築地市場

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no trip to tokyo would be complete without a trip to tsukiji shijo - 築地市場 - the biggest wholesale seafood market in the world. we got there too late to witness the famous fish auction in the morning - arriving only to see a few discarded tuna that - having been rejected by the japanese - would now be offered to john west.

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the market only recently re-opened to tourists; a ban was enforced after tourists were caught kissing one tuna and riding another like a rodeo bull.

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the market itself was a boring, shabby affair, and an undeserving penultimate destination for the corpses of endangered species stolen from australian waters, only to be fed to hungry japanese mouths for research purposes. with 5 years of tuna locked in japanese fridges, flaunting of international conservation conventions and no respect for scientifically backed reductions in fishing quotas, this blogger gives a resounding 'fuck you' to the japanese fishing industry, and an equally impassionate 'fuck you' to the country that supports it.

. g supports the japanese fishing industry

onsen adventures

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what's the japanese word for getting together with lots of other naked men and splashing about in hot water? onsen.

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being a volcanic chain of islands, there are hundreds and hundreds of hot springs throughout japan, and visiting an onsen is a quintessential japanese cultural experience not to be missed.

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we first visited the onsen in nikko, famous for its 7-11, and our second in the mountains high above the town at a fetid 'source'. here we had a little bath all to ourselves for a few minutes, so all photos come from our second onsen.

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in nikko, after being dropped off by our servant and telling her to come back in an hour to pick us up, leaving our shoes near the door and paying our money, we were given locker keys and towels the size of a small white handkerchief. 'what's this for?' we wondered - to blow our nose? to cover a single nipple? to cover our dicks or balls but not both? i'm still not 100% sure.

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we stowed our clothes in our lockers and then proceeded into the onsen room, arranging our handkerchief discretely over various parts of our bodies as we saw fit. in the main room we found several baths and a low wall peppered with shower heads, buckets, soap, and japanese men of various ages scrubbing themselves raw before a dip. we didn't want to be the dirty white people who missed a spot, so both made a great show of scrubbing until we were lobster-red, then proceeded to the hot baths.

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i'm not a big fan of hot water, and basically it was a case of immersing oneself in progressively hotter water ranging from bath-warm to fuck-that's-hot, then cooling down outside or under cold water. the only other thing to do was hit the sauna, but we were so hot already that within a few seconds of entering each time, all the proteins in our body were threatening to denature, and we had to rush back out again.

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now though the onsen is naked except for the handkerchief, i was surprised to see what i initially thought was a japanese man entering the onsen with a small carry-bag, hanging loosely between his knees. and then reality slammed home. i will never forget for my entire life the size of those enormous balls. was he half man half cow? now i've seen some low hangers in my time but this was abnormal. they were so impractically large it was as if he'd walked straight off the page of a comic book in an akihabara manga porn store and into our onsen, and then right into my face. i couldn't look but i had to look at the same time - you know how it is. you could even see them from behind hanging off the stool that he was sitting on, so there was no need to even be discrete. somebody should have called the guinness book of records. or the police.

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our second onsen was high in the mountains near a forest lake, where the sulphuric waters of hell itself bubbled up through the mud. g came out unscathed but i had some sort of reaction and developed a bodywide rash which drove me insane for almost 2 weeks and precluded any further onsen frivolity. but not to worry - there was much more to see and do in 日本!

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Nikkō

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click for map!

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no, not my brother-in-lafacto's name in japanese, but nikkō: japanese for sunlight, and site of the UNESCO world heritage 'shrines and temples of...*yawn*

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who cares about temples i hear you cry in disgust? not us! suffice to say that only minutes after buying the bare-bones-minimum pass for 3 temple sites and passing under the first tori, we were already crawling around on our hands and knees smitten with boredom. we decided to only look at the forest behind the second site (the trees in japan are something else altogether - check out some of these pics), and skipped the third one altogether for fear of inducing boredom-seizures.

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our guest house was pretty awesome - it was our first of many tatami mat and futon related good nights' sleep, and the owner was lovely, but seemed to be addicted to servitude (at which she was admittedly a master), and sort of went on a bit about how poor she was, before taking some happy snaps of us with a $3000 camera and running back to her pad to have them printed and laminated on her very own equipment. maybe japan poor is like australian not poor.

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but the highlight of nikkō was: the 7-11. who would have thought that in the middle of the night you could cruise out to your local convenience store for a steaming hot three course meal double-wrapped in plastic casing/plastic bag/plastic staff and plastic greeting? it was enough to make us have two dinners.
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if only this pagoda could have housed a 7-11 to have made it more interesting...

there were two shock events in nikkō, both involving the camera. the first was where i somehow got my neck and foot trapped in the camera cord at the same time, resulting in "japan camera accident number one". both the camera and your correspondent survived - scratched but essentially functional - so it was ok.

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the second was where gerard took a photo of me from behind communing with the forest wearing my favourite shorts ever. when i later blew up the picture and saw the back of my arse in the aforementioned favourite shorts, my whole world came crashing down, and i was almost ready to call the whole thing quits. perhaps change my identity and start afresh. the offending article of clothing is now on the garment equivalent of death row with no chance of absolution, and has only the funky reality of easy clothes shopping in japan to thank for not being murdered on the spot in self-defence.

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oh god my eyes!

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i leave you with what g and i consider to be the best photo we took in japan. peace.
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8 seconds

japan rail recently did an audit of the punctuality of its shinkansen (bullet trains) - the ones that run the length and breadth of the country. it found after examining 160,000 individual train journeys, that the average delay in arrival for a shinkansen was 8 seconds.

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8 seconds?! can you imagine if such rampant punctuality was introduced into australia? people would go wild - run screaming from train stations frothing at the mouth. attendants would tell you that the train was coming in 5 minutes whilst looking you right in the eye. the loudspeakers would announce: "good afternoon passengers: the train to dandenong has been delayed, and is now expected in 8 seconds. connex apologises for any inconvenience caused". it would all be too much.
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but not in japan. if you catch a train 6 hours up the east coast and have only 3 minutes to change over to another train upon arrival, there's no more shitting yourself with fear that you won't make the connection - you can sit back and relax with the knowledge wthat you will have a full 180 seconds to change at the station.
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in fact, when travelling on local trains, you can go to the front carriage and gaze through the window at the driver with all the other window lickers (or did pottsie say that they were headbangers? i was too busy drooling on the plexiglass for it to register). these drivers (who all have autistic spectrum disorder) have a timetable (see the arrow on the photo above!), and this timetable tells them what time they need to arrive and leave each train station to the second. fetch the smelling salts!
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the shinkansen themselves are just awesome. on our first ride, i looked out the window at the blurred vegetation by the tracks, and felt like i was in free-fall - SIDEWAYS. in fact, when i later googled it, i found that the trains do indeed travel faster than the terminal velocity of a human being - still alive, but bound and gagged - who has been tossed into the sky over bass strait from an unidentified aeroplane. it was fast.
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the seats were a blessing too. with my buggered back, we couldn't have spent a lot of time on a train with normal seats - but in japan, even the dregs of society (like us) travel first class when they're travelling last class, as all seats recline to about 45 degrees.
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it meant that we could literally leave tokyo in the morning, pop over to a mid-western japanese city for a bit of breakfast and sightseeing, move on somewhere else for a late afternoon stretch in a world heritage garden, and then get back on the train and be home in tokyo for dinner with my sister. and that's exactly the sort of thing we did and the sort of thing you can do when you free-fall toward your destinations.
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special mention must be made of the JR pass - one of the worlds true travel bargains. for an amount that initially seems extortional, g and i bought three weeks of limitless travel on almost all the trains in japan - from metros to local lines to the glorious shinkansen. i reckon we saved about $1000 each as a result. cha-ching.
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the eastern capital

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of course my sister and her partner live in tokyo - that's the reason we came to japan in the first place. and seeing them was always going to be the best thing about coming to japan anyway. but there were other things to see and do in tokyo...
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even though i would go so far as to classify myself as a semi-professional tourist, more often than not the actual visiting of tourist sites has me wanting to put a knife in the nearest child. g and i are similar in that respect, and rather than suffer the nausea of looking at temples, we prefer to toss ourselves into the river of 'let's see what happens' and float on down.

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so what did we do in this massive alpha-plus megamegamegalopolis of over 33 million people all crammed into one pulsating, never-ending crowd? well...when i was able to pry gerard away from the japanese equivalent of the $2 shop (literally the 'hundred yen shop', where we spent countless hours, one of us with a dead and bored look in his eye, the other with eyes alight, arms full of copper and aluminium wiring, asking "but mon cheri, what do you mean we don't need a full body lyrca suit or a mini soldering iron?")...we did a few things.

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in a departure from previous blogs, i thought i could create some links to galleries if you're interested in seeing more. so...click on the picture below if you want to check out tokyo parks and gardens.

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click the pic below for tokyo streets.

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click the one below for temples (bleaughh) and tokyo castle

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or finally, click the shot below to see what we got up to when we met up with nicky in tokyo for her birthday!

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a city for people

hands up like astroboy if you're massively frustrated and angry about the state of affairs with regards to cars cars cars in melbourne?

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consensus.

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you ring up the local fishmonger to find out how to get there, and she'll tell you where to park, but she won't tell you which tram to take - even though there's a fucking tram stop right outside her fishmongery! what's wrong with this picture?

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living next to the freeway, i have spent many a choking minute gazing down from above upon the endless tide of cars flowing into and out of our great city, wondering what life could be like in a modern metropolis built for people - not for cars. and then: tokyo!
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what boundless joy to be in a city with public transport infrastructure! where humans dominate the landscape, and suburban roads are so narrow and inconvenient that cars are too frightened to come out, and only do so under exceptional circumstances, blushing with irrelevance. c'mon melbourne - we can do it! let's build up some density and make our reliance on private vehicles a dirty joke from the past!

i'd rather die than have a fat arse

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what better characterises japan than the toilet? clean, convenient, modern, efficient. the most advanced version we encountered sensed your presence and lifted its lid when you were near, only to reveal a heated seat for your pampered bottom. when the excitement of voiding was over, there was one button to squirt your bumhole, another to squirt your fannyhole if you had one (or jet your balls if you didn't have one but wanted to know what happened when you pressed that button), another button to massage your arse with rhythmic squirts of water, and a final button to fan dry your pudendum, dripping wet after all that fun. when it was all over, you simply had to walk away - no need to even look back - the toilet flushed and closed automatically. before leaving, one could wash their hands under the automatic tap - not that you've touched anything but a few laminated buttons anyway.
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and that was basically our experience of japan - convenient, clean, efficient and modern, but slightly distanced from reality and not particularly interactive.
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6 weeks on from our holiday, it's time to refocus the retrospectoscope back on the land of the rising sun. join me as i reminisce! expect multiple small entries - and feel free to leave a comment/not leave a comment/get fucked/eat 4 king size cherry ripes in one sitting like i did last week and arrive at a higher level of existence. the choice is quite simply yours :)

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and by opposing, end them (the twisted girl)

as many of you know, it has not been smooth psychological sailing for me over the last few years. when i consider myself at the age of 29 with a weak leg that's been getting gradually weaker since before my 26th birthday, and a fucked back that won't let me sit for more than 10 minutes without making itself felt, i have experienced deep feelings of disappointment with my lot. the recent addition of a C-spine disc prolapse has had me wallowing in self-pity - the brunt being graciously borne by the love of my life.
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but i know that my lot is infinitely better than that of most people in the world, and i am always brought back to this by the memory of a girl i once saw as i was waiting at an overpriced physiotherapist for an ultimately useless session of pilates. this girl was twisted - her legs were different lengths, her spine was folded back on itself twice over, and every movement was clearly agony as she staggered from one side of the room to the next. and yet as she talked to her carer, she laughed, and it was the quality of this laugh that left me awe-struck. it was not the laugh of someone who was tolerating her pain, or laughing politely, or laughing despite herself. this girl was laughing with complete abandon. the girl with the twisted body - in pain, disabled, dependent - was giving herself up to the joy in her life.
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it's impossible to feel positive 24/7, but life is a joy regardless. i am inspired by the twisted girl, and my desire is to be able to live the joys of my life with the same abandon that she lives the joys of hers - whether i get better, stay the same, or get worse. anything less than this sort of life is a life half lived, and grounds for taking arms against a sea of troubles. peace!

your money or your life

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when i was leaving H+R block last year, the fat accountant - who hadn't been able to stop shifting uncomfortably on his seat the whole time we'd been talking - turned to me, gazed over his glasses so that his meaning could not be adulterated by a high refractive index, and said in a tone of voice 1/3 serious, 1/3 dripping with sarcasm and 1/3 charged with disgust: "other doctors in your place would have claimed much much more..."

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i suspected that i had been reprimanded, but wasn't quite sure. what exactly had he been trying to say?

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i've just come away from this year's visit. different accountant, same old same old. again, words of wisdom, but this time in earnest: "ondrej - in the next 12 months you need to spend a lot more so that you can claim".

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the funny thing was, he actually meant it. i opened my mouth and uttered a few words about materialism, society and true happiness, but he had already turned away to plug himself back into the wall.

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one thing's for sure - if you cut them, they do not bleed.

the christian guide to felching

i recently had the most unpleasant and provocative experience of being asked a question laced with historical resentment: 'why did you hate us so much?'

i, a young australian, had been transformed and held to answer for the eastern european peasants that had made life so unpleasant for the grandparents of my young australian questioner - jews that had left eastern european in the 1920s.

though it was said slightly tongue in cheek, i found myself upset to the point of fury. a fury not about history, but about the inheritance of history. rather than feel angry with the implication that i inherited the guilt of one group of people, i was angry with the implication that i had not inherited the suffering of the other. the dirty issue of ethnic association (or nationalism, which is essentially the same thing) had reared its ugly head, and allowed me to ponder the matter.

i'm not sure that i quite believe in ethnicity, and i reject the idea of inherited guilt, inherited suffering, inherited thoughts and even inherited proprietorship of culture and cultural properties. after a few generations, so little is truly known and even less is truly understood about our backgrounds that they meld into a common background, and our collective achievement as human beings and our similarity as a species means that all history is our own. the suffering of prisoners on the slave ships bound for the americas in the 1600s and the hopes and fears of those who survived the atomic bombs in japan are as much my own personal inheritance as the tribulation of those involved in the prague spring or the eureka stockade. ultimately, it comes down to which stories are told and which stories we listen to. perhaps this is what ethnicity really is.

it saddens me that with such a wealth of human history, some stories are told over and over again, whilst others are simply forgotten, as if all people were not equal. i note with mispleasure that yet another film about the 2nd world war is currently in theatres - one of thousands in recent memory, all seemingly told from the same perspectives. the gypsies of europe were almost wiped out in the nazi concentration camps in the 2nd world war - why haven't i heard their stories (my stories)? is it because this group lack political power or organisation that their stories (my stories) are less important? no - just less told, and thus less remembered. english, french, jewish, german, and (especially) american perspectives of WW2? yes thanks i've heard those ad nauseum and now i've grown bored. i want some new perspectives and new chapters from our collective history from which i can learn something about myself and the human condition. please tell, because i'm listening.

coming back to the initial question that upset me. imagine for an instant that my questioner and i had DNA tests proving that we had been accidentally swapped at birth. would i now be any more or less jewish than i already am? would he? would i have a deeper anger (or of more concern, a right to a deeper anger) about the treatment of eastern european jews by eastern european gentile peasants 100 years ago? my answer is of course no - how could superficial regard for labels affect your own lifetime of real experiences, and the significance of our collective human history - whichever arbitrary part of it you may have listened to over the course of your life? i'm not saying that i would or wouldn't feel more or less jewish or gentile - that's beside the point. i'm saying that these labels are counter-productive. we as individuals and societies are a product of our stories - and in realising that we share in common with all other people the human experience, we take ownership of all human history and are enriched by it because it is our own personal history too. my people built the great wall of china, the pyramids, and the sydney harbour bridge. my people built the burma railway and they forced people to build the burma railway. my people executed people in death camps and were executed. my people enslaved others in africa and were enslaved in africa.

and yet...! young australian men, born in australia and speaking english as their first and often only language can still beat each other to a pulp in the street for reasons they're not really sure of, claiming an anger inherited from their supposed serbian/croatian/greek/turkish/insert-ethnicity-here background (one sided stories that they have been told). i once met a man who introduced himself as 'czech' and even had a tattoo of the czech republic on his arm, but when i started speaking czech he admitted to not understanding a word and having never been there - in fact on further questioning it was his great grandfather that had emigrated to new zealand and married a maori woman a century ago, so that not even his own grandfather spoke the language. i was amused, and then deeply saddened and finally frightened by this display, as it spoke of the need in our weak psychology to feel a sense of belonging to a special group that is somehow better or different to everyone else, even where there is no rational basis for that association. perhaps this void can be filled with nationalism or a strong sense of ethnic association and lead to anger and violence. but perhaps it can be filled with a sense that we are all part of the same group - an amazing group of human beings with a common history that binds us together. and perhaps this sense of unity will give us a basis for moving forward in a world where we really are all part of the same big family.