Gaijin Whorage II

So this is where the J-magic happens.

I was adjusting the sleeves on my lab coat in front of the bedroom's wall mirror--a large, opulent device performing its reflective duties in full view of the grand poster bed, and teal pool glow. While the director and crew went over shot placement and set up studio lights and camera booms, I casually fiddled with the soft pink dimmers, and browsed the sex toy catalog on the marble coffee table. It was all just too funny. As I was playing with the dimmers on the room light, pretending I was on the holodeck of some starship brothel, a portly audio tech wobbled in with a wireless mic in his hands, and a puzzled expression on his face.

So, we were shooting the experiment's re-enactment at a pool after all. It just so happened to be that the most feasible place in Osaka to shoot a pool scene, was in a typical Japanese love hotel.
Where people pay for a themed room in which to have sex.
It's a simple concept really. Take your lover / hooker / best friend's wife to the hotel, press the button of the room you want, slide your money under the opaque teller's window, and then head upstairs to pound the morning / afternoon / night away. Or just the hour--depending on how much money you think sex with...
[ please choose from the following: ] is worth.*

[A] ...somebody you just met
[B] ...somebody wearing a schoolgirl's uniform
[C] ...-out waking the entire neighborhood
[D] ...someone on a Hello Kitty-shaped bed

We were in the master suite on the roof. The most decadent of all rooms in this silly den of iniquity. The Flava-Flav royal honeymoon suite, towering above an entire hotel of lesser honeymoon suites. While this particular one had an "island resort" theme to it, I've since heard of other themes involving certain cartoon characters, hospitals, classrooms, medieval castles, pirate ships, the Taj Mahal, and other such exotic getaways.

The shallow pool lay under a massive, retractable moon roof, and ran the entire length of the suite, with full two-way windows into the bedroom, shower room, and adjacent sauna. How the camera crew planned to keep television audiences from seeing the palm trees and sandy beach slide show projected along the walls, I had no idea. But I wanted to believe they could. Just as I wanted to believe that the pool had been thoroughly flushed and refilled since its last "use." The professor Cussler stand-in seemed terribly concerned that props would be putting gel or syrup into the pool he'd soon be swimming in, to most faithfully recreate the experiment. So we're standing waist-deep in a pool attached to a suite in an Osaka hotel tailored towards having as much fantasy animal sex in as short a time as possible, and he's concerned about touching a little jello?? His wife must be a Japanese nun.
Silly me. Here, I was contracting an advanced strain of scabies just from the uncomfortable thought of what people had been doing a few hours before, in the very spot I had been instructed to leave my socks. I know how to say "I only touched the doorknob" in Japanese, but I've yet to learn "Does this look infected?" or "Will it fall off?" Sure, I had my lab coat, and all three of my lines memorized, but I still felt woefully unprepared.

Later that evening, while scrubbing my hands and face with toilet cleaner and burning my socks, I wondered how places like this managed to exist within a country globally reputed for being sexless and reserved. But maybe love hotels function for a different purpose--rather, not for killing a quick hour, or getting back at an old ex, but instead, a higher calling:

Little Shinichiro: "Mommy, where do babies come from?"
Mommy: "Well honey, when two people love each other very much, and are dressed up as pirates..."

So this is why the birth rate is so low? My grand J-train epiphany that night in front of the sink:
The trouble it takes to produce optimal circumstances required for copulation in Japan far outweighs the benefit. That, being a child.
Or something.

Aah shit, that wasn't very intelligent.




* Kindly feel free to insert** your own "bang for your buck" pun in the comments.

** Heh heh heh. "Insert."

Measuring academic pride in your man-boob cup size

So one of the teachers across the room just walked over to my desk and handed me this giant sheet* of strange translucent paper depicting the names of the current ranked sumo wrestlers. Apparently, one of the higher ranking wrestlers (16th place, is STILL like the fifteenth place loser) was an old graduate of ours. The Japanese really cling to this kind of glory--creating sensation from non-news(wrinkled gym bag + flattened nikuman + crying teenager = scandal?). In the grand scheme of the glory scavenger-hunt though, if your academia's brightest beacon of perserverence through the mental and physical teenage trial-by-fire, is a perfectly mediocre overweight wrestler, who graduated high school in 1998, you best fire the head of your student recruiting department. Anyway, don't get me wrong, I like fat, mostly-naked men (this is not to say, that I like men who are fat or naked, or even 'men', as a gender preference for that matter)** pushing and throwing each other around as much as the next guy, but only because it's hilarious when 400 pound whales repeatedly pimp slap each other in the face and neck. I wonder why he thought it was of any interest to me. Anyway, it looks kinda cool though. Maybe I'll write notes on it and hang it on my wall. Meh.

While forcing my protesting eyes open to watch enough shitty television for my next retarded video piece, I stumbled across a show that showcased the sumo and their daily routine as a wide load in a country of narrow alleys. One guy complained about his wardrobe (consisting of a bathrobe, and a bathrobe for wearing outside), and that he couldn't buy fashionable clothes. He alleviated this problem by buying designer wallets. An ass-load of designer wallets. Another guy ate through on average, around 110 fried yakitory (chicken on a damn stick) in one sitting at his favorite restuarant as his smoking hot wife sitting across from him, idly picked at a tiny bowl of rice that couldn't have held more than eight grains. I go to places like that too, but usually eat only four or five sticks, and then puke my gluttonous brains out from overindulging. Another guy had to get a special reservation from buffet owners before he was allowed to come. Undoubtedly to give the kitchen staff enough time to fill a cement mixer with vegetable oil, kill the fatted herd, and hide their firstborn.

I was thinking about shoving something down my throat and posting some Wikipedia regurgitation about sumo, to draw some conclusions about them, but you have fingers. Do it yourself.




* I have since learned it is called the "Banzuke," and it is not paper. It is printed on the recycled stomach skin of fallen sumo warriors.

** I am not gay. Get bent.

Dear ______, Sincerely, Me

This is my third time in Japan. Once in early 2004, again last summer, and then now. You want to know what stands out the most from all three visits?

The tv.
Yeah. Stupid Japanese television. Or rather, how incrediby and positively shitty it is. Three years, and you'd think it'd be different, with different shows, and different comedians. Nope. Still the same. Same damn comedians with their same damn jokes and elementary taglines and retarded facial expressions. Nothing has changed in three years, and it annoys me to high hell and back. It sucks, pure and simple, and I refuse to watch it. Oh, but right before I decided I was about to outright refuse to watch crappy Japanese tv, Al Gore "sensei" was on some stupid-ass variety show (one of thousands) last night. Funny seeing him on this side of the pond. Even funnier was the pathetic Japanese he poorly attempted, but I digress. An 'E' for effort. Is it just me or did he gain weight? Maybe it was just because he was standing next to the tiny J-trains...

So, yeah. I'm back in Japan. And the wonder is most definitely gone, but I was expecting that. I'm in a new city, with new people, and I'm jetlagged and krabby as hell. I wake up pissy every morning at 6 if I'm lucky. This weekend, I was tasked with re-orienting myself on a shitty old bicycle that will most certainly be the star of my upcoming video. And I don't have consistant internet access. Which is also annoying. Speaking of which, I'm putting together a little travel video this week so that I don't have to keep telling people what the general Okayama area is like. Just make 'em watch the video.

Anyway, there's no gaijin power this time around. Just raw survival. Or something. God, isn't it like 3 in the morning? Nope. 4:20 pm.

Damn.