So tired.

Friday night I was so tired that I had a couple of bagel bites for dinner. This is after a spectacular two days back at work which I can’t talk about for obvious reasons. In any case, falling asleep appears to be something I’m getting even better at.

Saturday was Megan’s brother’s wedding. They had a small family ceremony and a bigger reception. Oddly enough, the reception was in a beautiful venue in Milwaukie, Oregon, where it was hard to know that you were in amongst all the auto body repair shops and strip clubs. The only other oddity is how the staff of the venue wanted to hustle us off after 8:30PM. I suppose after the bride and groom left there really wasn’t any reason to hang around. Megan took us all out for drinks afterwards and I almost fell asleep there as well.

Sunday was almost normal. I woke up to watch some football. I went for my painful, I mean INTENSE, massage in West Linn. But this afternoon my brother-in-law wanted me to to take him to the Apple store to get a new MacBook. This is the fourth Mac I’m involved in buying this year. We got it back to his place and started setting it up when my sister and Megan got back. They also had computer questions and it was a weird sight after dinner, the three of them with their laptops on the kitchen table. Even weirder was my brother-in-law checking out iTunes and singing along with old Stones tunes. Yikes!

And here I am, up too late, trying to figure out why I’m trying to catch up on the TV shows I missed while I was in Japan this late at night. I’m not too bright, I guess.

Back on your heads.

I’m back at work now and, well, things are probably going to happen. But I’m not talking about that any more.

I think I’d better go ahead and replace my lost laptop soon. My mom will be back soon enough and want her “game machine” back. I got her a DS Lite and the Japanese version of Brain Age but she’s hooked on Tumblebugs. For that she needs the MacBook. If only Apple would come through with another discount. Oh, well.

I think I’m too sleepy to think of anything else. Megan’s coming up tomorrow because her brother is getting married this weekend. Whoopee!

I’m back and I’m sleepy.

After a poor night of sleep in Tokyo, I got up at 7AM Japan time which was about 3PM yesterday US time. I’ve been up for about 30 hours with only very short naps of less than 5 minutes. We got on the plane about 3PM Japan time and we got into Portland early, at 6AM. Unfortunately, being early didn’t help much because customs wasn’t ready and we had to sit in the plane, on the ground, for almost half an hour. I was at my sister’s house by 7AM and I think I was home by 9. And I did nothing today.

It wasn’t really nothing. I did laundry, got my car out of my neighbor’s garage, checked out some library books, and even locked myself out of the house. Late in the afternoon, my sister called and told me that the weather was going to get bad soon. I decided to “rake the leaves” (run the leaf blower) and mow the lawn. The mail arrived in the middle of this all and I realized I didn’t have the house key. Fortunately, two different neighbors had the key and I wasn’t out for very long. I even had time to clean some of the gutters before it got too dark.

And this evening I went to the Apple store to exchange my “old” (2 week old) MacBook with one of the new ones that just came out. I had to pay a restocking fee, but now I have a fancy new motherboard or some such thing. Hiron, the graphic artist, told me that in Japan all you can do if they come out with a new version soon after you bought your computer is go home and cry. I figure a restocking fee was a little easier than than.

I tried the US version of the Green Tea Latte at Starbucks and it wasn’t quite as good, but good enough. The sweetener tasted like Japanese apple juice for some reason. And my first dinner back in town was at Jack-in-the-Box. Lunch was a chili dog from a cart in my neighborhood. Do I know how to live it up or what?

Last full day in Japan.

I’ve been offline at my aunt’s house in the sticks. Seriously, she lives at the end of the bus line, and there aren’t many houses further down than hers unless you get on a boat and cross over to an island. My uncle, before he passed away (the big brother of my not-really-my-aunt) built a big house out there near the ocean with a beautiful view.

Aunt’s view.

My uncle spent a lot on the house and even the garden. I heard he might have spent tens of thousands on the trees in front.

Part of my aunt’s garden.

The house is a little hard to use, but it made my uncle happy and I suppose that’s what matters. We spent a lot of time just hanging out with my aunt, but my mom, sister, and I took a brief shopping trip to Fukuoka where we got sort of lost and couldn’t find any stores or food that were worthwhile. Of course, after resorting to lunch at Mickey D’s, we ended up finding plenty of things we could have eaten. I had a meeting with the Colonel, but we ate dinner from a bento stand on the way home.

Me and the Japanese Colonel Sanders.

This morning, my sister and I loaded ourselves into a train for Tokyo. I’m not a big fan because I spent most of my time in Osaka and there’s a difference between the two. But undeterred I took the train to shop in Akihabara where they looked at me funny when I asked if they had RFID readers.

Akihabara.

I was looking for Thanko which is really called the “Rare Mono Shop.” I was lost and I even resorted to going to an “internet cafe” which isn’t a Starbucks with free WiFi like in the US, but dark closets with computers where homeless kids spend the night. I spent the minimum for 30 minutes trying to find the Thanko store but it didn’t help. It took me about an hour and a half to find the store, which was closed! Fortunately, they had a second shop that was open, and a Japanese guy with a cowboy hat was looking for it too. With his help I found the store.

I barely got back in time to meet friends for dinner. Chico Hayasaki went to high school with my sister and she brought another artist friend, Hirofumi Nakano, or HiRON. We had dinner, and then more matcha latte’s at Starbucks.

Meet the artists.

I should shut the hell up and get some sleep because tomorrow we’re heading home. Fortunately, I crossed the last eating thing off my list: I made it to Mos Burger!

Another day wandering.

We all went to visit my not-really-my-aunt and not-really-my-uncle today. My sister ditched us to go shopping, but my not-really-my-uncle drove the rest of us around the area and I got to drop off the gifts I had for my old neighbors at the butcher’s shop and Naniwa Cycle, the racing bicycle shop I used to frequent. I also gave my buddy at Maeda Cycle some American coins I had for his kids. After that we drove around Takarazuka City which was hit pretty hard by the Kansai Earthquake and changed quite a bit. We even went to Kiyoshikoujin which is a mixed Shinto/Buddhist shrine in the hills of Takarazuka.

Kiyoshikoujin gate.

I’d been there lots of times and it always has festival stores out front. Today wasn’t a holiday so it wasn’t all that busy and many of the shops were closed, but it was still a uniquely Japanese spot from my old memories.

Festival stores in Japan.

Afterwards we went looking for a place to eat and even drove through all sorts of places near my old neighborhood that used to be rice fields but now look like the city now. We just missed going to a fancy Japanese restaurant because it was too late for lunch and ended up at another “family restaurant” chain that was pretty good.

We got back to the hotel just before rush hour and hung out near the hotel for the rest of the day. I guess this means I won’t get to see the inside of the weird building with no inside but hopefully I can come back soon to see it.

Umeda Sky Building

This waiting 16 years to come back kind of sucks. Too many things have changed. I know the reasons I didn’t come back, including personal failure, getting dumped by my Japanese fianceé, and not wanting to see my cousins when I was jobless, but it’s not so bad any more. The rest of my cousins aren’t doing much better than I am and I’m too old to let my failures keep me from coming back more often.

Tomorrow it’s off to my aunt’s house in the country (my real aunt) and so I probably won’t be online for days. It’s probably for the best. But right now I have to listen to some more Euro dance music on my iPod to try to get the religious chants I heard at my cousin’s place out of my head.

Wandering around Umeda.

We didn’t go very far today. We started out wandering around looking for a Starbucks. The coffee in the few places we’ve tried was disappointing, so we thought we’d get something that we knew was bad. On the way we found some ridiculously expensive stores, Gucci, Swarovski, Bulgari, and, oddly enough, Sony. Sony has a neat new Organic LED video screen coming out but I think it’s $1700 for an 11″ screen. The picture was beautiful, but I don’t watch anything that requires a $1700 screen. We finally found the Starbucks and I had the Matcha latte, which was surprisingly good.

We met an old friend from Portland for lunch and she took us to an okonomiyaki store. Her family and our family go way, way back. I think her mom moved back to Japan for a while and she grew up here, even though her grandparents were in Portland. I had “modanyaki” which I guess is really “Modern Yaki.” It has soba mixed in with the okonomiyaki.

Modanyaki.

She also took us to get some Japanese sweets, dango and matcha bean paste.

Matcha shirotama.

Her kids are both going to college next year, so we didn’t get to see them or her husband who almost got his PhD at Portland State University. A.B.D. is a sad place to be. I think he even had his thesis mostly finished before he moved back to Japan to take care of the family business.

After that we just did some more random shopping. When I first tried to buy a new PSP at one of the local stores and the lines were horrendous. It’s the start of the month and I think they released some new games. I did finally get the PSP, which is a replacement for the one that was stolen last week. Now to see if it will work in the US. I’m still just randomly punching buttons instead of reading the instructions for these Japanese games.

Hikone, schmikone.

I told my mom I wasn’t sure I wanted to go with her to see Hikone castle, but it was such a nice day I decided to go. It was a nice family outing with my mom, sister, and aunt. I’m not sure what made my mom decide to go to Hikone, but it could have been a death march. It was a beautiful 70°F, but in the summertime it would have been awful. I think we had to climb at least 20 stories to get from the base of the castle to the uppermost room.

Hikone Castle.

Keep in mind that the picture is of the main castle building, and that was only about 1/3 of the climb. We also had to cross a moat and climb up very uneven and large stairs to make it to this point. Castles weren’t easy to access because easy access would reduce their security.

The interior of the castle wasn’t very easy to access either. The stairs were more like ladders and I was surprised to see all the elderly people successfully going up and down them.

Hikone Castle stairs.

Finally, the castle town is as bizarre as most tourist spots here, and a cartoon mascot is plastered all over the signs and museums. We saw chrysanthemum shows, creepy dolls in beautiful kimonos, maneki neko collections, and in every one of those exhibit halls was the mascot. We even saw the mascot in a stonemason’s store where it was in amongst the gravestones.

Me and a stone version of the Hikone mascot.

We got back in time to start some shopping. It’s the first day I’ve actually paid for anything besides a hotel room. I bought a lot of kitchen timers for gifts and I bought my mom a DS Lite to replace her stolen GameBoy. I had no idea the screen would be so small but I’m sure my mom will figure it out. I bought myself some t-shirts with odd writing, and my sister told me specifically not to buy some clothes that looked, well, incredibly gay. And by gay I kind of mean stylish and overpriced but I really mean that I would have to start dating dudes with shirts like that.

Actually, some of the shirts were kind of inexpensive and I thought of buying something just to piss off my friend Megan. I think I need to stick to buying more geek gear, like the stuff at Thanko. My sister and I are planning on going there on our last day in Japan.

Back to Osaka.

What’s weirder than pulling into a Japanese rail station and seeing a giant golden Goddess of Mercy?

Kannon-sama

Maybe it’s going to your cousin’s house and seeing 3 cousins and various kids of theirs for the first time in 16 years! We weren’t going to stick around, but they invited us for dinner and told us we could meet our cousin’s kid’s fianceé. So we stayed for seafood pizza from Domino’s and sushi. Check out the squid and shrimp.

Seafood pizza.

Here’s a picture of my two eldest Osaka cousins (brother Kimikazu and sister Kyoko). That’s Kyoko’s son on the left, and her grandson (the son’s nephew) on her lap. The son was telling us how he did absolutely nothing in college and how his mom wrote his final paper. We asked why it didn’t have his mom’s name on the diploma. He’s a butcher now at a supermarket and works horribly long hours wondering why he went to college at all.

2 of 4 Osaka cousins

Next is a blurry picture of my aunt, my youngest Osaka cousin Maki, and my mom. My aunt is my mom’s older sister. I finally figured out I had the flash turned off later in the day.

Aunt, youngest Osaka Cousin, and ma.

Proof that my sister is in Japan with us: a picture of my sister and my uncle (big brother to my aunt and mom, and father to all my Osaka cousins).

Sis and Osaka Uncle.

And finally, my Osaka cousin, his son, his kid’s fianceé, my cousin’s wife, his middle daughter, and my aunt. Last time I saw them, the son was 12 and the daughter was 9. Now he’s getting married?

Cousins and a possible addition to the family.

I forgot to take a picture of my cousin’s youngest daughter who is 21 now. There are also no pictures of me and everyone has told me that I’ve gotten fat. EVERYONE. That’s not going to keep me from eating. Takoyaki is still on my list of things to eat, and I may have to get more Beard Papa pumpkin cream puffs. I’m going to be even fatter soon!

No picture day.

Funny how I didn’t end up with any pictures today, seeing how I took a few with demo cameras at the store and even got yelled at for taking a picture in the store with a friend’s camera. We’re in Toyama today, visiting family friends. We ended up going to the electronics store to get an ethernet cable, going to the mall twice (once for ice cream), and going to eat sushi on a track. I ate so much sushi for lunch that I couldn’t eat dinner. My sister swears that I pulled the same stunt on a trip to Japan back when we were kids and I wouldn’t eat sushi for years afterwards. The fish is incredibly fresh up here in Toyama, and I ate a lot of it.

Another big surprise is how good the ice cream at Baskin & Robbins is here. The Pumpkin Pudding ice cream really tastes like pumpkin, and the Gingerbread Blueberry ice cream really tastes like gingerbread.

Tomorrow we head back to Osaka and we’ll see what happens there. I expect that I’ll finally start spending some money on silly things. I have to replace my mom’s stolen GameBoy, for example, and I may get her a DS lite and Brain Age. She likes puzzles like that.

Visiting my not-really-my-aunt.

My mom and my sister left for parts north of Tokyo, or at least north-ish, to visit friends. I decided that if there were going to be just all women there, I’d go by myself to my old neighborhood in Osaka instead. This also meant that I could visit with people from my old job and about ten of us went out to dinner at a yakiniku restaurant.

The old gang from Mitsubishi Electric.

We did the traditional exchange of business cards even though my cards are wildly inaccurate at this time. Most everyone is a manager or even above. The tall guy second from the left has lived in the US and I keep in contact with him through email from time-to-time. He’s also the only one who still works for Mitsubishi. Everyone else works for Renesas, a company that’s was started by 55% Hitachi and 45% Mitsubishi.

I stayed at my not-really-my-aunt’s place (mom’s sister’s husband’s sister’s) and they took me to their garden where they’d won one of the prizes for having one of the 10 best out of 450 gardens.

My sort-of-uncle’s prize.

Their vegetable garden is in a community garden that used to be an old bamboo field.

Takanaka’s garden.

Afterwards they took me to a Japanese cafeteria where I got to eat lots of things I haven’t properly had since I left Japan 16 years ago. Certain kinds of fish, croquettes, etc, that we usually get frozen in the US. They didn’t make much money off of me. It only cost about 1000 yen for two of us and I slipped on the way out, dropping my tray and breaking my dishes.

A Japanese cafeteria.

Later on in the day I went looking for places I spent a lot of time and didn’t recognize much. In sixteen years and one huge earthquake, they’ve torn down buildings and put up new ones. They’ve also widened the roads and made new ones, which really confused me. Nobody’s moved very far, but lots of stores have closed. Fortunately, both the bicycle shop and the scooter store I went to are still around. The guys at the motorcycle store still look the same, but Mrs. Maeda passed away a couple of years ago.

Autoshop Maeda

The kid at the bicycle store, who was in middle school, is now running things as his dad had lung cancer. The “kid” is now in his early 30’s.

Naniwaya Cycle.

They’re tearing down buildings to widen the road and I thought the bicycle store was gone but luckily they were still around.

Outside Naniwaya Cycle.

The funny thing is how everything in Osaka is getting to be 100yen stores. Even McDonald’s has a 100yen menu. The weirdest thing, beyond the teriyaki burger and the shrimp-fry wrap with 1000 Island Dressing was the “MegaMac”, a big Mac with doubled-up patties (4 patties!)

So I spent a considerable amount of time and money to get to Japan.

And what am I doing? Hiding in my hotel room. Things have changed in 15 years (my hotel room, for example, has a desk in it and isn’t just the size of my bed) but I remember things don’t open until 10 or later. In any case, I’m not brave enough to get on the train during rush hour with all my luggage. I have my laptop bag, a carry-on-sized-bag for my clothes, and a carry-on-sized-bag for all the presents I brought. As any good Buddhahead knows (and my Korean friends as well) you have to bring a lot of gifts for all your friends and family. Maybe that’s why I shouldn’t have that many friends. I suppose, I don’t, really.

The bathroom of my hotel room is still the weird one-piece-molded-plastic thing, but the toilet has the bidet feature. I’m afraid of most of the water in Japan, so I’m not trying it.

The shower at Shin-Osaka Station Hotel.Molded fancy toilet at Shin-Osaka Station Hotel.

Once again, my ass hurts.

After fifteen years, I finally made it back to Japan. But it took fifteen-and-a-half hours of sitting and my ass always hurts after I fall asleep sitting up. I’ve only been asleep for three or four 10 minute stretches, once on the plane and the rest on the bullet train. It wasn’t all that easy to find the hotel, either. The map was cartoonish and the roads were small and not well marked. Just like the Japan I’m used to.

It’s now 6:30AM US time and I left the house at 11AM yesterday. I better get some sleep while I can.

Some people don't believe my luck.