Prelude to a Binge

A friend from work back in New York was getting married over my summer vacation, in Brazil. As soon as I got the invitation I scrambled like a madman to find an affordable flight to Sao Paulo but unfortunately I’m on the exact other corner of the planet. The only flights within my price range were 500 dollars more than I could afford anyway, and had a flight time of about 30 hours each way, with multiple stops. So once I had officially given up on Brazilian bride’s maids…sigh…I made a last minute effort to secure a reasonable vacation here in Japan.

I brought Daphney over and we secured a hotel for ourselves for two nights in Osaka. I will tell anyone who comes to Japan, never to use the internet to get hotel reservations, it serves no purpose. All you have to do in Japan is call the hotel and make a reservation, and in most big cities they’ll have an English speaker on staff. You don’t even need to give them a credit card number, let alone pay some kind of deposit.

A day later I sat alone in my apartment, scouring every Youth Hostel website the internet had to offer looking for a hostel in Tokyo during one of the three busiest tourist weeks in the year, 3 days before I would arrive. After about two hours I hadn’t found anything. However, I had already purchased a 400$ Shinkansen (bullet train) ticket to Tokyo, passing through Osaka for the two days we would stay there. I would be going to Tokyo solo, and Daphney had to work for those days anyway.

Eventually I found a hostel for 25 bucks a night for 3 out of the 4 nights I needed, so I called them up. The girl at the desk spoke very good English, and had a very cute name which has already eluded me because she turned out to be rather ghastly, and was summarily erased from the important part of the memory which stores information about potential mates. So I made a reservation for the 12th, 13th, and 15th of August. I asked if the hostel could help me find accommodation for the remaining night, and she said they could, and put me to the top of the list for a room, if there were any cancellations. I hung up satisfied and called back El Charro, who had invited me out to dinner with himself and some other gaijin at The Hat’s place.

El Charro, his girlfriend: a lovely girl you won’t have much chance to hear about through this blog, due to some unfortunate circumstances, who we’ll call Madam President, for some notorious games of Asshole; and El Charro’s best friend from San Francisco, who we’ll call Shawshank, because he’s already escaped from prison, and El Charro’s brother Princess Jesus, who was here for vacation all jumbled their way through my house and demanded a ride. (Nobody tell the AP style guide about this last “sentence”)

Having told them previously I would not be going anywhere until I found accommodation in Tokyo, I reversed my decision to stay away and acquiesced, even going so far as to offer my services as DD for the evening. We had food and plenty of booze to bring to The Hat’s which was a solid 20 minute walk from my apartment, so we loaded up into Yama and drove a little out of the way to a grocery store where we knew we could park. This will be important later, remember that the car is approximately 4 kilometers from my apartment.

We hike a few minutes to The Hat’s place, and settle down as the salad is being mixed and the pasta is almost ready. We were naturally a little over a half hour late. We’re pretty much late for every meeting or gathering outside of work in Japan. We were joined by the other American teacher, who we’ll call Zen, and the new French teacher, Champagne. We ate, and everyone else drank, and general frivolity was the order of the evening. Madam President was leaving the country soon, so she wanted to make the most of the night, and as soon as they showed a willingness to take a cab home, I began catching up, released from my DD burden. Beer cans were stacked, and sake glasses rang for the next hour or so, and the divine saucing ended. El Angel Solo, also knowing we wouldn’t have too many more opportunities together decided Karaoke was in order.

The only member of the crew steadfastly against our present course of action was El Charro, who through repeated drunken episodes and multiple sessions of passing out on the floor had decided paying exorbitant amounts to hang out with his friends was no longer worth his trouble, he’d been Karaoke’d out. He threatened to charge straight home by himself in a taxi rather than go to a fun filled drunken sing along. While the rest of the group was trying to cheer him into it, I began trying on hats, and some hilarious photos resulted on somebody’s camera, somewhere in Japan.

Eventually most of us moved on down the street, having made a compromise of first going to Yatai (outdoor ramen and beer tent) and then going to Karaoke. Once we got to Yatai we met El Jesus Aviendo and his gorgeous wife Whacko. Once we got to Yatai though, nothing really happened, everybody was still throwing hissy-fits and mulling around with nobody committing to either destination. I chased some girls down the street to pass the time, my inability to speak coherent Japanese or English may have been the cause of their not so subtle rebuttals.

Eventually most of the group strolled into Karaoke, and proceeded to a room upstairs. We settled into the usual grooves, and ordered a few drinks, although I wasn’t set to kill tonight, only stun. The typical playlist had morphed slightly and some new favorites were emerging into the lexicon. These included: Rock the Casbah, Mr. Roboto, Bulls on Parade, Bullet with Butterfly Wings, Plush, and No Rain respectively.

The two hours passed without much of a fuss, there were those of the group that were past the sanity point, while I was held pretty much in check for the evening, which is ironic given tomorrow’s mishap. We exited Karaoke, and El Angel Solo and Madam President escaped into their little Husseinesque spider-hole under the stairwell, which they had dubbed their “clubhouse.” The funny thing is that one side of the clubhouse is totally exposed to the windows facing the street, so it wasn’t so much a private sanctuary as a kind of gaijin zoo cage. Both girls being incessantly drunk started banging on the window as I approached. Madam President attempted to press her previously covered breasts provocatively against the window and blatantly exposed pretty much both entire breasts con nipple to the passersby.

The passersby included an old Japanese man who upon seeing an exposed breast had the curious reaction of crossing his arms and yelling “Dama!” (no) Why he reacted this way I’m not entirely sure, half the town pays exorbitant amounts to watch Russian strippers with less adequate mammaries a block away. It is to be expected that I am the only one with any memory of this incident happening in the group. However, I am the only member of the group publishing to the rest of humanity, or at least my parents who check the blog daily. (Thanks for the hits mom)

I walked home after having maybe 6 or 7 drinks over the course of about the same amount of hours, I was by no means drunk, or incapacitated. So knowing I had to be at school around 11:30, I set my alarm for 10:30 AM and fell into a fitful slumber.

I woke up to the sound of someone opening the door and walking into my apartment, I jumped up in a spasm wearing only boxers and saw the husband of my boss charging into the apartment. He asked me if he knew if I had a class in a half hour, I shook my head and ran over to the wall above my desk, where I had clearly marked the class on my calendar and had a large note 3 inches above my computer screen reminding me of the extra kindergarten class I was supposed to teach in a half hour. I apologized for again having him have to come over to my apartment after I’d screwed up and he quickly left, seeing as I was visibly upset, and wearing only boxers.

In the euphoria of the day before an amazing vacation to two entirely new cities, and the success in staking out a claim at a cheap hostel in Tokyo last night, I hadn’t bothered to once look up at my wall to notice the giant note that I was supposed to teach an irregularly scheduled kindergarten class today. My boss had no doubt called to remind me, but ironically in following a memo posted at the school a few days earlier my phone was on “manner mode” and thus rang in silence while she called and left three messages in the preceeding half hour.

I quickly got dressed, brushed my teeth, and gargled with half of gallon of Listerine to get rid of any lingering alcohol stench on my breath, and peacefully, quietly walked out to my parking space to drive to the kindergarten. Now, do you remember where I parked my car last night? That’s right, 4 kilometers away. The stream of expletives I unleashed at that moment in time was Homeric in it’s prolific length. Birds and cicadas were silenced and flew to a new location, traffic came to a halt, and mothers covered their children’s ears.

I went into a dead sprint. I sprinted into town, tried to flag down 4 cabs unsuccessfully and continued sprinting, in the 90% humidity, and the 100 degree heat. I sprinted 4 kilometers in a little less than 15 minutes. I was going on pure fuck-up pride/shame adrenaline at that point. I ran into the supermarket the car was parked at, grabbed a 100 Yen bottle of water and dropped the hundred yen on the counter without stopping for the woman to even scan it.

I then blasted the a/c in the car while I chugged the water to make up for the massive amounts of sweat coating my entire body. I had to stop into the office to pick up my kindergarten supplies, I strolled in looking like I literally had just taken my first step out of the shower towards a towel. I stopped to profusely apologize to my boss and promise her she could chide me on the way back from class.

I arrived something like 20 minutes late to the class, and bullshitted three separate twenty minute lessons. It realistically made no difference to either the kids, or the teachers at the school, but in Japan it does look pretty bad. Sometime in the next few months we will get into why I didn’t really have anymore room to screw up with forgetting or being late or missing classes.

When I got back to the office, the boss was disappointed but understanding when I explained that after having 3 drinks (yeah, maybe she believed that) that I would have been perfectly legal and capable of driving the car home, but that I respected Japanese laws (zero tolerance, 1 beer = 300,000 yen fine) and that because Madam President was going home I wanted to share a drink with her and send her off in a good fashion, but admitted it was 100% my fault for forgetting the class. She charged me 3,000 Yen for being late to buy sweets for the teachers to apologize during the next class. This is ridiculous and exorbitant considering that I only make 2,500 Yen and hour for teaching, but vacation started tomorrow and I didn’t mind throwing her a bone once and a while, so she could maintain her ideas that she had rigid control measures over all of her employees.

The next day I went to Osaka, and did not come back to my hotel before dawn for 7 straight nights of going out. Stay tuned blog monkeys.

Wheat Out

RIC...El Angel Solo

No, it’s not a misprint, it stands for Rest In Canada.

Well, our fine young Canadian friend El Angel Solo, Angela, has departed this country to go home to Toronto. That’s in Canada, stay with me people. We could do naught but send her away in an orgy of binge drinking, ugh, on a Wednesday.

The evening began as these evenings generally do, at a nomehodai (all you can drink for two hours) restaurant. 14 people, a mix of gaijin and nihonjin sat around a huge table swapping embarrassing stories, most of which didn't revolve around El Charro and I. This was comforting. The evening started simply enough. We all ordered drinks, and talked away an hour or so, salad, Vietnamese spring rolls, fondue, roast chicken and other various dishes were served. I planned on drinking but I didn’t plan on getting totally blasted, until El Jesus Aviendo rolled onto the scene and decided he wanted to make up his two hours of all you can drink, since he arrived late. We sat at the bar.


We ordered a shot of whiskey.
We ordered another shot of whiskey.
We ordered another shot of whiskey.

At this point we ran out of our chasers, vodka tonic, and whiskey and coke, respectively. So we refilled our chasers, and asked what the bartenders name was. He was a sprightly chap with fantastic hair, missing one of his front teeth. I don’t remember his exact name, but it was something like Shoita.

We instinctively and simultaneously named him Showtime, which, ironically enough was my nickname at Mather Street. Showtime seems happy with his nickname, we are happy showtime likes his nickname, but would have continued using it even if he didn’t approve.

We order another shot of whiskey.

This probably would have been the end of our binge, although since we had drunk the shots in less than a half hour we weren’t really feeling it yet. Then another Gaijin who has his own school in the area, who we’ll call “The Hat,” came over and said, “Hey, you guys doin’ shots of whiskey?”

We order another shot of whiskey.

Our nomehodai was running short at this point, we didn’t have too much time left, and then another Gaijin, the one who is replacing El Angel Solo at SES, who we’ll call “Pretty McPolo,” came over and said, “So are you guys drinking shots?”

We order another shot of whiskey.

This is the first shot that does not go down smoothly. The gag reflex hasn’t kicked in, but my body is in the first stages of denial. At this point, El Charro, who is noticeably intoxicated comes over to the bar and says, “Gimme a shot of F!#$ing Whiskey!”

El Charro does not take whiskey well. This is evidenced by his behavior on the night of La Escuelito Corriendo’s birthday party. We yell at Showtime for the last time.

We order another shot of whiskey.

El Charro puts his glass down on the table, his eyes bug out a little bit, and he immediately sprints toward the bathroom. He does not handle his whiskey well. The nomehodai has officially ended, thank god, and I don’t remember anything that happened from the bar stool to leaving the restaurant, but it has been confirmed by multiple sources that El Jesus Aviendo put his head down and proceeded to vomit at the bar, on the floor next to his stool. He then apparently got up and vomited somewhere else.

The next thing I remember we entered Karaoke without him. We sat down, ordered drinks, qued up a few songs, and then my body rejected my whiskey. I stood up, steamrolled over 3 or 4 people, ran to the bathroom, and lost my proverbial lunch. I didn’t so much make a mess though, and cleaned up the toilet area before I stood up. I washed off my face, took my shirt off, and walked quietly back to the Karaoke room.

I then tossed my shirt in a corner, sat back down in my seat, and passed out for an hour and a half. Everyone apparently had a good time around me. I woke up for some reason during “Everything Zen” and grabbed a microphone and started singing again. Since the entire process of waking up and grabbing the mic took around 2/3 of a second, the audience was surprised. Than El Angel Solo requested one last Steve Wheat Pearl Jam rendition which I happily supplied and Karaoke was over and I went home with a cute girl from a small island south of Japan.

We took a shower, and despite the fact that the mind was willing, my body was not conducive to procreation at that particular juncture, and I fell asleep sometime around 6. I had class at 10 the next morning. Thanks to the girl I managed to wake up, one of my Japanese friends who was instructed to call my phone to make sure I woke up, called 45 times. He literally called 45 god damn times, and I didn’t hear the phone ring once. But I made it, everything was ok, the world was in order, and El Angel Solo was on a plane sometime Thursday night.

Falling off the crazy tree...hitting every branch on the way down

Well it has finally come to it, after thousands of words and dozens of picture less pages, Golden Week, and the best week on anti-biotics ever is finally drawing to a close. It ends with the craziest story of all, the volcanic mountain top rave, a 48 hour bender in the midst of a sprawling campground. Naturally all of the details won’t be discerned but the bulk of the insanity is describable without revealing the total disregard of societal norms, and moderation. And without further ado…

Yama burned up the dark hill of some country road as fast as its tiny little engine could carry two full sized gaijin (whiteys) and a weeks worth of paraphernalia. The speakers blasted psytrance in the form of the wildly discordant Cities of the Future. Emotions were running as high as they’d been for the entire trip, the party we’ve looked forward to for almost two months was a few kilometers away. A few kilometers of dark turns, cleaved into mountain fuming with sulfurous gases, the Earth’s colossal force slumbering for the time being, somewhere below the surface. We were told that asthmatics were advised not to even enter the region, as the air impurities could catalyze an attack.

We arrived a mere half hour after the music started but the initial two parking lots were already filled to the brim, and two grungy looking twenty somethings with light-rods led our two-door monster to a parking space on the grass down the hill from the ticket table.

I shouldered a backpack filled with some essential goodies and we headed up toward the party. At the ticket table we ran into a tiny snag, as they wanted to charge us extra because El Charro had forgotten the flyer we got at the last rave. However, the gathering’s maitre de of bump in the night, Hiro, was the man who gave me the flyer in the first place, and he remembered the only gaijin at the last rave, so after having a brief conversation with the girlfriend of one of the DJ’s we slowly lumbered up the next hill toward the rhythmic bass thuds ahead. This is a picture of me under the massive lumber arch which signalled the entrance to the campground some hours later in the night.

After about ten minutes of walking we began to see signs of life, not bodies twisting to the rhythmic thumps of the music, but arms rhythmically beating tent stakes into the ground, dozens of tents already setup and dozens more everywhere in the woods taking form as we walked past. Then next to a small bathroom the trail came to choke point before we entered a massive clearing, over a football field in width and at least twice that in length.

In the area around the back where we were standing and the right and left sides of this field were various distributors of such paltry, unimportant goods as food, water, and beer. Straight ahead of us, about 50 yards away, was a massive circular depression ringed with stone, where a half dozen Japanese guys were busy constructing what looked like the beginnings of a fire that might last twelve hours; which, consequently, it almost did, the fire burned well past dawn and nearly to noon. A short distance ahead of the fire pit was a small teepee which housed the mixing board and various technological knick-knacks, in front of that in a space about 50 meters long and twice as wide, about 100 Japanese ravers were getting their dance on. At the far end of the field, was a massive teepee under which the DJs of the evening would take turns spinning there wares to the general amusement of their adoring public.

It was still dusk when we had finished our initial exploration of our surroundings and we sat on the stone as they set the fire alight. Despite the fact that hard psy-trance was booming so loud it seemed like it must carry the entire 20 kilometer distance to the mouth of the mountain, the fire somehow lent the whole scene a sense of tranquility, despite the fact that a fire is essentially partially bottled chaos to begin with.
El Charro and I sat there with the initial beer in our hands before the onslaught of heavier fare when the scene was comically broken by a tall, long haired Japanese man dancing around the fire clad only in a blue bikini. The surreal nature of the gathering was starting to take form.

Through Hiro, the organizer, and the girl we spoke with at the entrance we began to make a few new Japanese raver friends, who set us on the course to satiate our more metaphysical appetites. Darkness had completely fallen, around 11 PM it seemed like most of the tents had been setup and the dance floor and fire pit began to accumulate fresh bodies. At this point it was hard not to feel like an outsider, considering we were the only gaijin in a group of about 400 people circulating the party. As the storm clouds of the mind began to metathesize in the blood the “dance floor” called.

El Charro and I then separated for periodic amounts of time, to dance, wander, or socialize as we saw fit. I dropped my bag in a corner somewhere, because it’s Japan, I could have left it in a stranger’s car and they would have put it on the ground before they drove off. Due to our complete lack of communicative skills in Japanese, the party became an internal, self-conscious, but still very fun trip for a few hours. That is, until a boat load of gaijin came onto the scene. A motley crew of Americans, Brits, a Frenchie, an Irish guy, and a Japanese girl fluent in English floated into the party. As this point we had people to socialize with, which made for much better transitions from “dancing” to sitting around the fire and talking.

The featured DJ of the party was an American born half-Japanese guy from San Francisco, and we were introduced by Hiro and quickly settled into a light hearted semi-circle so that we could pass the conversation along, to the right. The party was more or less your garden variety mountaintop Japanese rave during the night. There was one incredible visually stimulating aspect of this party though, the DJ’s were spinning at the edge of the clearing, and as such the area directly behind them was deep forest, and a dense tree line. Projected onto the tree-line behind the DJ’s was a psychedelic visualizer, something akin to your windows media player visuals, just a lot better, and it was the size of a movie screen projected onto the black foliage twenty feet in the air. Here's a blurry picture of it which does a horrible job of explaining it.

As the fire began its ultimate decay, having already burned almost all of its fuel, the sky began to enter that coquettish state of not knowing whether it was coming or going, whether the night was still hungering for darkness or ready to concede to something as simple as a floating ball of nuclear explosions. It was at this time that our surroundings were more accurately revealed to us. We stood upon a plateau maybe two-thirds of the way up the mountain, and although most of the clearing was ringed by the hilly slope of the mountain itself, or trees, one side was completely covered in beautiful flowers, and I could see an overwhelming distance across a valley to the tops of the other mountains in the range.

The music took no notice of the change in setting however, and continued blasting as if the party had started an hour ago. It was at this point, sitting around the stone belt the circled the fire, that a Japanese guy with long hair, clad only in leather pants, sandals, and a blue cape, danced over to me with a bottle of Jose Cuervo in one hand, and a joint in the other. Breakfast was served.

After slathering on some sunscreen in preparation for the onslaught of the summer sun I decided to go for a hike. Well it didn’t exactly happen like that, the hike more or less found me, as I was sitting with a notebook on a bridge near the parking lot. I noticed the bridge led to a path that went up the mountain, at the time there really wasn’t a choice.

The hike started with a narrow passageway like something out of an Indiana Jones movie, the rocky path was full of small stones that rolled away down the mountain as I walked, and I was completely encapsulated in a swath of bamboo, above me and to both sides. Severed stalks of bamboo jutted across the path at about eye level and the sunlight shining down on the leaves illuminated a fog of dust particles that made this area something like walking through a kind of ethereal curtain, solid and visible, but having no substance or resistance to my movement, like the gateway to a different world.

As I climbed a little higher, the intensity of the music began to diminish, and I was confronted with my first choice. I had come to a fork in the trail, and there was a rather interesting sign which looked like some kind of warning. Naturally I straddled the chain across the trail to the right and took the path less travelled, because the sign could have said nude women, and free cheeseburgers, I mean one can never be sure of these things. However, the sign apparently was a warning and after walking for a little while I was forced to retreat from a horde of naked women wielding delicious cheeseburgers. So I pressed on over the “real” trail.

The footpath which was previously concrete, broke, shattered and disappeared further up the trail, and then I came to a small clearing where a forgotten picnic table was conveniently placed, I assumed for sitting, and so I did. I once again opened my notebook and began to scribble as tiny red wood mites crawled along the white pages. The contents of said notebook are not to be revealed until my death, to what I assume can only be a legion of loyal followers. Sitting at the table the sounds of the mountain equaled the volume of the now distant music.

A short to long time later I stood up, left the table and continued climbing somewhat vertically along the side of the mountain, suddenly their was a roaring sound above my head that I couldn’t quite place. Then I saw it. The biggest god damned bumblebee any man on Earth has ever seen, its wings sounded like a helicopter, and it must have measured four inches long. The more I stared at it though, the odder it became, it wasn’t just massive, but the proportions of its being seemed wholly impossible. It would be akin to staring at a cruise ship hovering above you with nothing more than helicopter blades holding it aloft.

After the giant bug finally flew away, I realized I had climbed to a point where I could not hear the music anymore, near the top of the mountain. I sat down and scribbled some more into the journal, and remarked upon the irony of my situation. My goal had been to climb to the point where I couldn’t hear the music anymore, and I had achieved my goal, but now the problem was, that I couldn’t hear the music anymore.

However, after about twenty minutes of walking I had circled back to the original side of the mountain, and the music was ten times louder than before. I was almost directly over the camp, some thousand or so feet above, give or take a few hundred feet, to the point where the people weren’t really that visible, just the outlines of biggest features, and a mass of dancing dots somewhere near the middle. I turned around to go back down to the party. The only thing that happened on the way down is that I acquired a nifty little bamboo walking stick.

When I got back to the party I was in a fantastic mood, like a flower child coming back from something probably very much like this party, with different music. I danced around, I stole a soccer ball and tooled around with that, I bought about 6 bottles of water and drained them, and carried on with general frivolity for the better part of an hour, until I became rather bored with unbridled happiness and decided I was hungry. There was an attractive Japanese hippy chick making food of some kind or other near the back of the field, so I strolled over to her tent and got overcharged for some delicious concoction of what looked like couscous with some spices and fresh tomatoes and cucumbers and other non-meat items. As I hadn’t eaten in about 14 hours, it tasted pretty damn good.


It was sometime in the next couple of hours that we decided we needed some kind of sleep, we’d been up a solid 24 to 26 hours already, and the music was not letting up in intensity, which was beginning to piss almost all of the white people off. What I’ve been told by El Charro, whose experience in these arena’s dwarfs my own, is that there is generally a much lighter set when the sun comes up, and not the continued hard pounding bass of the midnight hours.

The other gaijin (whitey’s) were camped out at the “hippy festival” somewhere near here. I have no idea what the hippy festival was, but by their description it was quieter, and we could crash in their tents for a little while, so we made our departure from the scene. We drove about 20 minutes, down the mountain, along some country roads, and eventually came to the remnants of the hippy festival. A French guy, Irish guy, 2 British girls, and a Japanese girl blasted off in a 60’s looking VW hippy van ahead of us, but we somehow arrived way before they did.

We hung out with a few American jets at the hippy festival grounds, which was slightly less auspicious than the psytrance rave, basically just a big field with some huge teepees built hither and thither, and most of the gathering had already cleared out. One of the Jets (people teaching in Japan for the JET program) happened to have a football with him, and I immediately goaded him into throwing it around with me for about a half hour. I hadn’t seen an American football since I left the states.

We had blankets, so we decided to join our new friends at Denny’s for some much needed diner fare. I don’t think anyone had eaten anything of substance in at least 12 hours. Before we left though, I saw something that may possibly be burned into my memory until I die.

As we got into our cars and turned around to leave, a white VW van, rumbled into site, going way to fast, spitting mud in all directions, and nearly tipping over as it came onto the grass. It was also blasting Rage Against the Machine at ear-splitting volumes. The motley, international group of strung out ravers plowed their way over to their tent, and we stopped and rolled the window down. I was talking to the tall, blonde British girl, who seemed quite attractive the night before, but now looked so strung out from various activities last night that she looked quasi-monstrous. She was making us promise to come back after the meal, which we had every intention of doing, and as we were talking, “Killing in the Name of” peaked. I started honking the horn in synch with the bass line and the last thing I will remember of this trip was as the girl leaned in to say, “We don’t really mesh well with the hippies,” a French guy and an Irish guy were screaming, “F*&! YOU, I WON’T DO WHAT YOU TELL ME,” over and over again into a head of broccoli, while a tiny British girl was honking the horn.

After we finished our meal at Denny’s and promised to e-mail each other etc…it began to rain. We were planning on taking a nap outside on what was a beautiful day and regenerating a bit, but now that would be impossible. El Charro and I had a little pow-wow, and despite being up for something like 32 hours straight, we decided to make the drive home, and pass out for a day before work started again. By the time we were back on the road again it had started raining…hard. The words torrential downpour would probably describe it best. That was the least of our worries however. We only needed to take one highway all the way back to our doorstep, and calculated it would take around 4 and a half to 5 hours based on our trip to where we were.

We hit the mother of all traffic jams, something like 300 meters away from Denny’s (Joyful). I was officially not happy anymore. We waited in traffic for about 40 minutes and we still weren’t even on the highway yet. We parked at 7-11 and bought about 30 dollars worth of sugar, caffiene, coffee, crack, ginseng, vitamin packs, etc…and got back on the road. The whole drive back, traffic would accumulate and then somehow the road would be empty for about a half hour. Just at the moment when we thought maybe this time the traffic had finally ended that it was smooth sailing home, we could bury the speedometer and make up some time, we would run into another endless pile of tiny white Japanese cars. After 7 hours of driving, multiple rest stops, and 40 sleepless hours of partying and driving and traveling my body had finally reached its limit. I pulled into the next rest stop, woke El Charro up and let him drive the final 2 hour leg home.

He dropped himself off and I drove the last 5 minutes from his house to mine. I didn’t unpack, I didn’t even bring my backpack in, I unlocked the door, took off my shoes, and dropped into bed. I woke up sometime around 7 PM the next day, and relaxed until work started the next day. The road trip had officially ended.

Dude, where's my party?

When we left our hotel sometime around checkout the cash in our pockets was all but spent. On the way to and from “the island” we had seen the sign for a local post office, so we went to investigate. A post office is the only place in Japan where you can withdraw money from an international bank account. I had taken out around 7 or 800 dollars before we left, and I had maybe 200 of that left, El Charro was down to naught but his credit card. We pulled over and parked near the sign for the post office, there were no kilometer notations on the sign, so we assumed it had to be within walking distance.

After about a half hour of walking we walked to an overpass to get a crow’s nest view of the situation, and spotted the post office down the street. When we approached the entrance the doors didn’t open. And if it’s one thing I’ve learned about being white in Japan, it’s that all doors, automatic or not open for you here. The post office was closed. This was potentially catastrophic. An immediate panic crept over us, the first question El Charro asked was if we had enough cash to get home, which we did, but that was a horrible question to even put to words considering the next stage of the journey was to the active volcanic region where one of the biggest outdoor raves in the country was about to take place. We assumed that if this Post Office was closed for the holidays, it was a definite possibility that they were all closed for the holiday.

We got back in the car and high tailed it to Beppu, too distraught to even bother putting angry music on the ipod speakers. We dismissed our hatred of Let’s Go and managed to get a vague understanding of where the biggest post office in the city was located. We circled the runways for about a half an hour and finally spotted the monstrous white building that was Beppu’s central Post Office. We parked in an almost full parking lot and happily sauntered into the building, which was almost entirely closed, except for the ATM’s.

There were a few people on line for each machine but we expected within 5 minutes we’d have the cash in our hands and be able to continue on our journey. However, the ATM’s in Japan aren’t exactly just ATM’s, and the post office doubles as the largest banking agency in Japan. I have no idea what the other features of the post office ATM’s are, but I know you can pay your rent, water bills, phone bills, and electric bills at the ATM. I imagine you can acquire a mortgage, refinance your home, browse the internet, find a mail-order Russian bride, order pizza, and type your doctoral dissertation, because we waited 40 god damn minutes for three people to finish their transactions before I could spend 13 seconds grabbing my cash.

But we had money, so we left the Post Office in high spirits and a much lower bottom line on my savings account, as I had to take out money for myself, and El Charro, who you might recall forgot all of his money in a desk drawer at home.

It was nearing the time for the breakup of the fellowship, whereby our enchanting Canadian gal, El Angel Solo, would get on a train bound for home to go to her friend’s wedding, and El Charro and I would be headed for 2 days of reckless insanity. We parked Yama in the parking lot of the train station and asked for the nearest Starbucsu (starbucs). We also found a bookstore, because El Charro and I did not in fact have any god damn clue how to get to the party. So we purchased a very handy atlas, and poured over its pages while sipping yuppie starbucs drinks trying to figure out how to get to Aso. As it turns out we only had to take one road for most of the journey until the very end, so after figuring out where that road was we walked around the city for another few hours, enjoying each other’s company, pestering the natives, and finally dropped her ass off at the train station and boogied out of there.

We got on the road and out of Beppu without too much trouble, and the road almost immediately began climbing into the mountains, the road built to fit two opposing lanes of traffic was barely large enough for my tiny Suzuki Alto. This made driving along these beautiful vistas somewhat intense. But the views didn’t stop, it was an uninterrupted wall of incessant natural beauty for two straight hours. No rest stops, no hotels, no Onsens, hardly a car in either direction; nothing human and ugly to offer us a break from the mountains, flowers, rivers, and massive insects and birds.

It was as if there was a God, and he or she or it, was giving me this one long stretch of unimaginable beauty, seconds before he was going to throw my tiny car off of a cliff and send me packing straight to hell. But, as I’m still here to write this we know that there is in fact no God.

We finally stopped where there was some space for El Charro to take a pee break, and then it happened. As soon as I stood up to stretch my legs, my body full force let me know that I had to poo, and poo a lot. Apparently God just has a better sense of humor than I’d imagined. Naturally we hadn’t seen anything resembling a bathroom for a long damn time, so this was going to be a commando squat, something I’m not quite hippy, or commando enough to have much experience with, and I didn’t exactly have time to go through basic training right at that moment.

I opened the trunk, fumbled through my backpack, pulled out a notebook, and ripped out a half dozen white sheets of paper and then hobbled farther into the woods. What happened next could only be described as a poosplosion, the sound and the fury, Louie Armstrong meets hurricane Katrina. The Japanese however, now refer to it as the unknown ecological disaster that destroyed 3 square kilometers (1.8 miles) of natural habitat and forced 15 different rare plants and animals onto the endangered species list.

When we had reached the city of Aso we stopped at ShopRite (Maxvalu) and bought some food, went over to the in store microwave, nuked it, ate it and continued on to the next town, which was supposedly where this gathering was taking place. I say supposedly because we didn’t actually have any idea what the specific location of the party was, we were helped out by the text message of one of the crazy ravers we met in Fukuoka a few days earlier. Since I had left this particular detail up to El Charro, I was markedly unhappy with our current predicament. In fact he hadn’t even remembered to bring the flyer for the party that we could have used to at least give someone an idea of where we were heading.

However, the party did go for 48 straight hours, and it wouldn’t even start for about 4 hours so, we relaxed and went into a vacation state of mind. We had reached the town that we knew was very close to the party, thanks again to the crazy Indian girl we met in Fukuoka, and El Charro’s plan was to stand in the parking lot of the convenience store at the town’s main intersection, and wait for someone who looked like they were ready for a drug addled 48 hour party to stop in and give us directions. Not only did we look ridiculous standing there, but the prospect of someone showing up hours early for a two day party was looking fairly grim at that particular moment in time. So we got back in the car and drove around for a little bit.

We had failed to procure a tent for ourselves at that particular moment due to some dramatic circumstances at home before our departure, but we knew there was a hostel not too far from the party we could crash at. We actually knew a lot of things about the “area” but not so much where anything actually was. Then low and behold, we drove right past the hostel, so we stopped and checked out the prices, found out they had about a million beds left and then left. We would have asked the proprietor about the location of said volcanic trance rave but she was about 173 years old, and very cronish looking so we thought better of it.

Back we went to stand outside of Lawson, the convini (convenience store) once more. We had stood outside for about an hour before we realized we’d only seen about three cars pass by, and none of them contained anyone looking like they were off to a rave. I looked inside the store and saw that the clerk was a twenty something with spiked hair, and a tattoo. I sent El Charro in to plug the bastard for some information. In literally ten seconds they both come walking outside of the store and the kid takes the map and makes two very small very specific circles of possible spots for the party. One was at least a 45 minute drive from where we were and the other was about 10 to 15. We bowed, said about 40 thankyous (the plural of thankyou, come on Microsoft word spell check) and blasted away in Yama.

The road was completely uphill, which was a good sign, since the party was supposed to be in the mountains, and we drove optimistically up the mountain, the party still two hours from beginning. Then all of a sudden we came to a campground, it was a YMCA campground believe it or not, whether the acronym translated or not, I don’t know, but as we drove around the parking lot it became pretty clear this wasn’t our destination. We kept going uphill, and eventually we came to a rather large intersection, and stared in confusion. We waited a few minutes, and a few cars passed us, coming from the left, then coming from the right, and going straight. We went straight for a few minutes and seeing nothing turned around. We drove for about ten minutes until we were stuck behind a cab going very slowly down the road, occasionally slowing to a crawl, with its two occupants looking around wildly. We felt this might be a good sign.

We followed the cab down the hill for a few minutes until it stopped completely and two Japanese twenty somethings got out to look at one of the signs on the side of the road, I glanced at El Charro and he immediately jumped out of the car to talk to them. I pulled the car over and got out after him. The two kids pulled out the flyer for the party that El Charro had forgotten at home, and pointed to the sun and then indicated that it was a sign for the party and that it was up the hill. We were very excited by the current turn of events. We offered to give them a lift, but they had their tents packed into the cab already and our tiny car was filled with our own travel remnants. So we followed the cab up the hill, when we got to the same perplexing intersection the cab stopped, one of the kids got out and ran across the intersection to a similar looking red sign on the other side of the road, he then indicated that we did have to go straight, so our intuition was right on earlier. Maybe 50 meters from where I had originally turned around, there was a huge purple sign that said “Mystical Village” in huge English characters. Common sense would tell most people that if they were looking for a huge campground full of dancing drug addicts in the middle of the woods, a sign pointing to a place called the “Mystical Village” is probably a step in the right direction.

The next time the cab stopped we were at the party, there was a table where tickets were being doled out, but it was still an hour and a half before the music started, and we were starving, so El Charro and I went all the way back down the hill to the Denny’s (joyful) down the street. After our meal, we went back up blasting psytrance from the Ipod speaker’s in joyful celebration.

We had driven three hours to a remote forested area of Japan’s southern island, both of us illiterate is spoken and written Japanese, with no idea where this party was, and yet somehow we’d managed to find it. Surviving it, of course, is a whole other story.

Wheat Out

Let's Get Naked...Part II

The Onsen in Beppu was gargantuan by comparison. We jumbled into the entrance of the Heotan Onsen in Beppu, and were overwhelmed by the sheer number of people waiting to get in. The parking lot was packed, and it took a few minutes to secure for ourselves, ball towels, tickets for entry, lockers etc…Once we donned our awkward wooden clog like sandals the entrance opened up to a huge waiting area with tons of vending machines and picnic tables scattered about a large rectangular open air room.

One of the reasons this Onsen sounded so appealing was due to its “hot sand bath” facilities. So we went to our respective gender based locker rooms and disrobed our civilian garb before re…robing for the sand bath. The sand bath area is co-ed for families and spouses and what not, and despite the fact that all you had to do was cover yourself in sand and relax, we were unsure of what to do once arriving in the room. The sand room was a large concrete rectangular room, with 6 areas about bed width and about 20 feet long, spread down the room. It wasn’t really possible to bury yourself and then poor more sand on top of yourself, so the buddy system would have to be initiated. After standing around awkwardly trying to gauge the best method for sand immersion and relaxation El Angel Solo and I picked a spot and began experimenting.

Unlike the beach, the hotter sand was farther below the surface, so I dug myself a little trench and started piling the sand on while El Angel Solo hit me with the plastic sand scooper that was nearby. It’s difficult to describe the sensation of sitting in a pool of hot sand with someone gently pouring the fine grains on top of the thin layer of fabric separating my skin from the heat. I guess sensual would be a good word. The sand feels like weighted water essentially, it flows over me, leaving only heat in its wake, it ripples, and rains from the scooper, and I quickly enter the relaxed mode of a man with nothing to think about but the euphoria rising from somewhere within me. Then the cackle of my neighbor breaks the spell, “Alright I’m done, do me now.”

It’s hard to return a comment sufficiently thanking her for her small labor, but reminding her that she’s an impatient nuisance who with one comment wrecked everything she had done for the five minutes before. So I just say, “Sit over there and wait a god damned minute, I’m relaxing for the love of crap.”

Getting up in hot sand when you’re a hairy bastard is a bit tricky, suffice to say there was more sand than skin in most places. So I began pouring sand on El Angel Solo, after a few minutes I just poured a ton of sand on her breasts, which she liked at first but eventually told me to stop, I figured this was the quickest way to piss her off so I could wash the sand off all the uncomfortable nooks and crannies where it had accumulated. I stood up, and when I looked over, El Charro had a whole &*^$ing Japanese family pouring sand on him, a little girl, wife, and husband. He said it had nothing to do with him, for some reason they had just volunteered to do it. Lucky bastard. He naturally enjoyed the experience more, and stayed for quite a while.

El Angel Solo and I departed at our respective gender based locker rooms and I quickly disrobed and headed for the shower stools. It only takes one Onsen experience for the routine to click, and you become much more comfortable with the overall environment. In the stool shower room there were at least 6 different indoor pools, as well as outdoor pools, 2 different saunas and my favorite room that we’ll get to later. Though I didn’t do it that day, you can get the closest shave of your life with a simple Bic at the Onsen, the air is so permeated with heat and moisture that you won’t even cut yourself, and it’s a chin like a baby’s ass for 24 hours.

I scooted out to the outdoor pool and moved toward the corner which was empty of patrons, there was a sign at the end of the pool that I couldn’t read, but it apparently read, “do not walk this way magma is being injected into the pool and it’s hotter than the ****ing SUN!” I made an about face and tried with every ounce of willpower I had to keep from screaming and crying from the unbearable pain…it was that hot. Once I labored back to cooler climes and rested my back against a rock, I was treated to Japanese guy after Japanese guy, and sometimes Japanese kid after Japanese kid, walking into the scalding hot section of the pool, screaming like little girls, and running and jumping back to the slightly cooler waters.

After that pool I did the ole’ jump in the freezing cold pool, hit the sauna, jump in the freezing cold pool, hit the hotter sauna, jump in the freezing cold pool go back to the hot water routine. As I sat in the pool reflecting on the greater forces of the universe, and where I would likely get inebriated later that evening, the sun began to set overhead. It reminded me of the flaming good ole’ days of sitting in the hot tub with a cigar, and a glass of Australian Shiraz with the poker crew and watching the sunrise on a Friday night…you know, without all the naked Japanese men around.

The hordes of children at this Onsen struck me as slightly peculiar. Kids under 7 in general are pretty much asexual creatures, actually some fathers bring their little girls into the men’s section of the Onsen. They run around ball towel free, or vagina towel free as the case may be, like little Asian nymphs bounding along the rocks, and generally frolicking hither and thither. It lends the Onsen an almost Willowesque (or insert poorly received fantasy flick here) quality, but the nymphs and faeries were almost the most annoying part of the fantasy, so it wasn’t long before vast reserves of mental energy were spent picturing the pure hearted little bastards falling on the rocks and shutting up.

So after the little bastards had sufficiently ruined the outdoor pool for me, I went to what would become my favorite room at this particular public bathing establishment, The Waterfall Room. The room is rectangular, with a massively high vaulted ceiling, and I had to climb down about 25 steps to get to the floor. Directly across from the stairs, lined along the far wall were about a dozen pipes, sticking out of the wall. I’ll leave the obvious phallic metaphors to you the reader, as I continue with my story. The pipes were probably a good 15 feet (5 meters) above the floor, and pouring a steady stream of water in the direction of the ground, most likely aided by gravity, but I can’t be sure the fundamental laws of the universe have any effect on this country.

So as is the usual trick, I spent a few minutes watching what other people did, so I could fit in, then decided what they were doing was stupid and made it up as I went along. I sat under one of the pipes, where water was falling, and was treated to a shoulder massage. It was one of the most interesting physical sensations I’ve ever felt. I moved my head under the water, and became completely deaf to the outside world, while getting a scalp massage. I tried leaning in a number of different positions to hit different areas of my back, and it felt nice but was slightly awkward, so I had the brilliant idea of laying down under the thing. Naturally I positioned my ball towel in a comfortable position for some cushioning, and then sat under this pipe for about an hour. It was bliss.

Afterwards we went out in search of meat. We ended up at a Yakiniku restaurant. This is a Korean barbecue restaurant, a little do it yourself affair. You sit at a table with a small grill in the middle, sticking a foot or so above the wood. You order a plate of assorted meats, and barbecue to you heart’s content. We ate without any major incidents and then moseyed back to the car, where there was a minor incident. If you recall we managed to park for free, however, we did not look at the hours for the parking lot. Yama was the only car left in the lot, and chains were drawn across the entrance. Luckily the chains weren’t locked, so we just unhinged them, drove over the chain, and sped down the road to the center of town.

The details are starting to blur now, being a few months removed from the event, it’s sort of like trying to remember the last few hours of a binge through the fog of a hangover, and I was hungover two months ago when it happened. El Charro was DDing that night, so I know we found a few bars, and wet our whistles a bit. The drive back to the island from said bar was worth mentioning though. We were listening to a psytrance band called Infected Mushroom’s killer track, “Cities of the Future” driving through Beppu. We noticed for the first time, that during the night, the entire street on both sides in both directions was covered with blue, white, and green lights, that were setting off on a timer down the road like an epileptic airport runway. So as the bass thumping came in under the vocals, “take me down to the cities of the future,” El Charro was burying the speedometer down the empty streets after the traffic lights had ended and the road became one lane. The drive became an intensely trippy experience, barrel-assing
down the lonely miles (kilometers) 90 miles an hour (130 km/hr) with these lights beckoning us back to our remote island.

There are a quick series of turns and narrow roads that gave me the slight feeling of diving into the bat cave on the way in. The island is dark and quiet; the hotel is empty, even devoid of staff at this hour, giving it an almost ethereal quality. As we walked back to our building I heard an oddly repetitious sound, and I stopped to identify it. The three of us stood next to the main building of the hotel, and the only rooms were on the second floor. After a few moments we realized what we were hearing was the syncopated coiling and uncoiling of mattress springs. The island from that moment on had an official love shack.

We stumbled back to our room, finished off last night’s booze, and fell fitfully asleep sometime before dawn, as expected we would wake up well after check out tomorrow.

Let's Get Naked...Part I

Well for those of you reading the blog thus far, I assume you’ve come to the logical conclusion that I’m a cultural imperialist who has no appreciation for other cultures or ways of life, and I came all the way to Japan for a new environment to booze and carouse in. Well, you’re only about 80% correct. I happen to appreciate other cultures for exactly what they are, crude imitations of the perfect culture of my people. I am man enough to admit it.

I will also offer a brief warning to those of you with weak stomachs, or umm…imaginations because there are never any pictures to accompany these blatherings. There will be an excessive amount of male nudity in this entry, accompanied by detailed descriptions of male nudity. There will be a tragic amount of male nudity, and no description of female nudity, for reasons that will be understood only if you make it past the male nudity. But enough of that, we have stories of bathing naked with hordes of Japanese men to get too.

We woke up sometime in the mid afternoon and decided to spend our waning daylight hours in Beppu, grab some food, and find an onsen to relax in. We drove back into town, and encountered massive traffic getting up into the mountain, where it seemed like all of the big onsens were smattered across the cityscape. We drove up the hill, and being in a particularly good mood, I put on the mantel of obnoxious American, screaming pointless slogans at passengers and passerby indiscriminately. I would shout things like, “It’s Golden Week! We’re on vacation!” or the obligatory “I’m on anti-biotics, bitch!”

We managed to park the car for free, in the parking lot of some illegible establishment, and wandered in search of food. Our heroes have had enough Denny’s (Joyful) for one city, and declared we would find a small out of the way restaurant and do our damndest to order something edible.

After we’d completely given up on that we decided to search for a chain restaurant with English menus, but we spied a really fat Japanese couple walking into a restaurant. To give you an idea of how rare this is, we’ll compare it to walking around a smallish city, say Albany, and seeing Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, the Pope, the Olsen Twins, and Satan walk into some hippy cafe together. Our rationale was that if fat people were eating there, then the food is probably good, and/or cheap and plentiful. Either of those would work for us, but it turned out to be the former.

We walked into a sushi hole in the wall – all of the fish was neatly arranged at the bar on ice. It was all incredibly fresh, and seemingly impossible for us to order. There were no pictures on the menu, and if anything familiar sounding like Tekka roll was written on the menu, we couldn’t read it in lines, dashes, and pacmans (katakana). So we walked up to the counter, and with the help of our portly patron companions, managed to point at fish in the glass and make up numbers for what we thought we wanted.

Me: ummm….the Tuna looking thing there *pointing*
Portly Pepperpot (male) – Ushkalushi?
Me: Hai (yes) Mitzu (three)

Me: and the uhh, salmon looking thing over there *pointing*
Portly Pepperpot (female) – Baklaitemu?
Me: Hai (yes) Yatzu? *shrugs shoulders* (4)

And so on and so fourth.

The chef didn’t make any sushi rolls, the ones you would recognized as small balls wrapped in rice, he made only sashimi, a chunk of fish sitting on top of some rice; but Holy God, Mother of Pearl, Jesus H. Tapdancing Christ was the fish incredible. We dipped the sashimi into some shoyu (soy sauce) and it just fell apart in your mouth and slid deliciously down your throat. It was by far the most unbelievable sushi any of us had ever had, maybe ever will have. I haven’t had anything like it anywhere else in Japan. We went back to the counter and pointed at another half dozen unpronounceable fish for bigger and bigger numbers of servings with the same result. We didn’t ask the price, we didn’t want a salad to go with it, we just ate and ate. We even out-ate the helpful fat people.

This would be the basic reason why we hate “Let’s Go”, and the prototypical travel books. “Let’s Go” would have told us to go to some tourist trap with decent food, where everyone has been before, but somehow fulfilled a tourist’s idea of the stereotypical experience they wanted to have in said country to bring back in the slideshow; but without the book we had stumbled onto one of the best meals of my life. That’s essentially what traveling is, coming to terms with your ignorance and taking chances that may enhance your life.

This is why not 3 hours from eating I would be sitting in a pool with 20 naked Japanese men…and enjoying myself.

So we’re going to have to break with the chronological order of the vacation and go into a dramatic flashback sequence…STAR WIPE! (for you Simpson’s fanatics)

The Saturday before we left for our epic, anti-biotical road trip we decided to go for a test run to an onsen, knowing full well the city of Beppu sported some of the best in the country. We were graciously given until 3 PM to begin our journey, as most of us we’re plastered from some even or other the evening before. We took two cars, between myself, El Charro, La Escueleta Corriente, El Angel Solo, El Jesus Aviendo, one of La Escueleta Corriente’s students, and an attractive Japanese girl from the office, who we will give an American name, let’s say Daphne.

We drove to Kasado Island, up a winding narrow road, past a giant painted Dinosaur, to Kasadojima – the Onsen of Kasado Island. So let me describe what an Onsen is a little bit. An Onsen is a Japanese public bath house essentially. Everyone inside is nude, and despite their cultural reservations toward sex and drugs, public nudity is a part of traditions that go back far longer than current societal reservations. An onsen is a place to relax, and unlike the spa culture in the US, it’s extremely cheap, only about 700 yen (7 bucks) and is supposed to be available to poor and wealthy Japanese alike. When we get to the counter of the Onsen we put our shoes in a little locker and don the Onsen slippers, we then get small tickets for a towel and general admission. At this point the guys and girls separate into our separate locker rooms.

Once the three of us walked into the lockroom, the game was officially afoot. I looked around nervously, there were two half-naked Japanese men getting ready to disrobe, and I couldn’t remember being this uncomfortable since the banker grabbed my ass my first day of work. El Jesus Aviendo looks at us, shrugs his shoulders, and says, “Well, let’s get naked.”

It was actually the perfect way to break the ice, and we brought him along because he knew how this whole shebang worked. So I took my clothes off, and opened the bag that had my towel in it. Let’s take a moment to describe the ball towel. It’s a small square towel, about the size of a hand towel in your bathroom, used expressly for the purpose of covering your genitals as your flapping around the onsen from one pool to the next. Usually the towels are monogrammed with the initials or name of the onsen, so you can amass a collection of tiny towels used to cover your penis from unwary Japanese gazes.

Before we can jump into a hot pool of water and splash each other and giggle though, we’ve got to scrub down. As soon as I walked into the Onsen area, with the pools of water and what not, I noticed a series of pink plastic stools near the walls, which were lined with mirrors and shower heads attached to cords. You have to “shower” before you enter the communal pools. So I plant my hairy ass (if there was any speculation let’s put that to bed now) in one of these stools, and in front of me are a bottle of soap and a bottle of shampoo. So, I threw the ball towel onto the shelf in front of me and went to town, all those remnant fumes of alcohol faded away and I readied myself for the plunge.

We rinsed off, gathered our respective ball towels and looked over our options. There was a pool inside, and a pool outside. We went outside. The pool was about twelve feet wide, five feet long, and about thigh high. We clambered in sat down and were treated to an amazing view of a chain of islands fading into lighter and lighter blues as they approached the horizon and the sun shouted a slim highway of bright light across the Pacific Ocean. We sat in awe of the scene for a good 15 minutes without a word passing between us, my mind wandered through the landscape of my life’s history, and plans for the future, visions of prophetic greatness rose from the depths of the empty closets of thought, and the world, and the naked men sitting next to me completely faded from view. That is until the entire universe that had gathered around me was shattered by some Japanese asshole in front of me. (Go ahead…read it again)

Speaking of Japanese asses, it would have been kind of awkward walking around a room holding a tiny towel in front of my dangling member, but luckily, the hairless skinny Japanese men have asses that closely resemble that of Japanese women so after a few minutes I had my own convenient towel rack…Alright, alright, I went a little too far, I’m pulling your leg there, getting an erection would have been not only horribly embarrassing but I think probably emotionally scarring as well. And most of the people in the onsen were over 60 so don’t worry about my masculinity, I’m good to go.

Kasadojima also sported a small sauna, so that was the next stop. Next to the sauna though, was a small pool of water slightly above freezing temperature. So we jumped into the cold water, shocked the body a little, then popped into the sauna for a spell, then jumped back into the cold water again, and then outside to the hot pool with a view. We repeated this process a couple times and then went out to the hot pool for the last time. It was hard to resist the urge to simply stand naked outside in the cool breeze overlooking the ocean. Eventually the three of us did succumb to the inherent human desire.

So picture for yourself, three hairy-assed (what are the chances) gaijin standing outside a Japanese bathhouse overlooking the sunset, in the pose of a 15th century Spanish explorer of the bow of his ship heading towards the new world. Or maybe a more colloquial picture would be three Captain Morgan’s standing naked at the top of an island in Japan. There was something unmistakably Rockwellian about it, maybe bizarre Rockwell. Three men standing with their right leg on a small boulder, eyes fixed in the distance, holding a small ball towel at their sides.

After our dramatic experience we dried off, got dressed and hiked around the onsen for a little bit before going home…

STAR FADE ! (back to the future…err…present…err months in the past)