The TechNomad Journals - Tokyo Tales and Seoul Searching

The TechNomad Journals - Tokyo Tales - Seoul Searching

Wednesday, November 1st 2005

Well there I was, innocently enjoying bustling Hong Kong Central, thinking about how I would begin this recount when I bit into my fried shark ball and burning hot shark juice literally exploded all over my arm. Being the only westerner in the small Dim Sum shop I tried to play it cool, but my initial yelp followed by the severe lack of napkins proved to be rather obvious. Still unsure of where to begin and now considerably distracted I returned to my shoebox palace in the heart of Causeway Bay to get cozy and start writing. Indeed it’s hard not to feel ‘cozy’ when you can get out of bed, shower, make coffee and get dressed all without completing a full step. After some mental constipation, I went for a smoke outside and as usual I appreciated the curious glances of passers-by. Today's glances were special though because not only am foreign, hence questionable, but I was standing next to “Thai Jade’s Thai Food Restaurant” (Jade really wants you to know she’s cooking Thai food) in my pajamas and furry Androscoggin slippers and looking disturbed. But hey, one thing I’ve realized is if you’re not going to fit in, you might as well really stand out. Oh well what do you know, there’s a beginning for you.

So once again welcome to the Technomad’s Asia Travel Log. I will save the details of this tropical jungle metropolis for the next time, instead this email covers my time spent in Seoul and Tokyo during the last month. Let me just say, this email is not going to teach you about the history of Japanese Calligraphy or the Reign of King Sejong. Instead I aim to describe some of the subtle, and not so subtle idiosyncrasies that one notices when dropped from their comfort zone into their “What-the-hell-is-going-on” zone. As usual I have split the email into BRIEF and EXTENDED updates, and as usual feel no guilt if you delete this email without reading it either. But at least for some minimal-text-to-read-fun check out the new pictures at snaps.projectfresh.com….

After jetting from Los Angeles in late September and stashing my possession filled car, Big Red, in the Brewery’s parking lot, which was promptly ransacked and robbed, I arrived in Tokyo. My RISD friend and Puma Tokyo’s design rock star Ray Horacek insisted I stay with him for the month and in return I would “get him up to date with technology”. Good deal. As it turned out shortly after I arrived, Puma shipped him off on a trip for almost three weeks so I didn’t see much of him except squeezed on either side. Before he left however, Ray and his girlfriend Etsuko, a wonderfully sweet Japanese girl, showed me the basics of getting around and tried to point out as many of my “Geijan” (“Foreigner”) flaws as possible. “You’ll never be accepted but knowing [BLANK] will at least make you look like more respectful”. For [BLANK] examples - I get into some interesting customs in the JAPAN section below. I had solo adventures and as an added bonus was joined by my Yoga guru sister, the lovely Sissy St. John, in the last week for some sibling shenanigans. I met some great new friends – including German/Japanese Karaoke Superstar Jun and saw old RISD Luke as well. Thanks Ray and Etsuko – and really I am sorry about the blue ink on the wall and banister, usually I come home wasted at 8am in a more controlled way.

So besides further conducting my mobile productivity test, the point of this trip is loosely labeled as technology research/inspiration. I attended two tech conferences, one in Tokyo and the other in Seoul, South Korea. It’s fun to don a suit and pretend that I’m actually interested in buying 30,000 units of whatever – but more importantly if I want to see a utopian cyborg future I better stay on the tech edge baby.

In SeouI I stayed in a small but immaculate room near Samsung Station (yes, they seem to own most of the town) and did my best to dig up some old Korean friends from RISD. However it didn’t help that at RISD most of them all used western pseudonyms like John, Jim and Tim. Meanwhile when looking through the RISD alumni network all I could find were Joons, Shins and Kims. Anyway I found some good ‘uns – Young, Hyerin, Jeanny and Suzie, much love and thanks for the jellyfish tentacles. Met some new ones too – Insup and James, my new K-Brothers. Oh and Young, when I asked, “What is fun for a solo guy to do around Seoul” thanks for sending me to where the US army and the whores hangout – you KNOW my scene.

So the good news is that while I may have some symptoms of “yellow fever” I have so far managed to duck the bird flu. “Are you worried?” people ask. In the words of William Wallace, or at least God’s most good-looking crusader Mel Gibson: “All men die, but not all men truly LIVE!”. While restraining from going around with a painted face and yelling “Freedom!” to my nervous Asian compadres, I have successfully marched from Tokyo to Seoul while trying not to inhale too much in crowded elevators. I am now in HK for one month where I hope to make my base for a jump into the Chinese mainland and perhaps Thailand if time/money permits. The current plan has been to try to fund these travels by doing freelance web design while on the road.

Being the eternally estranged “Foreign Devil” I get a lot of time to myself so with each trip comes great realizations - yet my newest realization unveils a rather difficult inherent problem: I am absolutely HATING web design. Well not completely. I still love the design/interface/details side but I loathe the production side. In Tokyo I managed to get some low tables for minimal Yen by winning a street arm-wrestling match but even with three cushions floor-based work was literally a pain in the ass. One particular week saw me get so emotional about the whole affair that I lay on the wood floor in a sullen state staring vacantly at the ceiling. The only thing that brought me out of it was the tiny, blue-haired landlady walking by my courtyard window and presumbably thinking she had another corpse on her hands. I am not meant to sit in front of a screen all day looking at code that I know a Pakistani team could do better and more quickly than me. So goddammit I went and found myself my very own Pakistani team. Truthfully it didn’t have to be Pakistani’s, other bidders were Ukrainian, Argentinian, Chinese and I even got a strangely worded bid for Ho Chi Min, Vietnam.

Now you won’t believe this. There I am, going through the project parameters and chatting with my pTeam when all of a sudden they said they were having an earthquake and they had to evacuate the building. I thought they were just pulling a lazy streak when I turned on the news, which was relaying this latest natural disaster. (Is it just me or does the world’s climatology seem to be crazier than ever following the “Day After Tomorrow” movie last year?) They were just south of the epicenter in Lahore and I didn’t hear from them for 5 days. Luckily they got back in contact with me but sadly they turned out to be possibly the worst team ever; they are currently trying to redeem themselves under pressure form the escrow company.

Damn I am the habitual tangent-ifier. The point IS that if I keep with this web work I’m going to go either need to find a good team that I can creatively manage and professionally trust or a constant supply of intravenous amphetamines. Luckily using rentacoder.com is far easier than finding illicit chemicals. Ideally when I travel I could be doing research, getting new ideas, schmoozing with clients, managing projects and sowing the seeds of network joy like never before! Perhaps even dabble in some programming for fun – it really gets the ladies. So I vow this my sweet readers: before I venture on another trip I will return to the US and incubate. Then, not unlike a small blind rodent, my once pink skin will gradually become hairy with experience and I will gain glorious vision.

Who needs friends when you’ve got a good cell phone? That’s my motto. Well you have to have people to call right? Sure, if you want to use your phone for calls. But why make calls when you can do karaoke right from your phone? That’s right my amigos, after mastering the Korean menu system of my rental I found the option to turn my phone into my own personal karaoke machine. Admittedly I didn’t know the included Korean pop hits but I’m sure with time I would be singing some downloaded Elvis or Sinatra to myself and feeling pathetically alone in the world.

Seoul is a techy wonderland and Samsung is leading the way. Samsung and Seoul are reminiscent of Sony and Tokyo before Sony became an evil proprietary mega conglomerate. But back when the aim was to beat the US into the transistor radio market, Sony, like Tokyo was booming. In fact South Korea is developing so quickly it’s newest project is building a complete city from the ground up: New Songdo, the South Korean “ubiquitous city” of the future is being built for one reason – to explore the technological possibilities and their impact on a completely immersed society. Damn that’s fresh.

You don’t have to wait for New Songdo though to see some good tech in action. RFID chips – you may have heard about them promising to change the world – have actually been around for some time now. In fact they are they very tech that might have gotten you busted trying to heist Art History books in your freshman year at art college. A passive little chip is powered by a magnetic field as it passes though it. It then activates and sends a signal back and BOOM, something happens. In Seoul all of the public transit, like Hong Kong in fact, uses cards with these chips embedded in them and activate in the proximity of a scanner. It’s rather funny to watch the commuting women ducking their shoulder bags while passing through the turnstiles – they are close to being part machine and they don’t even know it.

So far in my experience Asia has been the land of good service and while I have a feeling that Hong Kong may have some delightful surprises up it’s sleeve I was hugely impressed in Seoul. Is your cell battery dead after a long day on the phone with your Swiss bank in Zurich? I know mine was, so I popped right over to “Buy the Way”, a wittily named convenience store where you can hand over your phone battery and for $1 they will charge it up for you! Did the celebrations of the merger get so rowdy that you had a few too many drinks to drive? No worries, just call one of the numbers on the fliers conveniently pasted to your car window and a man will appear and drive you – in YOUR car - home for a bargain.

If it’s a Seoul-mate you’re looking for than you have many options that I will describe from clean to shabby. If you still live with your parents, as many young Koreans do, you might want to find yourself a DVD-bang room. Time Out’s description of these rooms was far more innocent that is the general understanding by locals. When I asked pure-as-snow Susan if she wanted to go to a DVD-bang room with me what I was really asking was “Do you want to go feign to watch a movie but actually get steamy?” We didn’t get our DVD-bang on but she did put me straight on the issue.

Another option to DVD-bang rooms are Love Motels. These are often elaborately themed hotels and are available by the hour. They have everything from flatscreen TV’s flashing porn to immaculate bathrooms with jacuzzi’s – some are even auto-payment so you don’t have to feel guilty when you want to get busy with your leather clad man-slave.

If you are out with the boys and just looking for some nice girls then hop over to a Booking Bar. In these bars you will get a table and probably pay a couple of hundred dollars for a bottle of liquor. Then as you chat about your disdain for the evolving rights of females in the workplace you can enjoy the girls that the bar manager sends to your tables. Apart from having a penchant for submissiveness, these are normal girls who voluntarily go to these bars to meet eligible husbands. Good luck sweetheart, as soon as you show any personal opinion your ‘eligible husband’ will signal the manager and another girl will take your place.

The next step up to beautiful filth are Hostess bars. Here the girls are more dedicated to their jobs and strive to make you feel like a superstar. They pour you drinks, light your cigarettes, laugh at your jokes and even sit on your lap if you buy them drinks. Beware though gentlemen! While your G+T might cost you $7, drinks for one of these ladies might set you back $30 a pop!

The next thing to look for is the double barber pole. Usually barbershops by day these places transform at night into… happy-ending barbershops! A haircut AND felatio! How can you beat that? (Pretty easily if it’s the old barber doing it but I have a feeling the staff rotate along with the service provided). At the bottom of the barrel even the dreggy prostitutes of Insadong were polite and rather than just jumping into “Hey, I’ll give you a blowjob for $35!” they start the conversation with the much more subtle “Hey, buy me an ice cream!” That was a bit strange I admit but I’m proud to say that no ice creams were bought.

Call me old fashioned but I’m just not into paying for sex. Yet. Perhaps I have to get more old, hairy, fat and bald to really appreciate it but while I am working on that in the meantime I’d rather play the age-old game. Usually that is a game of odds – throw enough darts and eventually you’ll hit the bull’s eye or at least blind your prey. However when you don’t speak the language things get a bit stranger; your classic funny stories don’t work and you have to resort to super simple English, making weird faces, gesticulating like a primate and smiling a lot so you don’t seem threatening. Maybe the highlight was when I got a crew of Korean girls back to our table and they nicknamed me Duki-fresh. Duk is a soft and squishy white rice cake so in retrospect it might not just be because Duk sounded like Doug - I cried myself to sleep that night. Obviously I haven’t quite mastered my inter-cultural flirting skills…

The food was unbelievable and really quite cheap if you knew where to go. I didn’t but was armed with a ‘Time Out – Seoul’ and it led me to some feasts for around $5. My peeps in Seoul also took me to some great restaurants and perhaps my favorite dish was Bulgogi, where you lay meats on hot grills at the table. I appreciate the idea of jellyfish tentacles, silkworm larvae and dried squid but while the kids on the street may squeal with satisfaction they only got a restrained wretch out of me. Barley tea was often served with meals and is bizarrely reminiscent of cheerios, without the milk or crunchy oh’s. Indeed only the essence of cheerios is present. Don’t worry if this description escapes you; no one knew what I meant even “in the moment”.

In terms of alcohol they have all the old family favorites from tequila to whiskey and some good local beers. One beer, called ‘Hite’ has one of the stranger labels I’ve seen on a beer. It’s a Korean guy looking up in the air and looking like he’s under a great deal of strain; he is either at the peak of his 200th sit-up, having a heart attack or perhaps painfully constipated. I neglected to take a picture but this gets filed along with the other “International Marketing Triumphs” that you’ll see in the pictures. Many people drink Soju – a rice liquor that comes in many flavors. Like Japan, drinking is a great way to escape the stresses of the day as many people work from 9am-10pm! These Asian fools really let loose, telling you all sorts of private details while they get more drunk. Drunkenness also excuses anything that happens that night, like for example problems with blue ink, but by morning everything is back to normal, except white walls.

It is great to see Seoul on foot and I also got to do one of my favorite kinds of tours: the “hop on and off” bus tours. Usually pretty cheap, you get an all day pass to hop on and off these buses that go in a loop around interesting areas of the city. There are some great old palaces, shopping market frenzies and nice parks to balance it all out. In the downtown area the wide streets and surrounding skyscrapers are made a little more aesthetically pleasing by a rule that if a building is above a certain height it has to have a large sculpture outside. The people were also probably the most friendly in Asia I have encountered so far, with a few people coming up to me, tapping me on the shoulder and then waving at me right in the face. This was especially nice because while I don’t feel this way in HK, westerners seemed rare in Tokyo and Seoul and there were times I did feel like a bit of an outcast. At one point an open bus was going by and I made eye contact with a cute little kindergarten girl and waved, all of a sudden the entire bus erupted in “hello’s” and “how are you doing today’s” with the children practicing their English!

Obviously there are some funny quirks to the society too. It is a very cliquey culture; if it’s trendy everyone has to do it to excess but as soon as the trend it gone, it better be gone with you too. South Korea, not unlike the US, completely idolizes its pop stars. But a funny difference over there is that there is no such thing as selling-out. If you’re famous you might do advertisements from skin cream to cell phones and only appear to be more successful than ever while those positions in the US are usually given to falling stars or when the salary is large enough for the elite to be swayed. I kept seeing the same girl all over the place and when I questioned my South Korean friend they said it might be the same girl, or another who had plastic surgery to resemble her! Yes, like many western countries, plastic surgery is prevalent in South Korea however boob-jobs are more rare with many girls opting for lighter skin, cute little noses or eyelid surgery for more almond shaped eyes. Apparently it’s usual for girls to walk into surgeon’s offices with a magazine cut out of what they want to look like.

A funny little detail is that in Korea when you are born you are one year old straight off the bat. Honestly I always think a ‘conceive day’ would be the most accurate but possibly more awkward for you and your parents to celebrate.

South Korea has a tough history of having to be defensive to invaders in its land. Whether it was from the east, in the form of Japanese attacks that destroyed much of their architecture and relics, or more recently from the North, in the form of those no fun commie-red North Koreans. Even with these difficulties South Korea economy is booming and it’s really beginning to shine internationally. I didn’t get to visit the DMZ (Demilitarized Zone) but apparently you can look out across to Communist North Korea and also explore the infiltration tunnels that have been found and cut off. On each side of the DMZ there is a flag and a large slogan. North Korea’s flag is the largest in the world and the slogan reads “Follow the Ways of the Leader”. South Korea’s is smaller but at night their slogan is lit “Freedom, Abundance and Happiness”. I know where I would rather call home.

OK, perhaps I should have made this into two separate logs – I didn’t realize how much I had to say about South Korea. If you agree, here’s an easy trick – copy and paste from “Japan” down and put it in a new email, send it to yourself and read it next week. Alternatively, take a break, curse my name, or write me an inflammatory response…

The first thing you might fall in love with in Japan is the automatic doors on the taxi’s. Sure the taxi’s cost $6 as soon as you get in but honestly, how many times have you said “If only I didn’t have to open this door – It’s such a hassle!” Well this is your place my friends. You don’t want to squat with the peons on the Limousine Bus? (Not as fancy as it sounds). Well a taxi from the airport into central Tokyo will only cost you $200. 200. US. Dollars.

Luckily there are other travel options because if you relied on taxi’s you’d soon be broke. The subway – once you work out the ticket system and master the complexity of the dozens of above and below ground lines – is the best way to get around this ridiculously busy city. The stations are often packed with people but are surprisingly efficient. In fact, Japanese railways are so timely that if for some unthinkable reason, your train is late every passenger gets a slip to prove it to their bosses. The train journeys are often very quiet, but if you’re lucky, on really packed train you might hear a female cry “chikan” which means that some groping pervert got identified. Otherwise people often close their eyes; they are usually not sleeping but just are escaping the threat of any eye contact in an enclosed space. Even when you do get to your station, be prepared to get confused by the often numerous exits; Shibuya Station has 57 exits and 100’s of 1000’s of commuters a day. The best thing to do is find a little nook, or one of the prevalent maps, and work out where you are while the tidal crowds flow by. Many people wear medical masks but apparently this is usually to prevent them from spreading whatever they’ve got rather than fear of catching something; how respectfully strange. Other public transport includes good bus routes, a driverless monorail and water taxi’s on the Sumida River.

If you’re feeling brave and athletic, which the ladies can tell you I usually am, you can rent or buy a bike and ride to your destination as many others do. What was amazing to me was that bikes were parked on the sidewalk and not locked to anything! This culture is so honest that items are rarely stolen and you will usually find items right where you left them unless they were handed to a policeman.

You can do a lot of exploring by foot and even if it starts raining, stalls everywhere put out cheap umbrellas that usually sell for about $3. When I was walking around I noticed a strange phenomenon – at crosswalks even if no cars at all are coming, people wait for the “green man”. It is actually bad luck to cross on the “red man” because some text messaging person behind you might automatically follow your lead and walk into the street without looking. I’ve seen it happen, although the person was soon alerted by the rare honk of a car horn. In fact people use their phones more than anywhere else in the world and many are calling the younger generation 'oya yubi sedai,' or 'the thumb generation'.

The Japanese are very intent on making people feel safe and on city construction sites there are usually more people making sure you don’t accidentally fall in holes or drown in wet concrete than there are doing the actual work. These protectors appear to be superheroes as they wear bright costumes with embedded lights and wave a light saber type device to let you know there’s a 30ft, noisy bulldozer behind them. If you do find yourself walking a lot then you really don’t have to worry about stumbling into the wrong neighborhood; day or night it is completely safe to walk around, even as a lone woman or man dressed as one. One day I idly walked onto the concrete walkways that line the east side of the river and found myself completely surrounded by homeless structures. Amazingly though each structure was a tidy little unit, made of tarps, rope and other materials – outside there was often a pair of shoes and even a small bunch of drying laundry; even the homeless in Japan have high standards!

This does bring me to the seemingly innate manners of the Japanese. While they are likely to forgive the ignorant tourist it’s always best to try your hardest not to appear like an ‘unfocused eggplant’, so here are a few rules to follow:

- Do not accept compliments – don’t get offensive trying to refuse one but a too ready “Thank you!” appears quite arrogant.

- Do not pour your own drink – make sure your friend’s glass is filled and they should do the same for you.

- Do not say “chin chin” as a toast – this refers to the penis penis in Japanese.

- Do not stick your chopsticks vertically in your rice bowl – this symbolized death! Wooooo - Spooooky!

Settling in you will notice is the complete cleanliness of this incredible culture. Except for a couple of youth-entrenched areas there is not a single cigarette butt on the ground. Oddly enough there are not that many trash receptacles either but I preferred walking for an hour with an empty bottle rather than dirtying such a lovely place. The Japanese are polite to a fault and you rarely hear them say “no”. It is either “Yes”, “Maybe” or “It’s difficult”. Apparently this can often pose problems in business situations but for the average tourist it’s quite friendly to experience.

The polite ways of the Japanese carry into their language quite seamlessly with numerous ways of saying the same thing based on varying levels of respect. As a responsible tourist eager to pick up the local tongue, I decided that it might be important for me to learn some swear words. I was told that there were none and when I asked, with my western malevolence, how you insult somebody, my question was met with confusion. “Why would you want to hurt somebody’s feelings?”. “OK - What’s the most offensive slur in Japanese that you know?” I was really grasping here but the best I could get was “unfocused eggplant”. Those crazy Japanese, even their insults are cute. I decided to quench my learning thirst with the “Intro to Japanese” section of my faithful ‘Time Out – Tokyo’. The selection was basic and while some pretty obvious ones were omitted I did pick up the handy “nukanaide kudsai” – “I don’t want it extracted”. Great help.

I got enormous pleasure from Etsuko calling me “Mr. Douglas” and insisting that, due to my lactose intolerance, I not eat dairy products so I wouldn’t get ‘diabetes’; diarrhea is apparently a hard word to remember. She would often slip into full on Japanese and I would have to do my best at understanding or just nod and laugh. Ray and I were talking about why so many western men like Asian girls and why the reverse is found less often. His theory is that, and of course this is certainly not a rule, western guys are used to providing for their women while the women of Asia are brought up to really take care of their men. When these two meet it can provide a highly symbiotic relationship with each party putting the other first. On the other hand many western women, like eastern men expect to be taken care of so is more parasitic and it doesn’t work as well. Whatever the case, I’m all for mixing things up; if we’re still around next millennia we’ll probably be all a similar shade of beige.

The food in Tokyo was probably the best I’ve ever had in the world and if you know where to go, or know some locals who do, it doesn’t have to be too pricey. One of my favorite parts about eating in Tokyo is that the service is stellar. For my 26th birthday Ray and Etsuko took me to Ninja, where a ‘real’ ninja met us at the door and took us ‘secretly’ through tunnels and over small bridges to a small underground ninja village where we got our own little room. We were served crazy sword speared food and delighted by magic tricks. After we ordered deserts the hot ninja chick confided in us that the desert menu was actually a secret document so she set it ablaze and then made it disappear! Like at Ninja, most tables are equipped with a small electronic buzzer that you press when you need a waiter. If you are impatient then it is not inappropriate, and can be rather fun, to yell across the restaurant “Sumimasen” (“Excuse Me”) – somebody will immediately run to you – remember, service comes first in Japan!

When it comes to ordering food it is either super easy or completely impossible. Most restaurants have windows full of their offerings represented by exquisitely hand crafted fake meals. Sissy and I actually found the street that sells these fake plastic and wax model-meals, which was rather odd to walk down. Other places have picture menus and it can be as easy as pointing or you choose a meal number and pre-pay in a vending machine outside for minimal human contact. On the other end of the spectrum were restaurants with large lists of illegible Japanese words with no pictures. I did find myself in this position once, so I went with the flow and ended up with a large piece of purple octopus tentacle in my soup. But one thing is for sure – nothing can be worse than unagi – sea urchin. This cold, gooey mass is better left in the sea as far as I am concerned.

When you do finally decide, a lot of restaurants equip the waiters with small PDA devices to take orders so details are not forgotten. When you’re finished you rarely settle the check at the table; you pay at the cash register near the exit and an interesting side note is that leaving tips for meals or drinks is not necessary. If you do leave a tip it has been know that the waiter chases you onto the street thinking that you accidentally left some money on the table.

From approximately 1640 – 1870 the Japanese established a policy of national seclusion to protect the integrity of their culture. The fact that few Japanese girls were feeling my freshness is either a remnant of this deep-rooted distrust of foreigners or it’s my threatening western manliness. While I am unsure of where the blame falls one thing is for certain, it’s not too uplifting to walk by a procession of girls leaving the all-girls school located on the corner of your street and not to have even the slightest reaction from one. I’m not looking for a crazy explosion of lustful excitement but my usual odds are at least a glance from one or two out of 10, not zero out of 100. Etsuko said they probably were too shy…

My own pathetic human feelings aside it was quite hilarious to observe these girls, many dressed in uniforms resembling Sailor Moon. To see the really crazy costumes you can head over Harajuku on Sunday and while avoiding being trampled by the waves of weekend shoppers you can see, at the corner of the Meiji Shrine gardens, groups of kids – mostly girls – dressed in the most outrageous costumes. From Matrix-style black overcoats to bizarre Little-Bo-Peep-on-Acid outfits I’m not quite sure what it’s all about. It’s another funny example of proving your independence by dressing outrageously and hanging out with like others of the same mindset and hence finding yourself back in conformity of sorts. But nonetheless I had to get in some pictures with them, especially the weird pink-shepherd-good-girl holding hands with black-sherpherd-bad-girl combo teams. I loved that.

Once again there are always the options for the horny man, and while Gaijin are not allowed in a lot of sex clubs, it was fun to at least look inside. The interiors are truly bizarre; on the walls are all types of settings that you can choose from. One fantasy even involves you paying to go inside a fake train and then grope the female ‘passengers’. Here’s the interesting thing, in Japan there is no shame related to pornography. You might be at a hardware store and there’s a shelf of flashlights, there are some batteries, there is the porno shelf… Similarly on the train there might be a businessman reading a violent rape fantasy Manga comic and no one bats a judgmental eyelid. I went into one porn shop, for research purposes obviously, and I have never seen anything like it. It was five stories tall with sections for every fetish, including some REALLY bizarre ones. The fact is that normal intercourse has to be censored, but completely inappropriate things to do with fruit for example is OK; apparently many men grow up with rather strange fetishes. The top floor was full of costumes and where I finally found what many at home requested; sets of schoolgirl panties labeled with a big yellow sticker: “USED”. Sorry boys but for $160 a pop - and upwards for the more soiled garments - it’s just not happening.

They have basically the same types of sex trade places as Seoul in Tokyo except here a sexy massage parlor is called a “Health Club”! There are also “Soaplands” where bathing is included, as many Japanese enjoy bathing before getting dirty. “Soaplands” used to be called “Turkish Baths” but on one particular incident when a prominent Turkish official arrived and was looking for a real Turkish Bath house - he got so offended by the ‘extra-special’ service that they had to change their names!

I finally got some faux respect when we went to a Hostess bar and one of the girls mistakenly thought that she’d seen me on TV playing rugby. I ran with it and said that I was a touring Rugby Star and I was signing all sorts of body parts in no time. “James Rock” was the best pseudonym I could come up with at such short notice but in retrospect I could have milked it for longer by just using the old classic “Willard Douglas Campbell III”.

Karaoke, roughly translated as ‘empty orchestra’, is a quite regular form of entertainment but quite different from the western version. You get a room just for your group, somebody works out how to use the complex remote and karaoke console and you sing songs picked from a huge song bible. Drinks are brought to your room, more people start singing and the night goes from there. The club scene is rather comparable with most cities except the entrance price is often around $30 - although this usually includes a drink. Certain bars won’t let in single foreign guys, apparently we have a bad rep for being pushing with the small Asian girls. Come on! Strangely, for such a cosmopolitan city the trains end at around 12:30am even on the weekend – just when you feel things are getting started. So the nights out regularly go on till dawn, which is often due to the daunting thought of going bankrupt from a taxi fare. Many people just stay up to first train around 5:30am. If you want to kill some time before the first train you could go to a Manga room. These rooms are usually for the individual who wants to pass a few hours taking a nap, watching a movie, reading comics or of course viewing some porn. Others don’t bother getting a room and just take a nap on the grass; on numerous occasions I saw businessmen sleeping in parks near stations.

This section could fill a book so I’ll just give a couple of examples. The first symbolizes Tokyo’s amazing convenience. Vending machines in Tokyo run rampant but it’s only been since thousands were introduced during the Olympics in 1964. Even on a small dark alley they stand out like a bright beacon of refreshment. Some sell cigarettes and beer, as there is no rule about public drinking, but the majority sell cool drinks with hot drinks more available as it cools down in the winter. Sissy was on a mission to try every unsweetened tea on offer, I’m not sure how far she got in her experiments. Others sell plastic figurines, collectable beetles and even ‘school girl panties to go’ although the latter has been outlawed with new regulations.

The second sums up the beautiful attention to detail. One night we all went to see Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. At one point when the Umpaloompa’s were dancing around the chocolate river I thought to myself, “Damn, it’s so chocolaty you can almost smell the chocolate”. A minute later I turned to Etsuko and relayed my thought; she said rather matter-of-factly “Oh yes Mr. Douglas, in this theater they are pumping chocolate smell through the AC…”

This trip so far has been both amazing in an observational way but also in the effect it’s having on me. Even without learning the language or accomplishing everything I wanted to do I can say without a doubt that I will not leave here as the same person who arrived. These culture shocks call for survival skills, usually pertaining more to social side than to actual hardcore survival but nevertheless a good challenge.

With only three cities down I have also realized the immense differences of all these Asian cultures and while Seoul and Tokyo had quite a few similarities this Hong Kong place is truly insane, from yelling dumpling ladies to the bamboo scaffolding… but you’ll have to wait for that story.