Today's the day I left for Japan. This required me to wake up at 6 AM. Considering that usually when I see a clock say 6 AM, I take it as a sign I'm up a bit too late, this really sit too well with me. In any case, after eating the strange meal the day people call "breakfast" I headed over to the airport for a 14 hour flight.

This trip marked the first time I ever flew on a 747, and thus my first experience with in-flight movies. In-flight movies are exclusively limited to those which are suitable for all audiences as it turns out. In other words, they are absolute, unwatchable garbage. I'm talking movies starring Martin Lawrence and Jennifer Lopez here. Thankfully the sound was only there when wearing headphones, so I was able to ignore them and concentrate on my books... speaking of which, why did I only just find out that Orson Scott Card wrote a third Bean book?

The second thing I noticed about flying on a 747 was that they are seriously not designed for people with legs as long as mine. I was packed in like a sardine the whole flight, losing feeling in my feet pretty regularly, and to make matters worse the guy in front of me decided to put his seat back for almost the entire flight.

Shortly after landing, I heard the funniest little bit of engrish of the whole trip. "Ah, Norsewest!"

Next it was off to the shinkansen, AKA bullet train, for the long long ride up to Iwate Prefecture. I noticed the shinkansen seemed to have pressurized cabins and turbulence, much like the airplane it resembled. I also noticed someone wandering about with a cart of bentos, in every train, and on every train station. Evidently it's like Nurse Joy from Pokémon.

Bentos: Little boxes containing various types of food found in Japan. Some of the more interesting items in this one: A pickled eggplant which looked like a dark blue blue whale. A scallop, with eyes. Miso rice ball. A little flower made of fish paste. Fish paste is made from raw fish, but takes the form of weird clayish stuff in various colors. It's quite good.

Before reaching my cousin's apartment, we had to stop at the home of some friends of his. Thus I was introduced to the wonders of Northern Japanese Plumbing. Seemed rather Rupe Goldbergian to me. For example, to use my cousin's washing machine, one must go to the kitchen and turn on the water heater, run a hose from the shower to the washing machine to fill it with water, then later run a hose back from the washing machine to the bathtub to drain it, and so forth.

Other traditional bits of Japanese house trappings were just fine though. Tatamis, futons, paper walls, the whole shebang. Door frames were bothersomely low though.

I have seen almost no grass in this country. I spent the vast majority of my trip in a small town, but every single centimeter of it was paved over, except for the mountains which were too steep to build on, and absolutely covered in trees.

The next morning it was straight over to my cousin's house.

Fruit Drops: Remember that scene in Grave of the Fireflies where the little kids are starving to death, and they resort to pouring water into an empty tin of Fruit Drops? Not only do those fruit drops still exist in Japan, but the company making them has taken to sticking a picture of that scene on the side of them.

Mochi: Green tea is pretty darn pervasive in Japan. The concentrated form of it is often used to flavor icecream. It's good.

After sampling the various foodstuffs at the apartment, we went to a local Shinto shrine my cousin had been helping out, as they were holding a going away prayer ceremony for him. This was televised on the local news, so for the rest of the trip nearly everyone we met brought it up. In any case, yon ceremony involved everyone having a sip of sake, which doesn't taste like anything but burns your throat for those of you who were curious.

Upon returning to the apartment, I saw a suitimation fight scene taking place in the neighboring parking lot. Sure, they weren't levelling Tokyo, and they weren't 50 stories high, but I saw big rubber lizards fighting live on the streets of Japan!

A few thoughts on transportation: Cars drive on the left here, contrary to what flipped manga would have you believe. The bottom of buses are made of wood, and you pay when you get off, based on how far you went. Train ticketing is completely automated. You buy tickets from an ATM sort of thing, pass'em through automated turnstyles at both stops, and never come into contact with a human being. Presumably a computer keeps track of everything you're doing, but it seems disturbingly like an honor system.

Conveyor Belt Sushi: OK, so here's the deal. The sushi chef is standing in the middle of the room. Around him is a conveyor belt full of small plates of food. Around that is a bunch of booths. You sit down, when you see something that looks good, you grab it and eat it. The plates are color coded by price, so when you're done, they just count'em up and bill you. Nice.

That night, we went to a dinner party with my cousin's Aikido class. Some of the more interesting people included Elf Girl, who could just as easily be 15 or 50, and Hyperactive Man. Hyperactive man had lung cancer at one point. While hospitalized, he refused to stay in bed, wanting to run around and such. Upon recovery, he couldn't lift his left arm due to having several broken ribs while having a chunk of his lung surgically removed, so he just went to class and fought with his other arm.

Afterwards, karaoke at a place called Sound Life. It had some seriously strange decor. Overall, it had a 50s diner sort of thing going. Then one side of the room looked like someone's garage or basement, with various crates and boxes strewn about, and the other side looked like an arcade, featuring, amoung other things, a Johnny Mneumonic pinball machine. And a dog. The arbitrary video played in the background while someone sang the Sesame Street themesong for the record was girls in bikinis at the beach. Doesn't get much more inappropriate than that.

Vending machines are ALL PERVASIVE. There's an average of one per street corner no matter where you go. However, they aren't overpriced relative to stores, so you actually tend to make use of them. Plus they invariably have a row of standard beverages (although these rows occasionally contain Calpis, so that's getting lose with the term standard), a few teas, and then a full row and a half of coffee.

Over the course of my stay in Japan, I was helping my cousin ship everything in his apartment back to the U.S. Today, this involved loading 25kg of manga into my suitcase and lugging it two towns over for a discount shipping rate. This seems to have roughly tripled my muscle mass.

On the same trip, there was a lunch party for departing JETS. This consisted of about 100 people walking up and apologizing for forgetting my name and me explaining that I wasn't in the JET program to begin with. This was followed by a bit of an afterparty where much Farscape was watched. Huzzah.

Animal life here is exactly like animal life where I live. I wasn't expecting any sort of fierce jungle beasts or anything, but I'd figure there'd at least be a LITTLE regional variation to the birds and such. But nope. A seagull's a seagull's a seagull.

Calpis: Here we have a very strange tasting beverage. I tasted five distinct flavors: Milk, Cantaloupe, Citrus, Sweet, and Other. Other tasted like some sort of chemical used to clean chalk or something. Oh, and the ingredients list contains "active culture of milk vinegar." The creepiest thing about this stuff though is that it grows on you. I got myself off after one bottle before it became habit forming.

I had this strange beverage on the way to an aikido lesson. Speaking of aikido, some time on this trip, I saw a video of a major national aikido demonstration, wherein the grandson of the founder of the school did something most impressive. He stood there, facing one attacker with his back to the other, both of them charging forward with katanas. Within one second, both attackers were on their backs, with a sword held at each of their throats. Spiffy stuff that.

There's a dense layer of fog around the mountaintops around here. Periodically this will descend, and you will get just as wet as if it were raining, without water drops hitting you from any particular direction.

Filled a dumpster cleaning out a closet before going to yet another going away party.

Edamame: Boiled soy beans served in the pod. These suckers are good. Darn good. Here's a thought for you though. Soy beans are green, tofu is white, soy sauce is black. Something doesn't add up here.

Uni: Raw sea urchin roe. It tastes pretty much like it sounds. Really freaking nasty, and it's by far the slimiest thing I've ever ingested. Amazing what social pressure can do though, isn't it?

Shiokara: Raw squid pickled in its own guts. It tastes a whole lot better than it sounds, but it's still revolting.

Kurage: Jellyfish. Defying all logic, it is very crunchy.

By this point, I'm pretty well grounded on how parties go in Japan. Everyone goes to a restaurant and has various good type foods, and gets drunk, and gives speeches. THEN everyone heads over to a karaoke bar, and gets drunk and sings. THEN everyone heads out, and gets drunk, and has some ramen... although I keep missing out on that part as my host wants to sleep instead. The point here is that the nation as a whole seems to be an alcoholic.

Capsule toys are still going strong in Japan. My cousin is rather addicted to them too. Every time he saw those little spheres full of cheap plastic, a pitstop was made.

Halfway through my trip, I finally get to do some sight seeing. We went to see the giant statue of the goddess Kannon overlooking the harbor. It's in this little mini-village sorta place, with a bunch of restaurants and gift shops sprawled out make sure your hunger is replaced with tacky junk.

Soba: Soba is like ramen, but the noodles are made of wheat germ, and the broth is more or less just watered down soy sauce. It doesn't taste nearly as health foodish as you'd think, and is darn good.

The gift shops were really really tacky. They were also rather generic as gift shops go. There were daruma of various sizes, and those lucky cat things, on the same shelf as, like, fake rubber novelty butts. I was unimpressed.

Tea: Leaving one of these gift shops, we were offered some tea. This was some FREAKY TEA. It was bright green (while green tea is usually really brown orange or yellow), had some strange pellets in it, and tasted like it was made from sea water.

Getting closer to the statue, there was a variety of smaller shrines and temples, most of which involved dead babies. Here's my cousin's explanation of why: "According to buddhism you see, when babies die, they don't have enough karma of their own to get reincarnated, so first they have to go to a special Baby Hell. Baby Hell is a windswept lonely rocky land with no Mommy and some demons. To escape and get reincarnated, each baby has to pile up a thousand rocks in a stack. But this is really hard for babies, especially if they died because they were premature or deformed. Also the demons keep coming around and knocking down the rock piles. But there is one Bhuddist god called Jizo-saama, who besides being the god of travellers, also if you find a statue of him by the side of the road, and you put a red hat or scarf on it, Jizo will go to Baby Hell for you and help your baby pile up rocks while keeping the demons at bay."

The biggest sub-temple was said to contain some of the ashes of Bhudda. It also contained statues of various Bhuddist gods. Last I checked, Bhuddism shouldn't actually HAVE any gods, being that it's just following the teachings of Bhudda and all. Then there was the statue itself, also of a Bhuddist god(dess), but filled with statues of the Seven Lucky Gods, from shinto mythology.

On the way out of this place, I started humming "Seven Lucky Gods, they're magically religious!" at which point I promptly tripped and scraped my knees. Coincidence? Or the WRATH OF THE GODS? Personally, I attribute it to irony, as part of my theory that our existence is all just a work of fiction by a total hack. In any case, after then missing the visiting hours of the Iron and Steel Museum, it was off to grab a bite to eat at MOS Burger.

MOS Burger: This is a Japanese fast food chain on par with McDonald's. The first thing I got was a burger. It was like a standard fast food burger, but half normal size, on a whole grain bun, and the toppings were... different. Instead of tomato slices, there was lettuce. Instead of onions, there was lettuce. Instead of pickles, there was lettuce. Instead of ketchup there was lettuce. Instead of mustard, there was lettuce. So basically, more than half the height of the burger was lettuce. After that though, I got a Nan Taco, which is pretty much taco salad on the Indian equivalent of a pita.

After all that, we swung by a videogame/manga/video store. And yes, it did have all manner of vintage SNES games, and games that aren't out in this country, and I didn't really give a smurf, because I'm broke and I have every practically game I want for every system that can play imports. I had plenty of similar stops coming up in the future besides.

Astro Boy is ALSO everywhere. Posters of him coat the sides of buildings, appropriate or not. His themesong used in parades...

We went to a second hand store to dump off an old TV my cousin wasn't going to need anymore, and while we were there, I snagged myself a copy of Dragon Force 2. Huzzah! After that it was straight across the street for some more conveyor belt sushi, where my cousin decided to try some hoya. Iwate is the only part of Japan, possibly the only part of the world, where people eat hoya. Why? Because they're freaking sea squirts that's why. The look on his face was priceless.

Next we went on a boat tour of the local coastline. I'd throw this in a nice green box, but I actually have some pictures to show you, and I doubt you'd like the color contrast there. Anyway, as the boat was launching, and indeed for the duration of the tour, a flock of seagulls was following behind the boat, plucking crackers from the outstretched hands of tourists. There was also a hawk flying around which I found to be pretty nifty looking. Getting out a bit farther, we could see the Daikannon from the day before. Here's a closeup by the way. Then of course we had a nice little waterfall, and some more unique sights, like this tori gate on a rock, which a seagull decided to perch on, with one of those Seven Lucky Gods next to it. These were nifty too, but I don't like how this picture came out. There aren't a lot of other interesting pictures in this pile though, as the tour ended early due to the excessive fog that day. So, we cut our losses and headed over to the aforementioned Iron and Steel Museum.

So here's the story. The first modern style blast furnace in Japan was built in Kamaishi, my cousin's home town. There were a few interesting things to see in this museum, a lot of dull stuff too. Some of the stranger exhibits included a funky little hologram show, a wall of fossils, and a room full of various 3D puzzles.

Then it was back to the shrine I mentioned back on day 2 for a going away barbecue. In case I haven't made it clear, a lot of people were sorry to see my cousin leaving Japan here.

Yakisoba: Barbecued soba. I wasn't aware that pasta could be barbecued, but apparently it can. It's quite good in fact, although it's a bit greasy.

After downing that, and getting into a lovely little discussion on operating system preferences (Microsoft wa akuma doesn't need translating), we slipped off to a side area of the shrine featuring some very nice medieval relics. Numerous nifty swords, a naginata, and a couple sets of samurai armor. I got a couple pictures of the non-digital variety, but they weren't too keen on me snapping one of the armor someone died while wearing. Evidently Japanese ghosts don't like having their pictures taken.

On that note, on the trip home we stopped by a very cool graveyard built on a mountainside. It's been there long enough for a forest to have devoured a good chunk of it, and from the treeline you can see the whole town. I took three pictures here, only got one back, and it was just some funky little bubbles of light. Shame.

Do Not Eat. This is the label on these little moisture fighting packets found in a lot of food type boxes. Their effectiveness is rather limited though. As part of my cousin's pack rat habits, he had a huge pile of them, but they couldn't even absorb a cupful of water between them.

Today we headed over to Tono, a town which, unless I'm blending my stories together, is so far out in the mountains that it was cut off from the rest of the world until the 1950s. It has a lot of weird local folklore, an odd fascination with kappa, and it's home to the last sight seeing stop I had a chance to make in Iwate.

The 500 Disciples of Bhudda. A Bhuddist monk carved 500 faces into stones on a mountainside in the span of a single year, and that's something worth seeing. It isn't something worth talking about here though per se, because erosion and moss have left the sucker rather unimpressive today. The journey to see them was pretty impressive though, because this isn't a tourist trap. This is a bunch of moss covered rocks, on a mountainside, in the middle of a forest, which most people don't know exists. Kinda like Gumjiwamp now that I think about it. So anyway, first point here. The path to this place (or at least /a/ path, more on that later), was completely overgrown. There were some very old stairs, but trees were growing out of them and smacking me in the face. Which of course reminds me. It was raining on this little journey. A lot. I had a Hello Kitty umbrella, but that does nothing against soaking wet tree limbs smacking you in the face, so the bottom line is, I was completely drenched from head to toe. My shoes felt like wet sponges by the end of this. Along the way though was some very interesting wildlife. Lots of big funky looking worms and caterpillars, and a nice big poisonous snake to round out the menagerie of long freaky critters. And THEN there were the micro-frogs. Each adult frog was roughly 1 cm long. And there were a lot of them, all over. Rather tricky making sure I didn't step on any in fact. I thought these were some weird rare local oddity, but upon my return I was told the suckers live in the woods around here too. This area was also a national park, protecting an endangered species. Specifically bears. There were a lot of signs scattered about warning people about the various bears. I'm not generally worried about bear attacks, although it is rather unsettling that these signs had pictures of bears which seemed to be wearing bibs.

I can handle chopsticks fairly well I think, but random people keep coming up and forcing me to hold them properly. It goes without saying that when holding them properly, I can't use them.

Today started was a mad dash to get the last few massive boxes of stuff in the apartment packed up and shipped out. This wasn't done in time to catch a train down to Tokyo though, so there was plenty of time to head over to the house of a friend of my cousin's for lunch. We had a rather interesting discussion about the Japanese school system and how stressed out it leaves the kids. Psycho to start with or not, when an 8 year old decapitates 5 year old and leaves his head on a staircase for all to see, it's a sign that kids seriously aren't getting enough chances to blow off steam. School shootings bug me more though.

Pringles are a very common sight here. They're pretty much the only potato chips I see, although admittedly there are bags on lower shelves which probably contain chips I don't notice. There's also a competing brand of potato chips sold in tubes called Chip Star.

Down to Tokyo finally. After a long shinkansen ride, we checked into a hotel and headed off to wander the streets for a while. There was a truly impressive toy store, five floors of it, containing just about everything, from RPGs, to plush toys and action figures, to excessively accurate replica guns. There were even replicas of Meryl's derringers from Trigun, but I don't believe they had enough in stock to do any sort of proper cosplaying. Mainly though, we just sat around playing arcade games. We found a copy of Bubble Bobble which proceeded to eat most of my cousin's pocket change.

Heaven and Hell: After having our fill of the coin-op scene, we headed over to Shinjuku to eat at the Heaven and Hell restaurant. It had two floors, but heaven was closed that day. The decor was rather interesting on the hell floor. Narrow low ceilinged corridors, dripping candles everywhere, all sorts of twisted metal lining the walls, etc. Oh and then of course came the very strange bathrooms, but we won't get into that. The food wasn't really all that remarkable, aside from mentioning that the menu of an American Chinese restaurant doesn't have much in common with that of a Japanese Chinese restaurant.

I was warned many times before coming on this trip that people would attempt to speak to me in horribly mangled english. That didn't happen once. Every person who decided to speak english to me was quite honestly more understandable than I tend to be. The only point of confusion to be had was that the word cousin and the phrase "I run a few web sites" flat out didn't parse.

Spaghetti with Meat Sauce: Before I left, I felt compelled to try at least one Japanese attempt at western food, so for lunch I had some spaghetti with meat sauce, despite, nay, because of the warning I was given. Pasta sauce in Japan is composed of two primary ingredients. Ketchup, and oil. There's a few other things in there in trace amounts too mind you, but as they actually dump in a bottle of ketchup, there's way too much sugar, and it's rather lacking in things like salt, garlic, basil, etc. etc. This would probably have been the nastiest thing I ate on this trip if I didn't accept those dares to try uni and shiokara.

After that unappetizing airport lunch, it was time for the long plane ride home. I had the presence of mind to keep my laptop and GBA on hand this time, so I didn't have to deal with the in-flight movies... at least until the batteries ran out. All the little graphics in this rant I made on the plane, along with writing a good chunk of this.

Upon landing in Detroit though, the day went rather sour. It took forever to get my bag off the carousel, and while I was double checking that it was mine, I was picked up by customs, and forced to explain every single item I was carrying. Said items for the record included some rather dirty, and wet clothes thanks to the fact that line drying doesn't work in the rain, an extensive collection of Farscape tapes, a few Super Famicom games, and various cheesy souvenirs. The Farscape really made him curious. After this ordeal, I was sent upstairs, still holding my 30kg bag. After having to take my laptop out a second time to get through an X-ray, and going on a bit of a wild goose chase, I was told I had to take my bag up to the third floor, where the escalators didn't go, and recheck my bag. I got a bit more of a runaround there, along with some shock on behalf of the checkers that I was sent all the way up there. THEN of course, I had to go through another scanner, getting my laptop checked out a THIRD time, before finally getting to my connecting flight, three hours later. I intend to avoid setting foot in that airport ever again after all that.

Day 14, for the curious, didn't exist. I left on July 10th and got back on the 24th, but the international dateline and the rotation of the earth managed to arrange for me to only spend 12 nights in Japan.