Category: Exploits

Busy three day weekend. Had to go clear out remaining stuff at my little sister’s apartment in Sakai on Saturday (the stalker incident left her shaken and we didn’t let her be there by herself after that), but there was too much to move with my car in a single trip, so I enlisted Taro and his van to help out. Friday, after work, I rode the hydrofoil to the airport and from there took a couple trains to his house in Horyuji. Inevitably, drinking ensued.
Some memorable moments include picking up my new theramin at Taro’s new incense shop, snapping a shot of a girl in a pink yukata playing an accordion, and eating a heavenly slice of yubari melon while lightly fingering a Fender bass.
The most memorable conversation that night was one between Taro and a friend from overseas who shall remain unnamed because:
1. His older sister, who I know from university, and respect, sometimes reads this weblog
– and –
2. His older sister, who is known to punch people in the mouth, sometimes reads this weblog
(If you think you are the sister I am referring to, you definitely are not the sister I am referring to. Or in a way, maybe you are. Don’t ask me, it’s a zen thing.)
Anyway, this anonymous person, who I shall call Mr. X, has only been in Japan for a year or so, and had a lot of questions regarding daily life. Easy enough, so we helped him out and gave pointers and I got very sleeeeepy from the beer and knocked out for a while. When I awoke in a fuzzy state of having just realized that I must have dozed off for a spell, I was in that “overhearing snippets of hushed conversation” state of not-quite-awakeness.
Fascinating. Mr. X had started confiding in Taro about recent sexual escapades in an altogether serious manner. Serious, as in, “Am I fucked up if I get off on dotdotdot” type of talk. Now substitute the following for dotdotdot:
1. Kinky oral stuff? (Taro’s answer: Hell no!)
2. Buggery? (Taro’s answer: Nothin’ wrong if she asks for it)
-and-
3. If she wants to stick her soapy fingers up my butt during oral gratification? (Taro’s answer: Um)
At this particular juncture I could no longer contain my amusement and exploded with laughter, forever staining the moment with much back slapping and ribbing (Mr. X, you dirty dawg!). Mr. X was thoroughly humiliated and will probably have to go to a therapist to fix the emotional damage I caused by waking up at just the wrong moment, overhearing his dark secret, and then teasing him about it all night. Plus, he never got the last question answered because Taro went off on one of his tangents and the most interesting aspect of the story became whether the girl in question is a soapland veteran or not. (“Soaplands,” previously known as torko, short for “Turkish bath,” are places to get “sudded up.” One of the standard “services,” apparently, is anal probing).
Anyway, if you think you are reading about your little brother now, I just want you to know: It ain’t him. He’s an angel.

I just typed the search string “nagoya late night stupid drunk motherfuckers” into the Yahoo Japan search box on a whim, to find a good pub out here tonight. Quite unexpectedly, this blog was listed 5th. Damn, I feel like I own this town already.
Later: Why is Nagoya food so salty? It’s like a monkey got loose with a salt shaker in the kitchen or something. Bad, bad monkey.

Sometimes, after a long day on the road and a few beers, Japanese comfort food just seems more appealing than anything else. This photo was taken at a robata-yaki shop in Kochi that we found late at night after checking into the hotel.
Yes, the fish are eaten whole. On a related note, the kitty ate two whole frogs next to a rice paddy today. The vet later told me that frogs are potentially bad because they have a lot of parasites. Maybe I should cook them next time.

My day started at home on monster island (Awajishima). Woke up at nine. Picked up my new cellphone at the nearby AU shop with Nam (will write review later – it’s a Sony/Ericsson A1402S, an upgrade from my trusty old Hitachi). Went to the high-speed boat terminal down the street and caught the hydrofoil to KIX. Met up with none other than deep thinking shitblogger extraordinaire, Kevin Kim, on a day trip from Big Hominid’s Hairy Chasms in the “sea of Korean tourists lugging many tape-patched boxes around” scenario alluded to in my previous post (link).
Hopped on the very Nemo-esque Nankai rapi:t train to downtown Osaka. Feeling hungry, we homed in on a forgettably-named okonomiyaki shop across from Namba Parks and I dutifully snapped the obligatory nerd blogger photos with new phone.
From the heavens, a seed crystal fell into my bowl. As structure took instant form from the nether edges of velvety nothingness, I watched the world exist apart from myself and stole a glimpse of the Path. This is how I achieved x-ray vision.
In my heightened state and unfettered by the bonds of sanity, I instantly realized that Kevin is indeed an alien construct like I suspected all along. However, also as predicted, we got along very well since my girlfriend and I as well as the entirety of the Asian continent (and for that matter any lines of text appearing on your screen) are merely figments of my blog’s imagination. There was way too much ice in our cokes.
Walked up the shotengai (covered arcade) to nanpabashi (pick-up bridge), where they have drained the stinky canal quite a bit and apparently plan to beautify the river… It just warms my heart to see my taxes spent in this purely symbolic effort, I mean, remind me again, how do you turn mercury into gold? But I won’t go into that today. A bald, scary-looking man dressed in shorts/white t-shirt approaches us after hearing us talking in English, and turning to me, loudly asks, What do you think takoyaki? I find myself strangely unable to answer, but I smile and the guy half-grins back in such a way that raises the hair on the back of my neck. Something is not right in there, behind his eyes, which would usually put me on guard. But today I am dwelling on a different plane and feel a strange need to help this guy in some way. So I have a brief conversation with madness and in a short time have confirmed that there is no answer to his riddle, it is a genetically modified logic bomb. Yet I must give some sort of answer. I stall by talking about the hot weather, then throw a loop back at him by teaching him the phrase, How about some hot takoyaki?, which seems to please him immensely. After practicing his pronunciation on me a couple times, he wanders off into the crowd chanting this new incantation over and over and over again. The crowd parts to let him through, this man with a new mission in life. (Note: If homeboy ends up stabbing someone important while yelling about hot takoyaki tomorrow, I’m really very sorry.)
We had dessert in Kirin Plaza at the far end of the bridge, on the 4th floor. Nice place. They have a brewery on the first floor, so I had a pint of their ale – yum. We saw an art exhibition on the 6th floor, which started out interesting but kinda fizzled out for me at the end. Too many neon fish-headed creatures. Plus, I hate galleries that ban photography outright. Many of the paintings were labeled as digital proofs, so I found the photo ban a bit ironic. But it was cool inside and hot on the street, and too many neon fish-headed creatures is, by definition, preceded by just enough neon fish-headed creatures, so I had my moment of equilibrium – which is definitely redeemable for an Hour or Two of Thornless Respite come Armageddon.
Nam took off for a dinner meeting with friends, and I walked with Kev back to Nankai Namba station. We parted ways there and I presume he is now locked in a room at the Korean customs office for trying to smuggle Japanese centipedes into the country so he could make them publicly surrender and admit that his centipede really kicks ass…
DVD Bonus: The toilets on a Nankai rapi:t train look like this.
UPDATE: If Kevin’s always going to let the Japanese version of history stand, I hereby declare the official spelling of his name everafter as “Cevin”. Also, I predict he may appeal (in vain) with minor technicalities (i.e., “it’s just a bug”), when he hears his pet centipede is now officially classified as a Japanese territory.

If you are picking up someone with the last name “Lee” whose flight from Korea disembarks at the exact same time as three others, it might not be terribly helpful to hold up a sign with only “Mr. Lee” written on it. I’m partly saying this for the benefit of the tour guide who did so and got bumrushed by fifty different Lees today, although he eventually learned from his mistake and scribbled in a first name and flight number as well.

I was shootin’ the shit with a salesman from TUV (a safety standards certification company) a few years back and found out he was a long time student at a local Shorinji Kenpo (Japanese shorin = Chinese shaolin) dojo. We went out drinking soon after. A few too many beers and hours of talking about favorite kung fu movies and martial arts/fighting in general led to a sloppy session of chop-socky in the parking lot behind the bar. It was just good-natured fun and a testament to how well we got along, but ended with a bloody nose (his) and torn suit pants (mine) because, like I said, we were pretty toasted, and I got in a lucky shot when he challenged me to try to get in a hit. His nose didn’t break or anything, but it did start dripping blood and he got that crazed look in his eye so I used my failsafe technique – the Sir Robin – and ran away… Then promptly tripped over a parking cone, skinning my knee on the gritty pavement and tearing my pants. We both ended up laughing pretty hard at that and it ended the night on a good note.
Our conversations that day stirred up childhood memories of Tae Kwon Do class and our sensei, Master Shin. Master Shin was a former ROK marine hand-to-hand fighting instructor who immigrated to the US in the hopes of hooking up with, in his words, “a fine white lady.” Before deciding on Tae Kwon Do, my mother had taken me and my sibling to several different dojos and I remember very clearly choosing Master Shin’s dojo because he ran the tightest operation. Even through eleven year old eyes, Master Shin was clearly a good teacher, and knew his subject very well. I remember Tae Kwon Do lessons with much fondness, because it was the only time all of us kids were in the same class, so to speak. We are all two years apart in age, with me at top and Merin (the future doctor – maybe) at the bottom (four all together – Justin, Mika, Adam, Merin). I think Merin was around five when she started, and she ended up being Master Shin’s pet student, because she was the youngest in the dojo and an absolute terror. I’m sure she would have ended up biting her opponents to capitulation if she had been old enough to enter tournaments. She was an absolute doll on the dojo floor, still wobbling around on the unsure footing of post-toddlerhood, yet delivering perfect block-feint-roundhouse combos on a munchkin scale.
Master Shin knew how to bring out the killer in us, which I suppose is not a surprise for man who made his previous living teaching soldiers how to kill with their bare hands, and I cannot speak for my sibling, but I basically saw him as a god among men. You know that scene in the Karate Kid where Mr. Miyagi breaks the beer bottles that the rednecks put on his truck? Master Shin did that in real life, before that movie ever came out. There was a picture of him doing it in the LA Times, a split second where his ridge hand is chopping through the fifth bottle of eight or nine in a row, his face scowling with fierce concentration. When I saw that picture, I just knew that he was picturing those bottles as enemy soldiers, because he had the gift of being able to channel his anger. Years later when I saw Emperor Palpatine harnessing the power of the Dark Side and shooting energy bolts from his fingertips in Return of the Jedi, I thought, that’s Master Shin. Perhaps that’s not the best analogy, because I never really thought of our sensei as being a bad man, just a real life bad-ass, in every aspect. He would scream at me when I was sparring and I could beat bigger kids several belts above me simply because my fear of getting hit was a lot less than my fear of disappointing my sensei, wasting the training he put us through. I would later carry this attitude into high school sports where it served me well.
Master Shin was from a different culture, a culture of tough guys, and this was one of my first glimpses into Korean culture. I learned from him that a man must back up what he says. This was back in the eighties, I guess, and discrimination against minorities was still out in the open. Local rednecks would sometimes jump students from our dojo who had done nothing more to deserve it than wear a gi out in public. Master Shin vowed to get back at these guys, and I heard from one of the senior students that he did it in a particularly nasty fashion, especially after one of them threatened to pull a gun after they intruded the dojo during an advanced weapons course at night. We never heard the specifics of that situation and never asked, either. I was present when a bodybuilder from a nearby gym came in and wanted to arm wrestle with Master Shin. Guess who won? It was all over in an instant. Master Shin could channel his energy into the “one inch” later alluded to by Mr. Miyagi. While lecturing, he would sometimes hold pine boards at arm’s length with one hand and splinter them in a blur with his free hand. “Always remember,” he would say, “the most important things in a fight are: Speed. Power. Focus. Hit faster, harder, and more accurately than your opponent, and you will never lose. SPEED. POWER. FOCUS.”
Yes, we were taught the art of breaking in our classes. It is often frowned upon by purists these days, but it was definitely one of the most fun parts of training. I guess the downside of this is the various fist-size holes in the walls, broken doors, and other war scars our house accumulated over the years as tempers flared and anger manifested as destructive kinetic energy (sorry, dad).
Back to the musing on culture I started above, I think one should imagine Master Shin in context as having come from a warrior society (specifically, the ROK marines) when I relate stories like the Pig or the Bunny Rabbit:
The Pig:
Master Shin taught us the spear-hand technique, but banned us from using it in practice. Too dangerous, he said. Only a technique for killing. He told us that to pass his advanced course in the old days, one had to kill a boar with his bare hands. This was where the spear hand was employed, a linear strike with fingers extended and slightly curved, designed to penetrate flesh. Apparently, the hardest strikes sometimes result with elbow-deep penetration into the pig’s head.
The Bunny Rabbit:
I have always regretted not having been able to go shooting with Master Shin, because this was before the Assault Weapons Ban and the Brady Bill and all that other hoplophobe bullshit and he apparently had quite an arsenal – full auto Tommy guns, Uzis (Did you know these were classified as obsolete in Israel last year?), etc. Anyway, Master Shin decided he wanted some realistic target practice, so he bought a rabbit at the pet store. Which is kind of horrifying from a typical American viewpoint, except that it doesn’t end there. The rabbit, in fear, would not budge, no matter how it was prodded, screamed at, frightened. I have this mental image of Master Shin turning red with anger and screaming at the top of his lungs, maybe firing off shots to scare it into motion, and yet the furry little bunny not moving an inch… A rabbit is not a boar, I guess. Interestingly enough, I don’t remember what happened to the rabbit, but it would be really touching if Master Shin ended up keeping it as a pet… Somehow, I doubt that, though.
I wonder what happened to Master Shin. We never kept up through the years, but I hope he is still teaching. Maybe I’ll look him up the next time we take a trip home. It would be cool to hear some more war stories, I reckon.

An absolute lifesaver. I must be spraying an equivalent of a full shot of the cherry-flavored stuff every night. It’s the only thing stopping me from scratching the inside of my throat with a wire coat hanger.
I don’t take it to work with me because I’m afraid I’d accidentally leave it there, and then I’d have to go a whole night – or in the case of today, a whole weekend without it. I already suffer (and make those around me suffer) from apnea, so without my trusty blood red Chloraseptic spray, my girlfriend would probably smother me with a pillow halfway through the night. On a related note, last night we slept under a mosquito net that she brought back from Thailand as a sort of joke and rigged up on in our bedroom by hanging from cheap resin string attached to the curtain rods, door stops, and the ceiling light. It was kind of fun at first since it added an Indy Jones-ish mystique to our typically Japanese tatami-matted room, but sleeping under it can be described aptly in a single word: Claustrophobic.
It may have been psychological, but it felt ten degrees hotter under that thin netting than the rest of the room, and I spent all night dreaming of being a female replicant being chased by Harrison Ford and wearing a wedding veil in a stuffy old warehouse – a true testament to the power of movies! Anyway. I woke up this morning to the sound of my alarm clock ringing (it really rings when you have a headache, doesn’t it?), and did the good old “blind wild cougar swipe” in the general direction of the evil sleepkiller… And brought the ceiling light crashing down on my leg since my swipe thrashed the so-easily-forgotten mosquito net just hard enough to pull the string attached to the light etc. etc. and so forth (compliment The King and I, Yule-not-Chow-Yun version). But all was not lost cuz the bulb Did Not Break.
Girlfriend wakes up, covered in limp netting yet in all her morning beauty, and sweetly asks, “WHAT IN THE HELL ARE YOU DOING?”
If you ask me, who am I supposed to ask?

Golden Week is what they call spring break in Japan. Why it’s golden is something I can’t quite recall, but it may have something to do with the millions and millions of people on vacation at the same time and highway rest stops overflowing with urine.
Yesterday I went to pick up my girlfriend at Kansai International Airport. Driving from Nara to Osaka usually takes 30 minutes or so, but it took around an hour this time. Halfway there, I got a call from her saying that the flight was cancelled and she would instead fly in the next day (today, in around 21 hours). Since I was already halfway there, I decided to go and have a day out in the city. Specifically, the Namba area. More specifically, the area around the new Namba Parks shopping area and the equally new WINS building where you can bet on horse races. They ran big races today to coincide with the national holidays. Perhaps you can already guess where I am going with this.
It took me an hour and 15 minutes to park my car. I paid 50 bucks for the priviledge of parking there. 50 bucks for seven hours, and this was a cheaper place than most, since it’s located farther away.
But other than that, I had a good day. I’m lucky I didn’t have to drive home, because the Hanshin expressway was backed up with going-home traffic from Ashiya all the way to Tsukimiyama (approx. 28 kilometers) at 2:30 in the afternoon. Anybody that got caught in that mess is most probably still there.
I think about weird stuff late at night, right now my mind is all over the place. I wonder if my brother Adam is sleeping in between horses tonight, or on top of several cubic meters of seafood flavor instant ramen.
I may update again soon, but if not – hey, I’m on vacation. And my girl is coming home. Golden week, indeed.

The main reason I didn’t feel like posting until today was:

Yowch.
This isn’t me by the way, I just took the picture. As you can see, I must have made a fine pinhole camera out of a beer can. Not that I remember it that well. As a week early birthday present, we took Bill away from his bar in Nara in order to take him to, you guessed it, another bar. Tramp’s bar in Osaka, where I hadn’t been to for years, but where happy hour is still 180 minutes long. It was a great night, but reminiscing about it in detail still makes me slightly ill. To make a long story short, I think we discovered a shit hot way to feel like Fido’s ass for days on end. A recipe for it would look something like this:
Official Recipe for Fido’s Assmaker
Ingredients:
Mediocre beer (we used Asahi Super Dry, the MGD of Japan)
Cheap tequila (they only had Cuervo, but anything will do as long as it’s warm – this is important!)
Ouzo (also warm – not that it matters with this shit)
B-52s (no comment)
Baked cheese fries (sprinkled with paprika, no garnish – this is completely irrelevant)
Preparation:
Show up late for happy hour with an empty stomach.
Directions:
Pacing yourself against the end of happy hour, after which prices double (not a joke in Japan), inhale as much beer and tequila as possible in a 1:1 pint-to-shot ratio. Note that lack of refrigeration multiplies the nastiness factor of cheap tequila to the point where you can almost forego the salt and lime (heresy, I know). At the halfway point of the evening, pound the Ouzo. Regret it, both instantly and for days hence. At this point, cleanse the palate with cheese fries and beer, and allow the walls to blur quite nicely.
If you are sitting next to guys who insist on staring at your group and making loud comments about you because the possibility that you just might understand their language hasn’t entered their minds, try ignoring them for a while. If their voices rise to more irritating levels because the noise in the bar is getting progressively louder, give them them the look. You know, the crazy gaijin’s gonna stick his foot in your ass and make you his little geisha boy look. Even racist fuckwits deserve fair warning, after all. If they persist, however, and you start fantasizing about escalation and how nice it would be to “accidentally” elbow them in the face on the way to the pisser – sit back as your friend takes the initiative and starts an ad hoc lesson in foreign affairs. Note their shock at your friend’s fluency in their language with smug satisfaction. Prepare for some serious entertainment because you’re just sure that he’s gonna take the piss out of them (it’s time for PAYBACK, baby)… Then watch in utter amazement as he chooses not to do so, and ends up chatting with them like old friends for the next couple of hours. In retrospect, that was the right thing to do, of course, but it would have been so much more fun to write words like, “hamlike fist,” or “smashing right hook,” or the time-tested “tiger uppercut.” Ah, well. I didn’t have my camera, anyway.
Additional Tips:
If you try this recipe in Japan, like us, make sure you hit the bar on open mic night. It’s a whole new world of irritation to hear a guy alternatively moaning “hey mannn,” “oh maaaaan,” and “hey maaaaaannnnnn,” with a Japanese accent into the mic for thirty minutes, but luckily, the tequila should help take the edge off your nerves. Speaking of which, I must reemphasize the importance of using warm tequila. I am fairly sure that this was a major factor in the earth-shattering headache I experienced the next day. And of course, the Ouzo did its job by making me feel sickly for a few days.
I may have gotten off lightly, though. I received the following mail to my phone the next day:

From: xxx
Date: Sun, 18 Apr 2004 10:40:35 +0900(JST)
To: Justin Yoshida
Subject: ouch
woke up in an alley behind my local train station..must have taken a cab…

The poor guy doesn’t remember that I put him in it, and that he couldn’t tell the cab driver his whole address because he kept falling asleep after reciting the city, Higashi Osaka. After the third try, the cab driver agreed it would be best to let him sleep it off some and ask him again after getting to the general vicinity. Guess that didn’t work out too well…