Go West: A tale of Pork bones and Mongolians (part 2)

Waking up in our well furnished, but not-quite-large-enough-for-four-people hotel room I endeavoured to have the shower that I was sorely missing having not had a chance to do so in the Net Cafe. They had showers there, but I stupidly put my phone on silent meaning I overslept by 20 minutes whilst the vibrations from the phone frantically told me to get out of bed. Being a white western man, I consider shower time to be an entirely private affair; you go in and take a shower alone. This is not the case with the Japanese; family members often wash each other’s backs before taking a shower, and as in this case, sometimes girls will barge in whilst you are standing, naked as the day you were born, desperately clinging to the shower curtain in order to provide a modicum of protection, and insist that there’s no time to wait for you to finish. With my trauma still fresh in my memory, we left to hotel and travelled to our raison de voyage; the final day of the Fukuoka Basho - the grand sumo tournament.

The outside of the venue was decorated in all manner of colourful flags, each with the name of one of the more well-known of the wrestlers emblazoned on them. My friends and I had a box seat whilst the girl who performed shower interuptus on me had splashed out for a ringside seat. A box seat at sumo largely consists of four cushions with enough space for you to sit and have a picnic/build a fort/put on a gymnastics show. Generally speaking, they are the medium priced seats, coming in at 10,000 yen per day, the ringside seats costing 15,000 yen and the seats at the back 5000 yen. We got there quite early, only a small handful of people came to watch, as tournaments are set up so the the lowest ranked and least famous fight first and the wrestlers get increasingly more prestigious until the last match in which the grand champion fights.

It took me a little while to figure out what was going on, but I eventually got the gist of it. First the name caller (so called because he calls people’s names) comes on stage and sings on the names of the wrestlers in a high pitched, nasal drone. The wrestlers then enter the ring and start their warm-up dance. First they point to the sky, put their hands on their knees and crouch down. Then keeping the knees bent at the same angle they lift one leg up in the air as high as they can and bring it down on the ground in a stomping motion, repeating the process for the other leg. The wrestlers then crouch down, touch the ground with their knuckles and promptly stand up to repeat the process again, the higher-ups also leave the ring to throw salt on it. This whole process took up most of the day I spent watching sumo, and considering most matches only last a few seconds, the result ends up being that there is a huge build-up of tension. The fact that the match takes a lot less time than the very ritualised build-up must be why the Japanese take sumo so seriously, because the actual fighting comical to the point of being farcical.

Sumo consists of two overweight men slapping each other’s jelly rolls and trying to make them either fall over or step out of the ring. Since they’re are not allowed to strike with the fist, the matches often resemble a cross between a cat-fight outside an Essex nightclub at 2.00am and the fight scene between Hugh Grant and Colin Firth in Bridget Jones’ Diary. However, as the day wore on something changed. I don’t know whether it was the alcohol, the over-exposure or the hypnotising effect of jiggling blubber, but I began to find sumo less ridiculous. It probably helped as well that by the end of the day the fighters were of a higher quality, but sumo was starting to make sense. There are no weight classes in sumo, so wresters are almost forced to be as heavy as they can to survive, and there was real skill and technique being displayed by the wrestlers.

Aran...I think

The most surprising thing, however, was that the majority of the top-ranked sumo players – the champions and grand champions, are foreigners. Yes, in a land in which the Japanese make up 99% of the population, one of their most cherished cultural items is dominated by foreign gentlemen. The foreigner sumo wrestler comes in two flavours; ex-soviet and Mongol. Two of the four current champions, Baruto and Aran, come from Estonia and Russia respectively, whilst another champion, Harumafuji (who suffered an injury early in the tournament and thus was not there) as well as the current grand champion, Baruto, and his successor, Asashoryu are all Monoglian. I must say, I was very pleased, as watching a fat white man waddling around with nothing to protect his dignity but a strip of cloth reminded me very much of home; in particular, beach season in Poole. In the end, Hakuho proved why he was the grand champion by stomping the upstart Toyonoumi into the ground with the force of 1000 Genghis Khans, which was a shame, because apparently if Toyonoumi had one everyone would jump up and throw their cushions at each other and the wrestlers.

The day ended in a hour long party with the sumo wrestlers, of which about half was taken up with a long presentation during which I drank all the wine I was suppose to save for the toast. An unfortunate miscalculation meant that by the time we arrived at the station to get the bullet train, we had only 10 minutes to find the platform, buy all the souvenirs and board the train. So I transformed into super present buying mode and managed to accomplish all my goals within 5 minutes, although many Fukuokans were no doubt entertained by the sight of me desperately grabbing things from the shelves like a forgetful parent on Christmas Eve. If you are considering coming to Japan to watch the sumo, then I highly recommend bringing alcohol with you, repetitive, ridiculous and yet highly entertaining...as long as you’re just a little bit drunk.

Go West: A tale of pork bones and mongolians (part 1)



Hakata Bijin (they don't seem to
 wear their hair in ringlets as frequently
 as the ones in Nagoya do)

 Japan is, by in large, a relatively emaciated country. There aren’t too many fat people around, besides the occasional one you run into at the gym or in the delicatessen section in the supermarket. With this in mind，I went to the one place in the world where morbidly obese people in loincloths slap each other’s man-boobs whilst a cheering crowd bays for blood. Not celebrity fat camp, but Kyushu basho, one of the six annual sumo tournaments held in Japan. I took the bullet train at stupid o’clock on a Saturday to arrive in the city of Fukuoka/Hakata, a place so cool it has two names, after almost 3 and a half hours. In case you are wondering, food-wise Hakata is known for its tonkotsu ramen - a type of cloudy ramen made with pork bones (don’t give me that face, it’s delicious), mendaiko – spicy, marinated fish roe wrapped in a sausage-like casing, and it’s good quality gyoza, which are a little smaller than average. The city is also famous for its Hakata Bijin, or Hakata beauties, who traditionally were supposed to be so dainty and delicate they made the gyoza extra small, so the poor little creatures didn’t have to open their mouths too wide.

That's not filth encrusted on the grill,
it's delicousness

Our first day of the weekend was spent stumbling around Fukuoka sightseeing and pretending that we weren’t sleep-deprived. We visited a couple of temples first, two relatively big ones in Fukuoka, where we got our fortunes told (I was slightly lucky, although my health fortune apparently suggested I would enter into a long and painful illness), drank seawater and threw 5yen coins into a big grate - standard stuff. We also went to a museum where I tried out cloth weaving with a shuttle loom, and listened to old recordings of Japanese people speaking now dead dialects very quietly. Afterwards we went to a little roadside shanty-town style restaurant/bar where we had some of the tonkotsu ramen and grilled meats. The restaurant was a smoky little shack run by an eccentric old man who insisted on giving us ‘service’ (Japanese term for freebees). You can probably get a good idea of what the place was like if I told you that the patrons that were smoking (all of them) threw their cigarette butts on the floor instead of stubbing them out in an ashtray.



"KITTY-CHAN!
KONNICHI-WA!"

After almost falling asleep on the train, I made my way to the Yahoo! Dome. The Yahoo! Dome is the stadium for the local baseball team – The Fukuoka Softbank Hawks. In Japan, many of the professional baseball teams have companies names inserted into the middle like the Tokyo Yakult Swallows, the Chiba Lotte Marines and the Hokkaido Nippon-Ham Fighters. I guess since Premier league clubs are owned by Russian oligarchs and oil tycoons rather than companies, it’s doubtful we’ll see the Manchester Glazer United or the Abramovich Chelsea. Swarming around the stadium were thousands of university students all dressed in sharp suits. Apparently there was some sort of job fair being held there; well, either that or someone was giving away free vodka and suits. Passing through the horde of identically dressed Lilliputians we eventually came to a shop called RoboSquare; a shop that sold and displayed the very latest in Japanese robot technology...well sort of. The one robot that piqued my interest in particular was a Hello Kitty robot, solely because it was featured on Jonathan Ross’ Japanorama TV show. It didn’t work then and it didn’t work now: You end up shouting “Kitty-chan, Konnichi-wa” over and over again, and she just criticises your intelligibility. There were other robots there; a dog whose name I forgot, a penguin who sort of wobbled, cooed and produced an egg from its viscera, and a seal that was genuinely adorable and apparently designed for therapy with Alzheimer’s patients. I left feeling that whilst we had come a long way from furbies, it will be a while until the commercial robot market can compare to, say, iRobot.

Vegetable mountain

We made a detour to Fukuoka tower whilst we were in the area; a tower that seemed specifically designed as a dating spot. There were secluded sofas, a romantic cafe and even a lover’s retreat – an evocative name to describe an observation deck with mood lighting. For dinner we had a dish called Champon. Essentially it’s a bowl of broth with some marinated chicken gizzards in it, covered with heaps of chopped cabbage and lashings of spring onion, positioned in the middle of a table on what can best be described as a camping stove. If it doesn’t sound very appetising, that is because you are a philistine and can’t appreciate the joys of chicken intestine and cabbage soup. When all the cabbage and spring onions have been eaten, the waitress comes over and dumps two heaps of noodles in the simmering pot. This being Japan, the meal was naturally an all-you-can-drink affair and the air hung thick with the aroma of cheap cigarettes. The restaurant itself was a run-down place with a buzzing neon sign outside and delightfully old-fashioned decor, air conditioning running non-stop and a cramped seating area where two people at opposite tables would practically sit back to back. It was perhaps the most atmospheric place I’ve visited thus far in Japan.

Afterwards, we decided to take in some of the nearby yatai, or food stands. The they amounted to little more than shacks on a half-flooded, rain-soaked promenade where patrons sat around a central counter and ate things like deep-fried cod roe. Upon seeing the menu I endeavoured to try that most exotic and dangerous of fish – the fugu or blowfish. For those of you not familiar, the blowfish is a delicious albeit somewhat expensive fish that if prepared incorrectly can be poisonous – fatally so. Throwing caution into the wind and my life into the hands of the owner of this shanty-town shack I tucked in and... well, I’m here now aren’t I? The fish was delicious, and actually relatively cheap, a delicacy I’s highly recommend, although I’m still not convinced that the best way to prepare such a fish is to deep-fry it. The remainder of the evening was spent making conversation with a couple of Koreans (who incidentally couldn’t speak Japanese) about the recent attack by the North on Yeonpyeong island. Feeling the glow of the beer kicking in, we retired to our hotel for some well earned rest.

Stranger in a familiar land



Tebasaki

Last weekend I was visited by some friends from university, or rather a friend and her boyfriend, whom I had met only once and didn’t really speak to him. It was one crisp autumn morning in late November that I received a message from her asking whether we could meet up over the weekend and guide her around Nagoya and show her and her boyfriend the sights of Nagoya. A normal request you might assume, but panic began to set in, as I began to realize two things; firstly, there

 are no real tourist attractions in Nagoya, secondly, the few that there are, I had never been to. Reaching into my bookshelf, I pulled out my trusty copy of the Lonely Planet’s guide to Japan and flipped through the book to learn about the city I’ve practically been living in for almost 4 months. There were only 8 pages in a book of about 500 that were about going to visit Japan’s fourth largest city, most of them being about which net-café to stay in or where to buy tebasaki (a type of peppery chicken wing that is almost ubiquitous in Nagoya). In other words, it was absolutely useless.

So when Saturday finally arrived, I wrapped up in my coat, scarf and jumper and headed out to Nagoya on the train. After eventually meeting up in the train station, we took the underground to the government district, Shiyakusho and that’s when I realised that my palms were getting moist, my forehead getting hot and my clothes were starting to stick to me. Not a tropical disease I can assure you dear reader, but something much rarer; warm weather. As a result, I arrived at Nagoya castle carrying most of my clothes under my arm in a desperate attempt to try and not boil to death (just how much snow are you getting in the U.K.?) Buying a ticket, I made sure to stop off at a traditional Japanese tea room, which sold green tea with gold leaf in it. I’m not sure what gold leaf adds to the flavour or how Zen the experience of drinking something so opulent is. My friends and I took a short detour through the woods, passing by a depiction of Nagoya castle as a piece of tofu with flowers in its hair on the way. After the hippie’s wet dream we went to see a bunch of actors dressed up as soldiers, accompanied by a cutesy representation of Ieyasu Tokugawa. I’m still waiting for Hampton Court to feature a cutesy Henry VIII wandering from room to room killing his cutesy wives or a doe-eyed Winston Churchill chasing an adorable Hitler around the war rooms. Eventually we made our way to the inner walls of the castle compound, only to realise when we got there it was still largely a building site. Apparently, the castle was completely burnt to the ground during World War 2; half of it was rebuilt in 1959, but didn’t start re-building the other half until 2009.

Miso Katsu

Standing in the open courtyard, being slowly roasted by my over enthusiasm for cold weather, we made our way to the donjon - twin keeps connected by a raised walkway, and looked at the exhibitions inside. One of the key features of the castle is that it has two tiger-headed dolphins on the top posed in such a way as they look like deep-fried prawns (another Nagoya speciality) from far away. After visiting the various exhibitions and sitting on various displays of traditional Aichi culture, we went to the next best place; the wretched hive of saturated fats and heart attacks known locally as Yabaton. Yabaton, for those that aren’t aware, is a local restaurant chain that serves deep-fried pork in a miso sauce. The taste can a little overpowering for a newcomer, but my friend’s boyfriend seemed to enjoy himself immensely. In fact he was so pleased by the meal that he bought a T-shirt from the restaurant, which I suppose is right up there, in terms of fashion statements, with buying a T-shirt with a haggis on it from Scotland, or a Cheesesteak on it from Philadelphia or a kangaroo on it from Australia.

Afterwards we headed to the Osu district of Nagoya, one of the few places I had been before, sometimes called the Akihabara of Nagoya (minus the maid cafes, the porn, the wall-to-wall electronics or anything that really makes Akihabara what it is). Osu itself largely consists of a large covered street with innumerable clothes shops, shoe shops, South American restaurants and trendy cafes. In short it’s more like Paris than Akihabara, well it would be if central Paris didn’t have any white people. We visited the giant Shinto temple there called Osu Kannon, got our fortunes, rang the big bell and quickly moved on. Travelling to Sakae, the city’s entertainment district and home to the so-called Sakae girls (girls who dress in short skirts and wear their in dyed ringlets that flock to the innumerable nightclubs here), I felt obliged to introduce my charges to yet another Nagoya speciality and something I’d never had before – Hitsumabushi. Hitsumabushi is charcoal-grilled eel served with rice, stock, wasabi and other accompaniments. The idea is that you divide the eel into quarters, the first quarter you eat unadulterated, the second you eat with wasabi and seaweed, the third you eat with stock and the last you have as you like it. I ruined my last quarter by putting too much stock in my bowl, turning my delicately balanced and harmonious meal into a rice gruel with bits of eel floating in it. Unfortunately my friend’s boyfriend didn’t like eel, so he had the thing on the menu with the least eel in it – dried eel spines. It was like watching Monty Python’s spam sketch. So while he sat there eating his bones, my friend and I quickly finished up so we could go to another restaurant so he could get his fill of another Nagoya speciality – Oyako-don, a name that means parent and child rice bowl. In case you haven’t figured it out, this relates to the fact that the dish consists of chicken and egg. Wikipedia calls this turn of phrase poetic; to me it’s more of a brutal reminder of harsh reality. Having torn apart a family by shovelling it into our gaping maws we said goodbye and I went back to resolutely under-exposing myself to the culture of my new home.

Apologies for the lateness of this update; you'll get two this week to make up for it

The rolling stone gathers no Mos

We all know America as the kings of fast food; the streets of New York are filled with street vendors peddling hotdogs of dubious quality, Jamie Oliver was practically lynched when he went there and there are more burger joints than there are libraries*. Britain too has become a fast food nation, even though our first fast food restaurant chain in Britain, Wimpy, served its hamburgers on a plate and expected us to eat them with a knife and fork. For those that are interested; Wimpy itself went out of fashion in the seventies, along with flares, unionism and 25-minute rock songs about goblin kings, but the British tendency to eat burgers and pizza with silverware, lives on. Normally Japan isn't really considered a fast food-loving country, since its population aren't corpulent gastropods, but it is. Japan loves it some fast food, some imported, some indigenous, all seemingly served by a good looking young girl with immaculate manners and strong perfume (i.e. the polar opposite of British fast-food workers). So allow me dear reader to explore some of the food options for the lazy foreigner in the land of the rising sun.

American imports

Colonel Santa

KFC – The Japanese have their own version of fried chicken called Kara Age, which is widely available as pub food. That said, one should never underestimate the appeal of bread crumbs and fake colonels, as KFC holds an important place in Japanese culture. The Japanese for some reason associate KFC with Christmas (perhaps they cannot tell two bearded white people apart.)

Mr. Donut’s – A shop that sells...well...doughnuts. Coming from the land of grey skies and gloomy faces, Mr. Donuts was like taking an LSD trip whilst watching the Beatles’ Yellow Submarine film, in that the sheer range of colours blew my mind. They don’t taste half bad either. In Japan the stores occasionally give away free doughnuts, prompting queues lasting for several hours.

Mc Donald’s – Do you know what they call a quarter-pounder with cheese in Japan? They call it a “Kwohta Paunda Chiizu.” The Japanese also sell Teriyaki burgers in Mc Donalds, which are actually better than most of the other things on the menu. The burgers are suitably ‘Japanese’ in size. There are a number of imitators such as the unfortunatly named Mos(s) burger, but none of them sell cheese fondue burgers. Mc Donalds does.

Japanese fast food

Yes, that is a raw egg in the middle

Gyuu-don (牛丼) – Shredded beef (gyuu) over a big bowl of rice (don). This basic dish comes lathered in a delicious sauce not unlike a casserole sauce you might find in British cooking. The bowls come in small, medium, large and Godzilla. These dishes are normally remarkably cheap considering how much they fill you up.

Takoyaki (たこ焼き)/ Okonomiyaki (お好み焼き)– These two dishes are most commonly associated with Osaka and the Kansai region of Japan. Takoyaki are bits of octopus inside batter dumplings and topped with a vaguely sweet sauce, mayonaise and mountains of spring onion and katsuobushi  (かつおぶし), which are dried fish flakes. Okonomiyaki on the other hand is a thick pancake made of batter and diced cabbage fried and topped with essentially the same things. Co-incidentally, the best way to annoy an Osakan is to insist that these two originally come from Nagoya or worse, Tokyo.

Ramen （らーめん）- Big bowls of soup and noodles which may or may not include meat, boiled eggs, spring onion. I’ve only ever been to proper Ramen restaurants after binge drinking, and as such I always subconsciously associate them with donner kebabs. The dish is hearty and delicious, but I must confess that I’ve never been able to finish one

This sort of silliness would never be
tolerated in a good old-fashioned
Indian restaraunt

Curry （カレー）- Curry in Japan is not Indian, thicker, sweeter with more sauce and fewer vegetables. The curry is always brown. You can usually choose how spicy you want it and pick a meat cutlet that you want to deep-fried and served on top. Served with the thick risotto like Japanese rice that is ubiquitous here rather than Indian basmati rice. The rice is always white.

British fast food

Fish and Chips – Only found in ‘British’ pubs, it’s actually scampi and potato wedges.

So there we have it everything you ever need to know about Japanese fast food. You now no longer need to come over here and try it.

*This is not just idle fact, but cold hard speculation

Gaijin Smash

It’s gotten much colder here in Japan. However, I feel I must stress the relativity of Japanese conceptions of cold; in Japan, it’s cold when you have to wear a jacket, whereas in Northern England, it was cold when it became hazardous to kiss someone lest your lips get frozen together. As oddly temperate as Japanese cold weather seems, mainland Japan seems to neglect to install any radiators, insulation or even close the windows in its school classrooms or corridors. In fact the only place which has those things is the staff room, where we also have a coffee machine. This has lead to fantasies of sipping a cafe au lait, laughing, whilst the Japanese waifs and urchins outside press their noses against the window, silently sobbing wishing only for more gruel.

It was on one such brisk morning that I strode into one of my lessons, wrapped up in a sweater and feeling a little tired from another sleepless night getting eaten alive by mosquitoes. In acknowledgement of this cold weather, the teacher ordered the children to close the window. Clambering over the bookshelves and desks three of the boys prompted started to struggle to close the window, which was above the door to the classroom. Feeling every inch the symbol of masculinity and physical strength the gaijin is supposed to be, I brushed the students aside and proceeded to show the children how it’s done. Placing one hand on the window, it promptly fell out of the rail and fell, frame and all, on the floor outside the classroom.

As there was no immediate sound of broken glass, I was optimistic, but after closer inspection it was revealed to be in worse condition than the re-election prospects of the Lib Dems. Sheepishly I walked back into class, pride shattered. As a third teacher came to clean up my mess, I endeavoured through a mixture of professionalism and sheer pomposity to carry on with a normal lesson and ignore the white elephant in the room. Unfortunately I chose this moment to smack my head on the metal bracket encasing the enclosed T.V. Normally, low-flying T.V.s aren’t really a problem in Japan, but then again, there are precious few Japanese people over 6’.

After a hard day’s work self-harming and vandalising school property I arrived home only to smack my head on a door frame. I’m thankful that I’m not into the habit of leaving discarded banana peels around my apartment, because the universe would not be able to tolerate such high concentrations of clichéd slapstick, and I’m sure I would have received some form of divine retribution. Still it was good practice for when the economy falls through completely and I have to persue a career as a circus clown. Now I just need to learn how to terrify young children...

Maid in Japan

Me after having just donned
my night's attire

Halloween is a time where all the scary monsters and demons come out of the woodwork to terrify little children and make grown men cower in fear. Of the many monsters in the Halloween canon, the most terrifying is easily the 6’3 transvestite with hairy legs, a beard and a maid costume. Just for the record, I never intended to dress as a maid for Halloween, just as I never intended to get sexually molested (again), accidently expose myself and pass out on the train ride home, but I did. With your interest hopefully piqued, dear reader, I shall start my tale at the most suitable of locations, the start. Having been invited to the annual JET party, I was in a spot of bother, it was three hours before the party and I still didn’t have a costume, so I made my way to one of Japan’s most curious institutions, Don Quixote, or Don Kihote as it’s known in Japan. Besides being the fictional, farcical knight who famously tilted at windmills, Don Quixote is also the name of a Japanese chain of shops that sell almost everything under the sun and have a famously convoluted floor design. In particular they sell a number of costumes amongst other tat, and being Halloween, they had a very good choice of costume. Remembering my previous cross-dressing experience, I suddenly felt the compulsion to wear a skirt again. I was tempted by the Neon Genesis Evangelion school uniform, but it was pricy and didn’t fit me anyway. That’s when I saw the answer to my prayers; the manly schoolgirl/maid costume set, featuring a fat Japanese guy on the packaging gurning and posing in a feminine stance. Having already been a schoolgirl in Japan the choice was obvious, French maid it was.



At the restaurant

I arrived at the party venue early, and deftly slipping into my one piece outfit and matching alice-band, I went to meet the other party goers outside. Luckily the night wasn’t cold, and seeing as I had neglected to invest in any stockings, I was in luck. As more and more of my friends arrived to see me at my most beautiful, I was slightly disappointed to see that I wasn’t the only man to come in drag, some Japanese guys had the same idea too. The restaraunt itself was fantastic, the food wasn’t the most creative in the world, just the familiar Japanese izakaya fare, but the atmosphere was superb. The restaurant was decorated as a horrific prison, with the individual rooms being enclosed behind prison-bars and the staff dressed as goblins and ghouls. Half an hour in, the lights went out and the staff put on a horror show; having strategically positioned myself between two attractive Japanese girls I was in the best position to capitalise on the terror they invoked. Afterwards though, things took a turn for the surreal. As the effects of the copious amounts of alcohol on offer started to kick in, I left my seat and my new companions behind and joined in the frenzied dancing that had erupted in the middle of the restaurant. Limbs flailed, skirts flew and at least one fake samurai sword prodded me in the arse. That’s when the skirt flipping started.

Mickey makes some
new friends

As much as I’d like to say it was mostly women that were lifting up my skirt, it would be an outright lie. Although there were a substantial number of women trying to lift my skirt and even pull down my underwear, it was mostly men who were trying to get a peak at what lies beneath. So for the next few hours I wandered around the restaurant, having alcoholic beverages foisted upon me and desperately trying to fend off the advances of drunken patrons. Eventually the party finished and the attendees went their separate ways. Some went to Karaoke, some went drinking some even went home for an early night, but having not had enough of being the center of attention I decided to join some of the Japanese in going clubbing. That’s when things turned from bad to Japanese.

I wasn't the only one
to have this problem

Arriving at the club it became apparent that I was right to assume that Halloween was mostly about getting drunk and dressing like a tit, the streets outside the clubs and off-licence were teeming with drunken revellers. There was a group of wallies, sexualised Disney characters, and characters from films as diverse as Avatar, Donnie Darko and Battle Royale. What I did notice was a relative absence of traditional Halloween monsters; no ghosts, no Frankenstein’s monsters and only a handful of vampires. Having entered our first club, my companions and I proceeded to start to dance the night away, only to be shooed off-stage 15 minutes later when it was announced they were starting the transvestite show. Half a dozen men came on stage one after the other to perform erotic dances and create an atmosphere of complete moral decadence and perversion. It was fantastic. None of them were particularly convincing, but they acted in such a supremely confident manner, I couldn’t help but admire them, it was like watching a real-life version of Bara no Soiretsu, aka ‘Funeral parade of roses’.

Transvestite

Naturally the skirt flipping didn’t stop, only this time, I seemed to have forgotten to redo the flies on my boxer shorts after a toilet break, accidently giving the two girls who successfully flipped my skirt rather more than they bargained for. Having failed at my attempt to convince them to reciprocate in a “I’ve shown you mine, now show me yours” type affair, I moved on to other clubs. The rest of the evening was spent in much the same way as before, being come on to by both men and women alike watching another tranny show and spending a lot of time dancing and drinking, it eventually got to 4.00. Exhausted by my endeavours, I decided to pass the time waiting for the subway to open by eating a huge bowl of ramen and drawing the attention of every other patron, naturally all drunken revellers. Like one of the living dead I stumbled back to the station, boarded my train and promptly passed out. I tried to keep myself awake by listening to the Beatles’ White Album, but that just made things worse when I woke up to Revolution no.8, a song seemingly designed to be as disorientating as possible. Unfortunately, I’d missed my stop and woke up at the end of the line, with a group of high school students eyeing me nervously and keeping their distance from the drunken cross-dressing foreigner lying with legs akimbo (boxer-button naturally done-up) and splayed across the train seats. The walk home from my stop was horrible, it had gotten colder, I was exhausted despite my un-scheduled sleep and I was already starting to have a hangover, but it was one of the best nights of my life.

Mammaries make the world go around

Today I was going to write about Japanese food, but I can't think of anything funny or poignant to say, so today I'm just going to talk about my kids being perverted and sex-obsessed again. Maybe I shouldn't write these blogs in the hour or so of free time between my last lesson and the end of work when I'm too tired to write anything half-decent. It was the day after writing my last blog about sex-obsessed pupils that I became acquainted with my first really perverted pupil. Let's call him Ichiro because he plays baseball (that's an American pop-culture reference; next stop losing my sense of humour and joining the writing staff of a Seth McFarlane cartoon). It was the first time I'd taught his class, so I was doing my self-introductory lesson, and was in the middle of handing out sheets for the kids to guess facts about my life. As I passed Ichiro's desk e stopped me and with a wide grin on his face asked me "Sensei, do you like Kyabakura?"

This word Kyabakura is actually a loan word derived from an English one, or rather two English words condensed into one; Kyaburei and Kurabu, i.e. Cabaret Club. Now when I think of Cabaret, I think of Lisa Minelli, oddly inspirational Nazi anthems and golden cigar cases, but, this being Japan, the caberet club is very little to do with those symbols of Weimar culture. The Japanese Cabaret club is all about attractive women making conversation and flirting with you while you buy them drinks and spend lots of money...allegedly, I've never been of course. So after answering in the negative (naturally), he proceeded to ask me whether I'd been to an Oppai pub (i.e. bar where the women prove not all Japanese have flat chests...allegedly). Time was getting on and I had to finish distributing handouts, not listen to inane questions from some lascivious pubescent, so I ignored him and moved on. Unfortunately he took my lack of comment as a yes.

Following the lesson, he and his friend accosted me and quizzed me about my preferences on the chest department. Trying to be the inspirational teacher I wanted to say that the size of a woman's chest doesn't matter and you should not judge a woman by the size of her rack any more than she should judge you by the size of your little katana. But, as is so often the case in Japan, the language barrier posed an obstacle to my sentiments so I just said 'docchi de mo ii' or all of them are fine. Slapping me on my back, Ichiro gave me a wide grin "You know... senzuri" he asked. I could guess; sen means 1000 and zuri means stroking. In case I needed any further clues he simulated masturbating whilst pulling a face that looked like he was having either a jolly good time or a stroke (no pun intended). Well, that was it, time to go, I gave him a clip round the ear (you are still allowed to do that in Japanese schools) and moved on to my next lesson, strangely relishing the new insights into the psyche of the Japanese adolescent he had given me.

Onsens and sensibility

Having been neither a homosexual nor a member of a high school sports team, I’m not particularly used to looking at naked men. Of course this changed when I went to Japan. One of the most treasured of all Japan’s cultural artefacts is a place where men stand around naked as the day they were born, showering and pouring water over themselves like they’re in a shampoo advert. The Onsen or hot spring is almost ubiquitous in Japan; it’s as common in downtown Tokyo as it is up some god-forsaken mountainside somewhere. Now, before I came to Japan I bought a Lonely Planet guide to Japan, and whilst it had little to say about Nagoya, by local city and the fourth largest in Japan, it did devote thousands upon thousands of column inches to detailing every single onsen no matter how insignificant. I can only assume that this was because being in a big bath is something that forms that backbone of most people’s holidays. However, as much detail as the authors went into about their personal experiences in these various hot springs, they never once mentioned that everyone is naked.

What is your impression of a typical Japanese man? Maybe it’s a samurai type filled with testosterone, or a hard-drinking salary-man (business man) who can’t really handle his booze, or even a trendy, metro-sexual fashionista? Whatever the typical archetype of a Japanese man may be there seems to be one assumption about the Japanese man that seems to be almost universal; that he has a tiny penis. Assumptions about the size of Japanese men seem to condition the foreign mindset; male foreigners will pat each other on the back and feel smugly superior whenever the topic of dong size comes up. So naturally, when the opportunity arose for me to investigate whether there was any truth behind the claims of an unequal distribution of wang, I couldn’t help myself. It was there in the onsen that I started my mission; on a quest to find out whether the Japanese really do have wee willy winkies.

Now, the Japanese do provide modesty towels which, unsurprisingly, are there to provide a modicum of modesty. Being only hand-towels they can only cover the front, not the back, so whilst you can provide decent cover when sitting down by placing it over your lap, you are generally reduced to carrying it loosely in front of you should you decide to walk around. However, all this is hypothetical because no-one ever uses the bloody things. In fact the Japanese seem to make a mockery of the whole situation by placing them on their heads whilst in the bath, for what reason I’m sure I’ll never know, but it allowed me to carry out my research effectively.

In the end, my findings were inconclusive, there were small ones, (including one really, really, embarrassingly small one) and some big ones, but I had to discount the survey because the sample size was too, err..., slim. Besides penis length is supposed to be measured from one’s upstanding citizen, so the experiment was entirely unscientific. That said, the onsen was pretty relaxing, but after half an hour your fingers grow all wrinkly and by then you’ve seen enough wrinkly body parts to last a lifetime. Maybe the whole experience would be different if everyone wore swimming trunks, but if that was the case you would have any memories to wash away with alcohol afterwards, and that wouldn’t be nearly as fun.

Why grandma! What wide eyes you have!

There is a time in every man's life when he has to make a confession, the truth is I was not always the paragon of manliness and confidence that you see (or more likely don't see) before you. Indeed when I was but a spotty teenager I was not what you would call a consummate ladies man. An unfortunate early un-requited infatuation meant much of my experience of women as a schoolboy was centred on the early halcyon days of the internet; when one had to rely of the scraps and titbits from pay-for-porn sites in order for one to get their pubescent jollies. It was in university that I had my first long-term girlfriend, which I found out mostly consists of apologising for transgressions you may or may not have made. Now, as a single man once again, I’m starting to enjoy single life a little; I can choose any facebook profile picture I want without feeling a pang of guilt and I have more money to spend on things like extension cords and floor pillows.

"Now why are you telling me about your love life?" you ask. "It's just like the budget deficit; it's totally boring, I don't want to hear about it and the only people that would are probably slightly creepy old men." Well, I tell you this, so that I can put in context just how easy it is for a young white male to meet girls in Japan. Now, the lot of the gaijin in Japan is not an easy one, we have to sit at the front of the bullet train, we have to go to segregated pornographic manga stores and the Japanese KKK is made entirely out of samurai, ninjas and battle robots. On the other hand, if you have an X chromosome and are foreign looking, at least Japanese women (and men, as I found out) will think you're sexy. You see, as a foreigner you embody the exotic other; wild, outgoing and a heavy drinker. In short, you are seen as a Conan the barbarian figure only weaving a shirt and tie and your +69 staff of penetration is entirely metaphorical. The same goes for women too, foreign women are seen as sassy, sexy and outspoken – the Xenu warrior princess archetype if you want to continue this tortured metaphor. The point I am trying to make is that foreigners find themselves foisted with a whole new sexualised identity when they come to Japan, even if they were the world’s biggest shut-in in their own country.

Allow me to demonstrate. Last weekend I went out with a friend to visit a women's university’s cultural festival. It seemed that the entire reason I was him that day was to make him seem more attractive to women through a process of osmosis in which he would acquire (what he considered) my natural gaijin masculinity. So for a day, I was his tool, hanging around and drawing women in with my long eyelashes and flabby gut. It didn’t really work, he was too...herbivorous...to ask them for their phone numbers and left the girls with vague assurances that they would email him. The largest problem with his method of ‘catching girls’ was presuming that they would instantly fall for a foreigner, let alone a man who happened to be friends with one, as opposed to actually spending time talking to women and getting to know them on a personal level. Ultimately it was because I was a foreigner that he considered me to be God’s gift to women. That said, the women here probably pay more attention to my inane prattle than they did back in the UK...

So I guess what I’m trying to say is that the fact that people consider me sexy is super prejudiced and racist. The next woman to complement me on my hairy legs, tall stature or wide eyes is going to get SLAPPED...with a racial discrimination lawsuit. WE SHALL OVERCOME!

The entry that is all about my penis

My children are always asking me how big I am. Day in day out they ask me "how many centimeters" "how many centimeters." They've probably heard from their friends just how big Westerners are, but since I've been at school, the children just can't help but admire my length and girth. Of course I'm talking about my height, standing at 6'3" and quite broad (read fatty still hasn't lost his beer belly) kids often fall silent when I walk into a room. Either that or they stare, slack-jawed at, what I like to assume is the tallest man they've ever met. Now, Japanese children are notorious for being shy, and many of them are, but as you may have guessed from the title, many of them have interests that could at best be described as eclectic and at worst as downright perverted.

I was sat eating the school lunch with some of my 6th year elementary school children, i.e. 11&12 year olds. The desks in all Japanese schools are notoriously small, so Godzilla here has to either sit spread-eagled and risk being entered onto the sex offenders register or balance my desk on my knees and watch as my miso soup spills into my green tea. So we sat there making small talk, about Dragonball Z or whatever anime was on the boy next to me's pencil case, let’s call him Oedipus (for reasons that shall become clear later). I started talking about my beard (now dearly departed) and asked young Oedipus if his father had a beard. Oedipus said his father didn't have a beard, but he did have a very hairy penis. I spat out my green tea in shock. Oedipus burst out into fits of giggles but in between chuckles he managed to ask me whether I had a hairy penis. I tried my best to pretend I hadn't heard the question, but the boys on the table were having none of it. The girls naturally rolled their eyes, "boys are such children" one said. It was then that Oedipus' friend opposite him asked me in an absolutely deadpan fashion "Tom, how long is your penis?"

That was it. "Hey, what do you think are you saying" I replied, well the Japanese equivalent, and I'd like to say that was the end of that, but when the time came around for my next lesson with them in which the children drew monsters according to my English instructions, lo and behold, Oedipus and his friends had all drawn penises on their monsters. Oh well, at least they didn't try to stick their fingers up my arse. Oh wait, they did that too.

Bunka-fest '10 (The hottest transvestite show in town)

Last blog I talked about the sports festival and its analogue the Western sports day. But, dear readers, there are actually two festivals in Japanese schools; the second is the 文化祭 (bunkasai) or cultural festival. Now the impression I got from TV and manga before coming to Japan was that the cultural festival was like an open day, except it didn't really involve showing off what you learn in lessons or trying to persuade Mr. and Mrs. Biggleswathe that little Dicky would be better off going to your school next year rather than Borstal comp. down the road. No, in the cultural festival, I was told kids run little cafes in their classrooms, they turn their classrooms into haunted houses and they give performances of their light music club, that sort of thing. But no, how wrong I was. Turns out, that stuff happens in senior high school; in junior high it's all about the choirs. Yes each class sings a song straight out of the secular hymn book, which are purposely designed to be as similar to one another as is possible to get. The overwhelming impression is like being in a church and singing evensong minus any God. By church I mean the Church of England, not one of those fun-having, Koran-burning evangelical jobs you get in the States.

So for the entirety of the morning, we listened to each class sing their song, and then each of the year groups sang their own song. A bit dull, but I wasn't really complaining because it in the afternoon that the fun began. You see, I'd signed up to participate in a teacher's performance of AKB48's song Aitakatta, a band which is composed of 48 15-24 year old girls as is probably the hottest act in Japan at the moment.  Over lunch I was presented with my very own skirt and neckerchief, thus fulfilling my number one ambition here in Japan - to dress up like a schoolgirl and make a fool of myself. After watching a three piece rock band (guitars turned all the way up to 2) and a very good pianist, I was ready to get dressed. I slipped into my skirt, (well I say slipped, I mean struggled) and fastened my neckerchief, and got ready to join my co-workers. Some were dressed as Otaku, the primary fan-base of AKB48, others, like me were dressed as schoolgirls.

So there we were, waiting for the cue to come on. Of course the kids had no idea we were in drag; one poor girl strayed into the lobby where we were waiting and promptly died from shock. The skirt was decidedly more breezy than trousers are, it's a good thing I've cultivated a good crop of leg hair to act as nature's own legwarmers otherwise I may have caught hypothermia. Between the unshaven legs, the 6'3" height and the beard, I wasn't going to be fooling anyone that I was a middle school student, but some of the other more effeminate looking teachers put on a slightly more convincing drag act. The teachers dressed as Otaku pulled it off quite well, even the football-mad P.E. teacher, who would be one of the last people I'd expect to see hanging around Akihabara's porn palaces, stuck on his thick-rimmed glassed, tucked-in his socks and pulled out his largest camera. We were to be the reinforcements, joining the group about a minute into the song and surprising the students with the sudden arrival of cosplaying teachers in their midst. As the brass band played the opening notes of the song, we waited for our cue to come charging out from behind the students and make our way to the performance.

Gaijin - ruining Japan since 1854

About half a minute into the song we made our move, rushing out, as slipping on the heavily waxed gym floor in our socks. Having joined the rest of our posse, we stood dumbly for a few seconds, as everyone simultaneously forgot what the moves for that part of the song was. Polished it was not, but I guess it wouldn't have been as fun if we took it seriously. What resulted was one of the most enjoyable performances I'd ever done, although it felt far too short at the time, you could see the kids loved it. As we rushed out of the gym, the cheers went up, I remembered why I had so much fun at the Japanese society dance team in university, except even more so, because I got to wear a skirt.

O brave new world, that has such people in it.

The festival pretty much ended there. There was the usual closing ceremony and some of the kids were given awards, although I'm not entirely sure why. The student council president was quite funny though, witty and confident, most of the jokes went over my head, but the few that I understood I enjoyed. So that was it, my cultural festival. Not entirely what I expected, but an extremely entertaining experience overall. Next year I may try and skive off work at my elementary school again.

The meeting of exercise

It's just occurred to me that the previous three entries in this blog have been about sex in some way or another. So I guess this time I'll talk about something wholesome and all-American this time; competitions of athletic prowess. Yes, even an uncivilised and barbaric nation like Japan has Sports days, but their feeble and un-Western minds seem to have distorted the correct (white) way of doing them. Yes, in England, sports days consist of sitting around bored, watching the more athletic members of your class or form run endless sprinting, hurdles and long-distance races, and sometimes for a bit of excitement you can have the privilege of watching boys jump into sand pits instead. Normally the most interesting thing that can happen in a British sports day is if someone gets heatstroke; thus providing everyone else with a talking point.

In Japan, things are a little different. The Japanese equivalent to the British sports day is called an undoukai (運動会), literally a meeting of exercise, although, It is normally translated as 'sports festival.' Whilst festival might be a bit of an overstatement for an event where you're sat down for most of the time, counting the rocks in the sandy sports field, it's much more festive than the British version could ever aspire to be. For a start, there's not much in the way of sports at a sports festival, the kids tend to play communal games; like tug of war, throw the tennis balls into the basket ball hoop, ten-legged race (that's with 11 people). Occasionally, the brass band comes out and plays a stirring marching song (you know, the sort of thing they have at an American football game) and sometimes the kids take part in some sort of North Korean-style gymnastics session. In the end, they're too busy doing anything but sports to fit a 100m race in. The only example of sports at these sports festivals I've seen is the relay race, and even then they get the same amount of attention as the roll-the-giant-ball-over-your-backs-like-you’re-on-Takeshi's-castle event.

Now, I imagine some of you might be saying "Hang on Tom, aren't all these events really boring?" Well, I know nothing can compete with the white-hot excitement of a long jump competition, and true some of the events like the mass skipping event is a real snooze-fest, (especially in the surprisingly hot mid-September sun), but the real advantage of the Sports festival is the variety it has. You know how in Japanese game shows, everyone's involved in some sort of wacky competition that is more entertaining than it is an accurate test of physical capability, well the sports festival is like that. The sports festival is not some sober competition of athletic prowess like the Olympics, but a bizarre and entertaining event, which is less about skill as having fun, like the world cup. Also it has ceremonies. Lots and lots of ceremonies. The opening ceremony features each class marching past a podium with the big boss man (headmaster) on top, and extending their right arm out as if to salute him. They carry flags with their class colour on it and keep in rigid formation. In fact I have a video of it right here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ilXVkgmJk2E. They also raise the national flag whilst the Japanese national anthem (a.k.a. the world's most downbeat national anthem) plays over the loud speaker.

Afterwards all the teachers get together and do what Japanese teachers do best; get drunk and try and set the foreigner up with any single girl under 30. So, that’s the Japanese sports festival in a nutshell; basically an outside Japanese game show with a little disarming militarism thrown in for good measure.

Journey to the center of the Japan part 2 - Topless bars and Manga kisses

Having left the porn/manga store in Akihabara, I noticed that it was rapidly approaching 5.00. My friend and I made our way to the neon playground of Japan - Shinjuku. Shinjuku is probably my favourite place in Tokyo; the streets are crowded, the shops open late  and there are innumerable small little ramen shops, izakayas and toriniku stands crammed in between giant department stores and electronics shops. One area that captures the feel of Shinjuku is its seedy district – Kabuki-cho. There is no real physical boundary between Kabuki-cho and Shinjuku, and it is very easy to stray from one to the other without realizing it, but as soon as you enter into Kabuki-cho the keen observer can immediately tell the difference. Kabuki-cho is famous for long being a Yakuza hangout, and walking down the street there are still many men hanging around with visible tattoos and missing fingers. Nowadays, though it seems more of a place for 'Yankees', by which I don't mean fat American tourists, but young Japanese people with dyed hair and pierced ears, basically, the stereotypical rebellious kid. At first glance, Kabukicho seems to be just like any other district of Tokyo, albeit with a slightly more intimidating crowd, but as you get further into Kabuki-cho, you arrive at the sex shops. Yes, Kabukicho is Tokyo's red light district, and although prostitution is illegal in Japan, the Japanese get around the law by employing various euphemisms and sophistries that keeps the practice of the world’s oldest profession alive and well - compensated dating, remaining the most popular. There are also a variety of other, more legal, institutions related to the sex industry, if you are interested in possible catching hepatitis, you may want to try one of the following:
Oppai-pabu (Titty pub) - topless bars
Soaplands - 'massage parlours' in the very loose sense of the word (i.e. men go there to get 'soaped-up')
Hostess bars - bars where the waitresses are very attentive
Love hotels - hotels where the rooms are rented by the hour

There's also your usual selection of pimps, prostitutes, touts, johns, gangsters and the very occasional policeman, who seem to mostly be there to remind people not to smoke on the street. Unfortunately dear reader, I didn't go to any of these establishments and spent the remainder of the evening with my friend in a ￥270 izakaya (that is an izakaya where everything costs ￥270. An opportunity missed? Perhaps, but I'm just thankful not to come away with VD. After meeting up with another friend, our small party left Kabuki-cho behind and headed to the station. Soon, my new friend and I left for Shibuya, another entertainment district, not as expensive as Roppongi, nor as seedy as Shinjuku, Shibuya attracts a lot of foreign visitors. About 1 in 5 people seemed to be non-Japanese, and if that seems somewhat underwhelming to you, bear in mind I can count the number of white people in my hometown (pop. 60,000) on one hand! My friend and I headed to a little Ramen place, where I ordered too much...again. One day, Japan, I will master your Ramen portion sizes. After she left I headed to, of all things, a British pub. As much as I love it here in Japan, I do miss being able to order a pint of ale in a dingy little drinkery where a ban on smoking means all sorts of horrible smells assault your nostrils. So there I was, sitting in a faux English pub, being served by an Australian, with Lancashire hotpot on the menu and listening to the Smiths while some American guy to my left tried to impress a girl by explaining the difference in marital expectations between the West and Japan. It reminded me why I left England in the first place, there was something altogether...depressing about the place. It wasn't like the British pubs we have in Nagoya, which are just full of girls looking for foreigners to sleep with; no this was much more of an authentic British experience.

Having cured myself of my shameful nostalgia, I decided to expose myself to another Japanese institution - the manga kissa, or manga cafe. Whilst there does exist manga kissas which  are basically cafes for reading manga, these ones are specially designed for insomniacs and those too drunk to care where they sleep. You pay around ￥1500 for a small room about the size of a disabled toilet which has a computer and a reclining chair. You can either get some sleep in the hot and slightly noisy environment, or stick the headphones on and every episode of the Colbert Report that came out this month. I did both. There are free soft drinks, free manga library, and even a shower for the morning, but to be honest, it's more of an experience for the cheapskate, the adventurous or the sort of person that always wanted to look over the tops of toilet cubicles and see Japanese men asleep in their underpants.

Journey to the center of the Japan part 1 - Maids and Pornography (Akihabara)

For those of you that didn't know my birthday was last Tuesday, and to celebrate I decided to spend a weekend in Tokyo. What I couldn't have anticipated was how this supposedly innocent seeming trip would turn into an exploration of the seedy, the sordid and the downright Japanese. Having taken the Shinkansen from Nagoya to Shinagawa station, I met up with one of my acquaintances from University. I didn't know him particularly well，and he has quite a quiet demeanor, but all my other friends were working, socialising, watching paint dry; anything to avoid being in close proximity to me, so I just got on with it.

Our first stop was Akihabara, the district of Tokyo famous for its electronics and its Otaku (anime and manga) culture. Having missed out on going here during the Tokyo orientation, I was keen to see what one of Tokyo's most unique districts looked like. What was immediately apparent was that whist many cities have touts on the streets advertising various businesses, very few dress up as Victorian maids. This is a big thing in Akihabara - maid cafes, cutesy cafes where the waitresses dress up as maids. As the saying goes; when in Rome, go to a backstreet cafe and get pampered by women, so off we went. What first notice about the maids is that they all talk in a high pitched cutesy voice; its all "can I get you anything to drink master" this and "would you like to buy any additional services master" that. Everything is cute, the girls are cute, the food is cute, the customers are...lechers, but apart from them, it's all cute, all the time. Which is why it's most amusing to try and get the girls to talk in their normal voice; when I was ordering I muttered to myself "this 'rabbit super sparkle-sparkle parfait' doesn't really look much like a rabbit", to which she replied "yeah I know" before realising the horror of what she had done by letting her mask slip off and going as bright pink as my 'rabbit' parfait.

That said, the cafe was fun; the food was a little overpriced, and you have to pay a seating charge, and during the maid`s  concert, the music cut out causing one of the maids to swear under her breath (again in her normal voice), but that kind of added to the charm in a weird way. What was a little bit weirder were the customers, whenever the maids did anything clumsy, most of the customers would peer over. If I was an intellectual I'd say something about the clumsy maid being an archetype in the otaku community,  and how it reflected traditional Japanese conceptions of the role of the woman as the submissive partner and the man as her benefactor. However, I'm not an intellectual so I'm just going to say they wanted to look at her bum when she fell over.

 After leaving the cafe, my friend and I looked for something else to do whilst still in Akihabara, and luckily my guide book suggested a manga shop called 'Tora no Ana' just down the road. What I didn't realise was that this was Akihabara, home of the ronery otaku virgin and as such 'manga shop' actually means porn shop. The shop was a seven story building, the 1st two floors were manga and manga related magazines, and the remaining five floors? All porn. In fairness a shop whose name was 'the tiger's hole' and featured an anime girl in a tiger costume as a mascot probably should have alerted me to it's real nature. For those that are interested, the third floor was professionally produced hentai, both published manga volumes and anime DVDs. The fourth floor was generally a continuation of this, with a heavier focus on poseable figurines. For those that are familiar with the mega-popular band AKB48, one of the members recently quit to pursue a career as an AV idol (read porn star) and her debut video was being promoted on this floor. The fifth and sixth floor sold doujinshi (amateur hentai manga, largely focusing on characters from legitimate anime having sex) and the seventh was second-hand doujinshi. So yes, I was in a used porn store. Some of you may receive souvenirs in the post.