Remembering Hiroshima

…has been postponed for the time being in lieu of:
HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME!
Celebrations started early this year, and I have one last party to get to before the night is over. I’ve completely recovered from the heatstroke/food poisoning/mid-life crisis barfing thing the other day, so thanks to all those who wrote.
Nam performed Thai dance at the Awaji Westin today, perhaps for the last time, and I took around 500 photos with my new DSLR, so I’ll be posting about that soon.
Until then,
Justin Yoshida I
King of Awaji Island and Benefactor of Surrounding Territories

PETA, Rejoice!

… for I will never eat sharkfin soup again.
Yesterday I was in Himeji on a business trip. After our meetings, we went to the top of Himeji castle in the miserable heat and walked our clients a fair distance to their posh hotel. We then walked to the inconveniently located and much crappier hotel that we were staying at (a pox on our financial dept.), changed out of our dripping-with-perspiration dress shirts into casual ones, and immediately headed out for Chinese food back at the client’s hotel restaurant.
I was on my third small glass of beer before the food came, and had just finished my bowl of sharkfin and crab soup and a couple of light entrees when I felt the rumbling in my stomach. An ominous rumbling.
To make a long story short, I suffered from either:
A. Heatstroke
B. Dehydration
C. Food Poisoning
D. Thermal shock, or
E. All of the above
I did not make it to the restroom in time.
Cupping my hand over my mouth only resulted in directing the explosive stream of sour vomit all over my shirt and slacks. My shirtfront was covered with semi-digested bits of crab meat and black fungus from the soup, plus other sour beer-smelling detritus.
I finally made it into a stall, got lightheaded, and almost dunked my head in the toilet before I realized there was an unflushed turd in it. This made me purge even more, after flushing a few hundred times (even I cannot sink so low as to puke on another man’s turd).
After I washed off my face and most of the puke off my clothes, I attempted to dry my shirt so as not to make it immediately noticeable that I had lost my cookies when I returned to the table. I fooled nobody for very long, since I turned green after smelling the greasy Chinese food again.
I excused myself before the next wave of nausea hit, weakly stumbled to the hotel lobby and hailed a cab outside. The cabbie was being a fucking cunt and seeing my still-damp shirtfront, asked if I’d been drinking. I said “what’s it to you,” and he threatened to stop the car and kick me out. I threatened to puke on the floor if he stopped before we reached my hotel… Thus I got back in a precarious state of stalemate.
I collapsed on the hotel bed and the world went away for a few sweet, blessed hours. I woke up before midnight feeling completely restored, and was unable to sleep again. I took a walk on the empty streets of the city, swearing off sharkfin soup and remembering the most important things in life.
With work, I am disenchanted.
The most important thing in life, at any given time, is not to be puking your guts out.

NHK Fee Collectors

NHK is the national public broadcasting station in Japan. They send subscription fee collectors to seemingly every front door in the nation on a semi-regular basis, and in my experience, get turned away more often than not.
1.17 mil. households refuse to pay NHK subscription fees
People usually try to get out of paying by saying that they either do not own a TV, or do not watch NHK. The latter isn’t an excuse at all; you’re supposed to pay anyway. I always used to use the former until a few years ago when the NHK guy pointed out my newly-purchased satellite dish and I had to explain it wasn’t for a TV, it was for my global mind control experiments, and used the following lull in conversation as a chance to slam the door on his face.
In a similar way, most newbies to Japan initially think they can get away with a verbal Gaijin Smash (ala Azrael), but after years of verbal abuse from everyone the collectors are quite crafty and usually come prepared with laminated English phrase cards (Pay up you dirty, lying foreigner! GIVE ME MONEY!). Most recently, I tried acting like a member from the local Mormon church (there really is a Sumoto branch of the Church of LDS) and I like to think I came pretty close to converting the guy – I tried to give him a copy of the Book of Mormon that the real Mormons had left on my doorstep a few months before, but his formidable training eventually kicked back in and before you know it I was resorting back to door-slamming again.
If you DO actually pay the subscription fees, you are issued an NHK sticker to post above your doorway. I have known people who peeled these stickers off of vacant houses to post on their own, figuring it would show they had already paid, but ultimately, the joke was on them because NHK actually targets houses with the sticker (I suspect it is much easier to shame Japanese people into paying a second time than it is the first time, since it implies cheapness rather than moral belief as a reason for not paying the “mandatory” subscription fees).
The most hardcore NHK collector I ever met came knocking one day when we were living in the slums of Osaka, in Nishinari. I tried every excuse and gambit in the book, but this guy was firm and wanted the money, no excuses. When I tried slamming the door, he blocked it with his foot!!! He started cussing me out in gutteral Osaka-ben, which was a uniquely surreal experience – being cussed out by an NHK fee collector! Eventually, I tricked him into moving his foot and successfully slammed the door in his face, which infuriated him even more, and he started pounding on it from the outside and yelled at us to open it… At that point, the yakuza living upstairs opened his front door, leaned over the railing, and demanded to know what the fuck was going on, and “did he need to come down and kill some urusai motherfuckers?”
The NHK guy got spooked and left the apartment complex entirely. We laughed as we watched him walking away down the road – he heard us laughing and shook his fist up at us, mumbling and swearing to himself, kicking at a crumpled soda can on the street.

There is no love in your violence…

This sounds like a scene straight from Ishi the Killer:

…Nagasawa then punched the victim in the face, saying he did not answer politely enough…
…Nagasawa then allegedly followed the victim into his apartment and forced him to take off his contact lenses…
“Are you wearing contact lenses now? Put them in my eyes,” Nagasawa told the 31-year-old victim….
After Nagasawa’s arrest Thursday in Kawasaki, just south of Tokyo, police put on display what they confiscated from his home — 124 pairs of glasses and 30 pairs of contact lenses of a wide variety…
…Police did not comment on his motive but Nagasawa reportedly said: “I felt good when I wore the glasses of a friend in my junior high school days. I have ever since been searching for glasses that fit me.”

You can read the whole article here.
Sometimes the quotes from criminals in Japan are just so surreal. Just yesterday, I was watching on the news about a 14 year old kid who hit a man in a wheelchair on the head as hard as he could with a dumbell because he was angry and felt like hitting someone, anyone. I guess the poor guy in the chair just picked the wrong moment to wheel across the street.

On Inspiration and Foreign Language Study

Uninspiring story #1:
The Japanese girl who really went to Los Angeles in pursuit of life ala Beverly Hills 90210. (seriously.)
Uninspiring story #2:
Her best friend, who followed two weeks later.
Inspiring story #1:
My former female coworker, who taught herself English by reading the newspapers used as stuffing in the pineapple boxes shipped from Hawaii to the fruit stand she worked at as a child.
Inspiring story #2:
Japanese (especially schoolkids) who can’t even return basic greetings in English, yet can instantly extend a middle finger and shout a healthy “FAKKU YOU!” like it’s second nature.
On a related note, I’m one of those people who learn languages the fastest by concentrating on the following areas first and foremost:
A. Learning how to order food
B. Learning how to ask where the crapper is, and
C. Learning how to say “wench,” “ale,” “stanchion,” and the other real essentials
(Bonus: “Cowper’s gland” in Japanese is, simply, “Cowper,” yet “Fallopian tubes” is not “Fallopia,” as one would expect, which is a damn shame because it would have made a damn fine name for a 660cc sub-compact made by Mazda.)
Fuck a classroom. It’s all about what inspires you.