hentai

I know most of you have this view that Japan is full of wonder and perverts. I have seen some wonder and I have seen some perverts. Going to Downtown Tokyo you see all the great flashing lights and a huge modern city. Going away from there though you see a place that is crowded beyond belief with very little space for living. Maybe my childhood homes really spoiled me, having green grass to play in and pools to swim in.


Don't get me wrong, Japan is a great country, it just has some differences that just irk me at times. One of those is the hentai. Hentai, like gay, can mean many things to many people. One typical meaning is pervert. I heard a student call me it once when he saw me at the local school watching their sports day. I live right next to the school and could hear everything going on and wanted to check it out. Who knew that I would instantly be labeled a pervert for 1. being curious and 2. being a foreigner watching something that I guess only Japanese were allowed to watch with a clean conscious.


While riding the trains I am continuously looking around and on more than one occasion I have seen men reading comic books with very graphic sex drawn in. Others will be perusing the escort pages of the newspaper. Partly because of this there are women only cars on many of the trains during rush hour.


Remember that contest I had way back when? Well, I bought some things to send to the winner (and I will get around to sending it I promise!) and one such thing was a manga. Manga is Japanese version of a comic book. I made sure to not buy him a +18 version, but still wanted to get him something that had typical huge breasted women in it. I thought I found a clean one but when I got it home and opened it (it was taped shut, now I know why) it was all sex. Some of it was what appeared to be preteen girls and older boys. Not something to send to anybody, much less print.

I edited away the dirty bits.

I am not trying to make a comment that my culture is better than Japanese culture, because I think there are a few good things I would like to adopt from Japan, but man, sometimes I am left a bit unsettled.

Yesterday as I was walking up stairs to work I glanced up to see that there was a student walking ahead of me. She is in high school and wears the typical short skirt uniform. Just as I looked up she looked back. Great. Now I am a hentai again.

Ginza

I went to Ginza for the first time. It is said to be the most expensive real estate in the world. I met a friend there for lunch. Each plate they served had about a fork and a half full of food on it. No matter, it was good company, and I got a silver elephant watch holder!

A sign on the Lego display at a toy store.

Ginza and a typhoon

VJ

It has been quite hot here recently, hot enough to keep me from exploring much around Tokyo. I headed to Akihabara so I could buy Guitar Hero for the DS. Other than that I have been heading to the gym where the inside temperature has held at a steady 97˚F (36˚C) for the past few weeks.

I was determined to get out and see the controvercial Yasukuni Shine in Tokyo this Friday, never mind the heat. This morning I put a few things together in my head (along with reading an article) that today is Victory over Japan Day (VJ Day) and the last place I want to be is a shrine dedicated to Japan's war dead. There are going to be protests by anti-Emporor groups and counter-protests by rightwing nuts (think Minutemen and the Klan in the USA). They are both planning on a lot of violence, and mixed in with the heat things could get ugly.

So I have decided to watch the Olympics in A/C and safety. The only problem is that Japanese TV only shows a very few sports: swimming, judo, badminton, and ping pong, then replay again and again. Hopefully they will broaden their coverage soon.

This past week I went with a friend to Kyoto. On Monday I hopped on the shinkansen, aka the bullet train (a different one than Steph and her friend Kim took, how was I supposed to know that there was one at 4:00 and another one going to the same place leaving at 4:03?) for a 2.5 hour ride and watched as Tokyo blurred by. We got up to about 250km/h (155mph) and the ride was incredibly smooth. The weather was hot and humid the whole time we were there and it rained twice, but we were in good positions to sit out the storms both times.

Kyoto is known for its many many temples. They are everywhere. After awhile on temple looks the same as any other. Some you had to pay to see, some were free. Some had big expansive gardens, others just lots of gravel.

One of the first we went to see was quite the tourist trap. Had to pay 500¥ to get in, then find out that the temple is off limits and completely covered due to refurbishment. The grounds were beautiful though and the surrounding hills were covered in moss. One strange thing was that you could not see a single fallen leaf anywhere in the forest. As we were walking around we found out why. Old men were sweeping the entire thing.

Some temples had angry dogs.


Tuesday and Wednesday were temple seeing days and we did a short visit to the lackluster Kyoto National Museum. I shouldn't badmouth the museum though, they did have big comfy leather chairs that caused gimplexus.

We did walk down some random streets and were lucky enough to see a geisha in a deserted area so I was able to get a picture without hundreds of other people crowding around her. There is a certain area of town where the geisha still work and we were fortunate to see some actually working on a riverside deck.



Wednesday night we all just crashed in the hotel to rest up when I decided to turn on the TV. I never watch Japanese TV except for some soccer games once in awhile. I may have watched a total of 3 hours of pure Japanese TV before that night. The show that caught my eye was a compitition between a group of Americans and Japanese to see who could build the best tree house. This brought me back to memory lane and going with the family to some shop (a tree house store??) that had books on building treehouses. I remember looking at these books and always hoping on getting that three story victorian.

I also remembered that a friend (Bubba) of a friend (John P) was a treehouse builder in the US, I thought he would get a kick out of the show. Anyway, I continued to watch and who did I see working with Team USA? Bubba! The show must have liked him because they kept saying his name, which is the only thing I could understand.

The Americans built a 2 story with bridges leading to other trees while the Japanese just built some dodecahedron (12 sided die) thing for people to sit in. Team USA won 23-8 in a vote.

Thursday saw us heading out to a monkey sancuary to, well, look at monkeys.

This one didn't like be so much. It is blurred because I was jumping back while taking the picture.




Below are videos, one of the glories of Japanese toilets and the other is of monkeys. I posted more pictures on my flickr account which you can go to by clicking on "pictures" on the right hand side.

Off

I am finally on vacation. I get the next 2 weeks off to explore Japan a bit. Tomorrow I will head out with a friend to Kyoto for a few days. When I told my students about it every single one commented about how hot it is going to be there. Hopefully that means there won't be too many people around.

The past few weeks has seen many festivals. I went to the local one last week and took some pictures and sweated a lot.