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The Rojin (old folks) Home we stumbled across in Shizuoka was a happy accident, one of those random call-outs from the back seat of the car that normally go unheeded. We were searching for an abandoned hospital and having little luck- so the mere sight of anything remotely fenced-off fired up our blood and got us out there investigating.
Delathon Rent, a 28 year old technician on the Freya 13 space station, sits slumped in the Outer rim command pod with a gas hatch sealed behind him, video-phone in his lap, waiting for it to ring. He’s been waiting for about 10 minutes now, after intermittently placing calls himself to the Freya Commune for the last hour. He has an awkward itch in the corner of his right eye. He wants to scratch it with the machined tip of his blue biro, but he doesn’t. He’s afraid to even touch his eyes. Instead, he taps the pen against the video screen nervously. It makes a high clocking sound. He starts shuffling his feet over the dry friction floor to accompany it. For a minute, he considers whistling, then thinks better of it. Whistling is for happy people, and he is anything but happy. He can’t forget Boli’s face. The moment the first of them burst loose from his fingers. Poor Boli, smiling all black-eyed and blind when it happened. Talking to his parents, maybe, or an old girlfriend. They’d left him to die, and so he’d died.
Image from here. Tokyo Times went to the underground bunker in Yamanashi and managed to de-bunk some of the mystery surrounding it. He found a Sanyo magazine which featured a little icon of one of the odd logos from inside the bunker. It doesn’t explain everything, but it goes some distance to removing the thought it might have belonged to a cult. Mike and I went to the BE lab in Shizuoka- I was going to post my version tomorrow but may go with something else instead- give his a bit more time to breathe before I clog the airwaves with yet more shots of the same place. In other news- I have now moved in with SY. It was an almost completely painless (SY got scratched while carrying a bookshelf, had to listen to the moving guy wittering on in Korean with no end in sight) endeavour, all completed last Sunday. It sounds strange to say it, but despite adding my desk, chair, TV, and several bookshelves, her place actually feels more spacious than before. I guess we just feng shuied the heck out of it. I’m thinking I may start reviewing all the books I read here. At the moment I’m reading a lot. As prep for the move I sold a ton of old books, probably about 80, and made around 20,000 yen in credit at the Blue Parrot. I spent that right away, on around 20 new books, and am already ploughing my way through them. Better than TV, especially since LOST is done for this season. The headquarters of the Shizuoka newspaper in Shimbashi, Tokyo, is another Kenzo Tange building- he of Fuji Terebi and the Tocho. It resembles nothing so much as a giant mutated baobab tree, vivid rust-colored and sprouting fat boughs that elide in stubby endings, on one side its groping knubs reaching out to latch onto the closest building.
Ojarus are a couple of tea-cosy aficionados gone mad- either that or they’ve got some outlandish head-shapes. I caught up with them in Ueno just as they were finishing their bit of Heaven Artistry, and so I really don’t know what they did for their act. Perhaps poked people in the eye with their long blue head-hats? Tuned into to long-wave AM radio and danced along to Thrash Elvis out of Missouri (the home of Thrash Elvis, or so I’m told)?
Underneath Paris lie hundreds of miles of catacombs, dug over hundreds of years as quarries, tunnels, sewers and interlinked basements. Now for the most part they lie fallow, though never completely blocked-off for fear of sealing some intrepid explorers inside. Huge expanses are merely featureless tunnels of little interest, though nestled within their labyrinthine undulations can be found some fascinating pockets: rooms filled with stunning guerrilla art, bunkers from the World Wars stashed with antique munitions, secret underground cinemas, and of course the Ossuaries.
Emhoola peddled magic. He sold it by the cartload, and everywhere he went it was bought with self-deceiving gusto. He sold it in cheap brass compasses that no longer worked, in the shriveled corpses of pack donkeys whose heads lolled flea-bitten against the sales-rack strappings of his wagon, in straw dolls and dried frogs and mosquito paste and all variety of herbs and medicinal fungi. He was a collector of all things collectible, and he purveyed these wares with a rag and bone man’s pitch few could resist. “Freedom,†he’d call out, as he strode the dusty main streets of America’s new and little known frontier colonies. “Freedom for one and all,†waving dehydrated chicken gizzards before him, urging on his old yak Bray with musty carrots on a fishing line. People flocked to him everywhere he went, and bought his magic charms in droves. He told them he was a wizard, and so he was, though few knew more than the obvious. He marveled them with sleight of hand and he changed their lives with his premonitions and predictions. Those that bought the dead horses found flies no longer alighted upon their heads. Those that bought his watches found they were never late. Those that bought his onionskin sheaths kept knives which never dulled. Those that paid for his advice found their lives running clear and smooth as the Mississippi. He was happy, as far as he had any emotion. But the happiest he ever was, was probably the time the citizens of Summitville tried to kill him.
The Cosplay Factory Haikyo in Ibaraki is like a series of jewels bevelled so well within a crown of thorns that you wouldn’t even know they were there. Snuggled up inside a bamboo jungle and locked behind at least two sets of fences, it keeps its treasures safe- and what treasures: a NASA rocket ship boiler circa 1950, two enormous bread kilns not for baking bread, and a gaggle of Final Fantasy warriors posing for their daguerrotypes to be etched. Glorious.
Isidro’s furnace demanded FBI agents, but he only fed it limestone and coke, sometimes Rice Crispies if it was good. In return, it fed his insanity. Neither got exactly what they wanted, but it was a happy enough arrangement for the both of them. “FBI agents!” it would roar down the phone at Isidro, who often held a towel to his other ear to keep the noise in. “Out there, in the lawn, take your blunderbuss to the cheeky lot of them!” Isidro would look out at the lawn, see only squirrels. “They look more like squirrels,” he would say, but that would only provoke the furnace’s wrath. “They’re in disguise!” the furnace would roar. “Blunderbuss those sneaky squirrel-costume-wearing FBI agents!”
Image from here. The Dental School Haikyo in Ibaraki is one giant nest, a big empty shell carpeted with straw and twittering with the sound of swooping birds. Every room, corridor, and hall is scattered with their off-cast building materials, feathers, droppings, and bodies. Broken EXIT signs, fire-hose cupboards, sinks and shattered fuse-boxes all serve as their homes, stuffed with rotten straw and twigs.
REN, TEKALUS, LORIE They pick up the blip off the bait drop corner, burning bright green on the inner screen of their visors, flashing with a rapid-fire heartbeat, scouring afterglow trails into their eyes. “He’s a fat one, eh?†shouts Lorie happily, plumps out his black armoured arms before him like they’re resting on a vast belly. Ren and Tekalus wince at the static burst in their helmets.
Image from here. Misuterareta- Survivorship goes back to the Sagami Lake area, site of the Hotel Royale, and finds it now guarded by security vans and guard dogs. He ploughs on, and discovers a Pension Hotel surrounded by a wide and strange scaffolding walkway. He’s shooting with a D60 now, so image quality just got a bump. Tokyo Times- Lee stumbles upon and explores a conference centre near Yamanaka Lake, complete with funky brain-washing chairs and antique office equipment. |
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