Nichitsu is a tiny little village huddled in a chilly mountain pass, far from the nearest population center. Come an emergency the Doctor’s office would have been the only ER, so its few rooms were crammed full of equipment, now forgotten and lying in shadow: rusted iron operating tables, toppled X-ray machinery, birthing stirrups lying in puddles of water and moss, leather dentistry chairs ripped and spewing foam, ancient defibrillators on window-sills, walls lined with shelves stocked with bottles of nondescript pills and musty tinctures, documents sheafed and scattered everywhere, surgical clamps in heaps and organs floating in formaldehyde jars. All of it now sinking, as the floor-boards bow under the weight of 30 years of absence and neglect.
Fortune City
I started talking out loud around 3, I think. It’s a sweltering day, but that’s no excuse. It’s more to do with the height, I think. The wind rushing in my ears and I couldn’t hear a damn thing I was thinking.
What was I saying?
Oh.
I started saying things like this.
“I really want a tuna sandwich, I don’t know if I can do this without a tuna sandwich, I think I really need one. perhaps I should call the vets and make an appointment for Barney the goldfish.
I want a sandwich. The knife is digging into my leg. Look at me, I’m a star. I want a sandwich.”
And so on. Give them something to talk about. I know the police negotiator, strapped up with his bullet proof flak jacket can hear everything I’m saying and is scribbling it all down in his yellow notepad, ring-bound, but then that’s what it’s all about. So too is the hum from a small crowd in the street below, buzzing like the white noise of an orchestra warming up before a performance, like lots of hacking coughs, preparing for the end of me, each and every one ageing a little to watch me go.
It’s like reality TV. Safe. Distant. Gritty. Real.
I’m a star again.
Image from here.
Yoyogi Poodlers
Yoyogi Park is the consummate Japanese melting pot- perhaps the most varied and vivid spot in the whole country. On any given weekend you’ll find Cosplayers and Rockabillies near the entrance, frisbee throwers and spinners, hula-hoopers, and dudes doing comedy in leather face masks in the first stretch, African drumming groups, badmintonners, the artist with the stereo, the cyclist with the drums, folks rehearsing a musical with brooms in it, and all kinds of instrument-players and circus-skills practisers by the empty water pools, couples canoodling, photographers, dog-fanciers, partying gaijin, kite-flyers, hacky-sack-ists and more on grass beyond the fountain.
Oh, and of course- the Yoyogi Poodlers.
Poodle-ist.
Nanchatte Orange Soy Sauce
Soy Sauce is ubiquitous in Japan- the Japanese splash it on everything with gay abandon: fried fish, chicken bones, california rolls, potatoes, ice cream, tea. You name it- they condimentize it with soy sauce. Some soy sauce companies- perhaps following their brethren in the candy and snack world- have taken to augmenting their soy with extra awesome flavors; in this case- Nanchatte Orange, by Cheerio.
Yum.
Soy Sauce surrounded by little empty plastic fish- which come in bento lunchboxes filled with a single serving of soy sauce.
DoCoMo Tower, Shinjuku
The Docomo Tower in Shinjuku soars over the Southern exit / Yoyogi area like a great pink middle finger, thumbing its nose at the graceless cluster-bomb mess of old-modern Shinjuku with its super-sleek lines, haute-couture design domination, and clean parallels to other auspicious buildings like Big Ben and the Empire State Building. At 492 feet high, it houses 28 stories of pure DoCoMo goodness, capped with the Gothic-esque bell-tower clock-face, complete with flying buttresses.
From the bridge over the tracks in front of Takashimaya.
Ikebukuro Jingle Key-Chain
Train Stations in Japan have jingles; at least the stations on the JR Yamanote line do- when the trains pull in and when they pull out. They’re bright, cheery, and last about 10 seconds. I suppose they let us know- OK, now it’s time to get on the train. Now it’s time to get off. Oops, mind the gap! Each train station has a different jingle – Buddha alone knows why, perhaps so the blind know where they are – but now an enterprising toy-maker has produced a range of collectible key-chains that burble out the full range. Who needs Pokemon?
Ikebukuro Jingle Key-Chain, at Ikebukuro Station.
Weekly Links
Yoyogi Rockabillies – Excellent music video showing the Yoyogi Rockers teasing their hair, getting set, revving motorbikes, and of course- dancing.
Tokyo Green Island– Tokyo Photo-shopped to be paved with grass. Nice- I saw these first at the National Art Museum’s ‘Media Arts Festival’ near Roppongi.
Ugly Tokyo – Billy West takes shots of ugly city wires and bad city-planning.
That’s it for this week.
Nichitsu 3. A fire truck in the ghost town
Nichitsu Ghost Town stretches for around a kilometer, from the semi-functioning mine shacks at the mouth of the last tunnel, up past the Junior High School, the heavily dilapidated wooden apartments, and buildings stacked off the steep hillside on concrete supports, round a hill of white lime-chips, past the Doctor`s office hidden somewhere in the thicket of buildings, up to the Lower School, dorm, and warren of walkways.
Dis-sheveled buildings.
Universal Time
I’m working the deep 7 run again. Last time I was out here, must’ve been pre-schism. Before the split, and opinion divided the universe.
-Blah blah.
That’s what my mistress says, when I try to discuss politics.
-All I can hear is blah blah.
I suppose she reckons I don’t know more than anybody else, but maybe that’s not true anymore. I move in high places now. I deal with leaders of worlds. I see their colonies, their technologies, their lives, as part of the whole. I can still see the Empire, in the echoes, while all they see is me, and what I tell them.
-You’re getting silly now, says my mistress, her voice ringing tinny through my box-like living space. You’re not a God.
-I know, I say, fingers dancing over the ship’s controls, piloting us towards the next rift. It’s just my job.
I don’t kid myself. I know it isn’t me, or any other of the guys from Tempus. We’re just the carriers. It just happens that right now, our cargo is the most valuable thing in the universe.
Image from here, edited by Martin Meldrum.
Ryogoku Sumo
Sumo is the traditional Japanese sport, beloved of retirees and tourists alike. On any tournament day at the Kokugikan in Ryogoku you can see them lining up for tickets at the single ticket box; the old folks nose-deep in their rikishi listings, the tourists in their guidebooks, coming up for air every now and then wide-eyed with anticipation, wondering if something awesome is happening around them, secretly hoping to see something as cool as Edmond Honda’s hundred-hand slap or torpedo head-butt.
Well, I can dis-abuse them of that hope. To the sumo novitiate without 15 days to kill watching hundreds of fat men shove each other around a ring, sumo is about as dull as watching bugs fly into an insectocutor- a sharp surprise for the first few, a puff of steam, then the same again and again until all the bugs are dead.
Sumo Royal Rumble.