Floating Further Upstream -OR- How Tokyo Got Pwned By Amsterdam

*stretch* aaaaaaahhhhh that feels good.

Happy New Year everyone! How're we all doing? Y'all had a fanblastic hopover into 2k9? As for me, I think it's safe to say this year's transition was the most laid-back I've ever had. But that's getting ahead of things ...

DragonForce's new album ULTRA BEATDOWN is the pwnage!!! The name in itself...my heart jumped of joy when Ari first told me about it. Otherwise it's mostly funk I've been listening to lately. The defining song of winter 2008-09 is Incognito's "Close My Eyes" (from the album Adventures in Black Sunshine), which has made me soar in the skies of my soul about 50 times so far, I'm guessing. Music, music, music, as always, is what keeps me alive & kicking this winter. In fact, it's flat out impossible for me to get a winter depression if I spend an average of 4 hours a day on my music as I currently am, especially since there's so much new stuff involved - mostly me practicing to rap & sing while playing drums or keys at the same time. Quite challenging, but I have high hopes for the fruits it'll eventually bear! One for all, all for the 24th now - Jungle Jamboree Vol. 6, I can't wait!

Besides performing with Mineshaft Spirit Boots (opening act) and Jungle Mic (closing act), I'll also be dancing with the Funky Space Cowboys, the team I put together for Ego's end-of-the-year-party (they're called "forget-the-year parties" in Japanese by the way) on December 20th. It was a dream come true to do a show with an all-star team of my friends to What Planet is This?!, which I'm sure many of you know is one of my favorite songs ever, and one I'd been willing to make a show to ever since I started dancing in autumn 2007. Though the performance was quite messy in the end (as forget-the-year-party dance shows usually are, I hear), it - as well as the organization and practice - was a lot of fun. Here're some pics from an all-night practice session on December 18th:





You're probably thinking "wow, that looks like fun - not!". Right? Well, if good timing makes a good photographer, that just means I've got a long way to go. There were actually eight other people besides the ones pictured above, and it was honestly a ton of fun. Here're two pics from the dinner party after the main (dance) event on the 20th:




Besides FSC, I also danced with Ikeyan: "Ikeyan and Youri's wonderful world" was the name of the team/show, and we went at it with three Hiromi tracks edited together (Time & Space, Dancando no Paraiso and Love & Laughter). Though we didn't get as much feedback afterwards as we'd hoped for, there were three people who approached me later in the evening to say they had been really moved by the show. We were quite surprised - if anything, we were expecting things like "that was original" or "that was really fun", but not "I got tears in my eyes [...] this is what I would ultimately love to do with dance" (from guys as well as girls). Of course we were extremely happy that we were able to have such an impact with our simple creative expression, and we concluded that we should definitely work together on small-scale projects like this again in the future. For now, I'm trying to get a hold of the guy we met at Lake Biwa last summer, who was performing on all kinds of unusual instruments with a couple of friends (see this post from back then), to see if he's up for a musician & dance group performance.

The next day, I went to Osaka to go to a special concert with Sonoe: a duet by Hiromi and a well-known Japanese tapdancer (well-known if you're into tapdancing, I guess):




Especially since I'd danced to Hiromi myself the day before, I was very curious to see how they would organize things. It turned out that I didn't know much about tapdancing, since the guy was more of a musician than a dancer in the sense that it was more about the sound he produced than the visible movements he made. Anticipating the gig, I'd hoped to learn something useful from the tapdancer for my own dance (since, out of all the street dance styles, house dance in particular incorporates quite some tapping). However, the vastness of the gap created by the shoes (specialized tapdancing shoes vs. sneakers) ensured that half of the steps he did would be impossible for street dancers, and the other half makes a lot of cool sounds if you have those kind of shoes and are dancing on a custom-built wooden stage surrounded by expensive mics, but would barely make a difference for my kind of dance, which is almost completely focused on what you can see. Anyway, the show was inspiring enough - they played a couple of Hiromi tracks, some jazz standards and a classical piece, and I went home satisfied and eager to keep at it myself.

During the next couple of days, as is the case with Japan around year's end, parties sprung from out of every corner, and I managed to squeeze a couple of gatherings of my own in between the rest, such as the nabe party where Jesus and Jonfan had the longest arm-wrestling bout I've ever witnessed (Jesus won). Among the ones I attended were a gathering with Ikeyan and his ex-girlfriend the nurse (again), who was accompanied by one of her nurse friends this time. All good fun; I can't get enough of meeting new Japanese people.






The day after that, I left for Tokyo. I figured that since most of my Kyoto friends would be out of town around the New Year's, or busy with family matters anyway, and my Fukuoka trip didn't come through, I was better off chilling with Yokoo and the others in the East. So I set upon the usual 9-hour, 8-changes, unofficially free train ride.

I spent a total of one week in Tokyo. This time was undoubtedly less exciting than the last, but there's nothing wrong with relaxing, and it was nice to hang out with Yokoo without the time pressures of daily partying and sightseeing (though the reason we didn't go out that much was actually that he'd had strange pains since a couple of days before I came and was diagnosed with overtiredness by his doctor just after I arrived: "take it easy for a week", good timing!). Instead, among other things, we were able to discuss our business plans for the future. It's amazing how these things go; coming to Japan, I'd left everything regarding the future completely open. Just nine months later, the latest plan is 1. finish my MSc at Kyodai, 2. work in consultancy in Japan for a couple of years, saving a lot of money, 3. opening a restaurant on the beach in Thailand with Yokoo and Freddy, and once that's going well, open a jazz club in Tunisia with the same team plus Benkei, who has promised me his full assistance in the business/legal aspects of setting up business there, as well as providing a truckload of business/music/personal contacts - I'm not exagerrating when I say he makes it seem very doable.

Back to the Eastside, however. Met up with some of my other Tokyo homies (Koki, Sumi, Mirai) for a Nabe party on the 29th, and caught the following man in the act at a club called Air.



Though I was a bit disappointed in his choice of music (very deep house only, whereas I prefer a bit of soulful/funky/latin/afro mixed in) and more in the huge amount of people that made it impossible to dance in the main hall, the lounge area was cool too, and I had fun dancing with Koki, some of his teammates, and some other random people.

Just in time for the New Year, Sonoo came back from a couple of weeks' travelling through Switzerland and France. I picked her up at Narita, and she took me around her hometown Yokohama (about an hour away from Tokyo) that day. A very pleasant seaside city, the atmosphere is quite more enjoyable than Tokyo's non-stop hustlebustle - and the Chinese food is killer.
















That evening, Sonoo went home to crash out her travel exhaustion, and I hopped on a train back to Tokyo just in time for the moment supreme, arriving in Shibuya around half an hour before 0. Now Shibuya is one of the busiest places in all of Tokyo, especially at night, and I don't need to tell you Tokyo is one hell of an impressive city, so that means something...but for once, this huge capital was squarely defeated by my own much humbler hometown of Amsterdam. In terms of the amount of people and atmosphere, no question about it (though not by the amount of police officers on the street - I'm quite happy I don't need to pay taxes here). So Japanese New Year is quite different from Dutch New Year, then! I met up with Yokoo, who was coming from his deserted part-time job, at about 5 minutes to 0 and we managed to find the somewhat hidden 5th-floor izakaya where an ex-colleague of his and his friends were chilling at and order and receive a drink with just about 10 seconds on the clock. Thus we celebrated our good timing and very calmly passed on to the next day (I can't remember the last time I was sober at midnight on NY's).

Later that evening, one not-so-interesting club for 2 hours, but then off to my first hatsumoude ever. We went to Meiji Jingu, which is one of the bigger shrines in Tokyo, but because of the early hour (about 4 am), there weren't that many people (were we to have gone 10 hours later, ... see further down for pix from that scenario), and we comfortably cast our first prayer and purchased our first fortune, which turned out to be somewhat of a ripoff, as instead of the desired fortune message we got some lousy poetry by the Meiji emperor from an era long past. If it was any good, we might have forgiven the situation, but with a poem like "if you do not try / you will not accomplish anything", I could not but wonder what kind of person that mighty emperor might have been. Farmer's fart.



During the next couple of days, I met up with a couple of other friends: Aki, who took me on our first exploration of the more obscure neighborhoods of Tokyo, this time to Minami-Senju. She'd done some homework and came prepared with a halfway legible phone pic of a map that showed a recommended walking route to see the sights: a shrine here and there, some statues, a graveyard and, the diva of Minami-Senju, the place where used to be a red-light district - unfortunately invisible to the naked eye today. Because it was January 2nd - still right in the middle of the Japanese national holiday week surrounding New Year's - and this was a very untouristic area (until recently quite dangerous, Aki told me, though I have honestly lost the capacity to imagine what a dangerous Japanese neighborhood must look like - something like the Johannesburg I visited just before coming here, perhaps?), almost all the shops were closed, and it was somewhat like a ghost town. It's fun to get a new perspective like that, so I'm deffy gonna roam around some more with her next time.



We walked from there to Asakusa, from ghost town to ah-THAT's-where-everybody-was-hiding extremely crowded food stand area next to a major shrine: back in town. And this is also what I meant by the 'glad we did the hatsumoude at 4 am' remark - by the time these people got to their prayer, it would probably be 4 am again.






Running out of breath, so let's wrap up. A modest new-year's party with the 'Japan Hiromi fan club' consisting of all of four members including myself, and organized by Sonoe. The other 2 dudes, who I'd met at the Hiromi gig in Osaka a while back, are interesting, out-of-the-ordinary people: an only slightly crippled dude who lives off of government cash - the guy in the pic - and another guy who works on temporary basis as a...mechanic of sorts. Always good meeting people with who one shares exactly one thing (in this case Hiromi fandom) and getting along all the same.



The first Kyoto pix of 2009...





...and of course some never-failing Superb Chunks of Heaven:




See you in 2010!

P.S. Student part-time workers are often called arubaitosan in Japanese, which I thought I might share with you. Arubaito as in the German 'arbeit', and san as in the honorary suffix. Hooray for Japan!

They Didn't Let Me Ride On Neko Bus

I’m sitting in Starbucks, listening to Jamiroquai. My tall green tea, the cheapest drink in the store at 340 yen, is finished and the empty mug is standing invisibly behind my laptop screen. It’s 8:40 pm on Tuesday, the second of three days of non-stop dreary rain, and I have ninety minutes left before I meet Misa. Tonight I’m breaking up with her.

The vacation has finally come to an end, and I’m working my way through a pile of chores, getting used to the feeling of responsibility once more. People have moved back, out and around, and I’m wearing a sweater for the first time in months. Kyoto’s smalltown feeling is slightly depressing, but melancholy moods like these make for productive creation.

It’s autumn, and I’ve been in Japan for exactly six months…

*REWIND*

Tokyo was a BLAAAAAST!!! In a nutshell, this is what happened.

I arrived, immediately felt at home, realized I’ve always been a city boy. I met old friends, made new friends, now have more friends there than here. Be it clubbing with Koki’s team and one of Japan’s best dancers, drinking beers in a dark park where the jogging never stops, enjoying a hearty takoyaki or nabe party, playing Super Nintendo all night or doing very irresponsible things in a friend’s 21^st-floor apartment, I went to sleep at 8 am every day and am still recovering from the jet lag.

Details, then. Remember Yokoo, Koki’s middle-school friend who I first met when they were heading back to their hometown Fukuoka for a week a couple of months ago and passed through Kansai? I probably spent 70% of my time in Tokyo with the guy, and it’s largely thanks to him that I now have the wonderful feeling that Tokyo is not the scary metropolis I anticipated it would be, but just another home, and a crazy fun one at that.

One of the best things was his driving me around on his motorcycle every day. Besides the first day, when I went around by train and foot with Koki, it was all bike. I saw most of the usual places – Asakusa, Ikebukuro, Akihabara, Ginza, Harajuku, Ueno, Shinjuku, Shibuya, Odaiba, Aoyama, Roppongi – and a bunch of places whose names I forgot. More than that: Thanks to being above ground and in the open air for the whole ride, I walked out with a tight-knitted whole of a city instead of the patchwork of towns that would have been impressed on me if I did everything by subway. It was my first time riding on (the back of) a motorcycle for more than a couple of minutes, and damn, it felt good. It’s going to be a tough decision which license I’ll get first, by the time I gather the money.

(the second pic is not his bike)

Sleeping in a different apartment just about every day helped to sharpen my perspective of Japanese normality, and made it easy to feel free – you’re just there for a couple of hours, do whatever you like, clean up a bit, and move on. I took this mentality too far on the last night, and am grateful to the friend who lives in that apartment for talking it out with me in a relaxed way – you rock, girl!

Ten days was a perfect length of time. I met everyone I had planned to, made a heap of new friends while bouncing from one party to the next with just enough to time to relax in the mornings, and left the city with things undone. Considering that my unlawful travel scheme worked and going to Tokyo is thus officially cheaper than going to school from Oubaku (though it takes nine times as long and requires nine times as many changes), I am very inclined to return to Tokyo soon. Maybe in the 5-day long Kyoto University Festival at the end of November.

Almost everyone I hung out with was originally from Fukuoka (a prefecture ten hours southwest of Kyoto, see map below). I've heard from various people that Fukuoka natives are open, friendly and like to have a good time, and I was indeed able to confirm this piece of information. More interesting, I picked up some Fukuoka-ben (dialect), and am struggling to refrain from using it back in Kyoto. It's just so catchy! I think I might be heading to Fukuoka around New Year's - the party is supposed to be great.

I also ate ramen three times. In chronological order, the biggest, the tastiest, and the spiciest ramen I’ve ever had. Definitely worth creating a new religion for.

Also, by a quite canny coincidence, the first H&M in Japan opened just five days before I arrived. Behold the organized monster that is Japanese society:

After walking for three blocks and turning a corner, I overheard a potential customer inquiring about the duration of the queue from that point. The official responded with ‘about an hour’… and it took me another three blocks and a corner turn to see the end of the queue. The next store will open in Harajuku in November. Perfect timing!

The rest of the pics, then ... proving that I did undertake some culturally educative activities after all! Koki's buddy was showing a compilation of three short movies on the floor below the floor where the paintings you can see on the pics below were hanging. I'm very interested in Japanese contemporary art, because I think it can teach me a lot about the relationship between Japanese and Western culture, the Japanese way of thinking, and all that yummy stuff. On the other side of time, I had a 90-year old calligraphy pro choose the kanji for my name (finally!). It turned out like this: 弥尾利, or ya-o-ri: the first character is quite obscure and appears in words and phrases that refer to buddhism and the lunar calendar, the second means tail, and the last means advantage. Man, that dude was one of the coolest people I ever met. Probably one of the last people alive who can actually read all those funky scrolls, and he toured my buddy and me around the exhibition, reading and translating for us with a wit that made me believe he must have been a serious playboy back in the day.

In all, I hope you realize that the reason why I say Tokyo was a BLAAAAAST!!! is only because it would be quite annoying if I used 1000000000000 exclamation marks instead of three.

*FAST FORWARD*

Finishing what I began, I broke up with Misa last night. It was emotional for both of us, but I don't doubt it was the best thing to do, and I have hope that we'll be able to maintain a lasting friendship.

Tomorrow I'm moving - my band's singer is generously driving me with my stuff -, and next week is the beginning of

another six months of CRAZY FUCKING AWESOMENESS!!! YEAH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

P.S. As for the title, yeah. Studio Ghibli Museum rocked and all, but holy Mr. Hankey, there's fluffy Neko Bus right in front of my face with a bunch of kids inside and around, happier than you'd ever be on conventional drugs, and the dumbass museum employee tells me "if you're smaller than the height of that bar over there" .. almost committed another major sin there.

P.P.S. Ramadan is over! Here's a pic from during Ramadan: a very happy after-sundown Benkei who was suffering for a month all by himself.