I watched cloud shadows on the ocean out of the small oval
window of the plane as I flew to Osaka. I was sitting next to
a Chinese man who told me about bars in Tokyo that are 9
stories underground. I found myself attracted to him, and the
feelings seemed mutual. I enjoyed his company and remembered
his kind eyes.
I arrived in the city at night, hungry and tired, and wandered
out from the depths of the Tennoji train station onto a busy
road engulfed by towering skyscrapers. The air was permeated
with cigarette smoke and sweet mild sewage. It was raining
lightly, and the heat and humidity alchemized everything into
a rich perfume.
I walked down the street as floods of cars drove by on a busy
thorough-way, and I entered a convenience store carefully
inspecting rows of colourful pre-packaged food for something
vegetarian. I ended up selecting a couple of large sushi rolls
based on the images on the labels, and when I got outside I
eagerly tore one open and took a big bite. As I chewed, my
mouth filled up with the most horrid fumes of rotting
putrescence and I ran to a garbage bin and violently spit out
a glob of partially chewed food. I threw away the rest of the
roll and tried my luck with the second one. It tasted pretty
good, like sweet veggies, and the rice was perfectly cooked
and slightly gooey.
People were staring at me quite a lot, and I figured that it
was because I was a freaky looking gaijin, though
later on I realized that I was committing a huge social faux
pas by eating in public. I also later on realized that I had
unknowingly purchased a sushi roll made with natto, a
fermented tofu product that has the colour of decayed meat and
the consistency of a product I used in the film industry a lot
call 'Ultra Slime'.
I continued walking down into a residential neighbourhood
following the printed out directions I had to the guesthouse I
had booked. The streets became more narrow and labyrinthian,
and were creepily quiet. There were a lot of darkened wooden
store fronts, and I caught glimpses of the inside of izakiyas
through draped fabric. Lights flickered on neon business
signs, and I was guided by halos of illumination from drooping
old school street lights. Small residences with large plastic
bottles of water outside of the front doors lined the streets,
which were shrouded in dense tangles of telephone and electric
wires. I had no cell phone. I knew no Japanese. All of the
street signs were in hieroglyphs. And it was late. As I gazed
around me, I felt a bit like how Homer Simpson might feel
being plunked into the middle of a Phillip K. Dick novel.
I finally came upon the large wooden door of the Peace House
Showa, a cozy residential building with some large plants
outside. I was greeted by one of the friendly owners and shown
to the shared room I’d be sleeping in on a tatami mat on the
floor.
The milieux in the common room was very homey and people were
sprawled around, studying, eating, reading manga and chatting.
There was a large group of people seated on cushions around a
low table, and when I joined them I learned that most of them
were long term guests from other parts of Asia who were
immersing themselves in Japanese language and culture.
As I was going to sleep that night I realized that it was 6
months into 2012, and the world hadn't ended, as had been
predicted by many a new-age freakazoid.
When I was making tea for myself in the kitchen the next
morning, I met Molly, who was from Taiwan, and she had lived
in Vancouver for 4 years studying at UBC. She told me a lot
about her home country, and said that I should go there one
day, and that it had all the best parts of China and all the
best parts of Japan in one place. We decided to spend the day
together exploring Osaka.
Molly told me how the Chinese language evolved, and how in
Japan they used a lot of Chinese characters (kanji) and
then added the hiragana and katagana
alphabets. The characters inherited from the Chinese alphabet
have the same meanings, but are pronounced completely
differently. She also said that the written language was
simplified in China, and that in Taiwan they used an older
more complex forms of the characters.
She explained the difference between Buddhist temples and
Shinto shrines, and how they were often seen together. The
temples were larger buildings with Chinese style architecture,
and the small wooden Shinto shrines hearkened back to the
animistic Indigenous roots of the lands. We bowed and made
offerings with 5 cent coins at some of the many shrines that
were literally everywhere, and I felt very lucky to meet her
on my first day in Japan!
It was the Tanabata star festival that night, which is
inspired by the Qixi Festival in China, and both honour the
union of Vega and Altair (Orihime and Hikoboshi), two
constellations that only meet in the sky once a year on the
seventh day of the seventh lunar month.
There were large lanterns, strings of lights and coloured
streamers hanging all over the place near the temple where the
celebrations were, and dense crowds of people were weaving in
and out of each other. A lot of people were wearing yukatas,
which are like summer kimonos that aren't so heavy, as it was
extremely hot all day and all night. We ended up going to an
area where we wrote wishes on pieces of paper and hung them
from bamboo poles. After getting lost in the crowd and the
colours, we found a little place to eat Udon noodles.
On our way back to the guesthouse, we ended up on a street
with a lot of homeless people around; most of them were men,
and several of them had bright lobotomy scars on their heads.
Coming to Japan was last minute and emotionally fueled, and
I was still living in the shadow of an involuntary admission
to a mental hospital.
It’s hard to describe the kind of mania that inspires such
decisions. I always feel so lucid in the moment, and can find
some elaborate intellectual justification for the irrational
and hasty decisions I make; and then it takes quite a number
of emotional breakdowns for my ego to surrender to the fact
that I've betrayed my deeper intuitions, and have fallen into
a sinkhole of delusions.
The ups and down of bipolar/ptsd/schizophrenia, or whatever
the fuck I had or have or don’t have, is pretty overwhelming.
But it was distracting me from my inner pain. It’s like I
thought that if I kept running forward at full speed I’d smash
head first into something that would lift me out of my
darkness and despair: some friend, lover, scene, new hobby or
exciting adventure would wash away all of the years of
confusion and alienation. Or I could somehow burrow all of my
traumas deep into the crust of my psyche where they couldn’t
escape and try to ruin my life. But it became and endless
feedback loop. And everything that was fucking me up inside
became even more pronounced.
The idea of travel being an escape is an illusion, and it can
be shocking to come face to face with oneself. Most people
seem to cope by drinking a lot of alcohol, or staying
constantly busy and distracted; which is easy to do in Japan.
--
There was a bath house near the hostel and I started going
there every day, sometimes with others and sometimes by
myself. I loved going in and out of the hot and cold pools and
was surprised by how comfortable I felt being totally naked
with a bunch of strangers (though it was segregated by sex -
aside from children).
It was a bit seedy that's for sure, and one day I ran into a
woman there who had very long hair, a lean wiry body, and a
feisty outgoing personality. She also had several tattoos,
which were very taboo - so much so that many bath houses don’t
let you in if you have any. She was there with her son who
looked on the verge of puberty, and she told me that he was
half-Iranian and that she wanted him to learn English. She was
trying to introduce us, and him and I both felt very awkward
by the encounter, though I appreciated how brazen and
un-selfconscious she was.
When I was hanging out at the guesthouse that evening one of
the long-term guests from China showed up with a group of his
friends and they had some street food made from organ meats
that was specific to the neighbourhood. They offered me some,
and it was chewy and pungent and I couldn't get it down, but I
wanted to try it just so I could say that I did. He ended up
telling us how the neighbourhood we were in was one of the
last strongholds of the Yakuzas, and that they often went to
the bathhouse I was going to.
There was another guy hanging out at the table called
Gabrielle who was from Sweden and he sounded like Christopher
Walken when he spoke English. He had learned Japanese through
Skype over a two year period, and was speaking it quite
fluently with the other guests.
I started learning the basics:
itadakimasu - before eating, honouring the food
gochisosamadechita – after the meal, thanking for the
feast
onigiri – sushi or demon killer
--
On my fourth night at the guesthouse I went to a small
laundromat nearby to do my laundry. I put my stuff in the
washing machine and then decided to kill some time, so I
walked down the street for a few blocks, where I came upon a
row of small structures that were like tiny one-story doll
houses with barn style doors. Inside of each enclosure was a
ruby lipped young girl sitting motionless on the soles of her
feet with an older woman sitting next to her. Men were walking
by sizing them up, and one of the old women smiled at me and
motioned for me to come to her with a creepy outstretched
finger, saying “Hello”. I didn’t answer her and turned around
and went back to the laundromat.
There was a man in the laundromat with me and I sat across
from him in a chair silently waiting for my laundry. I closed
my eyes and zoned out. I had recently done a Vipassana in New
Zealand and was practicing "equanimity" and scanning my body,
but then I started to hear some strange sounds that grew
progressively louder. When I opened my eyes the man was
standing in front of me masturbating. He turned away and had
his ass hanging out, and then he grunted and ejaculated. He
started to do up his pants, and then I freaked the fuck out,
jumped up and started screaming “What the FUCK?!? what the
FUCK?!?.” I took out my camera and took his picture and we got
in to a shoving match. He body checked me out of his way,
grabbed his laundry and then started running down the street.
I chased after him and kept screaming in a fit of rage; and
even though I was in a densely populated residential area,
no-one came out from their homes to see what was up.
I finished up my laundry, and when I left I saw that there was
an elementary school across the street from the laundromat.
After arriving back at the guesthouse, I went up to my room
and silently cried into my pillow for a long time. My first
instinct was not to tell anyone because I knew that it was
cause tension and seriously disrupt my trip. I decided that I
would pretend it never happened.
NOT! I woke up in the morning and was very very angry and no
longer cared about the potential consequences of speaking up
about the experience. I was also like, fuck equanimity!
--
When I told the woman who ran the hostel what had happened to
me, her response was “I don’t know, I don't go to the
laundromat." Then she made an excuse to leave the room.
I wrote a family friend from Japan who lived in Canada. She
didn't refer to the incident directly but said “Kyla! Don't
talk to stranger or do something to entice”.
I told a White male friend back home and he burst out
laughing.
I told another Japanese friend and he responded, "Proof that
you're totally fucking hot."
A French expat who was staying at the hostel said that it was
normal to see men masturbate in certain countries, like South
America, and that I was being too sensitive. It was like ya
but it was only me and him in there and he was masturbating
at me; it’s not like I just happened upon some guy jerking
off, which did happen one time when I worked in construction
– which was pretty disgusting, but not traumatizing in the
same way that this was. Also, we were right next to a
fucking elementary school!?!
I posted my experiences on a Couchsurfing messageboard, and I
was scolded like a child for not "doing my research". I was
also called a "racist" and a "pervert"(?). A huge discussion
exploded, and the initial responses (mostly from men, both
local and international) was that I had brought it upon
myself, and was being culturally insensitive. Previous to my
postings, I was messaging with several people about meeting
up, but when I followed up with them again, none of them
responded.
Molly, who I'd been hanging out with every day was very
sympathetic, and so was a young man from Korea (Ewan) who I'd
met on the first night I was there. And after a couple of
days, different kinds of messages started to be posted on the
Couchsurfing forum - messages from other women who had had
similar experiences (and even worse).
I spoke to an Australian couple who were staying at the hostel
and the woman told me that she had been sexually assaulted at
a bar, by another woman. The woman came up from behind her and
grabbed her breasts and then told her, "oh they're so big and
so beautiful". She was super taken aback by it.
I started doing some research and uncovered more and more
incidences of foreign women being targeted for sexual abuse
and sexual harassment. And although Japan is often perceived
as one of the safest countries in the world to visit, people
didn't seem to take into account the safety of women - only
how nice it is that someone won't steal your Iphone. In one
guidebook I read (that was written by a man), the author even
suggested that it would be perfectly safe for a woman to
hitchhike alone in Japan.
But foreign women weren't the only ones being targeted for
sexual abuse and sexual harassment: there was a whole
underbelly of sexual abuse that was not taken seriously in
Japanese culture, and many women were suffering in silence. To
be fair, it's not taken seriously in Western countries most of
the time either, but this was on a whole other level.
I decided that I would go to the police to at least have a
record of the incident for statistics, knowing that pressing
any kind of charges would be unlikely. I also wanted to show
them the photos I had, and let them know that the man was
frequenting an area near an elementary school. Molly and Ewan
offered to come with me to the police station and translate.
We rode our bikes through a shopping district with vintage
neon signs and run down store fronts, and eventually come upon
an old cement building where the local police station was.
When we told several of the officers there what had happened,
they laughed nervously and rolled their eyes. They said that
unless there was physical evidence of some kind of attack that
they wouldn't do anything. They told me that in this kind of
incident I'm considered a "witness" rather than a "victim".
They asked how long I had been there and told me, “it’s not
illegal in Japan”.
--
Maybe you dear reader are wondering why would I go to Japan
with no knowledge of the country and put myself in such an
unsafe situation. And in retrospect, it probably wasn't a good
decision to bring so much chaos and upheaval in to my life.
But just cause I was confused and vulnerable doesn't mean I
deserved to be abused.
Masturbating and exposing yourself to a person without their
consent is sexual abuse.
But what what I supposed to do? No one was taking the
situation seriously.
I really didn't know if I should get on a plane and go home.
It was a difficult decision to make and I ruminated for 2
days, and I knew it wasn't going to be an easy time; but in
the end, I decided to stay in Japan for the whole 3 months of
my visitor visa as planned.
July 8
I had brought a skateboard with me, as I heard that you could
skateboard pretty much anywhere in Japan, and that it hadn't
been outlawed in the same way it had all over North America.
There weren't many skateparks, but I found one that was fairly
close to the hostel and decided to rent a bike and check it
out.
It was a 2.5 hour ride and I went through shopping arcades
(which were a sanctuary from the suffocating heat), alleyways,
and streets densely packed with residences - many having
jungles of potted plants outside. I bought drinks from rows of
vending machines and took out cash at a bank machine that
played the Peanuts theme song. I also kept seeing tons of
quaint little Shinto shrines, and would stop periodically and
practice my ritual offerings with 5 cent coins I had set aside
in a little pouch.
The skatepark was really cool and they had a rope hanging from
the ceiling to help with learning to drop-in. Punk music was
blasting, and there was a French guy working there who’d lived
in Japan for seven years. He was really honest about how
difficult it was to live there as a foreigner; and when I told
him what happened in the laundromat he wasn't surprised at
all. He told me that all of his friends regularly visited
prostitutes, and that it was just a normalized part of the
culture. He also said that he felt like he would never be
accepted there even though he now spoke fluent Japanese and
had fully immersed himself in the culture; yet he said that he
no longer felt at home in Europe.
Later on that night I went out with a few guys from England
and we ate a lot of convenience store food and got lost by the
zoo. They all ended up getting really really drunk and were
yelping and stumbling around, which is totally normal in
Europe and North America, but it seemed to pierce the quiet of
the silent streets - and anyone who we came across was giving
us dirty looks.
I ended up leaving the group and as I was headed back to the
guesthouse I came across a 24 hour supermarket, and I spent
over an hour in there checking out all of the displays. Then I
came across another late night market and explored in there..
seeking sanctuary within and exploring the bizarre, complex
and enticing depths of supermarkets became a regular thing
during my travels.
July 11 2013
I alienated myself a lot by expressing how upset I was by the
dude jerking off in the laundromat, but Molly was a true
friend to me; and our family friend ended up arranging for me
to stay with her daughter, Maki, near Nagai Park. She also
gave me a bunch of other contacts in different parts of Japan.
I probably should have contacted our family friend before I
left and things could have been way gentler when I arrived,
but I hated being so helpless and vulnerable and reliant upon
others. I'd always been so self sufficient and independent.
And also: a part of me was acting out and wanted the people
close to me to see how much I was hurting, and to see that I
could see how much they were hurting - and to stop drinking so
much, working so much, and blinding themselves to what we're
doing to the natural world. But it was futile, and everything
kept getting built up more and more: buildings and egos, and
the nightmare of civilization being brought to it's crescendo.
That first night I spent in Maki's small apartment I dreamt
that I tore off all my fingernails. It didn’t hurt.
Maki was very kind and accommodating and I was really thankful
for her hospitality, though I also felt right away like she
was very overworked and that it was inconvenient for me to be
there. It really wasn't fair of me to put myself on to her, as
she also seemed to have many struggles (yet she appeared to be
accepting life with a lot more grace and sensitivity that I
was). Though shortly after arriving I realized that my
passport was about to expire, so I had to stick around until I
got a new one. And in the end, we got along really well, and I
appreciated her very much.
--
The Nagai Park was a huge sprawl with an outdoor swimming
pool, natural history museum, ponds, 2 large indoor stadiums,
a running track, a temple, a playground, a cemetery, a museum
of natural history, botanical gardens, a subway station,
multiple playgrounds and several ice cream vending machines.
I'd often walk through the park to the station on the other
side so I could explore it's intricate expanses, with a loud
hum of locusts all throughout and mosquitoes jabbing at my
sweaty skin.
There were people out running, biking, sun tanning, playing
frisbee, practicing musical instruments, street dancing,
singing, walking their dogs, having picnics, and exercising
unselfconsciously in tight speedos and dayglo running shoes
with giant Rorschach sweat blotches on their backs. People
would set up canvases to paint alongside a small lake that was
near the botanical gardens, and I'd occasionally see other
skateboarders taking advantage of the unlimited access to
cement. The only thing I can compare it to in Vancouver is the
Queen Elizabeth park, which has: gardens, a tropical solarium,
tennis courts, a giant dancing water fountain, frisbee golf, a
restaurant; and a giant pool and sports stadium across the
street. But Nagai Park was on a whole other level.
One day I saw a procession from the temple (or ‘temple on
wheels’, as one of the men in the convoy called it), which was
a wooden temple with large squeaky wheels that was pulled by
Shinto practitioners who had ceremonial garb on that was
specific to each temple. I'd also often see people out in
beautiful, brightly coloured yukatas and kimonos.
There was a long, enclosed, tightly packed shopping arcade
near Maki's and I started going there nearly every day. My
favourite kiosk was run by a friendly elderly couple who were
selling delicious fermented food. They prepared everything in
big wooden tubs and had a sprawl of bulk veggies and miso to
choose from. It wasn't very common to see foreigners in the
area so many people would talk me me, and even though they
worked long hours they always seemed to have time for niceties
and small talk, and seemed genuinely engaged in our
interactions.
One day I happened upon fan dancers at the entrance, and Maki
later told me that it was all people who worked at the arcade,
and their extended family and friends. Even in such a densely
populated city, people found a sense of family and community
with each other.
In was summertime so there were omatsuris (festivals)
going on everywhere and one day when I walked through the
arcade and there was a huge family gathering with a mini
passenger train for the kids, makeshift carnival games,
balloons, transformer masks, blow up samurai swords, fishing
for guppies, giant snails and beetles being sold as pets, live
music, karaoke, lots of people dressed up in fancy kimonos;
and tons of food like takoyaki, okonomyaki, corn dogs, snow
cones, pineapple on a stick, cucumber on a stick, rice balls
dipped in syrup, custard filled fish wafers, ice cream, squid
on a stick and beer.
I was having constant breakdowns while I was there but was
never able to stay in my head for too long as there was so
much external stimulation to pull me out of my despair. And I
started to feel comforted by having people around me all of
the time.
I also became obsessed with capturing images of the highly
realistic food models I would see outside of restaurants:
Maki got a few days off so we went to Kobe together. On the
whole train ride out I was overcome by the density of the
building clusters that filled the landscape - massive hulking
Soviet-style monoliths all stacked up and sandwiched together,
obscuring all but tiny patches of green mountains in the
distance.
Our first stop was the Tezuka museum, an homage to Japan's
most famous Manga creator. The building had a rainbow glass
dome, giant manga library, and it felt like walking into a
comic book when you went inside.
Afterwards we went to the Chinatown in Kobe, bought artfully
crafted over-priced rice crackers, and ate some food from
street vendors. Maki ordered a gelatinous mass of goo that
once was a pigs ear, shrimp balls and duck pockets. I got some
fruit on a stick and some freshly seamed buns.
We wandered down to the shoreline and I bought some
multi-coloured psychedelic tights, and socks that you can wear
with flip-flops, and we happened upon a big market down by the
harbor with DJ’s, dancers, inline skaters, mascots and tons of
food kiosks. Women with double ponytails and giant platform
boots were selling okonomyaki pancakes and serving drinks out
of extraterrestrial looking cylinders of coloured iced teas.
Punk rock clown doll girls with balloon flowers on their shoes
made intricate coloured balloon animals; and the sun beat down
on the cement shoreline.
There were networks of overpasses over our heads; and some
massive boats, including a few large gaudy yachts, and a
couple of giant cruise ships, crowded around the waterline.
Music was blasting from giant speakers stacked on top each
other. A helicopter flew by overhead. Then a giant
militaristic raft came flying past the shore like a hovering
insect, heading out to sea with a half a dozen men on board.
One man stood at the back facing the dock, his bare chest open
and chiseled like a stone sculpture. Was he the overlord of
the concrete wonderland?
Maki was a great tour guide and when we got to Osaka and went
to a little restaurant inside of the train station and ate yuba
(filo looking tofu), konitaku (jellied potato) and
tofu with egg and green onions. Then we went downtown and had
banana sundaes and went on a giant Ferris wheel and got a view
of the urban landscape around us.
Maki worked at a sushi factory and worked 16 hours a day, 6
days a week, and this was typical for most jobs in Japan; so
she wanted to make the most out of of the little free time
that she had.
I woke up in the morning to the screeching rhythmic sounds of
locusts chirping in the trees framing Nagai park. When I
looked out the window to where all of the sounds seemed to be
coming from I couldn’t find their shapes. I remembered a dream
from the night before where I was decapitating a locust.
When I was walking through the park later on I saw a half dead
locust on the ground, hunched like a fallen crescent moon with
a prehistoric backside, arms twitching and body moving in slow
arched movements as they clung to their last moments of life.
July 20
I woke up early and rode my bike through the shopping
arcade and then cycled around Aki's neighbourhood. I often
felt like I was in a video game or on a space station. Yet
in amongst all of the industrialization were serene looking
temples and small forest groves with beautiful Shinto
shrines.
In the afternoon I took the train to Dotonburi to see the
Bunraku puppet theatre. The story was about demons try and
seduce a young weaver girl who turns out to be a warrior
boy/samurai master who slays demons. More demons come and
one turns out to be a giant spider monster.
The weaver girl gets kidnapped by a one-eyed shapeshifting
demon disguised as a hunter. Then he pretends to be her and
her parents come home, and discover the trick when they see
a long tail coming out from their daughter's backside. She
returns to her weaving, and then is roused once more for a
final battle that takes place on a clothesline, where she
(he) takes her true form as a samurai master and is joined
by another samurai master and they slay the spider demon
together. Or something like that.
All of the action took place in front of a dreamy 3d hand
painted back drop, and all of the puppet animators were men
so it sounded a bit silly when they did the women's voices.
There were also 5 dudes sitting cross legged playing
Japanese ukulele (?) as a soundtrack. It was super fucking
cool; and during the intermission I was checking out all of
the super fancy kimonos and hari-dos, and people were eating
in the theater, which interestingly, was socially
acceptable.
After I left I grabbed takoyaki tacos off the street, and
then went into a little restaurant and ate rice balls and
green tea cake. Then I checked out a small segment of a
Kabuki performance, which was also super fucking cool, yet
also had men
playing all of the roles, which also sounded quite silly.
The make-up was really incredible, and I remembered about a
documentary I had seen at the Vancouver Film Festival one
year called The
Written Face.
Dotonburi is one of the main touristy area in Osaka and it
felt like the archetypal Japan experience based on images
I'd seen in magazines.
When I came back in the evening I walked through Nagai
park, and a quarter moon dangled over my head. A group of
men wearing large, brightly coloured, expensive looking
running shoes were exercising together in defiance of the
crippling heat. Mosquitoes nipped at my ankles, and sweat
beads formed along the base of my back and neck.
I made an effort to give Maki a lot of space and would often
stay out in the evening when she would come home from work,
though we still ended up talking quite a lot and getting to
know each other. She had done a lot a traveling in Europe
and in China, staying with host families, and was planning
to visit her mom in Canada in the coming years. And even
though I was outwardly wild and rebellious, and was she more
quiet and reserved, we had similar internal landscapes.
July 20
I found out that there was a punk bar in Osaka so decided to
check out a show. The venue was called King Cobra Squat and
it was in "Ameri-mura" (America-town), which has a lot of
Western-style restaurants and stores selling pop cultural
paraphernalia.
I entered up several flights of stairs to the cramped
venue and there were punks around who looked as crusty as
anyone in East Van, and people were side-eyeing me
suspiciously or just acting like I was invisible - so I knew
I had found an authentic underground venue.
After a while I noticed that people were mostly staring at
my feet, and I realized that I was probably committing
another social faux pas by wearing flip flops. Maybe you
only wear flip flops inside of your house? Maybe they
thought it was crazy to wear flip flops to a punk show? But
it was hot as heck outside!
The first band was totally awesome with the bassist in the
centre of the stage, and he had most immaculate hair - a
fountain of thick black strands flowing down to his waist.
He was flanked by two guitar players who shared vocal
duties, and they both wore vintage leather jackets. They
were playing classic stripped down Ramones style punk; and
were yelping and jumping around. They were all streaming in
sweat and at one point the bassist tore through the audience
screaming and hopping around like a jack hammer, while the
vocalists barked in unison, and drums pounded. I was in the
back of the room bopping around, yet surprisingly, the
audience was completely unresponsive, and seemed utterly
disinterested.
In between bands I went to the bathroom and there were a
wall of people leading up to it who were hanging out looking
cool and some of them eyed me up, but no one said hello or
showed any hint of friendliness.
I headed outside and ended up hanging with a group of
awesome crusty punks who were splayed out on the pavement
smoking menthol cigarettes and drinking Ahahi beer. They
offered me some and I joined them for a while remembering
the good times before I took too much and fucked up my body
and mind and ended up a husk of a human.
They stayed outside partying and I headed back inside for
the 2nd band, which was an awesome and energetic all girl
punk band. The beer I drank left me light-headed and
impervious to the too-cool punks all around me, yet I
couldn't help reflecting on how superficial the rebellion of
punk rock can be at times, and how it has it's own form of
rigid conformity that can be even more oppressive that the
mainstream society is supposedly countering.
Tuesday
Even though I'm a half-ass skateboarder I had a lot of fun
using it as transport and it was really freeing to
skateboard everywhere I went without restrictions: arcades,
malls and down busy streets. Sometimes I was met with a few
scowls, but most people seemed to think it was pretty cool.
I ended skateboarding through a big shopping mall and
checking out a store that sold all kinds rice crackers,
including a family of rice cracker people. The women working
there freaked out when they saw me (as happened a lot when I
went wandering out of the touristy areas) and called out
their manager from the back room. He asked if he could use
my skateboard and was scooting around the very narrow aisles
of the tiny shop. It was super cute.
Another time I saw a man in his 50's or 60's wearing a Hello
Kitty backpack carrying a skateboard and we smiled at each
other as we passed each other in the street.
When I skateboarded around Hirakata park, some skater guys
yelled over to me waving and said “cool”, but I was too shy
to talk to them.
July 24
I went to the botanical gardens and the museum of natural
history:
