End of Year Tops

So far I've resisted the temptation to draw up a top 'X' list of what's passed; but now have succumbed due to the brainwashing power of television.  I watched a 'top 100' list of youtube videos on the gogglebox.

They got it all wrong of course, showing a few of the good videos, but misplacing importance and, therefore, numerical rankings.

So, here is my Top 'X' (the final number is subject to change.)

Although no numbers will be assigned, the last video will be the absolute, no questions asked, best youtube video of the moment.

Due to the transient nature of the youtube 'scene,' it will only be the best at the time of publishing, not a second after.  Get used to it, the internet changes quickly!

First up, we have:



Jeremy Clarkson beatbox.  'Swedemason,' secretary of the Swedish chapter of our very own freemasons, presumably, has taken a vast number of clips and soundbytes, and spliced them together with an attention to detail that screams: 'Obsessive compulsive disorder.'  However - to create something that can even be considered music, and I do consider it so, from the inane ramblings of Mr. Clarkson, is a feat of patience and genius.  Good job.

Considering this is a family-friendly top 'X' I am sticking with the cutesy videos.  In that vein, there is this:



It was a close call between the video above, and this: Link.  I chose the one above because it's a genuine youtube, and therefore internet, breakthrough; whereas I suspect the linked clip to be taken from a 'you've been framed' style show.

Another cat that does deserve a mention however is this Japanese one.  From the land of ninjas I present to you:



I think this cats' name is Daruma.  A daruma is this.  You paint one eye before the new year, and then the other on new year for good luck... Or something like that anyway.  I can't remember the dates and whatnot.

Anyway; ninja cat.  Awesome.  Enough with cats now!

This next clip isn't; it's a genre.  The genre in question is the overexploited category of 'crazy Japanese gameshows.'  Producers and writers in the West are notorious for their chronic cranial malady, and this produces a lack of creativity, inspiration, energy, drama and so on.  This leads to the pathetic televisual experience we now have.

The very few things that are worth watching, however, can be traced directly from the above genre.  And now the videos.  In order to demonstrate the genre to its' best, a few different videos are required.  Remember, this is merely the tip of the iceberg.  (I realise these clips may or may not be thought up in the land of the rising (I've genuinely no idea whether they were) but I have an affinity for that area, so let's pretend they were.  Plus the Japanese have a reputation for this kind of thing, and one must earn any reputation.)



The precursor to our own 'hole in the wall.'  No adlib dubbing from Craig Charles is necessary.

For the next clip, they're wearing binoculars...



This.  Is.  Genius.  This is, literally, wet your pants funny.  And I think everyone will agree.  It's not often you get to watch something this funny, and the whole family can watch, appreciate, and enjoy the humour in it.

In this next clip let me forewarn you:  They all run like uncoordinated fools.  And that is how the average Japanese person actually runs, I've witnessed 'the platform run,' several times!



Ok, so this next one doesn't really need introducing, but I will anyway.  Japanese gameshows have their own subgenres, such is the volume, they need subdividing and classifying.

This falls into the ever popular - 'laugh and get a forfeit, don't laugh and get cake,' sub-genre.  The forfeit is usually extremely painful, and, depending on the time the show is aired, may or may not result in groin based pain.



This next video.  Still on the Japanese gameshow theme.  Think a light-hearted version of the Johnny Knoxville classic.  Chicken or the egg?



This next clip.  Yeah...  It's brilliant, but I'm not going to introduce it; self-titling removes the need for any introduction.



It's when he arm swings straight through and only clips them.  That's got to hurt.  That's got to hurt like nothing else in the world.

The next clip demonstrates why Japan so desperately needs English teachers.



Why didn't they hit the guy who screwed up?  Oh that's right, it's ok to screw up, but don't laugh at him!

One of the many similarities between our countries:  Men dress up as women a lot on television, yet no one asks why.


Ok.  Moving further down (or up, depending on whether you live in the southern hemisphere) the list; the two chinese students, who, bored one day; mimed the backstreet boys.  They gained infamy in china, and commercial success, with adverts and sponsorship.  Considering the extremely tight communist control in that country it's amazing.  Chinese people can't even watch youtube!  It's restricted from within the mainland!  How did these guys get so famous?  Probably a youtube style ripoff hosted within the borders.  Anyway; the guy in the background is playing counterstrike, (version 1.6 (oldschool)) and was implemented to create a 'living background,' instead of just a static background.  In the outtakes, in case you can't read chinese, someone knocks on the door asking for a towel or something, one of them misses his cues, and something else happens.  I forgot what though.



They do a rendition of a popular chinese song, where the leading lady is dying from a terminal illness.  In the original video she has a nosebleed that is faithfully recreated using ketchup.  The out-takes are something else entirely for that video.

I was going to finish this today, but it's late and I want to head to bed, so I'll upload the absolute, unquestionable number one at a later date.

The Trip from Minamisenju to Yokohama

So this particular post covers the night before I left minamisenju, to the day after I arrived in Yokohama.

It's worth noting that drawing money out here is really difficult!  If you have a visa card it's fine, but if you have a debit card like mine, it's nigh on impossible.  I have to go to the big post offices and draw money from their machines because the banks don't accept my card, and none of the normal atm's here do either.

Also, they only use cash here.  Unless you're buying a  car or some expensive tech, they use  cash.  Essentially drawing money out at atm's is important here, and I can't do it easily!  It's quite the pain in the backside.

On the plus side it means I don't tend to keep drawing money  out, and I think this helps me keep track of my finances.  I'll draw a certain amount out and say to myself, ok this has to last x number of days.  Quite handy in that respect I suppose.

So I arrived here desperately needing to pay for the rent in my new hostel, and it took me two hours to find an atm that accepted my card!  Really annoying.

So having found the atm I went and ate dinner with my university language exchange buddy, who came to hull for a month between her normal degree study, and her masters.  She's a biologist studying seaweed and algae and wahtnot.  It's all very clever stuff.

Ok so the pictures start with the night before I left minamisenju, and me and the girl who works behind the Aizuya bar in minamisenju went to eat some dinner, that took about four hours...  Taking your time is important to me apparently, I never realised this before.

Ok so we had 'western' foods tonight.  Pizza, pasta, that kind of thing.  I remarked that even the pizza is tiny and cute, then couldn't resist making a little face out of it.

Don't play with your food children!

Yeah we got some strange looks from the staff...

Then we added a nose...

I don't know why...


But it's fun I guess?

Ok so this is the Aizuya bar.  The woman working behind the bar also works in the adjoining hairdressers.

The people that work here are the best I've met so far on my trip; amazing and friendly!

I'm pretty sure the bar makes no money, it's just something to do for fun, and it shows with the way the staff talk to customers, and how easy it is to strike up a conversation with them.

Really nice people.

The woman on the right owns the hostel/bar with her husband, and they have the cutest baby ever.  It's this devious and cunning little blob thing that already knows how to break things and spend peoples money, in the coin machines they have around the place.

It's a shame about the picture really, but the lighting didn't allow for a very good photo.  If only I had a good camera!

Ok so I forced her to do the bunny rabbit ear/peace/v sign thing.  She works behind the counter in the new koyo hostel and is an amazing help.  She showed me how to get all around the place, and is just generally awesome.

She also bought me lunch!  Thank you very much!

I'll definitely head back to that hostel on the way back to the airport.

Ok so now we're in Yokohama.  My bags weighed too much to take photographs while travelling, but there really wasn't much to see anyway.

This tall, cool looking tower is on the coast of Yokohama overlooking the sea.  The cool thing is that this isn't particularly tall, there are buildings nearing 100 storeys that have obsvervation towers at the top, but this is probably only fifty or so, if that.

So many unbelievably tall buildings in Tokyo and Yokohama.

So I like this picture, even though it doesn't really have a story behind it.  All the birds are facing the same way, because the wind is blowing directly in the faces and when they want to take off, they simply hop off the edge and use the headwind to fly off.  Literally zero effort required!

Another view of the same boat.  Nothing more to say here really...

Moped modification...

You know you've taken it too far when you put a massive fin on the back of a moped to make it look like some kind of shark...

Big bikes are few and far between here, even on the motorways you'll see more harleys than sportsbikes, which again makes no sense.  Harleys work on american roads, but Japanese road are like English ones.

There are side-streets that have turns a harley would literally not fit around.  Bizarre.

Speak of the devil...

I've seen a few R1's parked around the place, and a few more 600cc bikes about the place, always parked.  Never ridden.

This cool looking structure is a hotel/apartment building overlooking the bay area.  It's gargantuan in all dimensions.  Most tall buildings are quite slender, but this thing is broad as much as tall, so you recognise it all over yokohama.

The distinctive curve reminds me of the gherkin, only this building is pleasing to the eye.

I really struggled  to get a good photo of this wheel.  It's substantially smaller than the London eye, but it's still a skyline dominating lightshow.  It's called the clock, and each spoke lights up like a second hand.  It also has a digital display in the middle showing the current 24hr time.  It's impressive.

Inside there's a log flume, as you do, and running around the area is a small roller coaster.  No I didn't go on any of them, my companion is quite timid.

Ok so now we're going to play a little game.

Guess what this shop is...

A little more will be revealed in the next picture...

Ok so there's no name yet, but the little figurines should give it away...

That's right!  It's a pokemon shop!

It's actually styled to look like a shop in the game, and has places to meet other pokemon players and trade junk!

It's a whole shop dedicated to a game franchise, frankly that's incredible and well worthy of a few pictures!


That's everything for this portion of the blog!

Kamakura Redoux

Ok so I've updated the previous entry, regarding the trip to the imperial grounds.  That section is now fully completed.

This entry is a chronicle of my second trip to Kamakura.  This has been my favourite day thus far, for a number of different reason.  Firstly the people, secondly the luck, thirdly the festival:

I went there with mikal and Ashmi Thapar, who I had met all of six minutes before stepping onto the train together.  She then left us to visit Yokohama, and we soldiered on.  We arrived at the main Kamakura shrine area, the very same as in my 'kamakura in the rain' section, where a large festival was taking place.  This was the  original purpose of the visit, but I didn't know there would be a horseback archery demonstration at the same time, so my interest was immediately piqued when someone walked by with a longbow, a full head taller than he was.

We ambled around for a while, unsure of what to do.  We tried several times  to get a seat, but they were reserved; standing room only!  Standing room in Japan equates to enough space for roughly half a person, and we were two decidedly un-Japanese guys.

So we asked a police officer, essentially, what's up with this then?  He didn't understand English, but one of the competitors came up to us and handed us a form, for free, that costs 5,000円 and has to be booked well in advance.  So we got into the special seating area.  We had no idea what was going on, but we were essentially sitting next to some serious, prim and proper looking Japanese who were constantly greeted by dignitaries, and at one stage, the head of the tample itself.  These were serious people.  Who they were, only god knows.

So we were sitting around six feet from the track these horses were running along, and maybe forty feet from one of the three targets placed along the track.  We had the best seats in the house for the premier event in the kamakura calendar.

The event itself was pretty awesome, as you'll see from the pictures I'll put below.

Mikal, being American, got bored after an hour or so, and then left to buy things and whatnot, so after the entire tournament was complete I ambled around the shrine and watched the taiko drummers for  about an hour.  In retrospect I must have looked something of a berk, standing in front of a stand of drummers, mouth agape and non-moving.  However, I cannot get enough of those drummers and that type of music.  I could, and literally did, listen to that for  hours on end.

At this point I moved onto the koi ponds and sat there, watching people feed the massive carp in the grounds.  After being transfixed by this for some unknown amount of time I ambled up to the main temple, where a crazy-awesome photographer struck up a conversation after perving me apparently to 'check the light.'  So we headed to a bespoke starbucks, the first in Japan to be housed in a building that's not some ugly, prefab american monstrosity.  We talked for a couple of hours, and it turns out that he's immense.  He's a bloody good photographer, but I think he needs to work on his marketing because it appeared to me that he missed several tricks in promoting himself through the internet.  You need to work on this sir!

So after this I met back up with Ashmi and we toured the temple grounds by night.  They had a light show, projecting images onto the temples and shrines themselves.  Considering the conservative nature of the country, this display was something completely unexpected, and despite the occasional image that didn't quite work because of the unusual shape of the shrines, it was a really good 'installation.'  Unfortunately I couldn't capture any pictures, but Ashmi tried, so hopefully I can steal some from her.

We went back and watched the same taiko drummers that had now been playing for six hours, they were all still smiling and joking, fantastic.  They have several instruments to create the sound; two small drums, one large, pipes/flutes and a kind of metal ball on a stick, hitting a metal container.  As you can probably  tell I've no idea what it was, and trying to describe it is bloody difficult too.  They were getting so into the performance that they kept breaking the stick though, which made me laugh.

At around 9PM we went and ate at a small restaurant that turned out to be really expensive, but the most amazing place to eat in.  After keeping them open for ages past closing time, and with smiles on their faces (through gritted teeth) we left.

I arrived back home at around 12:30, and it was an amazing day.

The photographs roughly follow the proceedings described above.  These guys are the drummers.  All the players can play all the instruments, and they switch round at intervals.  They can switch round in the middle of playing, pitstop style.  Fantastic.  Amazing.  Brilliant.  I cannot praise this music enough.

The guy in the masculine red shirt is playing the hand-stick-pot thing.

I'm going to bombard you with pictures of these guys.

More pictures!!!

Remember I said this kind of looked like a stage, a few days ago?  Guess what it is!

Feed the fish.  They feed the pidgeons with fish food too.  Strange.

Look at those peons without tickets!  Losers...

The roped section in the middle is where the horses run.  Some of them were quite feisty, and someone got run over at the start line.  They run individually and fire at boards, examples of which you'll see in a second.

These 'shrine maidens' are everywhere helping out and about.  They're essentially free help, while the girls wearing different coloured skirt things are the proper workforce.









I'll update this post when I have some more free time...

Ok so the post that's standing up there has a wooden board placed on it, with the backing piece to stop stray arrows.  The bit that's behind that is another layer of security, to catch the arrows that are so far off course that someone might get beaned by them.

The arrows aren't tipped, but even these blunt ones can do some damage.  They weigh a surprising amount.

What an amazing setting!

This is a traditional getup for shinto priests.  I don't know how high ranking this guy is, but he was leading the archers around on their parade lap.

This old boy didn't compete, but he lead the first set of archers around.  I've just noticed, looking back at the photo, that everyone is blinking at exactly the same time.  That's scary.  Conformist culture has gone too far when everyone blinks together...

The little ones were carrying the helmets behind each archer.  It's kind of like ye olde knights of yore back home I guess.  King Arthurs servants and whatnot.

Look at the size of that bow!  They don't fire it in the way you might expect, bolt upright; instead they fire it gangster style, with a length of the bow against  the side of the horse.  It's kind of difficult to explain, but you'll see pictures of it later.

This picture kills two birds with one stone.  Firstly, there's some badass samurai looking guy, which is really cool.  The first one I've seen here.  Secondly, those wooden boards the kids are carrying are the targets.  When the arrows hit, they shatter too, which looks cool.

This guy was all tooled up.  Look at the number of arrows he has, and the number of helpers.  He also had the strangest hat, which makes him a winner in my books.

So they paraded up and down this strip, and on the second time round I managed to snap this, to show how detailed this guys armour is.  This may well be ceremonial, but I don't see how it would protect you from anything, even if it was made from titanium; there are so many exposed parts!

Oh no, he's trying to get artistic!  I really like this photo though, it shows the massive amounts of colour that is missing from everyday life here.

The procession stopped in front of the dignitaries to our right, presumably to pay respects.  It was a prime opportunity to capture the congregation all together.

This guy gets his own little column, for looking so depressed while wearing what is essentially a really cool costume.  Shame on you sir!

The old lady directly to our right, with the black floppy hat on was really nice.  She offered me the seat next to her on several occasions.  However the people to her right were extremely xenophobic, they put their straw hat on the seat next to the old lady, in this picture you can't see it, but it was on our side, away from them!  Essentially when I sat down the old lady in black was separating us, but they still tried kicking us off to put their hat down!  It wasn't even as if they were saving it for someone, because no one turned up to claim the seat, and the entire transaction was completed wordlessely.  There is no age divide in terms of gaijin phobia here, it's purely on an individual basis.  This is both good and bad, particularly when you are lost, picking the right person to ask for help can be hard...

Another shot of one of the competitors.  I only included this because it's reasonably focused, and you're about to witness a number of blurs, that could be anything...

These guys are arranged in height order!  They replace the broken targets after each round and collect the arrows.  The procedure for handing the arrows over is one fraught with such technicalities that it would only be considered in Japan.  Imagine Wimbledon ball boy training, in a long skirt/dress thing, with gangly, unintuitive arrows that have to be turned this way and that over and over again.  The boy at the far end gathers the arrows and walks down to this middle station in a demure and conservative way.  He then meets one of the guys at this station, they bow slightly, crouch down facing each other and the one with the arrows turns them over, always in the same direction.  They both extend their arms, and the one without arrows places one hand underneath them, and one hand above them.  Once the exchange has taken place, they now arrow laden one turns the arrows over the opposite way to the first guy, they both stand up and bow again, turn at the same time and walk off.  The guy with arrows has to put them under his arm in a specific way.  Bearing in mind he's only 15 maybe, he has to carry a dozen arrows under one arm, with one hand.  Needless to say it looked quite precarious at times.

Onto the blurred photographs!  This guy has seated the arrow and is about to fire away.  Getting the timing right is hit and miss at best.

 This one is blurred, but it's mid-miss, so I included it because it looks cool.

A millisecond before he fires the bow.

Again I was just a fraction too early with this one.  The sports option on the camera makes all the images really grainy, but the focus is quicker, and the shutter reaction time is reduced too.

This guy was rubbish.  He prretty much gave up on this target.

 

This is the one.  It's about to obliterate the target.  They're really close to the target in terms of distance, but timing and technique in seating the arrow means a lot of people were rushing, and therefore doing what the above guy did.

This is the arrow handing over ceremony.  These kids were receiving on the job training.  The announcer mentioned that the kids here were from a number of schools, and this event serves to educate them in the specific traditions of the area.

This is a kind of little slideshow chronicle of events.

 

 

This is the group photo with all the competitors and school children helpers.  This is probably the most colourful thing you'll see, this side of shinjuku.

This is a slightly more professional looking musical outfit.  After every round they switched instruments, so everyone gets to play each instrument.

These kids were barely tall enough to hit the drums properly, but they were really good.  The middle one is getting a helping hand from big sis!

The whole setup is really primitive, and easy to assemble/disassemble.  It all goes onto the back of a van at the end of the day.  These kids  were doing the round robin thing too, except they were all fascinated by whatever was happening on the right there, I think it was food...

The colourful splodges in  this godawful photo are projections I talked about above.  The picture gradually changed as time went by, into a lot of different things.  It was all patterns rather than specific images.  Zebra stripes worked particularly well.

These guys kept breaking things because they were getting too enthusiastic.

This is the restaurant we visited after the amazing day of travelling.  It was expensive, but it was really nice as well.

The place looked a complete hodge-podge and mess, but it was kind of cool to be honest.

  That's my adventure to Kamakura, again.  All in all an amazing day.