Drink if you dare

Happy Halloween! Well, almost.

Why so serious?

Its my last day in Japan, its 10:55AM and I will leave tomorrow at 7AM for the airport, so this is really my last practical day. This means, I won’t get to see halloween here, hence the greeting now.

I am packing my stuff now, but my room is a mess so its taking a while. Sorry I haven’t posted in a while, but as you can imagine, I’ve been busy soaking up the last few days I have here.

On the way to Ginza

On the way to Ginza, we came across the “Communications Museum”. Since it was only 110 yen to get in, and since I am a geek, we went in. Upon entering the museum we discovered that today some kind of special event was occurring. I’m not sure but I think it might happen every Saturday, so lets drop the “special” and just call it an event. In anycase it was special to me.

Some kind of event

I decided to take a seat and go along for the ride.

I took a seat

View from my seat before Yvette arrived

Sitting down at a painting school from Ashley Mills on Vimeo.

We were informed that this was some kind of postal envelope painting class. Sounds bizzarre, but actually it was really cool. Let me explain. In the museum shop they had hundreds and hundreds of old stamps from, I don’t know, the 50s right through to the present day. These stamps had different values on them like 10yen, 20yen, 80yen, etc. Stamps with denominations 5 to 20 Yen were all in one plastic container, 30-50 Yen in another, and so on. The cost for stamps in each container was about 10yen more than the maximum denomination in that container. So for the first container, each stamp cost 30 Yen.

This sounds a bit ridiculous, that you would pay 30Yen for a 5Yen stamp. But the point is that these were old stamps that you wouldn’t otherwise get, unless you had been hoarding Japanese stamps from the 50s. The stamps were quite interesting stamps, with different pictures on etc. The idea of this workshop was to stick on your envelope, stamps with denominations amounting to the postal cost of your envelope to your desired destination, and then to paint around these stamps so that they were incorporated into the overall design.

The art teacher explains something

I’m sorry that I don’t have pictures of the stamps I chose, so unfortunately you can only see the finished product.

Yvette and Ashley paint envelopes

Yvette paints envelopes (look at the woman in the background)

Here are my masterpieces:

Ashley's amazing envelopes

The envelope on the right is the first one I drew. As you can see, I put the Fugu fish in the lake, which is being from the waterfall. Up some steps at the top of the waterfall is an old house. Around the lake’s edge, are various animals. In the top right the sun beams down on everything. I sent this one to Nicola.

The envelope on the left is the second one I drew. I started off with the train in the top right, and extended the tracks across the envelope. Unfortunately, this bright idea left me with little space for anything else. So I just shoved some scenery around the edge and an Olympics stamp on the actual tracks. I sent this one to my Parents and Sister.

The stamps on each envelope total 110 Yen.

Lets take a look at some other people working:

People enjoying the envelope making

It seems quite popular to use the fish stamps and put them in water. I mean, this is a pretty obvious thing to do, right.

More budding artists

If you noticed, there is a cameraman in the background. They appeared to be filming some kind of documentary or news footage. They actually came right over my shoulder and filmed me drawing my envelope. It was ridiculous, I was drawing some “trees” like a total douchebag, embarassing. Who knows, maybe you will see me on some obscure program about Japan one day.

Envelope painters

More envelope painters

Yet more envelope painters

After finishing my envelopes, I posted them in the provided postbox:

Ashley posting his envelopes

I made a small video of the people painting and stuff:

Bizarre envelope painting school from Ashley Mills on Vimeo.

After this we had a quick look around the museum, here is the slideshow:

After this we carried on walking into Ginza:

We're off to see the wizard.

The wonderful wizard of... Ginza.

On the way to Ginza.

Tight security outside the Maranouchi building.

Tokyo station

In Ginza, I posed by a pumpkin:

Ashley and pumpkin

In Japan they go beserk about Halloween. They have pumpkins and stuff and halloween themed menus or whatever for the entire month of October… crazy.

Pumpkinny type things

The last thing we did in Ginza, was visit “Wendy’s” where we proceeded to purchase “Super Mega Wendy’s” burgers.

Wendy's

Yvette deciding what to have

Super mega burger

Super mega burger meal

Sorry I’m being a lameass and haven’t updated the blog in a while. I’ll try and get something up tomorrow.

The gameshow was in Chiba. You already know where Chiba is from before, we went to Chiba to airsoft. Accompanying us to the gameshow were, James, Ivett, David, and James’s friend Clayton. Clayton is another American-Chinese. He works in Japan.

After getting to Chiba, we took a bus to the place.

Arriving at the game show

Arriving at the game show

Some super-hero and a big yellow thing

We had to wait in an enormous queue:

Enormous queue

But eventually made it around to the entrance:

Enjoying the queue

Enjoying the queue

Building next to the queue

The entrance

We went inside. There are lots of booth-girls around; women who stand around handing out game flyers. They pose for photos too. Here is a picture of some otaku taking photos of some booth girls:

Otaku geeks going beserk over some women

I also took some photos of booth girls, here is the slideshow:

It was almost lunchtime so we went for lunch. I had this meal:

Crappy meal

Japanese curry is so plain its ridiculous. If you goto a Japanese curry shop, it will sell 16 different types of curry but they are all the same flavor: curry powder flavor. They only differ in what is added, and that will be something very plain, like a piece of chicken, or a shrimp. OK the meal above wasn’t too bad, but it was expensive for Japan.

Sanple

Next we just walked around the arenas and looked at stuff. I’ll just put the photos for this in a slideshow:

I walked past this exhibit:

Motorcycle exhibit

and saw the motorcycle smash directly into a cliff and explode. I started laughing loudly and then I realized that there was a little child riding the bike on the floor, controlling the game bike. The parents looked at me and must have thought I was a right bastard.

We were walking through into another arena and suddenly came across tons of cosplay people. This really put Harajuku to shame. Here is the slideshow:

One notable occurance was this overweight woman:

Overweight cosplay, your thing?

Work it baby!

I realized that this crazy Otaku had been taking like a billion photos of her. Seriously he was there just reeling off hundreds and hundreds of shots. So much so that he was sweating, so I had to grab a photo:

Sweat boy

unfortunately the ruddy flash went off didn’t it and everyone noticed, especially overweight:

Overweight gives me scorn

So my covert operations had been rumbled. Overweight told me I wasn’t allowed to take photos now, but that I had to wait my turn. She was saying “he is now.. but you next.. you next?” almost demandingly… I just said “err yeah” and then ran away, dreading the prospect of having a personal photo session with her.

Personally I think Overweight and Sweat boy should have gotten it together. Actually I feel a bit sorry for Sweat boy now. Poor guy, he’s just trying to get some love off of Overweight.

Yvette was jealous of all the attention the cosplay girls were getting, ahem did I say girls.. I meant people.. of course it was because of their costumes we were phototgraphing them.. anyway, I took a photo of Yvette to make her feel more involved:

Yvette

Next, I saw one of my favorite games: “Katamary Damacy”. In this game you have to “roll up” objects in the environment like a snowball and so keeps on growing, allowing you to roll up bigger things. It is somehow cathartic in the cleansing sense. I got really exicted and wanted to pose with the lead character of the game, ridiculous I know.

Katamari Damacy

Katamary Damacy on stage

Katamary Damacy on stage

Katamary Damacy on stage

“Prince” the games lead character, then started posing with people:

Prince poses with some girl

Prince beckons for more love

Don't go overboard prince!

Prince and some woman

Finally I leaped into the characters arms:

Ashley and Prince

Prince is a bit of a dumb name, but in the game he is actually a prince, if you can call it a he, I don’t know.

After this we went home. At the train station we encountered this:

Strange promotion

Promotion woman

I thought it would be funny to go inside the cage, so I did:

Ashley inside promotion

The train station bore a funny sign:

Don't run chubsy!

Finally, when we entered the platform area, I noticed this:

Broken ticket machine

See! I’m not the only one who breaks these.

One final thing. Since we are on the topic of computer games. There exists game in Japan called “Battle Raper”. I’m not joking, that wouldn’t be something I would joke about. Here is the video:

Un-fucking-believable.

How I came across this game: I was looking for stuff about the stabbing in Akihabara that happened a while back and found it mentioned in someones blog, the guy was going on about Battle Raper too, because apparantly there was a big advert for it in Akihabara.

Atmospheric night sky

Saw this car on the way home:

Rad car

No, its not a ricer car, this is Japan. And fast cars ARE cool, driving that endangers others is not. (heh, I feel like the moralist at the end of a kids TV program)

When I arrived home, I saw the new girl in the corridor. She was going back to her room, but upon seeing that I had arrived home, she went into the kitchen. I went upstairs however, to see Ivett. When I came back down the new girl was gone, but I saw the kettle was on. I thought to myself “she must be lonely”. Basically she had only came into the kitchen because she thought thats where I was going and she wanted to speak to someone. Well, that’s my hypothesis anyway.

I had made arrangements to meet David, the Czech guy, in a place called Kinshicho, at 8:00PM. I thought it would be nice to ask the new girl so I knocked on her door and asked. Immediately she agreed. I had to wait for her to get changed and then we went.

I saw a comical sign:

Comical warning sign

We arrived in Kinshicho, and David took us to a bar that he had visited the night before. It was an interesting bar:

So THIS is where Teddy Ruxpin ended up!

Bar staff

Bar staff

Bar man

The last guy told us that he used to sell fake watches. I don’t know if this means he was Yakuza or what. I guess that would be pretty low level lame Yakuza. Anyway, he got caught and fined 300000, which is about 1500 quid. He doesn’t do it anymore. The woman bar staff member, was this dude’s wife.

Zee bar was on zee third floor

After hanging here for two drinks, the price of them had such a lightening effect on my wallet that I think it actually started to generate lift. Consequently I motioned for us to leave. I motioned using my mouth, vocal chords, and lungs, but these motions produced sounds that the others interpreted and understood as me saying “this is too expensive, lets leave”.

In Kinshicho

We messed about for a while looking for a place that sold cheap beers and then just asked some Japanese who directed us to a decent place.

Entrance to the new place

Entrance to the new place

The beers here were much cheaper. 530 yen (3 quid) for 633ml bottles of Asahi. Alright, not dirt cheap, but much cheaper than the 900 yen a pop I was paying for half a pint back at the other place.

Asahi beer

Asahi beer is alright, but Japanese beers pale in comparison to English beers. I think we can rightfully claim to have some of the best beers in the world.

New girl

The new girl is called Olga. She is Russian. She is in Tokyo for 1 month on some kind of holiday but she has paid for lessons during the week. I’m not quite sure if this is an entirely private affair or associated with some course she is doing in Russia. It would be a pretty wierd way to spend a holiday, going to lessons each day.

Sleeping dude

The dude above was sleeping. People seem to sleep everywhere in Japan. Obviously they sleep everywhere, I mean they are not bonkosculous (I don’t know what the word is for “does not require sleep” so I just made that up, ok). What I mean is, you will find Japanese people sleeping in many public places at odd times of day.

It is very popular it seems, to sleep in the subway and in bars in the evening. Sometimes this is because they have missed the last train and are killing the time until the morning.

We made friends with the people at the table next to us. I say table, but actually the table is only set a foot off the floor and the table is inset within a well in which you put your feet.

Table next to us

Olga talking to some Japanese guy

Olga talking to another Japanese guy

The crew

It is easy to make friends with drunken people. So lets not pretend we were best buddies or something. But it is always fun.

Olga decided to make a toast which I thought was quite cool so I made her say it again for the camera:

Olga’s Toast from Ashley Mills on Vimeo.

That reminds me. David and I both made bets with Olga. She bet that I couldn’t drink 1 shot of hot vodka without being smashpanned as a consequence. This sounded so easy that I bet her 2 shots. If I win she will be my slave for a week, which means that she will goto the shop for me or whatever if I need it. If she wins, then I have to buy her a sushi dinner. The same goes for David, but I can’t remember what he wins because he doesn’t live in the same house so her being the slave doesn’t make sense. The situation to try this bet hasn’t arose yet, but I look forward to winning it.

After this, we had to go, as we decided to head back to Kanda to continue drinking. I told David he could sleep on my floor (I am so generous, haha). Otherwise the night would either end, or we would have to stay up all night, since the trains stop at 12.

We had to run for the train:

Running for the train from Ashley Mills on Vimeo.

Going for the train

We got on the train:

Sitting on the train from Ashley Mills on Vimeo.

As you can see. The subway is quite mundane. What did you expect? I don’t know what possessed Olga, besides a skinfull that is, because she decided to start unwittingly entertaining us:

Dancing from Ashley Mills on Vimeo.

Damn that was so funny.

When we got to Kanda we went to Bar 82, which is this English pub, that isn’t an English pub.

Ivett and James in Bar 82

We started some kind of crazed arm-wrestling competition for whatever reason. Since I was much bigger than everyone else in the bar, I beat everyone that dared challenge me. So the competition was really between everyone else:

David VS James 1 from Ashley Mills on Vimeo.

James getting beaten. He hates getting beaten. hehe

Barwoman

haha, that reminds me, they have fish-n-chips fake-newspaper wrapped chopsticks here, you can see them to the right of that thing that says 400 yen.

Last Saturday, James invited me to goto an Airsoft game. Although I had some reservations about this, thinking perhaps that running around with toy guns pretending to be soldiers was a little otaku, I soon remembered that I am a man with a pair of bollocks, and consequently believe running around with toy guns pretending to be soldiers is infact cool and fun.

Irrespective of the “boys with toys” pheonomenon, I now do think that airsoft is really good fun and highly recommend that you give it a go. Anyway, on Friday night we popped to Akihabara to pickup some extra bb’s for the game. Here are some pics from the airsoft shop (note that if you click on a picture now it will be shown full size in a floating frame without leaving the page):

On the way back home we passed this odd statue of a naked woman draped in a nightshirt and a Fedora.. Ahh Japan.

The next day, we left Kanda at 8:00 for Chiba.

James seemed somewhat unimpressed with my attempts to photograph him:

It took probably 30 minutes to get from Kanda station to Chiba.

From Chiba, we had to take a monorail to somewhere else. In the monorail station I for some reason inserted my Suica card (like the stupid Oyster card) into the slot for the paper tickets instead of just placing it on the Suica area. I think I was daydreaming or something. Anyway, it fucked up the machine, but the guy just came out and took it apart to get my card back:

I found the monorail station very exciting, because monorails are cool don’t you know?

After waiting for a while, it arrived:

We got on.

And I observed this silly notice:

When the monorail stopped at our destination, we got off and started walking to the airsoft place:

Several things were observed along the way:

It would be nice to own that little sports car.

OK so we have arrived.

This was the first time I had played Airsoft.

In Airsoft the weapons are replicas of real weapons used by militaries worldwide. The weapons fire small plastic 6mm balls called bbs (beebees). bb stands for ball bearing, but these are plastic, and they are not used for bearings, but you understand the derivation.

The guns are setup so that the maximum energy that the gun transfers to the bb is just less than one joule, this is because for a bb to penetrate an eyeball you need more than one joule. This is therefore a compromise between safety and firing accuracy and speed. Whilst protagonists must always wear eye protection, this low limit ensures that in the event of an accident, it is unlikely that the eye will be permanently damaged, unless the bullet is fired at very close range directly into it.

Shooting is only allowed within the netted area.

In the image above you can see someone within the netted area, who has himself been shot and is leaving the game.

There are many different types of game you can play. As an example consider the game where each team has a flag to defend and it is the goal and objective of each team to steal the flag of the other team. The flag is in a fixed position next to an airhorn mounted on a wooden post, “stealing” of the flag is indicated by sounding this airhorn.

It is obviously very difficult to make it to the enemies flag since it is being heavily defended, but since the enemy is also attacking your flag, this means that there are gaps in the defense.

The game will also end if one team kills all members of the other.

You die when you get shot by bbs from the other team (I suppose it should also be same team too if you were being realistic). When you get shot, assuming you feel it, you should shout “I’m hit”, or just “hit”, or in Japan “hit-o” and then leave the game. When you leave the game you walk out with your gun held above your head or your hands up so that nobody else shoots you.

When you leave the game you are not allowed to communicate with anybody else, since this could be cheating. You should simply leave.

The guns are mostly electric powered. The battery drives a motor which cocks a spring and the spring energy is then released to propel the bb. This can be done several times a second, that is, the guns fire on full-auto. Usually there is a setting for this and typically the gun will have 3 settings: off, semi-auto, and full-auto. Obviously some guns like pump action shotguns, do not have full-auto fire.

Pistols are usually gas propelled and are charged up using a CO2 gas canister a bit like a lighter refiller. There are some gas powered rifles but these are quite rare.

The mix of genders is probably about 90% male 10% female. I guess this is to be expected. You can see one of the women in the above picture, using her mobile phone.

There I am ready to go into battle. I have James’s electric powered AK47 with folding stock as my primary weapon and underneath my hoodie I have a gas powered handgun. That AK is pretty cool as it has a working mechanism so the mechanics of the gun sound real when it fires.

I don’t have my hoodie up for fashion’s sake. A shaved head makes a good target and is quite conspicuous. It hurts if you get shot in the head. I have a full face mask.

I initially took my camera into the games but then I came out only to discover it had fallen out of its stupid pouch (remember I told you about this damn pouch on the camera post I made before). Luckily someone found it the next round, but I didn’t take it in again, which is unfortunate because it would have been nice to make some videos.

My cousin Eve commented on an old post saying something like “less of the macho posturing and more of the culture”, because we had just met James at a gathering (we are not allowed to have parties in Kanda house, hehe) we had in Kanda house and he was showing us the guns.

I can imagine her perhaps thinking the same thing here, but actually this is culture. Contemporary japanese culture, not ancient Japanese culture. Airsoft was invented in Japan, it is a popular sport so partaking in some games with other Japanese people is immersing myself right in the culture, or rather a particular subculture. But isn’t that what experiencing cutlure is all about?

I don’t mean to pick on you Eve, I’m just using you as my scapegoat. Some people come to Japan and they spend their entire time looking at ancient relics and talking about esoteric rules that Japanese follow. By doing so, they often miss what is right in front of their eyes; the real Japan as it is. Not how the lonely planet guide and the etiquette books say it is. I swear some people still think its the Edo period here or something.

The Airsoft game day cost 3000 yen including food. So about 15 quid. This sounds quiet steep, but only 34 people attended and the organiser has to hire out the field and staff the facilities, so I guess its OK. Anyway, I think it was worth it because I really had fun. This is what the lunch looks like:

Some kind of curry and salad. It was nice. 500 yen (as part of the 3000 total). And in an interesting Juxtaposition here is a Caterpillar:

At lunchtime James wanted to fix his gun because it wasn’t aiming correctly, the guy next to him was helping.

There you can see the shooting gallery. A game lasts between 20 and 25 minutes, so if you die early on you can come here and shoot off a few rounds. Speaking about rounds, nobody really plays with realistic sized magazines, but rather people typically use high capacity magazines with perhaps a 400bb capacity. This makes it more fun because bbs are not bullets and so they bounce off bits of wood or whatever.

People are generally very honest in Japan so you can just leave your stuff around and not worry about it. Actually Airsoft is a game that requires high morals when it comes to honesty because it is usually your own judgement as to whether you have been hit.

It is rare and not encouraged to challenge people about you hitting them with a shot, but you can do if you want. There were some proper otaku (geek maniac) people playing and I swear I unloaded about 30 rounds onto one of them and he didn’t die.

Sometimes you might not feel being hit also, for example if you had padding on. Sometimes they have referees but we didn’t.

The last game we played was like some kind of real-life deathmatch. If you don’t know what a deathmatch is, let me explain. It is a timed computer game, usually an FPS game, and the goal is to get as many kills as possible, when you die, you respawn at a random point on the map.

Well we played like a live version of this. When you got killed you had to goto a special point for your team and press the button on one of those counter things that bus conductors have, then you had to go back to your teams base and restart. The game lasted an hour. It was really fun. Our team won. The only problem was that my visor kept steaming up.

When I do this again I am going to buy some goggles and then wear some other kind of protection for my face because otherwise the breath goes up into the visor bit and steams it up. Believe it or not you can actually install a small fan into your visor to prevent this.

At the end of the day, on the way home, I saw this strange bar:

One more thing about Airsoft that I want to say is this. It really made me think about war and how terrifying it must be to be a frontline soldier. In airsoft it doesn’t matter if you die, other than you might be annoyed, but obviously in real life the story is different.

When you fight in this jungle-like environment it is impossible to see if someone is hiding waiting for you in the bamboo, but you can’t just sit there all day. You can’t win a battle by sitting around. Someone has to advance. Sometime it will be you that has to advance and try and take a new point. You may get cover fire from your team-mates, but the enemy guns are going to be well trained on you.

What about in WWI where thousands were advanced knowingly in archaic formation into German heavy machine gun fire. I visited The Somme in France once and there is a tree called “The Danger Tree” which marks the point where you come into range of the enemy guns. That must have been fucking terrifying.

I recommend you play airsoft because not only is it fun but somehow at the same time it is a sobering experience and will give you an insight about warfare that you cannot obtain by reading books. It gives you some idea what it is like, although of course trivially diluted.

Here is the slideshow.

This doesn’t really have anything to do with my stay in Japan, except after work today I decided to watch it, because I was thinking, “hmm I want to watch a Japanese movie” and this film came to mind.

The film isn’t long. Only 41 minutes. There isn’t really a plot, essentially some woman gets kidnapped, drugged, and then chopped up by some nutter in a samurai hat. The whole point really is an exercise in gore and realism for the film makers. I took screenshots of the film and provided some kind of commentry.

There are two versions: the non-gory version, with no gore in (except some blood on his gloves), and the super-gory version which shows all the sick scenes. I have put the gory one in a separate post (the password is “flower”):

http://www.ashleyinjapan.com/?p=2933

Here is the NON-GORY slideshow:

I hope you are suitably impressed.

This film was so ridiculous it was almost comical to watch. It was some kind of endurance test. In my mind I was like “no, lets not see the intestines dancing about… no, please no, not the jewels.. oh fuck, no I don’t want to see your collection”. Such a funny film, made me want to cover my eyes.

I don’t know whether I want to call this film a masterpiece or cheap gore porn. It is a pretty original film, and artistically it makes a bold statement without dressing it up as anything else and defines a reference point on the boundary of extreme cinema with which to compare other films.

Part of me wants show this film to other people now, so I can watch them squirm as they go through what I went through. Not in a sadistic manner, but I mean, it would be funny somehow, because I know what is coming next.

Finally let me say, whilst it is one thing to watch this film, it is another to go back over it frame by frame to take screenshots of the “best” gory bits. If nightmares are comprised of things one has already seen, then I now have ample fuel to generate some pretty good ones. sweet dreams hehe

This is the route I have been taking:

It is only upon drawing this out, I have realized that I have missed out some parts. I will adjust my route next time accordingly. Annoyingly, this probably means I will have to take more photographs at some point.

Yesterday I decided to take photographs of the route, since it is so cool, I wanted you to be able to imagine what it is like to Jog around the Imperial Palace in the centre of Tokyo. I am going to insert the photos as some kind of slide show because otherwise the post would be insanely long.

Running in Tokyo (lol) from Ashley Mills on Vimeo.

More running in Tokyo from Ashley Mills on Vimeo.

Guy skating a delivery trolley from Ashley Mills on Vimeo.