My brother sent me these pics yesterday. He found some house that has Pokemon painted all over it.
Pokemon house
April 10, 2010 at 9:24 PM
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3W + ∀
April 1, 2010 at 11:57 PM
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Phew. Wedding week is finally over. Last week I had 3 (pairs of) friends get married/have wedding parties, meaning that in a 7-day period I had a total of 2 receptions, 3 after parties, and 2 after-after parties to attend. It was a busy and expensive week. On top of that, Ari, Seth, and NR7000 were in town so there was the 2010 A-Team reunion to add to the Earth-shattering awesome festivities.
Monday was a holiday here in Japan, so Yuri and Sho-chan had their wedding party down in Kamakura. I hadn’t been out there in probably a few years and the weather was really nice. The wedding reception was super close to the shrine where the ceremony was performed, and it was a huge formal reception afterwards. Blanchard and I sang the Kishidan wedding song which was embarrassing to say the least, especially considering that the families of the bride and groom were also there. At least we uhh… practiced a lot for that. Ha, ha. The pressure and shame were short lived though, since the third and final karaoke song performed at the reception was by the bride and groom, meaning by the time they finished everyone had hopefully forgotten about the two off-key gaijin who sang earlier.
On Wednesday Seth somehow overcame his broken leg, broken cell phone, and broken computer and arrived in Japan. Oops! Met up with him in Tsudanuma and I grabbed some food at Jonathan’s while Seth sat around shocked that the restaurant was 99% chicks. Then headed into the city to meet up with Bryan and Brian for some yakiniku tabehodai. Thursday Nick came up via shinkansen, and we went to a creepy maid cafe in Akihabara. They’ve got a stamp card system, with the top tier “Black Card” requiring over 2000 visits. That is not a typo. Two. Thousand. According to our maid, there are about 6 or 7 potential serial killers with multiple mental disorders who have this card. Be very afraid. After having enough of our souls depleted at the cafe, we headed up to Namja Town for some gyoza and ice cream, followed by Lockup 2999. Lockup had some kind of campaign for March where you get half of your bill back as coupons. It’s actually a pretty decent incentive to come back.
Friday was the main event, Y’s. In the daytime we hit up Saize in Makuhari and Seth made our way to IES and Kanda. Shin-san wasn’t at IES, but we talked to Kudo-san and got to see some of the new kids. Vest! Crashed Hosoi-sensei’s office and caught up on old times with her. I’m pretty sure she remember every single detail about everything ever, since she even remember Seth’s girlfriend at the time, IUSTV, and that the Musashino line was late every day. We met up with her again later before Y’s with Bryan, and Mikey was super late for that. Couldn’t have been a better entrance. Hosoi-sensei knows how awesome the A-Team is. Y’s, even without the usual counter, was epic. Ari showed up direct from Narita and it was just like old times. We’ve been doing this for almost 6 years! Thanks to all the fans and supporters who came to celebrate with the A-Team at the 2010 Reunion.
Bryan and Saori’s wedding reception and after parties were probably the highlights of wedding week, since everyone was there and also because I’ve known Bryan the longest. It was pretty awesome, especially when the picture slideshow had so many A-Team shots. I gave a speech which ended up being a little shorter than I had planned, but I think it was fine. We made some new friends with (well actually just probably creeped out) Saori’s friends, ate some good food, and celebrated something that really made me feel old. Also at the second party and karaoke there was a kid who smelled like wet garbage.
After not going to bed until about 8:30AM on Sunday, I had to get up for Isoroku’s wedding after party that night. It was also pretty sweet, in a fancy lounge in Roppongi near the Ritz Carlton. I was worried that I wouldn’t know anyone there, but luckily there were some Kanda people I’d met years ago and from there I was able to mingle and such. Isoroku also gave out some pretty classy party gifts. I have no idea what I’m going to do with Ultraman Tenga.
Cleaned
March 17, 2010 at 2:12 AM
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I’ve been using the same dry cleaners since I moved to Chiba city back in late 2007. It’s right around the corner from my apartment, and is cheap and fast which is nice. The weird thing about dry cleaners in Japan is that they’re everywhere. There might be almost as many cleaners as there are convenience stores, and those are pretty much on every block. I’m exaggerating, of course, but just barely. On my way to the grocery store, for example, which is only a few blocks away, I pass by 3 conbinis.
But oh yeah, my dry cleaners story. So my dry cleaners has a stamp card – every time you spend 500 yen, you get a stamp. After 30 stamps, the card is full. Nothing is written on it about what happens when you fill up a card, but I assumed you get some kind of prize, or maybe special membership status, etc. I wasn’t really sure, but since I had to get my suits and stuff cleaned anyway, it didn’t really matter. I was kind of looking forward to fulling up the card, though, in the back of my mind.
Then finally, today, after two and a half years of watching the stamp count slowly increase, I finished it. I had 30 little “Masaki” stamps and I was ready to claim my prize. Victory was mine. Would I get like a special gold card to show my status as a power user of the dry cleaning shop? Maybe a gift certificate to help offset my years of dry cleaning costs? Sure if you do the math I’d only really spent about 15000 yen (USD$150) over 2.5 years, but the buildup was killing me. The grumpy old dude at the cleaners took my dirty clothes today and stamped my card to the last blank space (what you see on the left here is the new card).
And what did I get for my waiting? My grand prize for cleaning my suits and shirts enough to warrant a second stamp card?
Drumroll please…..
Umm yeaaaaah. After loyally going to Masaki Dry Cleaners for 2.5 years, my prize for filling up the stamp card was a pack of &#@%ing trash bags. A whole buck fifty’s worth of plastic bags. Thanks a lot grumpy old dude.
Niigata, Saaaaahkey, and the Senbei Kingdom
March 16, 2010 at 3:59 PM
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Over the weekend I got the hook-up from Brian and Bryan to go with them on a free bus tour to Niigata. Niigata’s up like northwest of Tokyo near the Japan Sea and is famous for rice, sake, and ski resorts. I’d never been there before and didn’t have anything planned so I figured why not. It was overall pretty fun since it was like a short road trip with friends, but I don’t know if the actual planned activities on the tour were as awesome as I had imagined. It was a pretty rough schedule too, so that might have something to do with it.
Woke up around 5AM on Saturday morning in order to get to Ikebukuro by 7:40. The only people I knew of course were Brian, Bryan, and Saori, but whatever. There were some actual tourists on the bus and some of B and B’s coworkers who seemed all right. We took a Greyhound-ish bus from there up to Niigata, stopping along the way at 2 or 3 “service area” rest stops. These are significantly better than highway rest stops in the US being that they actually have decent restaurants and shops, lights at night, and restrooms that have been cleaned this decade. Also there is much less of a sense of “you will be gruesomely murdered here.” The bus ride took about 5 or 6 hours, which was pretty grueling to be honest. I was able to get some sleep but not as much as I would have liked.
After getting to Niigata we immediately went to the “main event” of this tour, the にいがた酒の陣 (Niigata Sake no Jin), a convention for Japanese rice wine. They had over 500 different varieties you can sample, which meant by the time we got there around 2 in the afternoon, there was a huge crowd of old Japanese guys stumbling around totally red faced. There were seriously people sitting on the ground completely wasted. We also saw a women who had passed out in a pool of her own vomit get carried away in a wheelchair. I heard her friends say something like “she’s resting. She should be fine in about 30 minutes.” What a country. I’m no big sake connoisseur, but they had some good ones and some bad ones there. In addition to just regular sake, they had plum wine (umeshu) and the unfortunately named and milky white in color jizake, a kind of unfiltered rice wine.
We stayed at the show for a few hours, even though it seems like most people on the tour, including us, would have been fine with leaving earlier. We checked into the Toyo Inn and went to dinner, covered by the tour. It was a pretty fancy sushi place, but unfortunately the tour only covered one drink and like 10 pieces of sushi. I mean, the sushi was really awesome, but 10 little pieces of fish on rice isn’t what I would call a full dinner. Afterwards a small group of us went out to get dinner and drinks at a standard izakaya. This ended up being a pretty long night, topped off with some awesome spicy ramen.
Slept for a few hours again, at least actually in a bed this time. Woke up for another 9AM meeting time. We were taken to the せんべい王国 (Rice Cracker Kingdom), which sounds about 50 times more sweet than it actually was. It was pretty much just a small senbei store that also had a small factory in it. They at least had some funky little mascot characters I guess, but to be called a Kingdom I was expecting something more Namja-like. We also hit up some kind of museum village or something that didn’t have much worth mentioning except we found a hidden PaRappa the Rapper in the wall displays. Lunch was at some “wealthy mansion owner’s home” that has been converted into a tourist trap, but at least they had pretty good traditional Japanese food.
So yeah I’ve been to Niigata!
