhs tapes of c-span, adults seem to like that stuff.

maybe ill never full comprehend the mystery of what is sold in these adult superstores. i couldnt look inside cause the windows were blacked out. maybe they were watching a movie or someone was in there trying to sleep.

a couple hours later, the sun went down. it got dark outside. real dark.

i had been driving for almost six hours before i finally made it into st. louis. i was tired and delirious.

i also got to a certain point where i didnt know where i wa. yeah, i was lost. i did the first thing i could think of, i called my dad.

the conversation was something like this:

Brandon: Hey...whats up.

Darren: Hey son! I'm at a church thing right now!

Brandon: (under my breath) Oh...F*&$...S@#*!

Darren: ...what?

Brandon: Nothing, I cant talk to you (hang phone up)

I eventually found my way out of there, and narrowly risked crashing my car in the middle of a grafitti laced tunnel so i could take this picture for your viewing pleasure. if you look close you can see the arch, and youd better look cause taking this picture wasnt easy.

then i was on to peducah kentucky, the second best place in america to get killed by idiots, or in this case one idiot. second only to laramie, a hotspot of yesterday. i had been driving now for a good nine or ten hours, and i was feeling it.

i stopped at a truck stop in nashville at 3am. i bought two 5 hour energy shots to try to keep myself going. i knew i should have stopped and slept for a little bit, but i had to do the ballsy thing andd just keep on truckin.

when the girl at the counter asked me my age so i could buy the energy shots, i couldnt exactly remember. was i born in 1987? 1988? yeah, it was something like that.

i ride on through chattanooga, slapping my face to stay awake hoping the sun will come up soon. i roll down the windows and blast abba on the stereo. i can stay awake. i can keep going to columbus.

i cross the georgia state line sometime around 5am. it feels so good to breathe in the georgian air. i make it into atlanta about an hour and a half later.

those folks in that city are crazy. theyre going 90mph in bumper to bumper traffic so they can get to wherever the crap they work. no job is so important that you have to drive like a total freaking idiot to get there, but i reckon some people feel different. i finally made it out of there as the sun was rising to the east, the left side of the car.

it was one of the most beautiful sunrises i could remember in a long time. the georgian sky looks different than anywhere else i have ever lived. the rising sun glows on the horizon and the clouds come in the most beautiful and vibrant colors.

i drive for an hour and a half to columbus with the windows down breathing in the morning air. i leave my arm out the window feeling the moist air on my hands.

i had been driving for 17 hours with the only stops being for gas. i was tired, feeling almost half dead. i was delirious and was losing sense of where i was and why.

but i was happy

i was home

60cities 2days - day one

2009-04-28T22:17:00.000-07:00

ladies and gentlemen,

ok, so driving to georgia was something like an absolute hell. i apologize i have not updated recently, but preparing for the trip has me swamped.

but lets skip that crap and get to the point here. the time has arrived and in less than 36 hours i will be on a plane bound for tokyo. life is good and i feel like i am ready to go on and see 60 cities in 60 days.

but let me tell you about 60 cities in 2 days, the trip from provo utah to columbus georgia. a good 35 hours sitting in a car, feeling like you truly want life to end with every hour after six.

day one:

i leave provo utah at about 9am. 7-11 had just had a huge hot dog fair and so they still had hot dog balloons up in the building when i buy my hot dog and fill up my 100oz mug with mountain dew. i slowly begin to replace the blood in my bloodstream with a mixture of yellow food coloring, caffeine, aspartame and water.

interstate 80 could be the loneliest and most desolate road in america. wyoming probably has more people driving on the highway than actually reside in the state. it is a state of cowboys and bad weather. i drove through the worst ice storm i believe i have ever seen. the whole hour or 75ft visibility and winds up to 50mph was spent listening to alison krauss and robert plants record. it was glorious and serene.

heres the only two things worth mentioning about wyomings cities

cheyenne: the state capital. it has one or two mcdonalds.
laramie: the city where an alternative sexual preference could possibly get you killed by either one or two prejudiced and intolerant rednecks.

and here is a picture from wyoming compliments of the ol samsung camera phone.

image this natural beauty in the distance for over 14 hours straight. "14 hours...doesnt it only take 7 or 8 hours to drive through wyoming!?" you may ask.

well, i got to drive through nebraska also before finally stopping in iowa! here are some pictures of nebraska!!!

and...

and...

im almost falling asleep trying to look at the pictures now.

throughout the day i made about three stops for gas. at each stop i would promptly order one bag of doritos and a 5 hour energy shot.

this continued throughout the next day as well.

then at about 11:50, i made it into the omaha city limits. i gave a call to the lynes and met them in their home in glenwood for the evening.

on the lighter side of things, the trip on friday wasnt too excruciatingly painful. i got to listen to the newest radiohead record and victor frankl's mans search for meaning on cd.

if you get the chance, read that book. its life changing.

until next time, god bless ya.

Impending

2009-04-23T23:13:00.001-07:00

It was three years ago.

Or about that I reckon, maybe not exactly to the day, but it was pretty close.

I was in the last week of my three months at the missionary training center in Utah. I had just been through the most difficult time of my entire life. Even to this day, I can still say that those were some of the three hardest months of my life.

During the last week there, I sat outside on a park bench with some of the other missionaries that were going to go to Japan with me. It was a warm spring night. We sat and contemplated what it would be like to be in a foreign country trying to speak a language we did not know in less than a week. We were excited and terrified.

On the side of a mountain located to the east of BYU, a large "Y" that has been built into the side of the mountain to represent the school. Following the week of finals and graduation, it is common tradition to have a group of students hike to that Y and stand on the outer edges of the concrete letter holding lanterns. The Y stays lit for hours and glows in the sky like a huge floating ghost or the dark mark in harry potter or something. The time and effort it takes to do light that letter is incredible.

They lit the Y that night while we sat looking at the mountain, contemplating and praying. For a few moments, I felt like I was in a happy and safe spot. All the people I loved on the outside were done with school, my sister was home with my parents and I was a week from going to Japan.

I looked at my friends and said, "This place might not be so bad after all".

I was right, it wasnt really all bad.

They lit the Y again tonight. I sat in my car looking at it for a good long while thinking back to what I felt three years ago and what I feel now. I will be going to Japan three years to the day from when I went there as a missionary, and I ask myself simple and profound questions like how much have i changed from then and what i hope to gain from what im doing now as opposed to then.

I find myself just as excited and terrified now as i was three years ago. That never changes, the fear I guess. Its sad to become so used to something and then let it go. Once we become so accustomed to something, its difficult to leave it regardless of how bad the situation seemed at the time. This is high school graduation and going to college, this is leaving on a mission, this is coming back home, this is saying goodbye to a friend, and this is constanly growing and changing into a stronger person.

When I saw the Y lit three years ago, i felt like somewhere someone was doing something that was difficult, but meant something to them personally and they were with people they cared for doing it. I was in a training center for missionaries, but those people hiked a mountain along with others. They had so much freedom and I was envious of them. When I saw those lights, I felt like there would definitely be a time when I would have that freedom. It was serene and it was wonderful. I knew that there would be a time that I would have complete control and the imminent consequences.

When I was younger I once heard the story of a young boy who would look out onto a river and watch the barges floating into the middle of the night. No matter how lonely this boy was or how he felt he was alone in his sleeplessness, he knew that out there on thoser barges, those men were wide awake and hard at work. That thought brought comfort to that boy. He was not the only one awake at that time. He was not alone.

Thats what I felt three years ago looking at that Y when I saw those people lighting the edges with the lanterns. Somewhere, someone was doing something difficult but they were enjoying it. They were free to be there and that gave me the same comfort that boy felt looking towards those barges.

The lights went off at the Y at 12:23 tonight as I was writing. For a moment I felt alone again and empty sitting in that car by myself with nobody there beside me. I thought for a moment and realized that even if I didnt see the lights, those people were still there on that mountain, beginning the trip down.

Then I felt peaceful.

Something For The Kids

2009-04-20T22:25:00.001-07:00

Howdy there pardners.

Okay, so I know it has been a good long while since my last post to 60c60d, and I apologize for this. Finals week at BYU has taken a stronghold on my heart and my soul and left we worthless to this blog.

But there is a light at the end of this tunnel. I have officially bombed two of my finals (ok, maybe not) and I have three more to take before I totally enter into the downward spiral signifying the end of this semester and my return home to Georgia. From then...Japan.

So my current plans for my return home go something like this.

Lights. Music.

So a nice trip from here to Glenwood, Iowa this Friday morning after I attend the graduation ceremony of one of my friends here at this beloved University. It's a good fourteen hour trip there, so I reckon I'll probably get there in the middle of the night.

My dear friends, the Lynes live there in Glenwood, a small city isolated outside the city of Omaha close to the Iowa and Nebraska border. Their son, Steve, was my roommate my freshman year at this school and was quite the stud indeed. I'll spend some time with them, then head on my way down the road to Nashville Tennessee. I'll spend the night there, checking out the local music scene and taking in the spring music city air, before I head to Columbus the next day.

From then it's on to Atlanta the following Thursday. Atlanta to Washington DC. Washington DC to Tokyo Japan.

Still on this list of things to do and buy. I need a computer, a clean pair of pants and maybe even some deodorant for my stank.

I got some pins installed into my guitar. It's gonna be my old friend the Samick, the first guitar I ever owned. I also bought this fantastic thing that I put around my neck that I can use to play harmonica with no hands. Bob Dylan style.

So stick around for more fun to come.

60cities60days ParTay!1!1!

2009-04-20T22:15:00.000-07:00

Over the past few weeks, the ambiguity surrounding a lot of the aspects of my trip have left me buggin out, going old school bananas.

My sister recognized this fact and decided to throw the most incredible surprise party to let me know I have the support of some fantastic friends. Special thanks go out to Miss Caitlyn for putting together the great get together, Rachel for allowing us to throw it at her house, and of course all my wonderful friends for coming and dressing like old school Japanese folks.

The sign my sister made and hung out for all the world to see.

The barrage of party peoples.

Me and my sister rockin.

Me and Rachel walking as I carry a spaceship.

Anyway, a special thanks to everyone who came!

I love you all!

Keep checkin back for more...

Johnny Walker Himself

2009-04-11T00:28:00.000-07:00

Japanese children like to play with other things besides toys that are made to resemble incredibly fast passenger trains. In a country chock full of vending machines offering beer, cigarettes and pornography, you would expect those little whipper snappers would always have something to do.

But let me tell you something, you've never seen anything quite like one of these guys.

It's called a Kabuto-mushi. Translated from Japanese it just means helmet-bug. Kids play with these too, especially in the Summertime, cause apparently that's when they're born and when they like to go out and go swimming with girl bugs.

The first time I saw one, I thought it was a little robot or something. This little boy was standing in the doorway of his house and I reached down cause I thought he was offering me a stick of licorice or a lock of hair or something.

To my horror, it was not licorice at all, but one of these humongous bugs that he was just chillin' with like it was a dog or cat. I didn't understand at the time how amazing these bugs were. They even have video games in many Japanese arcades where you can play one of the bugs and fight to try to knock another bug off of your log! It's intense! Heck, I even saw Kabutomushi origami at the store.

I knew I had to have one, so about fifteen months later when I bought one of my very own.

His name: Johnny Walker

He was one of the most amazing pets I have ever had. When I bought him from the old Japanese lady, she was so excited to sell him! I found out later it was because he was so close to dying and nobody wanted to buy him.

I knew Johnny Walker needed someone to rub his feet and cook his meals after he got home from work, so I bought him a wife. I called her Sally Jo Walker.

They lived happily in my box in Toyohashi, until one day, the box started to smell...bad. I looked in the box and Johnny Walker himself had passed on. We held a funeral for him and then threw him out the window. Sally Jo was so distraught that she took her own life by jumping out the same window only a couple days later. She tried to escape from the box multiple times, so this required us to put her on a 72-hour suicide watch which failed miserably.

The bugs usually feasted on little jelly packets you buy from the 100yen store in Japan, but it wasnt enough to keep Johnny Walker alive.

His legacy lives on even if he does not.

The Pain Train

2009-04-08T23:03:00.000-07:00

Trains.

They get you around places you need to go and are often seen racing around christmas trees. They can also be found in the middle of the city where you live, occasionally causing you to have to wait five, ten or thirty-five minutes.

Bottom line is that Nippon is a train kinda country. They love trains. The kids play with toy trains the way young american children might play with matchbox cars or their parents guns.

I dont blame them one bit.

Japan is the home of the Shinkansen. The shinkansen is an extremely fast passenger train. Thats right, its freakin fast. Like Mario Andretti fast. The shinkansen could maybe reach speeds up to 200mph but some designs of the train relying on magnets have reached speeds up to 350mph.

BC Powder. Its just plain fast.

Japan is connected by a vast railway system which connects all regions within the islands and in some cases, connects areas of the four main islands together. In the inner cities, it is the preferred method of transit.

In a city like Tokyo or Osaka, busy commuters are often packed onto trains like the pit of an out of control Creed concert. There are specific workers for JR, Japan railways, whos job it is to squeeze more people into these trains and get them safely on their way for a good 16 hours of office labor at the end of their morning commute.

Bottom line is that the Japanese railway system is ultra efficient, ultra safe (usually) and ultra fun for someone looking for a good time.

There are signs in and around train stations warning the young women to look out for "chikan" or molestors on trains that take the opportunity during the busy rush hour crowds to cop a feel on a poor unsuspecting Japanese girl.

I wouldnt believe it but I witnessed it myself once on a Nagoya train. I started to shout "CHIKAN!!!", but being a big ugly american i think they may have thought i was talking about myself and was trying to shout and let everyone know i was looking for a good time.

Lets see if we cant find one somewhere on the trip and expose that sucker on the internet.

More havoc to come...

Spotlight: Tokyo

2009-04-05T02:23:00.000-07:00

Tokyo.

Its the mother of all cities. My first destination on my 60c60d trip. How long do I plan to spend in this area? Two weeks.

Almost exactly three years ago, I was driving through metro Tokyo towards Kichijoji city. I wasnt driving myself, but good ol Tucker Dendobukaichou himself was taking care of it. I was with about five other guys at the time, beginning my mission for the church.

I felt like I has just been placed on another planet. My eyes were wide open with amazement. It was the most beautiful and incredible city I had ever seen. We crossed the rainbow bridge and then past tokyo tower.

Arguably the worlds largest city, Metropolitan Tokyo is considered to be one of the 47 prefectures of japan. It is made up of 23 separate wards making up a total population of 8 Million. For someone like me, to put 8 million people in a city is almost unfathomable. I come from a town of 250,000, Columbus Georgia.

Tokyo prefecture contains 8 Million, but the greater metropolitan area of the city comes up to a grand total of about 35 million people. Simply extraordinary.

Despite the extreme population, the city runs like a well oiled machine. You can set your watch by the arrivals and depatures of inner city trains.

Tokyo is loaded with things to see and do.

Shibuya, one of the special wards of tokyo, has an intersection where thousands of people cross with each time the light flashes green to cross. Hachiko, the faithful dog, still chills out there like he has been doing for the last few years or so.

Fans of the film "Lost in Translation" may have seen Bill Murray playing video games, singing karaoke and watching a strip show in this part of Tokyo.

Harajuku, they got some wicked style at this kinda place. Harajuku girls show up on Sunday to show off their new whacked out clothing styles. For more info, check out "Harajuku Girls" by Gwen Stefani. Let me know if you can stand listening to it, you might be the first.

Oh my gosh, there simply too much. Kaminari Mon, Ikebukuro, Ginza...the list goes on.

For info on my personal take on my journey of this bohemoth city, my trip begins there May 2.

More havoc to come...

The Bicycle

2009-04-05T01:46:00.000-07:00

The Bicycle

The bicycle is what happened when the heterocycle became a little...curious.

It also is a grand way to get around a country that relies on trains and has sprawling but compact cities. Apparently when Tokyo was rebuilt after the firebombing of World War II, it was made more expansive than its former, pre-destroyed design.

Here is a Japanese Gal just be-boppin with her trikey.

I suppose in the days before automobiles and coca-cola, people in japan put things close together in an effort to make it easier to commute. Osaka, from what I've heard, maintains this style, compact, small, easy to travel around with something like a bicycle. After all, Osaka was spared from firebombs so the old-school ways are still stickin around. God bless the people of Osaka.

A great way to travel within these cities is a bike. I think I'll perhaps pick up one of these little foldable darlings to use to get around certain areas of the cities without the aid of a bus. Who needs the bus anyways?

So I'm considering one of these.

Do ya think it would work for a 200 lb american? Oh for sure.

I reckon it would be an incredible way to get from takoyaki stand to takoyaki stand. Maybe even taiyaki stand to taiyaki stand. Yakitori stand to yakitori stand. I might even try to go from yakiniku stand to yakiniku stand with this bad mamma-jamma.

Whats another 200 bucks ya know? Its a bike...and it folds!!!!

Someone must have been reading my diary to know my greatest wish.

And wishes do come true.

This is just part of my options, we also got trains, busses and feets.

More havoc to come...

More Recent Developments

2009-04-04T00:27:00.000-07:00

I was sitting down last night for about three hours trying to decide the best way to do this thing.

Trying to plan such a trip with no money raises a lot of questions and concerns...some greatest hits include:

1. Where will I sleep?
2. How will I get from one city to another with the destination being about 100 miles away.

So obviously these are things that I have been contemplating for the last month or so, but I've been getting more serious about it now and am weighing my options for how I'm gonna get around Japan and not die doing it.

The way I see it, if you wanna make an omelet, you gotta break a few eggs. As a poor college student, the figurative eggs im breaking will be the literal bank. It's gonna take moolah. Bucks.

But that's not the important part.

Right now, I'm not gonna worry about the money. The big issue right now for me is how I will be able to see the entire country in 60 days. People could possibly spend years in Japan and never be able to see every shrine, temple, amusement park or internet cafe the place has to offer, not to mention the bidet style toilets that made me feel like less of a man with each use.

But let me testify to you. The Japanese electric toilet is a thing of beauty, and the squirty thing will leave you in complete joy after one try.

But thats a whole different story.

Bottom line is this...

This is what I'm gonna do:

Two weeks travelling among the 23 wards of the humongous Tokyo and surrounding cities. The neverending metropolis.

South towards Kawasaki and Yokohama.

Then through Shizuoka past Mt. Fuji towards Nagoya.

On to Osaka, all surrounding cities, Nara, Sakai then Wakayama. Ferry to Shikoku Island. Cross the island, ferry to Kyuushuu Island.

Through Fukuoka, Kumamoto, Kitakyuushuu, back to Hunshuu, through Hiroshima, then Kobe.

North through Fukui, Kanazawa, Nagano, Niigata, Akita, Aomori. Ferry to Hokkaido. Five days on the northernmost island.

From then, a smooth southern return to the queen city Tokyo immediately following a long and lonely ride through Sendai. Then on to America out of Narita.

That is what it looks like to go through 60 cities in 60 days. This is what I'm going to do. The itinerary still exists albeit in a looser form.

Up next: Transportation

Ready and Not

2009-03-31T00:22:00.000-07:00

I spent about an hour tonight putting together pictures that I am going to use for headers on the page in the future.

I had one of the best opportunities of my life to be able to go to Japan for the time that I did. I was there for a little under two years. From that time I can honestly say that I fell in love.

I looked through hundreds of pictures tonight of my experiences. I was able to experience unimaginable beauty. The people, the sunsets, the rivers, the mountains, the cities, the never-ending fields of green tea, they all still remain a solid and eternal part of my heart.

It makes me so glad to be able to go back to experience it once again even if the circumstances are on a totally different scale.

Thank you from the bottom of my heart for joining me.

First Draft Itinerary

2009-03-30T02:29:00.000-07:00

After a lot of careful thought and consideration into how and where i should try to spend my time in japan living like a hobo. This is the itinerary I have created for the cities i will be passing through during my trip. This covers the actual 60 cities over the 60 days

Ahem.

Part One: Tokyo

Day
1 Machida
2 Harajuku
3 Shinjuku
4 Shibuya
5 Roppongi
6 Kawasaki
7. Yokohama
8. Fujisawa

Part Two: Shizuoka and Nagoya

Day
9 Numazu
10 Fuji
11 Fukuroi
12 Hamamatsu
13 Toyohashi
14 Nagoya
15 Gifu
16 Ogaki

Part Three: Kansai

Day
17 Kyoto
18 Yawata
19 Osaka
20 Namba
21 Matsubara
22 Sakai
23 Wakayama

Part Four: Shikoku

Day
24 Tokushima
25 Takamatsu
26 Matsuyama
27 Yawatahama

Part Five: Kyuushuu

Day
28 Oita
29 Kumamoto
30 Ogori
31 Fukuoka
32 Munakata
33 Kitakyuushuu

Part Six: Hiroshima

Day
34 Shimonoseki
35 Hofu
36 Hiroshima
37 Okayama
38 Kobe

More to come...

Itinerary

2009-03-20T12:43:00.001-07:00

loose outline of the trip itinerary coming soon...check back soon for more details.

The INnOUT

2009-03-16T20:58:00.000-07:00

okay, so I was looking at the web last night and saw that my idea to use the seishun 18 kippu to travel the very long distances between major cities and within major cities has been foiled.

this should give you the 411.

drats! foiled again!

apparently they have three windows a year in which they let you buy them. lame. lame. stupid. dumb. and the week before I get there is the cutoff date to use the ticket and three weeks after i leave, theyre gonna open it back up again.

so whats the big deal? i guess it really isnt too big of a deal, it just means I will have to find some way to get from city to city without paying the huge train ticket price.

bikes? hitchhiking? wait, no, i havent survived, rape and death free, in this country for 21 years just to get killed in another one while being there for two months.

if anyone has any alternative suggestions, now would be the time.

and in other news, i was also given the idea by derek z to live in internet cafes while im there. its such a good idea and its become such a big freakin deal that they have even done news stories about it.

for serious, check it out...

H e R e
or...
h E r E E
or even...
h E r R E

maybe all my dreams are really coming true!

Nippon Hotspots

2009-03-11T15:45:00.000-07:00

what is there to do in the country anyway?

60cities60days FAQ

2009-03-11T05:55:00.000-07:00

Q: will you have a camera crew to follow you around as you travel the country?
A: no, im not that cool, influential or good looking.

Q: how do you plan on updating daily when you dont have the internet?
A: im not sure but ill do the best i can. after all, the internet is everywhere anyways.

Q: what happens if you get sick?
A: i might die in an alley somewhere

Q: youre a 23-year-old college student, how do you have the kind of money to take a trip like this?
A: i dont have the money, thats why i dont have anywhere to live. the only thing ive spent money on is a camera and a plane ticket.

The Street Set

2009-03-10T04:16:00.000-07:00

the acoustic setlist

1. bob dylan - the times they are a changin
2. oasis - dont look back in anger
3. oasis - stand by me
4. love psychedelico - sad story
5. smap - sekai ni hitotsu dake no hana
6. green day - boulevard of broken dreams
7. flogging molly - ?
8. ?
9. ?

i need some more ideas, stat

The Essential GEAR

2009-03-10T01:38:00.000-07:00

my friends,

for my trip im trying to decide what types of electronic goods might be the best for me. ive got this desire to get this laptop and camera, but im not sure which one is a decent one. i also am totally torn about how im gonna carry a guitar around an entire country comfortably, maybe its not even possible.

probably not huh?

anyways, heres the frontrunners for electronic goodies. anybody got any thoughts on either one?

1. Acer Aspire One
2. Asus EEE PC

both cost like 300-350 bucks.

im already getting tired of writing. anyone wanna help me pick?

more havoc to come

The Best of Times

2009-03-10T01:19:00.000-07:00

dear friends,

first of all thanks for visiting the blog for 60cities60days! its great of you to stop by to see what the deal is.

so i reckon i should probably just let you in on what the real deal is.

the deal is that i will be flying to japan the last week of april, almost a week after finals week at byu. ill be arriving at narita near tokyo.

my main posessions will include:
1. a camera
2. a mini-laptop
3. two sets of clothes
4. an acoustic guitar

...and thats it.

ill only use the money i make playing music in the streets to pay for food and hopefully be able to make enough for trains around the country. ill be doing a lot of walking.

ill do my best to update this blog daily with a variety of pictures, thoughts and descriptions of what im doing and how i am doing. it might be tough to find a place to upload daily, but i will keep everything logged in my computer to quickly upload when i can. so the laptop does have a tiny purpose other than updating my facebook status. (cricket sounds)

so yes, maybe its a little bit crazy. probably more experimental than sensible. downright dumb perhaps.

keep your eyes peeled for more havoc to come