Holy Christ in a Mississippi Steamboat!

I was busy making up a listening dialogue test, complete with funny little drawings of a robot and a little house, when two boys came in to talk to one of my teachers. This is a normal occurrence. Suddenly, the teacher, who is generally of a very jovial, if somewhat sarcastic nature, suddenly erupts into a samurai-style scream at the boys. He proceeded to yell at them, I think they were dicking around with cell phones or even little games on their phones during class.

Japanese yelling is rare, but seriously upsetting. I jumped when he started yelling, and my heart is presently racing while he chews them out. I have no idea what to do until its all over, so I’m typing this quickly and loudly because the speed at which I type gives the impression I’m totally not disturbed by this predicament and am content to work in the midst of severe reprimanding… oh no, his voice is getting louder… okay, wait, maybe the kids are wising up… man, this sucks. I hope its over soon.

*sob*

I sank into my chair, my eyes wide in fear, staring at the thumb-sized wasp that decided it would hover laps around me. It seemed to get larger and more ferocious with every passing moment… before long it would be cat-sized with a stinger that could impale my skull.

I was gasping and dodging this chitinous fiend which was clearly bent on my destruction. It was ignoring and avoiding all the other people in my office, letting them go about their business. Perhaps they had signed some kind of peace treaty with its queen, or developed some kind of herbal remedy to keep demons at bay. I had no such immunity, and so I became the target.

Suddenly it dipped past my face, causing me to flinch in horror. In a moment of clarity, I grabbed the clipboard from my desk and sent it hurling through space and time in an enormous arc of devastation. I heard the clack as it struck my armored foe, sending it to the ground, where I swear I saw it shake the daze out of its head like in a cartoon.

I had not a moment to lose, once its senses were regained, it would come at me full force, filling my eyes and face with its demonic poison.

I stood up and slammed the clipboard on top of it, pushing down with all of my might. It felt like a mighty peanut cracking beneath my primate power.

Why couldn’t it be a nice little bug, like the tiny jumping spider that lives at my desk, who is presently scuttling across my monitor and scoping things out? I CAN make peace with your kind, oh God of Arthropods oh GOD OF CHRISTIANITY IT JUST JUMPED ONTO THE KEYBOARD AND I HAD TO SWAT IT AWAY!

There’s also a seven-legged spider living near my tv. It could wrap its legs completely around a ping pong ball.

What crawls over me in my sleep, in the darkness of the sub-tropical night?

My friend Madoka and I were talking about ruins, not an easy task in limited language interaction, when she told me about an island near Nagasaki that used to be some kind of coal mining town. On this little island, an entire city sprang up… school, hospital, pachinko parlor, factories, and living quarters, and it was a bustling little town.

Then it closed down.

Here is its sad, concise little story. Nothing too remarkable…

Until you look at the photos of the place. A tropical island slowly reclaiming a ghost city… hauntingly beautiful stuff. These are japanese website, so navigation is a little tricky, but there’s enough english in places to help you if you need it.

First site
Second site

I wrote an essay my last year of college about another ruins photographer, Sean O’Boyle. If the previous stuff thrilled you, check out this guy’s stuff.

So if anyone knows my parents, they know that they are OUTSTANDING cooks. This post is for them.

Hungry, but a bit bored, I decided to do a bit of cooking. Ducked into the grocery store near my home, picked up some spinach and bean sprouts, and a packet of what was surprisingly cheap chicken strips.

Started pan-frying the chicken, when I realized how symmetrical the strips were, and how they seemed to be creased exactly down the middle. Didn’t pay more attention, went to make the salad.

Began tearing up the spinach and I realized that I needed to put the salad in something… there was far more vegetable matter than I was going to eat in a single sitting, I could eat half for lunch tomorrow. What to keep it in? A-ha, a large tupperware bowl I have, big enough to toss the salad AND keep the uneaten half fresh overnight. Problem is, the bottom is covered in chocolate-chip cookie crumbs from the batch my folks brought with them (ate all the cookies, but never got around to cleaning out the crumbs).

Flipped the meats around, then took the bowl and started for the garbage can on the balcony, when I realized… “Shit… cookie crumbs and fragments… that’s almost like croutons, isn’t it?” So I left it all in there, added the spinach and sprouts, and just tossed all of it together. Heaped half on a plate, poured balsamic vinegar on it, and voila! Cookie-crumb spinach salad.

Pulled the chicken out of the pan and threw it on the plate next to my incredibly resourceful salad. Looked closely and realized why it had such a bizarre appearance… I do believe they were chicken spines. Or rather, the muscle around the spine, or something. Nothing bony in them at all, but certainly exceptionally chewy.

So, to my parents, some of the best cooks I know: Thank you for your culinary skills! They run strong in my blood, as evidenced by my fantastic meal of

Chicken-spines and Vinegar Cookie Salad.

We groggily woke up the next morning on our greasy cardboard, and noticed many of the employees were still working there. The guy at the snack counter looked like he was going to literally pass out and fall over.

We packed our shtuff and went outside, where another old dad and his teenage son picked us up. The dude’s English was really quite good despite his missing incisors, but teeth aren’t critical to linguistic knowledge. Apparently he had bussed all across the States in his younger days, thus the solid grasp of the language.

He dropped us off at a train station that we could take to our destination. He even bought us McDonald’s for no discernable reason (psychologists call this malady ‘generosity’). The train took us to a quaint little neighborhood where people were selling items in exchange for currency.

We reached the temple/park mountain, the place Abs wanted to see more than anywhere else. It was famous for its rows and rows of orange torii gates.

You can see how delighted Abs is to be there. There were literally a couple miles worth of tracks up the mountain that were housed underneath these gates, as you can see below:

So we climbed these really visually impressive trails up to the top of the mountain, avoiding the creepy black wasps that seemed to be swarming the place. We overlooked Kyoto from the top, and then began our descent, and stumbled upon a random wonder:

This place was huge, I mean bigger than your grandmother’s head. You can see the tiny white speck of a person to the bottom right of the temple. Kyoto is full of temples littered around the city like discarded coke cans, so its no surprised we stumbled upon this. We were lucky that it happened to be such an enormous building. I was able to peek inside, and in the darkness I saw a gigantic golden Buddha, whom I imagine Moses would have been very disapproving of.

We left the temple and walked out into the street where they had a parade waiting to welcome Abs and me. It was quite an honor, they even busted out their samurai.

By that time the whole neighborhood was really thrilled to have two distinguished visitors like ourselves arrive, so they had their kids break out their karate gear and what I imagine are karate flutes and paraded by us, playing an impressive mix of Abs’ national “God Save the Queen” and my own nation’s anthem, “We Will Rock You.”

Kyoto, like a pantless trenchcoated man in the park, had more to show us!

(Pssst… don’t tell anyone, but I’m writing this at work… getting paid by the JAPANESE GOVERNMENT! Actually, its mid-term exam week, so I’ve just been grading papers, and have a few spare moments to talk to you all about JAPANESE WILDLIFE!)

I was inspired to discuss the topic of JAPANESE WILDLIFE in light of a few run-ins this past week. However, what really set it off was an event this morning that shook me to my very core, which upset my deepest beliefs about everything.

There was a really damn huge spiderweb between my car and the next one.

THE SPIDER

I almost walked straight into the monstrosity of silk, cleverly located on the path to the driver-side door. Oh what a delight it would have been for the weird, long-bodied spider that had built it… 180 pounds of juicy human flesh. However, at the last moment, the threads caught my eye. Now, I’m serious when I tell you this next bit: the circular part was over two feet in diameter. It really was huge. And what’s more, since it was attached to two key points of my car, the rear bumper and the top of the driver-side window, we’re talking about yards of spido-silk. Most impressively, the freaky little arachnid built this deathtrap between the time I returned from work yesterday and this morning. Literally over night, it secreted an insane amount of sticky sauce and transformed it into a veritable cathedral of immobilization.

I backed away and went AROUND the front of my car to the driver’s door, where I grasped one of the anchoring strands and yanked it. It had physical, tangible resistance, it was not some ephemeral cobweb. It wasn’t steel, though, cuz I AM an enormous primate. But regardless, I was impressed. I climbed into the car and slowly backed out, watching the construction twist and strain under the pull. That was when I first saw the spider, crawling out from the fender of the other car, pulling in whatever silk he could save as spiders tend to do when their web gets trashed.

Even now there is a long white vein on my bumper; it is all that remains of that which I destroyed today.

THE CATERPILLAR

There is a great little lake not far from my apartment that I only discovered a few weeks ago. I think its spring-fed. Anyway, it really reminds me of Spyglys (Thorn) lake up in the summer camp I attended when I was wee (and when I was no longer wee), because it sort of filters out into a real marshy, reedy river. There’s an excellent and highly weird little path that runs behind the lake, alongside some kind of old hotel or something. You also have to walk past a house that keeps a dog, two turkeys, and a goat. I think turkeys are really rare in Japan, no one I’ve talked to has ever eaten any. Anyway, that’s pretty weird, but it was what I discovered further up the trail that blew me away.

Perched on an evergreen branch was a big ol’ fuzzy caterpillar, easily as long and as thick as my pointer finger. It was mostly a dull orange in color, and had occasional thick blue or black hairs jutting out of its back.

Having scientific instincts, I did what any biologist would do. I found a stick to poke it. Imagine my surprise when the thing suddenly doubled in half, swatting away my stick with its head! It was easily as forceful as a human finger-flick, some kind of incredible insect headbutt. I yelped a bit in surprise, and dropped the stick. The thing was a brawler! I decided to upgrade my field laboratory (I found a longer stick), and tried again. As the stick slowly approached, the caterpillar reared up its head, and once it was close enough, gave it a good solid whack, like a mom whacking a kid’s hand away from the cookie jar. I did it again and again (again, being a thorough and patient scientist), and sure enough, everytime I poked it, it whacked me with its big segmented-eye-covered head. Frickin’ cool as hell. Impressed by the fighting spirit of this worm-like critter, I nodded in respect, and went on my way.

THE DOLPHIN
Last weekend my good buddy Troutman got married to the lovely and intelligent Rie. The wedding was up in the next prefecture, so it was a heckuva ride up there. However, at one point, I found myself sitting at a restaurant along Kinko Bay, enjoying some really enormous fried shrimp. The wall facing the bay was really just a huge series of really big windows so one could yank shrimp-heads off while enjoying the beauty of the bay.

The waiter, after serving the meal, went to a window and pulled a camera out, taking pictures of something in the water below. Curious as heck, I looked, and discovered there was a dolphin in the water! Holy smokes! However, instead of jumping through hoops or trying to warn humans of Earth’s imminent destruction, it was just floating there, on its side. It was then I noticed its tattered fins, flopping jaw, and mottled skin color. The poor thing was dead.

It was really interesting. A wild dolphin, even a dead one, is an impressive thing. I found myself staring at it while I ate the hot-dog sized shrimp, not repulsed, but just fascinated. I wondered if it was one of the dolphins I saw in the bay so long ago at the beginning of October, or if it was a family member. I wondered what it called itself. Finally, I noticed it was smaller than the dolphins I’ve seen in zoos, so I wondered if it had ever gone on a date yet, or graduated high school.

So yeah, there you have it, the week of wildlife. As spring commences, I imagine I’ll be seeing more and more beasties doing amazing things (like invading my apartment or ear canals), and I will be pleased by the zoological forces blooming around me!

Boy, all this hitchhike storytellin’ must be tirin’ you folks out. Let’s take an art break!

There’s my logo entry. I think it looks pretty solid. A little fascist, but hey, that used to be a hot style around these parts. I hopes I win the pirate gold traysure!

The other interesting thing of note is this genius of a webcomic project: Arbuckle. It is not funny, it is sad and strange. It is an open project. Cartoonists are invited to take one of the thousands of Garfield cartoons and redraw them, stripped of any thought balloons. This allows us to see the true life of Jon Arbuckle, a sad and significantly disturbed individual.

I remember a discussion my senior year of high school in the most excellent Cartooning & Animation course the department was awesome enough to have. A number of us all agreed that Garfield was a horrendously lame strip. Garfield is the thing Bill Watterson had nightmares about, worrying that if he let Calvin & Hobbes get commercial, it would become the abomination. Sure, the fat cat can be amusing, but usually he’s just lame. Tailsteak’s project is a bold vision, and I will be contributing to it often. Gives me a bit of a sense of drive to draw on my own time, for such a worthwhile cause.

So I invite any of you with artistic talent to contribute. There’s a LOT of strips out there, and we need your help.

Here’s my contributions so far. Hopefully Tailsteak doesn’t mind my image-thiefing, but I’ve more than credited the website. Please check it out there yourself!

My first contribution. Just getting a grip on drawing in Flash, and just drawing in general. Had to come up with my vision of Arbuckle, as well.

This one’s more in line with the nausea I have of Garfield… illustrated by decrepit surroundings, and a hint of madness.

We got dropped off by the other foreigners here, between Saga and Fukuoka. These signs say, in Japanese, Saga and Fukuoka.

Yeah. Saga and Fukuoka.

We tried hitching a little longer, but got put off by a Japanese guy who beat us to the prime hitchhiking spot. He looked like a frog. We left him alone.

Night fell, so we left the service area and explored a park next to us. It was really high, away from the road, away from prying eyes of the local law enforcement. It was also near what seemed to be a very nice, upper end neighborhood. We found a dark corner and set up our tent, realizing that it was unreasonably cold. I put on all the clothes I had, climbed under my towel, and started feeling miserable.

So miserable that I accidentally did the ridiculous peace sign that Japanese people think is mandatory for taking pictures. My guard was clearly down.

I think an hour and a half was the longest stretch of solid sleep I got that night. Cold. Paranoid at every little noise, waiting for the Chinese to invade and take us away.

I’ll never forget the look on the faces of the old Japanese people taking their morning walks at 5:30am as two foreigners climbed out of a tent in their safe little park.

From there, we got hitchin’ right away. Slow start, but at least much warmer. An old dad and his 16 year old son picked us up on their way to some kind of motivational seminar, and dropped us off at the next service area, not too far. But it got us on a roll.

The next pick-up was a stylish bald dude and his cute, tall, willowy wife. He was really brusque, said he owned an architecture company. He took us for lunch, but it was weird, he was really rude about it. “Sit there. Eat. I won’t let you pay.” Like we were a burden. But what the shit did he pick us up for? Abs suspected he was involved in less-than-savory business practices (YAKUZA! YAKUZA!) and was thus used to just ordering people around and stuff. He even, in a bizarre attempt at helping us get to Kyoto, started walking around the parking lot to find Kyoto license plates, where he would undoubtedly tell the owner, “You. Take these kids to Kyoto.” Uncomfortable. Fortunately he ended up leaving.

The next ride was when we struck gold, though. A guy was returning from his mother’s in Saga, and happened to live just outside of Kyoto. He was returning the way we were going, and he took us like seven hours northeast until nightfall just outside of Kyoto. It was awesome

I guess he was in the Japanese Navy, a quiet, stoic kind of guy, but certainly friendly enough. He drove agonizingly slow (well, speed limit, but that’s agonizingly slow), but prob’ly if he got a ticket it’d be bad news, being a government employee. Anyway, yeah, it was great.

Here’s the bridge that connects the island I’m on, Kyuushu, and Honshu, the big, main string-bean island. Its quite magical, crossing it.

Then here was the hero of the day. We only remember fragments of his name, so I’m not gonna bother trying to reproduce it here.

We tried hitching a bit more, but it was too dark. And a scouting-out of the surrounding area revealed that there was no good secret place to pitch a tent. Fortunately this service area was open 24 hours. So we went to a small table, got some hot cocoa, and fell asleep like total bums on the table, drooling on our cardboard signs.

STILL MORE TO COME!

Wow. Alright. The Kyoto hitchhike. This is madness. Abs was pestering me for well over a week, urging me to do this. “What are you going to remember? Whatever you want to do? Or hitchhiking to KYOTO?!” It was a powerful argument that in the end got the adventurer deep inside me all tingly.

I bought myself a bucket hat for the trip (the previously mentioned excursion had left my delicate fleshes all pink from ultra-violent radiation), Abs crashed at mine, and the next morning we drove out to Kaseda to begin our adventure, one Wednesday morning.

We parked in Pierre’s lot, and walked down to the little side-street. Our cardboard read in foreigner-drawn Japanese: “North. Kyoto.” THREE minutes passed when an SUV slowed to a stop. The man inside leaned out, looking baffled, and asked in amazing English, “Where are you going?!” Kyoto, sir. Unfortunately, he was heading off to referee a sportsball game, so he could only take us the 5 minutes to downtown Kaseda.

From there we walked a block, holding the sign out, when a big fat Japanese dude in a wifebeater pulled over and emptied his backseat. I noticed a fine hat inside… the hat of either a copper, or a taxi driver. It ended up being the latter, thank goodness. He was on his way into the city to taxi drive, so he took us all the way to the interchange to the highway, which heads toward the heart of Japan like some kind of bizarre concrete vena cava (that’s the biggest vein in the human body. My girlfriend is so awesome she remembered just as quickly as a google search took).

Anyway, we were thrilled. We had gotten two rides in less than half an hour. We almost didn’t care where he dropped us off.

Until after he dropped us off. In the middle of a goddamn onramp. We were trapped. Our sign was no longer working. We busted out the purple marker and added “no ho e” in fancy japonese kanji underneath ‘kyoto’ so passersby would know we wanted “in the direction of Kyoto” and not “we only want rides that bring us all the way to Kyoto.”

Fortunately, only 20 minutes or so passed in the humid air, when a guy about my age stopped and offered a lift to Kumamoto, the prefecture straight north.

His name was Shogo, but his last name started with a ‘Hachi’ which is Japanese for ‘eight’ so therefore good enough for us. Eight was our new friend. He was super friendly. Apparently he was heading up to his alma mater, Kumamoto Uni, where he was planning on having a reunion with his younger buddies in the Civil Engineering program. They were gonna play some soccer than barbeque. Except he was running four hours late. He wanted to leave at 5 to get there on time, but he picked us up at like 9:30. HELLA lucky for us. Obviously we made a good impression, cuz a couple hours in he invited us to the barbeque.

A huge group of uni students, not too unlike the ones I left last year (except Japanese). They treated us to an amazing barbeque feast outside the civil engineering lab (a big garage full of I-beams and furnaces and other fancy stuff). They even fed us beer. Beer! FREE BEER. Ahem, sorry, reverted to collegiate for a moment.

Yeah, so the huge group of them were pretty much awesome. Just as our novelty wore off, we got a ride back to the highway, to the next service station. We hung around for another twenty minutes or so, when a car full of foreigners asked, “Hey, you guys heading north?”

Indeed we were. The group ended up being Kagoshima-jin like us, from a town farther north. They were heading up to Fukuoka. We shot the shit for an hour or so, and they dropped us off someplace between Saga and Fukuoka prefectures.

Pretty damn sweet. From there, we’d try to hitchhike more, but the daylight was steadily fading…

TO BE THE CONTINUED CLIFFHANGER!

Hey folks. Sorry I’ve been the suck at updating. Things are winding ever closer to a finish here in Japan, and there’s just lots of repetition. I’m sure there are still really interesting things happening, but I’ve grown accustomed, so I don’t see them so much anymore.

So really, here’s some updates that’ll be coming soon:

I created a logo for the JET Programme 20th Anniversary, and I’ll post that once I’m reasonably sure its past the deadline… don’t want any copycattin’ going on!

Oh yeah, also, last week, I hitchhiked to Kyoto. Pretty neat, huh? That’s the kind of thing I should be writing about, yeah? Just got photos from my partner in travel, Abs, so will be able to tell that berserk story over the course of a few posts, now that the logo design’s out of the way.