Free Candy Giveaway

Between December 28, 2011 and January 16, 2012, I took a trip to Japan and Vietnam with my girlfriend.  During this trip I kept a journal (which is totally more sophisticated and cool than a diary) to record my adventures in those foreign lands.  Over the coming days, I will be posting my journal entries from that trip.

January 3, 2012

Today, I learned a lot about old and new Japanese art.  I also learned that I enjoy depictions of humans fighting fish more than cartoons having sex.  Let me explain how these two lessons are related.

Early in the afternoon, I went with Eriko’s family to a museum that had a large exhibit of paintings by the artist Kuniyoshi.  Kuniyoshi was a Japanese painter of the ukiyo-e style who in the first half of the 1800s painted a lot of things of concern to people at the time, like waves and Mt.Fuji.  The paintings I liked the most depict famous samurai dominating everybody and everything in their path Jack Bauer-style, particularly large and oddly aggressive fish and whales.  According to Kuniyoshi’s paintings, apparently it wasn’t enough for samurai to fight just people, they also took on whales.  I am assuming they did so out of spite, a craving for whale sashimi or some combination of the two.  And as you can see below (click on the picture to make it larger), samurai didn’t just sit back in the comfort of their yachts and fire harpoons at the whales like the pussies in Moby Dick, they jumped on the backs of the whales and rode them like they were in a rodeo, while stabbing them with a sword.

Samurai also seemed to enjoy going to toe to flipper with many different kinds of fish.  The often shirtless samurai dominated even when the fish had teeth, a creepy red molester tongue and what I assume to be putrid breath.

And before all you knee-jerk vegetarians start defending the poor fish, Kuniyoshi’s paintings made clear that back in the 1800s, fish in Japan were complete assholes that were often the aggressors.  As you can see below, sometimes samurai were minding their own business and alarmingly large fish jumped out of the water and tried to tackle the poor samurai.

After seeing Kuniyoshi’s paintings depicting the horrific fish on man violence that must have plagued Japan in the 1800s, I’m beginning to think that the Japanese eat so much fish out of revenge more than taste.

Anyway, Kuniyoshi’s paintings are stunning.  I liked how they are much less concerned with physical realism than many Western paintings were during the same period.  I was struck how they look almost cartoonish, presaging modern Japanese magna and anime.  I actually saw a bunch of these modern day cartoons this evening when Eriko’s brother –Chu– generously agreed to take Eriko and me to a neighborhood called Akihabura.  I had heard that Akihabura was Tokyo’s electronics district and I wanted to go and see all the futuristic technology the Japanese have developed and are withholding from the rest of the world.  I was a little disappointed to find that the tech stores pretty much had everything you could find at your average Best Buy in the United States.  Even the arcades in Akihabura, of which there were a bunch, were mostly filled with 90s-era Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo games.  If you are looking for a place where the skills you developed playing thousands of hours of Street Fighter II in middle school will still be appreciated, look no further than Akihabura.  Here, your ability to fully harness Ryu’s “haaadddddooouuukkkeeennnn” move will still garner you a lot of respect.  The one item I did purchase that was far more advanced than any technology you can find in the United States was a USB drive shaped like a small dog that humps your computer when it is inserted (the only portion of the instructions written in English — “dog should start humping immediately when plugged in”).  So, I guess Japanese technology is still somewhat ahead of where we are in the US because none of my American USB drives have tried to make a sexual move on my laptop.

Anyway, apparently Akihabura is also known for its stores selling anime porn.  I guess it shouldn’t come as a surprise that males uncomfortable around women might be drawn to both electronics and porn and would want to shop for both in the same area.  I swear, I didn’t want to go into any of these anime stores.  As a white male with an Asian girlfriend, I know that certain assumptions are made even without walking into stores filled with cartoons getting it on.  But Chu and Eriko wanted to check out one of the stores so I went in with them.  As expected, except for Eriko, the clientele was all male.  The store was filled with mostly DVDs and books, but also had novelty items such as body pillows decorated with drawings of smiling large breasted cartoons.  I didn’t find this very appealing as I have always thought that it is better off keeping relationships with my pillows strictly platonic.  I have also never been particularly attracted to cartoons, with the possible exception of Smurfette back in the mid-80s.

For some reason, cartoon porn strikes me as somewhat odder than even good old-fashioned live-action porn.  Maybe it is because I associate cartoons with wholesome children’s entertainment and never really got into more adult uses of cartoons, like graphic novels.  Perhaps I am narrow-minded and think that it is unnatural for cartoons to watch human porn and humans to watch cartoon porn.  So, I guess I learned today that when it comes to Japanese art, I like pictures of samurai getting into fights with fish more than pictures of unrealistically proportioned cartoons having sex.