wednesday, the 15th

Pulling out my handy-dandy moleskin notebook, in which I am attempting to record every event and all my thoughts, I realize that my dates are wrong, and the previous entry belonged to Wednesday the 15th. I also neglected to mention that I went out to an oyster bar that night, and ate two different 5 dollar oysters, which are insanely better then the ones in good ol’ cape cod and cape may. Although I’m sure if I paid 5 bucks per, instead of one or two bucks per, they would be comparably delicious.

I’ve made friends, although they tend to be about 10 years older than me. This is amusing, since for now, I believe I am incognito in that respect.

That night, after our welcome reception, a bunch of us went out on the town, and somehow ended up at a karake bar. These are very different from US karaoke bars. if you've ever seen lost in translation a group of people rent a room and have the karaoke machine all to themselves. then they select the songs and sing for each other. less pressure because you're not singing in front of strangers, but you're also about 2 feet away from your friends. I ended up singing "99 red balloons" which went well until I remembered that about half the song is in german. unfortunate. then I led the group in a rousing rendition of "eye of the tiger." Also, on the screen behind the words, there is a music video, which consisted of a japanese dude training, smoking a cigarette and trying to look badass


Thursday, the 16th


In order to take advantage of my jet lag before it disappeared completely, I got up at 4:30 (and my body thought it was 3:30 pm) and went to the fish market. This was seriously one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen. Every type of fish you could imagine, some alive, some dead, some somewhere in between, in every form from already fried up, to steaks of tuna and salmon and everything. And octopus too.

It was gigantic. In this massive abandoned warehouse right next to the ocean, there were rows and rows of booths of Japanese wielding sharp knives, slicing up fish and eels swimming in buckets and everything. We were wandering around while men driving flatbed trucks were whipping down the narrow walkways, not slowing down and assuming we would hop out of the way. They were wheeling all sorts of things around, but there were also guys pulling carts, almost like a rickshaw, except like a flat cart, and in the back of the cart were 8 foot long, 500 pound tunas. We tracked those carts down to their source in the very back of the warehouse and wow. As far as we could see, rows and rows of massive tunas. It was an auction. Someone would ring a bell, and they would all start yelling out, everything being entirely indecipherable to me. Then some guy would wheel in with his cart and four or five guys together would spear the tuna with these lethal-looking hooks they had, and haul it up onto the cart. Then the guy would speed away.

After a good long while of watching this process, we decided to follow one of the carter guys and watch them chop up the tuna. Stealthily as 4 white Americans with cameras in a room full of galoshes-clad Japanese men could, we surreptitiously snuck behind him. For a solid ten minutes we followed him, convinced he was just messing with us, until he finally unloaded him at one of the booths.

Then we heard and buzzing noise and turned around and saw this guy sawing 6 foot frozen tunas into pieces with a huge table saw. Crazy

TBC…