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Ladies for ladies, Bears for men

On toilet doors you sometimes see fancy graphics, stylized versions of the little dude and chick that tell us which little room to go in to do our business. I’ve seen Picasso-esque renderings, melting-egg Dali versions, manga characters, the oft-confusing-to-illiterate-gaijin kanji versions, but never before one where the dude is not a dude but a bear. Only in Hokkaido.

This sticker was omiyage (souvenir gift) from a friend who went there for a holiday. Kuma means bear.

Crazy Kei the DIY cosplayer

Kei is a funky if kind of mad old guy I met one night on a random photo-walk through Shinjuku’s skyscraper district (West). I was on the bridge shooting pretty city lights and so was he, me with my dSLR and he with some weirdly contrived home-made compact camera. He’d taped a couple of enlarging lenses to both the back and front of what might have been a SONY coolpix, so the back-image was enlarged and the front-lens was zoomed out. It was one tricked out, pimped up compact camera. He let me toy with it for a moment. There were no settings of course, the whole thing duct-taped beyond recognition, but I felt pretty bad-ass all the same.

Kei shows off his bad-ass bike.

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Gutterman

by Michael John Grist

I found him one mad marsh-walking night.  I was out in the bogs, I don’t know why, crossing wet rivers and wading through peat mulberry patches, dashings of filth worming their way into the cuffs of my suit turn-ups, smidgeons of muck smudging up and under my fingernails.  I must have trekked two thirds of a golf course and the circumference of a lengthways lake when I hit upon the road.

It was just an ordinary road.

It had double yellow parking lines and gutters and manhole covers, and it had curbs and sidewalks, and that central white line, dash dotted.  It had lights too, tall curving streetlamps, blotching out yellow glow like a line of fairy lights in the dark of the fens.

It was an ordinary road, except it went nowhere.  I could plainly see that, from my dell in the darkness.  It began from nothing to my left, ran down for 4 streetlamps, arcing like bare back ribs from an all eaten feast, then it ended, a neat line, and back onto the marsh grass and stalky reeds of the night, lit up white like a front row of soldiers in a firing line, floodlit and waiting.

Image from here.

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Airplane boneyard in the Mojave desert

This is where planes go when they die. Vast hulks of metal that cost millions to build, now grounded in obsolescence, taken out to the boneyard to be shot in the head like Old Yeller. Their long neat lines look a lot like the white tombs of fallen soldiers at Arlington cemetary, seemingly endless in number, white-grey blips on a terracotta field, waiting for the day the decision is made to hack them open like a sheet-metal pinata to get at the valuable guts within.

Fallen soldiers at a final roll call in the boneyard.

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Not many banana

Raising kids is tough. Ask any parent and they’ll talk to you for hours about the hundreds of daily decisions they face in naturing and nurturing their kids into healthy little human robots. Apple pie or chocolate pie? Stroller or back-buggy? Power Rangers or Power Puff girls? Blue or Pink? Christianity or Judaism or Islam?

Recently I saw a T-shirt (at the Tokyo Motor show) encapsulating one of these timeless questions, complete with answer. I couldn’t believe my luck, so snapped a quick picture to share with you here.

What he needs is not many banana but also love.

So all you parents plying your kids with bananas, put them down. Only love will do. I feel this could be a great John Lennon lyric.

To sum-up, this is Tokyo content. I swore off it for a while, but with the new site layout I feel it can be allowed back into the fold. No commitments about how much I’ll post, but if something stands out I’ll probably stick it up here.

Seoul’s ruined Jumbo Jet, the Juan T. Trippe

Last month I went to South Korea to visit with SY’s family and get a feel for her country; we stopped off briefly in Pusan before heading on to Seoul where we saw the War Museum, the N Seoul tower, Gyeongbok Palace, and the ruin of the Juan T. Trippe Pan Am Jumbo Jet. That last is hardly on the tourist trail, it doesn’t feature in any guidebooks or promotional brochures, but it’s a soon-to-be-removed aficionado’s delight, a Jumbo Jet that fell into ruin not once but twice, the story only getting more fascinating as the owner guided us through the slow ruin of its refurbished fuselage.

Nose cone of the Juan T. Trippe

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