Off to the Land of the Rising Sun
I am leaving for Tokyo in a couple of days and I am totally unprepared. I am not really a planner by nature and tend to just go with the flow when I travel but this time I feel especially discombobulated. My usual MO is to go somewhere with nothing other than things that I MAY want to do then once I get there I am free to do whatever I want. I think the fact that Tokyo is such a big city filled with people who mostly don’t speak any English is throwing me off a bit. I have been doing a little research on the internet and have learned a few things about the city. So I present to you a Google guided tour of how I am preparing for my week long trip to Japan (By the way, where the fuck was Google when I was in school? It is so easy getting information to slap together a couple page essay on the chief exports of Guatemala or the “Teapot Dome Scandal”. Back in the day getting this information would have taken me off to the library to have a circle jerk with Dewey and his wacky decimal system. Now everything is a click away as students can thoughtlessly suckle at the bountiful informational teat that is “the Google”.
First things first, I typed San Diego to Tokyo into Googlemaps to get an idea of how far I am going to be traveling. I chose to get the directions by car and this was actually what it suggested that I do:
| 16. | Kayak across the Pacific Ocean
Entering Hawaii
|
 |
2,756 m
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and
| 32. | Kayak across the Pacific Ocean
Entering Japan
|
|
3,879 mi
|
That would be a hell of a trip, but I think I am going to go ahead and stick with Delta Airlines… and why a Kayak? If I paddled that far in the ocean I may be mistaken for a juice-head once people finally caught sight of me in Tokyo.
Once I am there the next most important thing was entered into the search field “Bars in Tokyo”. Besides listing out most of the bars in the area pretty much every site talked about certain bars where non-Japanese speakers were not welcome or walking into the wrong Yakuza club can get you in trouble quickly. I immediately thought how fucked up that was but then I stepped back and thought about it from a foreigners perspective in the US. If there was some obvious looking visitor who did not speak a lick of English going into a random club or bar here trying to hand the waitress a card with instructions in English while sputtering out sentence fragments they would probably not be treated as anything other than an annoyance or ignored completely. From what I have seen the US is one of the worst place to visit if you can’t speak English. I can just picture some beleaguered tourist stumble into Wet Willies and get told to fuck off because the bleach blond bartender (alliteration!!) with hair extensions couldn’t understand what he was ordering. Ahhh, land of the brave, home of the free.
Getting to Japan – check, getting drunk there – check, now how about seeing some weird stuff? You better believe there is going to be some bizarre shit going on there and I can’t fucking wait. People watching is so much fun. Here is a little sampling of things I want to see based on what I found after typing “weird toyko sights” into “the Google”:
Guys married to anime pillows:
Chicks dressed up like french maids to go to the mall:
Mothra battling Godzilla?
If I even see one of those things while I am there I will consider the trip a success. Wish me well, at the very least it will provide some great fodder for the blog, and if I do get killed by a roving gang of Yakuza thugs then it goes without saying that you must avenge my death.
[...] After spending 13 hours in the Portland airport I finally arrived back from my trip to Japan. Honestly, it is not as culturally crazy as many people would lead you to believe. Don’t get me wrong, if you want to find craziness and fringe culture it is definitely there in abundance (just like every other major city) but at its core it is a city of pretty normal, friendly people. The friend who I was traveling with was there for work so I basically wandered around the city by myself for about 8 hours a day then came back and had dinner and drinks/watched her throw up from food poisoning after she got back from work each night… good times. Anyways, there are several things that I noticed that I never had heard about in all of my pre-trip research: [...]