Naked Woman, Naked Man, Where Did You Get That Nice Suntan?

Okay, first I want to say thank you to everyone who visits my blog. I have really been trying to step up the appearance and interface and even made some small design changes since yesterday, so I hope there are a few people out there enjoying my efforts.

It's like "Thanks", with a Jamaican accent.

And I want to tell you that I've started using this RSS business I always see on other people's blogs and websites, and I really like it. Specifically, I am using "Google Reader" because I figure they already have so much of my private info, I might as well just let them know what I read online too. Anywho, it is a really cool and easy way to keep up with news, and people's updates to their statuses and blogs. Like Twitter for people who can decide for themselves whether they'd like to commit to more than 140 characters worth of input. It is also a nice way to bypass filters on your work computer if they block "blog sites" like mine does. >=D
You can now, also subscribe to my blog on the right hand side of the page. Or if you have your own "blogger/blogspot" than you can just "follow" me. The numbers aren't important, but keeping people (who want to be) informed on my life is very important.

One selfish request I have is that you vote on my poll honestly (if you already did ↑TANKS again!) with whatever knowledge you have of my ability and personality. You guys are my lifeline, and I am "polling the audience" before my "Final Ansa'".

Cerebral Side Rant OVER.

Also, please let me know what you think of my writing, or the content, or improvements, or requests for what you'd like to hear more about. I've added a bunch of simple choices you can choose from to the bottom of every post, or you can comment in detail. Because my favorite hobby is finding new challenges and life experiences, maybe you've already tried something you can recommend to me and I will get back to you with a post on my experience once I've picked up your gauntlet. You can do that here, or by email, or on fb, but I would like to know what you like and don't like or just your reaction to reading these entries. It matters to me.

So... anyone recognize the song I stole my entry title from? It's by a little band called "The Specials". And I thought of it because of the words "NAKED MAN".

Yes, after 5 years in Hiroshima, I finally went to the 裸祭り or "Naked Festival". This could also easily qualify as "Crazy Japanese Stuff", although if you're familiar with Shinto beliefs it actually all made plenty of sense. Still, it was that typical half-ceremony/half-competition that you commonly see in Shinto Festivals that purposely creates chaos for the joy of spectators and entertainment of the gods. So I feel "purposely insane" is an accurate description.
So I hopped a Hiroshima AJET bus to Okayama Saturday afternoon, Feb. 19th. and started drinking. The reasons for drinking were two-fold. One, I'm surrounded by other JETs drinking, on a chartered bus, so what better time to drink? And two, I knew by the time we reached the temple in the evening, the majority of the Japanese people there would already be drunk. So four drinks and several hours in, we were quite late getting there, probably because of traffic, and I was feeling drunk and a little bored, so when we pulled into a rest stop I decided to strip down to the cheap fundoshi (loincloth) I had bought last Halloween as a goof with my friend and run a lap around the parking lot. Brace yourselves; it looked like this:

But at least I was recycling!

There was a big tour bus of old Japanese people who had a good laugh and a few even applauded my scantly clad jog in the cold night air. Getting back on the bus our driver said "You're early! We haven't gotten there yet!" and laughed.
Looking back it was the closest thing I've ever done to streaking, but I wasn't really worried because Japanese people are much less sensitive to nudity as communal baths, hot springs, and the festival we headed toward had already made abundantly clear.
Keep in mind, at this point, I wasn't even sure if I'd be able to participate in the festival itself because I needed to have a team of at least 4 people and I was the only one on our bus even remotely interested, so I reasoned this was my insurance that at least I could say I wasn't too shy, even if the festival didn't work out.

Back, dressed, and on the bus to Okayama, the traffic made us later still and i was sobering up, which always makes me feel tired. By the time we got to the shrine, I wasn't really feeling "in the mood" to get naked in the cold. We walked around the grounds and went up to the alter and prayed.

There were TONS of cops there!

No Flash

Flash

Every once in awhile groups of "naked" dudes would appear running around in their fundoshi. Why and from where to where were they running? It was seemingly arbitrary.

This group was carrying the winner's of the "naked boy" portion. Calm down, you can see they aren't really naked.

I lost my group in the crowds and while I ate a doner kebab (my favorite Euro-food; for whatever reason you can always find at a Japanese matsuri (festival),

This sign advertises Turkish cuisine as one of the world's "Top 3"

 
I called some other friends who i knew would be there that evening. Finally getting a hold of one he said, "Come to the changing room, you can hold my shit for me". Okay, I thought, why not? I started asking around and as I got closer and closer to the changing room I began to think, "Why would I sit on the sidelines and hold stuff for someone else doing it?!? No, I want to be a part of this!!"So when I found the place and was looking for him, i ran into more friends and said "Hey, um, can I be on your team?" to which they responded "HELL YEAH!" and it was all good times from there! I bought my fundoshi and tabi (split-toe shoes) for 1000 yen (12USD) and paid another 1000 for the participation fee, and before I knew it an old Japanese man was wrapping me in the longest piece of cloth I'd ever seen, and friends were handing me large bottles of sake!

Haha John, thanks for that.

Not so bad yeah? You can't see it, but my but is hanging out with a thick white cloth covering my crack like a Kurosawa samurai film! The funny thing is, I wasn't the least bit embarrassed, despite my bare ass!

No pictures after that point, sadly. I left my pockets in my clothing and we commenced running laps around the temple like the groups of men we'd seen before. We probably shouted "Washoi, Washoi!" a phrase meant to to liven up our spirits and the atmosphere of the matsuri. We fell into a huge line of fundoshi-clad men, all still shouting. as we approached the temple. Even inside the temple, we were locked in on a path of follow-the-leader and followed them onto a detour into a small and ancient pool of waist deep water which we then sloshed and splashed around in. Keep in mind, this is February and after 9PM, so the water was freezing!
The procession continued to a Buddhist temple on the same grounds of as the Shinto shrine (this is common for Japan where they don't feel the need to choose just one religion), and broke into single file to pray at the alter before reforming and running up into the main shrine's covered (for lack of a better word) porch! It was so strange because less than an hour before I had been to all these same places, fully dressed and snapping photos: look!

Here's the Temple pre-being full of naked men and spectators!

This is the "patio" area's second floor.

But the patio area was now jammed in tight with similarly naked men, and it took only a few minutes of being jammed together to make us dream of that cold pool of water we so foolishly hurried through before! After 40 minutes of feeling like we were at the front of a U2 concert, the waves of people pushing us to and fro, and watching out sweat evaporate and rise visibly to the second floor, they turned off all the lights and under a strobe of photographers flashes, everyone tried frantically to grab the 神木, basically many sticks like what you saw young boy carrying in the photo of "naked men" above. If your group secures one and makes it out of the temple grounds, you win a large sum of cash! But that alone would not entertain anyone, let alone GODS, so being an all-male festival, anyone still within the grounds is allowed to try and take the sticks from you by any means necessary! So this is what it looked like when the sticks were thrown out:

That's me in the red circle!

In the end, I never even SAW a stick, only swarms of people already fighting over them. So once things died down, I changed back into my normal clothing, said good night to the friends I had met there, and walked back to the bus with my Hiroshima crew, stopping to buy a few celebratory drinks for the long bus ride home. I got home at 3 AM with work the next day, so my head crashed hard onto my pillow and I slept blissfully unaware, that as awesome a week I had just experienced, the next week (this last week, as I type this) would be. I really want to tell you about that now, but I will save it til my next post...

Hokkaido Snow Festival AKA Ryan is a great host.

Okay, I have one hour to blog the world to you! Then I have to get back to finishing my correspondence course! ん。

First off, THANK YOU to everyone who participated in my first ever POLL! There will be more. The results are in and surprise surprise: NO ONE wants me to write short fiction :P That's fine, I just thought I'd throw it out there, I didn't have any ideas anyway. What I WILL be writing about is....



CRAZY JAPAN SHIT YOU'VE NEVER HEARD OF...probably.

First I have a two stories that will lead into that, so I will write them in chronological order.

Then, in true blog format, they will be arranged in "Most Recent" to "Oldest" order and you'll end up reading it all Tarentino style anyway. OH WELL!
So story #1 of 2 that leads into Crazy Shit You've Never Heard Of starts ...now:

Yeah... That's one of the most amazing things I've ever seen. Click for full screen!

Last week I went to the Hokkaido Snow Festival in Sapporo, not the beer, but the city the beer is named for. As it turns out, Sapporo is famous for a lot of great food: Scallops, Crab, Miso Ramen, anything dairy related (Hokkaido is Japan's number one source for dairy products, so everything from butter to ice cream is fresher and more delicious there), and my new love: "Soup Curry". More on that in a bit.

Not cold for Hokkaido, PLENTY cold for me!

So I arrived at the airport and ran from the plane where a baby two rows behind me had been wailing nonstop for the last 30 minutes (I cannot stress how much I hate the sound of crying children, but I guess no one *likes* it), and quickly found my way to the bus which took me all the way to my friend Ryan's house.
He was at work, but left his apartment open for me, and I went in, got settled, and played with his cats. After a nap I tried to figure out his shower, but it was impossible. I should have taken a photo, because it was basically a gas-powered hot water heater complete with pilot-light lighter built INSIDE the shower. In stead of blowing his house and myself top smithereens, I used some body spray and wandered around his neighborhood, ducking into the first ramen joint I found for lunch.

The portion was huge, but this was clearly not the gourmet Miso Ramen I was looking for...

Me and Hattchan

I went back to the house and played with Ryan's cats more, eventually getting up the nerve to turn on his intimidatingly huge gas heater and taking a nap with the kitties in the living room. Why so home bound? I was also getting over a a bad stomach-flu and had messed my foot up playing Ultimate frisbee the Sunday before, so walking hurt, I had zero energy, and I wanted to take it easy so I would get well enough to enjoy my trip, but surprisingly (or not), despite all of this, I was quite happy and enjoying just being on vacation and having the OPTION to take it slow.

OH! looking at this photo, I realize that I am skipping the story of renewing my passport in Osaka the day before, which was a story in itself, but I guess that can wait until I get my passport back.

So that evening Ryan came home, we caught up on each other's lives since we hadn't seen each other in person since we MET at Tokyo Orientation for new JETs a year and a half before, played some Tekken 5, then went upstairs to his neighbor's for a small laid back Nabe (hot-pot) dinner party. For all my pains and ailments, this was a  PERFECT first day.

Day 2, I woke up feeling MUCH better! Ryan got off work and took me to his favorite Indian restaurant. Why Indian food? Some connection to Hokkaido? No, because Indian food is fucking delicious. 'Nuff said!

These are what the streets looked like outside downtown.

Ryan went back to work I walked around downtown Sapporo. My goal was to visit the Ainu Museum. The Ainu, for those who don't know were an indigenous people to northern Japan who have all but been wiped out by the modern "Japanese" people, so in many ways their history is similar to America and our native tribes. Along the way, I visited this amazing park where their Prefectural office and their historic "Old Prefectural Office" is. You might not care about this, but since I work every day at an old dilapidated Prefectural office, it was interesting, and the old building was super cool and reminded me of "Old Main" at the U of A, but with a frozen lake and an adorable, giant, Japanese-style snowman STRAIGHT out of Mario 64! Check it out:

Panorama WIN!

Afterward I wandered around trying to find the Ainu Museum. I KNEW I was close, but for some reason all roads kept leading me back to the great, big, CLOSED, botanical garden. Eventually I started asking strangers on the street until I got the answer I feared: The museum was INSIDE the botanical garden, and therefore closed for the winter. Damn. After three-plus hours walking around my foot was killing me as well. That evening I knew I would meet up with Ryan and his girlfriend and their friends, so I ducked into a promising looking sports doctor's office and wound up getting electro-massage acupuncture! (If that sounds like some crazy Japan shit you've never heard of, read my older blog about it!)

I love this pic cuz it looks like he's DJing my foot :P

Feeling MUCH better ALL OVER, and with my foot taped up, I met up with everyone, we went to an izakaya for dinner and drinks, and afterword starting getting into the snow festival area, specifically, the ICE SCULPTURES! I will just show you this one, but there were SO MANY amazing ones and just the sheer size of each one and how many of them there were, all in the same place was very impressive!

Day three I met up with some friends from Hiroshima after finally going to a famous Miso Ramen restaurant for lunch:

Yeah, THAT's the good stuff. けやき

We walked all over the main snow festival area, got lots of great photos and saw tons of snow sculptures!

This was just one small section...

We had a great couple hours hanging out and looking at all the incredible designs, but my foot was once again killing me, so we parted ways and I went back for another round of acupuncture. It was there I found out about some crazy Japan shit I had never heard of, but that will be a story for another time (Mwuhuhahahaha!)...

So I invited all my friends to meet me afterward for dinner at a Soup Curry (Calyi?) restaurant. Everyone bailed and Ryan said "What do you wanna do?"
"EAT SOUP CURRY!" was my response and it was the best decision I made that day!

After a snowball filled walk, we were ready, but I had no idea what glory was about to ensue...

I couldn't know the treat I was in store for, but Ryan clearly knew he was granting a wish I was too naive to dare dream. Soup Curry is a delicious soup broth fill a mountain of delicious ingredients and Indian curry spices. I have no idea if such a thing exists in India, but this should be served EVERYWHERE (same goes for Doner Kebab...) Ryan got the broccoli and Maitake mushrooms, which were as succulent as Fillet Mignon.

Behold....

 Isn't it glorious? This was recommended to me by both Ryan and his S.African ALT neighbors, so I had to order the "Crispy chicken". It included a quail egg, pumpkin, eggplant, potato, bell pepper, carrot and gobo (burdock) root. I was in heaven.
After that we THOUGHT we'd meet my friends in town for drinks so we headed downtown. Turns out, no one has even STARTED eating dinner (at 9P.M.) so Ryan and I go to the bar to drink while we wait. Not to whine, but everyone flaked pretty hardcore on us, and only one person bothered to apologize, but i guess they were all in vacation mode, but so was I, and Ryan and I made the best of our time at this cool game and entertainment-themed bar before going back home.

As luck had it, we chose the exact right moment to go home, because we ran into four of Ryan's friends on the train and ended up going to karaoke until 3am! Basically, this trip was a series of unfortunate disasters (sick, maimed, locked out of a museum, and deserted) that led to great things making all of the bad shit mean nothing.

We spent the next morning sleeping off that night and headed back into town to enjoy the remaining bits of the Snow Festival I hadn't seen already. We had some delicious "hot cherry beer", German flavored almonds, more food, and laughed at people slipping and tripping on the ice.

Yeah...wait, what?

All in all and incredible journey right? But Hokkaido had one last surprise for me. As I waited for my plane to arrive, who should i see getting OFF the same plane but NINJA from Die Antwoord!!!
I talk about this guy so much, seeing him made me think of that book/movie "The Secret", like maybe I had attracted him to Japan. He smiled and said "Hey" and that was about all I could ask for since he was in the flow of people going toward the baggage claim on the other side of security. Seeing a rapper you like in the airport is just about the coolest way to end a trip. I guess I would have like to be sitting next to him on a flight, but I'd also constantly wonder if I was just bothering him, so this was perfect. If you don't know Ninja, watch this, and watch out for my next blog, where I meet more random famous people and really DO wonder if it's alright to schmooze with them so long! Until next time,
Ziegevergewaltiger!