July 7th (Day 11)
Back from Kyoto and the last full day in Japan
Most of our last full day in Japan was spent recovering from the Kyoto trip. We spent some time getting things ready for the trip back, burning cd's, and I took the opportunity to photograph 3 cd's from M's CD collection. I was told this singer is her heartthrob...
We didn't have much in particular planned but A helped us take a train into Tokyo and we stopped at Shinzuku station to do some shopping. This is deep in the city and the towers loom over everything; there isn't a trace of green or uncovered earth anywhere. We walked into a large multilevel building and did most of our shopping in a store that occupied about 40% of the building or roughly half of each floor for 7 floors. This vertical department store sold all sort of strange random goods. It had the pocket watch I was interested in getting for 18,000 yen (much too expensive for a watch) and my camera was on display for $100 more than I paid in Nara. There were also selling SD memory cards for something like 6x what I could pay online.
The neighborhood tofu truck
Downtown Tokyo
Na and the colonel
In the home furnishings department (the right side of the 5th floor) I sat in a massage chair. It was frightening. It grasps your legs and hands and bends you at the waist. There are knobs that come out of the back and jab into your shoulder blades and down to your buttocks. It squeezes and vibrates your feet. We got a couple of pictures of videos of us using it.
A few steps away there was a seat shaped like a saddle complete with little stirrups. All the advertisements displayed a woman straddling it with a big smile on her face and her entire pelvic region painted with flames. The display chair was covered in plastic and I wondered if it was sticky.
The vibrating seat Her pelvis is aflame! They have these knobs that come out of the bottom you see...
I'm not sure how you're supposed to use the control panel when your arms are being crushed.
The store carried a little bit of everything. It had a hello kitty section blindingly pink and with every sort of item you could possibly imagine branded with hello kitty icons. I wanted to browse through the aisles and take pictures of the most egregious products but I didn't want to be considered that strange guy taking pictures of the hello kitty section. They were selling hello kitty potato chips.
After lunch and a little more shopping we wandered out and into a gigantic 7 level bookstore. Shamara wanted a map of Tokyo and I didn't need anything but I was sorely tempted by the children's books displaying giant beetles and dinosaurs.
A costume section of the multi-store More fireworks A giant bazooka party popper!
This array of creepy heads was to demonstrate the types of suncream you could buy 'self tanning' and 'ocean cool' 'rage' and 'max gel'
Strange Products
We took the crowded train back and met M at the station. She drove us to a gigantic grocery/department store (Ito Yokado) where S finished picking up gifts and we bought dinner (pre-packaged chicken chunks). I spent lots of time browsing the merchandise looking for strange products or silly names. There were many, many examples.
I want to get a 'sweet dog' bib for someone's baby 'Swing laundry sunny pinch'
Maybe I misjudged scooters... An unfortunately named, and um...shaped snack A tiny shopping cart
Waffle corn Some sort of dominated slave costume 'Come on!' Wait a sec...what are you trying to tell me? A pig shaped food cover
poopy picker giant dried squid
'Black black' and 'recaldrent' 'Whiteen' 'Flavono'
'Bub-can' 'Tasty-life' Try the bamboo stick for starting a fire (at Tokyu Hands)
Learn english as you poop
All sorts of strange clocks Solar powered flower shaped ipod charger A gigantic earwax cleaner
Head massagers uhhh...ok!
An octopus ball maker "Get Lobster" I think this is a parody of Red Lobster. Warning says "You can boil or bake me but you can't eat me." A ladle like that is called Otama. There was a stray seal that went way up a river and became popular in the neighborhood a couple of years ago and they named him Tama. Hence the picture of a seal. The spatula says "Raku ni hikkuri kaeru". Which means you can easily turn food over. "Hikkuri kaeru" means "turn upside down" but "kaeru" also means frog.
In the grocery section we found an entire dried squid for sale in a vacuum sealed bag that would have been a good gift for dad but probably wouldn't have made it through customs.
Fireworks
After a terrifying drive home we had dinner and walked back to the ghetto baseball field to finish off our fireworks. The rest of the fireworks were pretty lame with the exception of one more incident where I had to dodge an errant firework. We also played with something I'd never seen before. It was described by A as the most gentle firework you can buy. It consisted of a strip of paper that thickened at the end. You held it dangling down and lit the bottom. After burning a while it formed a glowing red ball of molten goo on the end of the string and began shooting out branching sparks. The sparks were very very tiny and shot out in all directions in the radius of about a softball. The sparks looked like three dimensional fractals and it was interesting and pretty; something I hadn't seen before.
Strange Japanese television
The other thing we did today was watch strange Japanese television. I learned that every day at 8:15 for the past 40 years or so there is a 15min episodic drama. The children's channel was especially strange. I saw a cartoon where a dog creature spoke with a toilet then jumped on him and pooped into his mouth with much grunting and relieved sighs. Shamara said that while flipping through channels she came across a news report or something where a completely nude man holding a sign was running down the street.
We also saw a short segment where a young man and woman were running around smelling people's feet. I didn't understand the point.
I got some pictures of some of the stranger things I saw. There was a retired sumo wrestler dressed as some sort of pastry thing that sits/lays on the ground in a lump and interacts with children. There was also a short segment (I actually saw on two different days) where a line of men walked in step to a tune and the first one passed an action down to the one behind him. It was really well done and humorous and although I liked it better the first time they did it, I got a video of the second time. If you turn the sound up you can barely hear the music they're marching to in the background.
If you turn up the sound enough you can barely make out the background music.
