No thanks to me, I made it home. Last night the weird people next door were making noise throughout the night again, but I thought I had enough sleep. I’m not sure any more.

I got on the Narita Express from Tokyo to the airport with time to spare, but a guy politely told me I was in his seat. Well, it turned out I was in the correct seat, but on the WRONG DAY. I’d reserved a seat for tomorrow. Fortunately there were open seats and the conductor just laughed it off. I got to the airport about an hour early and I got stuck in a short line with two incredibly slow people. I was pretty cheesed off so I checked my bags and breezed through immigration, forgetting that most stores and restaurants are on the OUTSIDE of immigration.

Well, not only are there few stores inside but there are no mailboxes either. I was supposed to mail my rental cell phone back to the rental company. I asked immigration and they told me in their best passive-aggressive Japanese manner to ask the airline I’m flying with. The airline told me that immigration forbids them from carrying things “back to Japan” from the no-mans land of the airport. I was pretty cheesed off, but fortunately got to see Obama win the election and that was a nice distraction. In the end, it only cost $11.95 for priority mail from the US, but I have to pay overtime charges for getting the phone back late.

As soon as we got on the plane, I found out that I was seated directly behind a 1-year-old Korean baby boy who was screaming. The guy next to me who was flying from Korea back to the O.C. bet me that the kid would be crying the whole time. Fortunately he was wrong and the kid stopped crying as soon as we took off. The flight was fairly uneventful and it sure beat flying with my sister and all of the stuff she ends up buying. Last year I had checked in bags plus 2 carry-ons and it’s always tight when you have a bag at your feet. This year I only had one carry on in the overhead bin. Plus I got a seat close to the bathroom so I could see when it was free.

So I got back, waited 50 minutes for my sister to pick me up, had breakfast with her and unloaded a bunch of her loot (including 14 pens) and went home. I was unable to concentrate on much after I got home because I’d been up too long. It’s 10PM now, for example, and I woke up at 2PM yesterday if you look at the time difference. I had a 10 minute nap on the train and a 10 minute nap while I was doing laundry here but I’m trying to stay up to stave off jet lag. The only reason I left the house today is to mail the cell phone and to pick up the mail I had held which was bills, charities, and election propaganda. Other than that, I can’t remember what I’ve done today. I didn’t eat lunch and I had Bagel Bites from the freezer for dinner.

Well, I suppose it’s time for some sleep. I’ve been up for 32 hours so far and I’m just not built for this kind of thing.

Here’s a picture from the men’s section of a Japanese drug store:

I really have no idea what it is.

There’s a couple of things people told me they wanted from me on the trip. THMFIC at the gym wanted me to to have an illicit affair here. I’ve never been able to pull anything like that off when I was younger, and I doubt I’m any more able now. I was also asked to take a picture of a pr0n vending machine and it turns out that there aren’t any small independent bookstores any more, so there aren’t any magazine vending machines. Here are a couple of pictures of vending machines since there still are drink machines everywhere. Mostly soft drinks, but some are beer machines out on the street.

I was surprisingly coherent today after getting as little sleep as I got last night, which was something like five hours. I figure the Oolong tea at Mos Burger was as strong as the Coke is at Mickey D’s, plus the people next door wouldn’t stop making noise. I still made it out the door with my sister’s NEW shopping list and went to Shibamata Kastushika to see the Tora-san Museum. My mom and the Kawasakis were afraid I’d get lost and my sister told me not to get mugged. Well the worst thing that happened was that I found out that the JR train turns into a non-JR subway train and if you stay on too long it costs 160 yen to get off that train and back onto a JR train. At today’s exchange rate, that’s a whole $1.62 that I lost.

In any case, I found out that there is an easy way to get to Shibamata by taking JR to Kanamachi on the JR Johban line, and then it’s just one stop on the Keisei Kanamachi line. Easy. And I now know why it’s not prime real-estate, there’s a HUGE sewage treatment plant nearby. Shibamata station has a statue of Tora-san.

After that, it’s a walk through traditional stores to the Shibamata Taishakuten temple.

I didn’t get any close-ups of the wares, but they sell traditional Japanese sweets and things you’d expect to see on the way to a popular temple. Combs, chopsticks, dango like Tora-san’s family was supposed to sell, and a lot of surprising expensive unagi lunches.

The trip to the museum is another walk through a fairly nice-seeming neighborhood. I don’t have any pictures because there really isn’t that much to take pictures of.

On the way back, I had my JR-subway-JR mishap and then went back to Akihabara Electric town for more geekery. I didn’t buy all that much but I did eat lunch which was unsurprisingly so-so. (Like I said, Tokyo food.)

Most of it was pretty good, but the Japanese curry was fairly tasteless. Besides, I had this guy eyeing me the whole time I was eating.

Of course, after that it was off to Uniqlo to shop for my sister. Uniqlo is like an Old Navy for Japan. Really cheap clothing. I felt like a total perv because she sent me to buy women’s thermal underwear. The store is divided into two sides and there really weren’t any other guys on the women’s side. Especially not in the underwear section. Like I said, my sister is quite demanding.

Other than that, it was a bit more wandering around Shinjuku stores for me. I’m so overloaded by the shopping that I just kind of wander around and look at stuff that interests me. I got some more battery-powered LED nightlights for gifts and that took a few hours. They’re not as common as I’d have thought, since Dr. Kawasaki can find them for about $10 at the DIY Home Center in Toyama.

I went to Mos Burger and ended up chatting with Chris, an American grad student at Sophia University, a Jesuit university here in Tokyo. He was talking about moving back to the US and asking how I found moving back. He’s spent his entire adult life in Japan and was kind of worried. Plus, he’s craving Taco Bell. That’s a bad sign, though Mexican food was one of the things that my sister and I always craved while we were in Japan.

Anyway, tomorrow afternoon, I’ll be on a plane headed to Portland. I’ll unload the bazillion pens and then it’s time to head home. I’m going to wander around the house and try to make it to the gym, though last year by about 9PM I’d started to hallucinate and I couldn’t discern whether I was awake or asleep. We’ll see how it goes.

You’re probably worried now that I’ve mentioned that I’m going to be longwinded, since I’m usually longwinded with no warning. But I’m in Tokyo now and since I consider myself a child of Kansai having lived there for five years, I have lots of wicked things to say about this place. I’ll just get them off my chest now.

WHAT A MOTHERF*CKING RUDE SHITHOLE THIS IS. I SHOULD HAVE STAYED IN OSAKA. HOW COME THERE ARE SO MANY TRANSVESTITES WHEREEVER I GO AND WHY DO THEY BUG ME SO MUCH?

I feel better now. I think I broke some of my rules for Japan today, which include:

• Never push anyone out of the way,
• but especially never push anyone older than me out of the way, and
• don’t push any kids out of the way.

I mean, holy hell I wasn’t even in rush hour and there were people EVERYWHERE. All I wanted to do was to get to the proper exit and it was nearly impossible.

My mom and I left the Kawasaki family’s house this morning, headed in opposite directions. She was heading towards western Japan and I was headed to Tokyo. I got some pictures of the Kawasakis before I left. I think they’ll really only make sense to my sister, but here they are. The think is, none of us thought to take any pictures until the last day and here are the pictures I took.

The senior Dr. Kawasaki trying to figure out his camera.

From the left, granddaughter Yuu, granddaughter Kei, my mom, Mrs. Kawasaki, grandson Go, and daughter-in-law whose name I’ve forgotten.

Dr. Kawasaki, eldest daughter Sho and her daughters Kei and Yuu. I don’t think I’ve seen Yuu since she was 1 and she’s 17 now!

Middle child, son Dr. Masaru, his kid Go, his wife whose name has left my brain, and his kid Taku.

In any case I got into my hotel and decided to hang out for a while, take a shower, and probably have dinner at Mos Burger. The room is pretty tiny, but not as small as I had expected, and I took a video of it.

In any case, I was surfing the web in my room when I found out that the Japanese weird USB store that’s always mentioned in Gizmodo was closed on Tuesdays! It was closed the last time I was in Tokyo so I figured I should make the trip to see it today.

The Raremono shop was my first big disappointment of the day, as the main store has even less stuff than the “second” store. I spent some time wandering the smaller stores of Akihabara, looking at electronic parts, and I think I’ve had enough Akihabara geekery for this trip. I even saw some of the people who work at the “maid bars” hanging around, though I didn’t look into going. I honestly don’t see the point.

Anyway, I made it back to Shinjuku, and went on a search for my sister’s final pen, which was a mess. I went across Shinjuku, which was somewhat difficult due to construction, to a store called Tokyu Hands. When I asked about the pen I was told for the third time that they don’t have Itoya Pens. The guy finally confessed that Itoya is the name of a competing stationery store and told me where to find it. I had to go all the way back across Shinjuku to the Odakyu department store which itself was under construction for the year-end sales and the store didn’t have the pen my sister wanted! So I got her STOP READING THIS IF YOU’RE MY SISTER another pen that seems kind of neat and writes well but isn’t exactly what she wanted. Someone will want it, I’m guessing, and I may even keep it even though it’s pink. When you collapse the pen, the tip withdraws, but when you pull it to its fullest length, the pen tip comes out. Neat, huh?

I decided, since THMFIC at the gym wanted me to do bad things, to go wandering around the red light district on the other side of the tracks from my hotel. I got lost and found myself getting asked to enter more and more establishments and finally I decided to ask one of the seedy-looking doormen where the train station was. Turns out I was going in the wrong direction and therefore further into the red-light district. I even had a large Nigerian dude try to pull me into a club, but in general, even heartless Tokyo isn’t all that scary of a place.

I finally had dinner around 8PM at Mos Burger. I thought about eating more Japanese food, but I figured I’m in Tokyo and I’ve always found the food here to be pretty bad. (Yet another bit of Osaka snobbery on my part.) I got a pork cutlet burger and found out you can get it with a salad set! Hooray for Japan.

Tomorrow I’m probably going to try to go to the Tora-san museum. Tora-san is a character from a series of Japanese movies that is in the Guiness Book of World Records as the longest-running movie series and I really like the movies. They’re all kind of the same. Tora-san goes to some part of Japan, falls in love with a local woman, ends up going home to get into an argument with the people there, goes back to where the woman is, but never ends up with her. The museum is located where Tora-san’s home is supposed to be and is in a bad area of town. I was warned by most of the Kawasakis to avoid this foolishness, but I think I’m going anyway. Otoko wa tsuraiyo.

Today I was still at the Kawasakis with all the kids and stuff. We went downtown to a big bookstore and one of the main reasons was to look for my sister’s Itoya Xenon pen. Apparently Itoya pens don’t exist in this part of Japan. We’ve all agreed that my sister is a harsh taskmaster.

Dr. Kawasaki (the older son of Dr. Kawasaki) was called out this morning and so our plans were slightly delayed. After he got back, we all went to a Japanese onsen hot spring, which was packed. There’s no pictures because you really shouldn’t see pictures of a bunch of naked Japanese dudes and they probably would have kicked my ass for bringing in a camera.

Tomorrow I’m off to Tokyo, my mom is off to my aunt’s, and the Kawasakis are all off to their respective houses. Not much has gone on here, but it was fun nevertheless!

I’m borrowing a laptop right now. I’m still at the Kawasakis and two of their kids and four of their grandkids are all here today. I went to see a movie with several of them and now I’m listening to the 3 and 5-year-olds melt down (it’s 10PM). More tomorrow, I bet.

So I may have mentioned what a pain it is to shop for my sister. Function doesn’t matter all the time, just whether things are “cute” or not. And then sometimes function does matter. Basically she’s a pain in my ass.

She sent me on another smaller pen quest (only two pens) and I bought a couple more address books for her. I doubt she’ll like either of the address books and one of the two pens doesn’t seem to exist in this part of Japan. Nobody had even heard of the company in two stores. Whatever. In any case, I also found out that her friend Carolyn, who was supposed to get one of these address books is ALSO a big pain in my ass for the exact same reasons as my sister.

Other than that, I have little to report. I bought myself a watch with a 24-hour hand because they don’t seem to exist in the US on watches less than $1000, and I found a Seiko here for $360-ish that had exactly what I was looking for. I can’t begin to tell you how long I was looking for a watch with the 2nd hour hand (usually set to GMT) which was yet another piece of my weird ham radio geekery.

The rest of the day was just a travel day. I got on my train on car 6 because it was about to leave the station with little notice and my seat was on car 12. I got to walk through the smoking car and wow that was awful. The whole car was blue with smoke. In any case, I made it back to Toyama with no surprises, and my mom seems fine. At least she seemed to like the two things I bought for her so she’s not as big a pain as my sister and Carolyn. Yeesh.

Oh, and I should have started doing some of the vacation workouts already. I’ve decided that since I’m on vacation and not near a gym, I’m going to be a fat lazy pig. The biggest workout I got was carrying 3 bags (one full of gifts) from Osaka to Toyama. These train stations need a lot more elevators.

There are a lot of things that make me wonder when I’m in Japan. Why was the hotel restaurant full of Germans yesterday and Koreans today? Why, for chrissake, do Japanese men wear tan shoes with black suits? How did my old co-worker’s son spend $2000 in two months on his cell phone bill? And why the hell was this girl reading a “CSI:Miami” paperback on the train this morning?

I may have forgotten to mention that I had them change my room last night. I’m now facing the train station instead of a wall and while I don’t watch the trains go by all the time, it’s fun to look out the window when I want to. And there’s that building that seems to be missing its middle.

In any case, I went to visit my friends the Maedas today. They run Maeda Cycle with their grandpa and we went out to sushi for lunch.

To get there I took the train and walked a couple of miles, probably, past my old apartment and to their store. I asked directions several times and people kept telling me, in Japanese, “Boy, that’s a long way from here.” I guess nobody walks in Japan any more. My apartment was on the top floor, second from the left, and was kind of a dump.

After I left the Maedas it was time for some serious shopping. I went into the middle of Osaka, to Shinsaibashi, to get my mom a Lesportsac backpack with little octopi on it. It took me about an hour to get there and I think I realized I’d never actually been there before. It’s a foreigner’s paradise, and I never particularly wanted to hang out with foreigners when I was living here. In any case, that wasn’t nearly as tiring as looking for my sister’s pen order. The bookstore has racks of pens and it’s kind of hard to figure out what’s where. And geez, she wanted a specific pens like a “Uni-Ball Signo DX 0.38mm in normal colors (black or navy).” Turns out that pen didn’t actually exist even though three guys were checking the shelves and one of them even called the manufacturer. All for a two-dollar pen. The pen ordeal took me about an hour, the same as going four subway exits and down the shopping district to Lesportsac and back.

I bought my mom a shortwave radio at her request (her old one broke) and then I took a break for dinner at Mos Burger. I can’t believe I used to eat this along with fries and only weighed 145 pounds.

I suppose it’s all OK because after doing a little shopping for myself (I bought a couple of t-shirts) I had mochi filled with ice cream.

Time for some sleep!

A fuzzy picture of a Japanese monkey at Minoo waterfall!

Now off to do her shopping. 🙂

My mom’s out of the hospital! Hooray! And since she sounded fine the first day, and even better on subsequent days, I’m thinking she’s fine. She probably just had poo-related problems. That’s my opinion and the opinion of at least 2 of the 3 Drs. Kawasaki.

I spent the day with my aunt and my pseudo-aunt and pseudo-uncle. I have pictures of most of the day in fuzzy iPhone style. It should have been multimegapixel sharpness since I bought a new digital camera, but it turns out that when they tell you that the battery isn’t pre-charged in Japan, they mean it.

In any case, I wasn’t bleary from the middle-of-the-night 3AM phone call from the burglar alarm company (the contractors disconnected the fire alarm again), nor was I too bad off from my friend’s SMS text message asking for my address soon afterwards. I boldly went forth to stand in front of the shiny camera display and bought another Panasonic Lumix, this time an DMC-FX37. As I mentioned earlier, it didn’t have any electrons in the battery, so it was a paperweight today. It would have done a much better job of the field of cosmos than my iPhone.

I probably would have taken a lot more pictures of the flora if I didn’t think that would turn me into my father. I’m already collecting cameras like he did.

My uncle has weird ideas of how I need to eat more meat or something, so he took me to the “Volks Family Restaurant” where he told me to order a lunch steak like he did. I had a doria instead. It’s sorta like a casserole. Volks was near his prize-winning garden (he won a prize last year and this year as well).

There’s both my pseudo-aunt and pseudo-uncle at the garden.

The garden and Volks are also close to the Minoo waterfall. I haven’t been there since my first date with my ex-fiancee about 20 years ago. Here’s my aunt (on the right) and my pseudo-aunt in front of the waterfall.

We hung around their house for a while and had dinner at the cafeteria near the garden. Today I had several of the things I wanted to eat last year all on the same day again: roasted Japanese sweet potatoes at the waterfall, and croquettes and roast mackerel at the cafeteria. Oh, and a co-worker from Mitsubishi who lives in my relatives’ neighborhood stopped by and we talked about old times for a while. Another uneventful but fun day in Japan.

Hah.

So I ditched my hospitalized mom and proceeded to Osaka on my own. I met my aunt here because that was the plan, but we both were here early and did different things to kill the time. Last year when I visited for the first time in 16 years, I had a list of things I wanted to eat. I think I ate most of them quickly. There was saba (mackerel), croquettes, tako-yaki (octopus dumplings), and most likely other things I can’t remember right now. I had most of the list finished on my first day with my pseudo-aunt and pseudo-uncle (for those who don’t remember, they’re my mom’s older sister’s in-laws, so not really related to me). This year I figured I should get a Big Man burger from Sasebo Burger, since I was eyeing it every time I went by last year.

This is a triple burger, whatever that is, but it has ham and egg and probably something else. All I can say is that it’s not all that large, and it’s not a cheeseburger.

The set also came with “jaga fry” which are like jo-jo’s with salt and pepper.

In case you were thinking all I ate today was unhealthy, I also went to Mr. Donut.

I also had time to go to a couple of camera stores to see if I could buy a charger for my digital camera. Apparently, they don’t stock chargers and they have to be ordered directly from the manufacturer. I thought this was a good chance to buy yet another new camera, but I haven’t quite decided if I want to risk spending all my cash on a camera since I may need it to pay my mom’s hospital bill. A nice Panasonic Lumix DMC-TZ5 to replace my DMC-FX9, whatever the difference might be. Or you might just have to live with the fuzzy iPhone pictures.

Time to get some sleep in this room that faces an office building!

Well, not really. The best part is that my mom looks a lot better and it seems like she had yet another misdiagnosis of pneumonia. She has no fever nor any other obvious symptoms and we (me and some real doctors) playing armchair quarterback think she just had volumetric shock.

All I did today, really, was go to the hospital a couple of times. I did have lunch at a Japanese all-you-can-eat restaurant and as you’d expect from an all-you-can-eat restaurant, it was so-so. I’m ditching my mom, leaving her in the capable hands of Dr. and Mrs. Kawasaki who we were visiting here in Toyama, and heading to Osaka tomorrow. For some reason, my aunt wants to meet me there and stay in the same hotel. I’m not sure what I’m going to do with my aunt but it’s probably not going to be quite as bad as sitting around in a hospital.

It was hard to sleep in the inn because of all the noise. Not from all the drunken revelry of the middle-aged Japanese men (which usually happens in these places) but from the wind hitting my side of the building. It rattled the windows and kept most of the people awake, but I had earplugs in. My camera is still dead, but here are some grainy iPhone pictures instead.

We went around the southern half of the island and saw lots more weird stuff. We finally ran into other traffic as we got close to the tourist spots like the gold mine and the bird refuge. We ate at a popular soba restaurant that only had seating for about 20 people and was about half-full but didn’t see hardly anyone else in the town. Like I said before, there’s a lot of historical things on Sado Island, but not that many people.

I was asleep as we got to the pagoda so I’m not sure what its significance is.

We almost got stuck on the island, like I did last time, because of high seas. We ended up not even delayed and everyone was on their way. Unfortunately, my mom got sick on the train and looked bad enough that we called an ambulance and I’ve already told that part of the story.