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cold concrete and death maids, aug 7 - 24, 2001

August 24, 2001 12:32

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--insects--
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locusts are huge, big, cool looking bugs that never cease to amaze me with the remarkable process of molting. i wanted to eat one the other day. but i didn't. the locusts are huge and loud here in the summer. they're called semi (seme, where se is like say and me is like me) and they scream hella loud until you turn them back over, smush them, put em in a jar, or make them fly away. how can an animal that can consistently land on it's back without an efficient way of getting back up have lived for so long...

anyway, so zazamushi are these little black worm-type bugs. they live in rivers. hachinoko are bee pupea, and sanagi are little, grubs, and grasshoppers are inago .... and they all come in these nice little gift wrapped packages. so i got back from last week's break and Nishikawa-san, one of my office mates, shakes a plastic bag at me. "for you." he says, and i am now the proud owner of four packages of insects to eat. yum. i don't know when i'm going to eat them, but it should be fun. apparantly up in Nagano since there's no ocean close by, everyone can't eat disgusting sea creatures, so they have to eat disgusting land ones. i can't wait till i try em.... yum yum....bee pupea... all in all i got a box of grasshoppers, a jar of bee pupea, a jar of the little black slimey bugs called zazamushi, and silk worm larva. who's gonna help me eat them....

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--i buy a desk--
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so i went to the store the other day and bought a desk. yay....

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--i buy a phone--
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i mentioned that last week was obon, right? the weeklong japanese holiday when everyone goes home to pay homage to their ancestors...well anyway, sean and i were going to climb mount fuji on sunday two weekends ago. i woke up really early so i could go to the rock climbing shop in west tokyo to buy a head lamp (and some quickdraws and a sling cause i couldn't resist...) and i get to Shinjuku by 2:00pm, the busiest and most dangerous part of japan after midnight. i was supposed to meet sean at 3:00pm so we could take the bus to fuji and start climbing that night. (if you leave by midnight you can make it to the top to catch sunrise...). i wait underneath a billboard for a horrible japanese movie called Red Shadow (you should see it yourself...) but sean never showed. i didn't have a phone so i had to walk into the train station to find a hidden public phone and call sean, who i never seemed to get ahold of. little did i know that he had long since gone to Shinagawa to see the grave of the 47 samurai who all honorably committed ritual suicide in a great display of intelligence...no actually the story is very moving, check it out on google if you wish. meanwhile, i'm stuck underneath a huge billboard for a horrible movie called Red Shadow, sitting on concrete smelling like piss and ashtray.

oh, a funny note. as i was sitting there for (2.5 hours!) some japanese guy sits down by me. then he looks over at me and gets up, walks further down to another billboard for a bad movie and sits on down there next to an old japanese guy. i guess he didn't like me. or maybe i stunk. or maybe i'm just foreign. little did he know, however, that that old japanese guy he just sat next to had two minutes earlier been stuck for at least a minute and a half with his shirt halfway over his head, trying to get it off. he just sat there with his shirt over his head forever. well, he finally got it off and used it to soak up sweat till he put it back on. sit wherever you want, man. at least he's not foreign....

so i'm sitting smelling cigarettes and that old guy's sweat under the huge billboard for the horrible movie called Red Shadow and i notice .... duh duh duh ..... death maids! i had forgotten i was in the fashion capital of the world!!!

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--death maids and bathing apes--
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Shinjuku is a great place for people watching, as is exemplified by the death maids. you might be asking yourself at this moment, "what exactly is a death maid?". well...picture a small, japanese teenage girl who for some reason is wearing the clothes of a 18th century European maid. floofy dress, frilly sides, long stockings, buckle shoes, lacy frilly collar complete with lacy, frilly hat. now, picture that japanese girl after she turned 14, realized that everything in the world sucked and decided that goth was the coolest thing around and you'd never understand why. turn all those clothes jet black with a touch of white lace every now and then and that, my friend, is a death maid. a bittersweet concatination of cute and jet black goth. i saw tons of 'em walking around. including one who just couldn't quite grasp the concept...she was dressed all in pink. a pink death maid dress....yeah, moving on...

i couldn't understand this brilliant new style until i went to Harajuku, where there's live music in Yoyogi park almost everyday. today's special was a new fad of music that i christened death maid rock. i didn't see any guy death maids, but the bands where mainly guys. maybe it was because the presence of the death maid chicks was so overwhelming....all i saw was a sea of black, frilly, floofy dresses. and those stupid maid hats....

anyway. yeah, so the death maids are the little girls who really like this new type of fad band in japan. i don't know what they're called yet, but i'll send an update as soon as the information comes in...

in other news, i waited for over 2.5 hours on sunday for sean. did i mention that? 2.5 hours sitting on the piss and ashtray concrete under the poster for the horrible movie called red shadow! to pass the time away, i wrote down all the funny english sayings i saw written on shirts. here are some that were pretty amusing:

and the grand finale.... then as i was heading home, i found a long phrase on a shirt that might explain some of the japanese teenage style, or any teenage style for that matter:

that's news from japan...

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