to tokyo

and then we were home

david riding in a car with anpanman and baikinman

when i look down i see impending doom

acutally it wasn't really that bad at all ( i don't think tokyo tower is as big as the CN tower)

Odieba from Tokyo Tower

The ever expansive Tokyo

we saw a grave yard from the tower

we were waiting to go to the top

tokyo tower is a big pink blob man

these are my little friends

people knit them small red caps

tokyo tower

on the way to tokyo tower there were flowers on the wall

a giraffe

the giraffe and the flowers

tokyo station

the bridge into the park and the things that are there

goodbye harajuku

beautiful blue

the man dressed as a carp

dusk

the emerald city

there were a lot of people in harajuku

akihabara is the electronic district and the place where everyone who loves manga goes

she reminds me of the maid cafes

there are no cars aloud on sundays on the street in akihabara

where they sell all the costumes in akihabara

the chandelier club

small streets in shibuya

it reminds me of a movie about when the future is grim and there are flying cars and everything is on fire

street art is my favorite kind of art

in shibuya there were girls dressed up as lollipopsollowed them around

but i was too shy to get a picture

eating bananas

Matsuri means Festival

they are for the gods

and ask that there is no illness or insects

they ask for a bountiful harvest

and the safety of our ancestors on their long trip home

where we ate sushi

in between

the fish market

may 2nd

A train ride to tokyo.
The first thing that happened was something horrible.
We got lost for about a zillion hours trying to find the guest house where we were staying.
Our bags were really heavy.
Our room was the size of one tatami mat and we had to share a futon, but they gave us two pillows.
We took the train to shinjuku and saw the lights by night. We saw the yakitori restaurants under the train tracks and they smelled so good and we saw the business men that sit in them. We stopped in a bar and david had a big beer and I had some shochu which i ordered without water not realizing that this amounts to the same as ordering a whisky on the rocks. I ordered a glass of water and mixed them together which made it much better. We walked around in the rain and took the train home to sleep and sleep.

may 3rd

We found the biggest fish market in japan but it was closed, but we still had some superlicious sushi.
On the way back we met a festival of men and woman carrying portable shrines.
In the park outside a temple they were selling bananas covered in sprinkles.
We walked around Shibuya and tried on sunglasses.
We met a nice boy that tried to talk to us in english and he told us where all the cool people go.
We had dinner at a restaurant where they were showing a western movie on the wall which seemed to fit the whole atmosphere. We shared a salad and fish and chips and rice. The salad had boiled eggs and avacodos and tomatos and crispy fried bits of a white japanese vegetable with holes in it that i don't know the name of and it was really good. The fish and chips were delicious as they always are. And the rice was fried rice which is always a good thing too. As I recall david had beer and i had a green tea shochu beverage that was quite good.
We decided to go out. I wanted to go to a place called WOMB and we got directions from the waitress with our handy dandy map given to us by the tokyo tourism people and david led us to where it should be. But it was not there. We walked through a maze of large houses that must have been the rich part of tokyo. We headed back the way we came. We bought saki and two beers at a convenience store. We saw some high school kids sitting in the parking lot drinking. We did the same. We sat, we drank, we got another bottle of saki, we watched people walk by and the watched us, we talked and we listened to music- David was the dj (I miss David as my personal dj), and I ran to the place across the street to go to the bathroom. When we had drank the last drop we asked the convenience store how to get to WOMB and made our way. We found it. We couldn't get in. The age is 20. No one ids except for clubs. David doesn't have fake id. All the clubs do it. We met a boy and a boy and a girl who were not from Japan. They were students studying Japanese. They were all 20 or older but the girl didn't have any id. Our plight bonded us and then they ditched us because we were hopeless. We walked around the area and sat to contemplate outside a love hotel where we saw a girl who was surely a prostitute leaving a man who was surely her appointment. Or maybe they were meeting, I can't quite remember. But I know we both knew what they were doing. There were a lot of love hotels there and a lot of men. We went back down to the main street and I went to the bathroom in Starbucks. We saw the boy and the girl again... they were making an id for the girl. It was late. We were tired. There was a second hand store that we went to that was in a building with empty corridors david remembered. We went there to see if we could sleep in one of them. We went there and the door was open. There were other people going in. We followed them upstairs. The store had turned into a club. There was music playing and people dancing and drinks to buy. We remembered the bar table from the morning and how we thought it was beautiful and the chandelier that made the place look like an old hotel bar room. It was luck. We bought our drinks and sat on chairs. There was an architect with broken english here with other architects from germany or some such place. He talked to me but I thought he was yucky so I made friends with a girl and her friends and we danced together. David talked to him and told him to dance with me so I ran to the bathroom. I remember watching the dj for a long time. I introduced david to my new friends. We sat on chairs as we watched everyone leave. The owner of the place was a pimp and had all these girls hanging around him. He was old. I remember that store had a really cute dog that I played with for a little bit. It was light by the time we left. It was the emptiest I have ever seen Japan. David said I kept laying down and going to sleep in the streets. We got to the station and got on the train and got to our stop and the bakery wasn't even open yet and david stopped at the convenience store to get some gross goods and we stumbled home and slept and slept. We slept and slept and we slept well past check out time and after they had knocked on our door for the second time I got up and said sorry and paid for another night. This is the story of the time I stayed out all night in Tokyo with my brother David.

may 4th

The next day we found the street that they close off on sundays in akihabara. There weren't as many people dressed up as I had hoped but there were some anime characters tottering around. Incidentally most of them were men dressed up as female characters and on that note I would like to say that there are a large amount of transvestites on japanese television, which is cool... they're really popular on the panel game shows.
We took the train to harajuku and walked around.
David was grumpy because he was tired and hungover.
We went to the park where all the cool people hang out but it was closed so I was sad.
There were a few lolitas sitting on the bridge and a man in a carp costume.
We took the train home and had big bowls of curry at Coco Curry. They were really big and we couldn't finish.
We went to bed.

may 5th

We woke up and it wasn't raining.
We took the train to tokyo station.
We walked along the streets that have all the stores where all the expensive things are.
We walked and walked and walked and I began to despair.
But then we saw Tokyo Tower.
We met the park and there was a temple and so many little statues with read shirts and windmills.
They looked like children. They looked like little buddhas.
They were brilliant.
I loved them.
They were a highlight.
Tokyo Tower was at the end of an avenue lined with trees that were great and sprawling.
We waited in a long line and ate a crepe rolled up with strawberries and ice cream.
I watched a clown making balloon animals for some children.
Some poeple behind us rescued our camera which was perched quite precariously.
We went up to the middle and looked out on Tokyo and on a clear day you can see Mt. Fuji, but it wasn't a clear day.
I sat on a small glass floor with some children and looked down.
We didn't go up to the top. The line was too long.
Near the bottem of the tower there was a little fair with Anpanman rides.
I bought you some Tokyo bananas from Tokyo Tower.
We walked to the station and stopped in a park where a man was playing the saxaphone to a tree.
We had to sit in the smoking car on the way back and it was gross.
We got back as the sun was setting.