Before it flits out of my mind, I suppose I should say something about this past weekend and Osaka.

This past weekend was a long weekend for us JETs, monday was a national holiday of some nature. With the extra time, I and several others decided to take a trip over to Osaka. The others were leaving early in the morning on Saturday, but I had to work that Saturday, so I didn't book a train with them. Last minute, I decided to take a half day of my vacation time so I could get out early as well and perhaps meet up with them sooner than I had planned. So, I file the necissary papers for a half-day vacation, they get stamped by the six proper authorities, I stamp them myself with my official little stamp, then I'm all set to take off the half day, which technically translates to about three and a half hours. Effectively, I had to file for vacation time to nix the work I would have had to do on Saturday, which I normally have off. Whatever, I don't care at this point, I'm gonna be able to get up early and go to Osaka, right? Wrong.

At the last minute I'm told I absolutley have to go to this hip-hop night in town. It's offered only once a month, and it's a "hell of a time." I think to myself, "self, you have to get up early to go to Osaka, but you can go out for an hour or so, have a drink, and check out this hip hop whatsit that all the kids are into these days." So I go. Naturally, the "one drink" turns into many more, and the "hour or so" turns into a solid eleven hours. I end up having to take the first train out in the morning at six AM, get to sleep around seven AM, and get up at 11AM to take a train to Osaka, kicking myself the whole time.

For what it's worth, the club itself was a fun time. It was a dance club: you dance, you drink. Pretty standard. The one notable exception was the "hip hop show" that they had at around 1AM, where all these groups of Japanese kids come up on a stage and perform these routines that they have been practicing all month. You can see a picture of one of the performances to the right. I would like to draw your attention to the rapt audience of Japanese kids sitting crosslegged on the ground. How very Japanese of them.

Then I went to Osaka. Osaka is a killer city, a true Japanese super-city with millions and millions of people and bars and restraunts and shops. Each night we went out we stayed past our last train, and had to get the first one at seven in the morning. With nothing else to do between the hours of midnight and seven in the morning but dance and drink, you tend to spend a lot of money, and feel not so good in the morning. Regardless, I never got very tired until I walked out of the clubs and saw the sun up, then it all hit me. The picture below is of a main street in Osaka. The sheer volume of humanity is staggering.

The first night we went to this place called Club Pure, which was a foreigners haven. I don't think that there were more than maybe six Japanese people in the whole club, which was rather strange. The music was deafening and the drinks were bottom of the barrel, so after a while you had a bit of a headache regardless of what you did, but all in all it was a fun time. It made me realize how sloppy us westerners can get. Two of our company were puked on, and one of our company puked on someone else. Sloppy, sloppy, sloppy. I, of course, was in control the whole time.

We slept until 2pm, and got up to find some food and prepare for the next night's activities. I strongly advised against going back to club pure, since I had had about all i could take of that style of club. Instead we wandered around Osaka hoping to hit a hidden gem, and we did. The first bar we went to was this tiny joint called Mojo that advertised "Let's stepping back in time to pay tribute to the oldies," or some equally awkwardly phrased tagline. Inside there was a tiny middle-aged Japanese woman with a white blazer and bell-bottoms on, wearing huge bug eyed glasses, and spinning tracks by the beach boys, and other late sixties artists, the type of stuff Quentin Tarantino prefers in his wierdo movies. Dancing to it were five Japanese people, one of them, presumably gay, kept thrusting out his ass in our general direction and backing up into Bryan and Justin, two of our company. We had some drinks, some laughs, but we had to go. As Bryan said, it was our "buffer bar": The bar in-between bars.

From there we went to a Japanese hip hop club called strawberry on the advice of two girls loitering in a shady alley. Unlike Club Pure, in Strawberry we were the only foreigners. Low and behold, as soon as we got inside, a hip hop show started up, just like the one I saw on Friday night; seriously coreographed, and about thirty minutes long. It occured to me (and validated by the vetran JETs) that these people (the Japanese thugged-out hip hop crew) are a very tight nit community. They are also hilarious in their attempts to be ghetto. We realized that, ultimatley, we were intruders in their little world, so we decided to leave.

The final stop in our night was an African bar that we passed up earlier because we thought it was a brothel, situatued as it was in between two very shady hostess joints. Turns out that it was a family run, very friendly establishment owned by a father and daughter from Ghana. They told us that we were welcome to their little slice of Africa, and that as long as we were there, we were home. The patrons kept pulling us out of our seats and pushing us to the dance floor, where we got jiggy with ourselves. We liked it there, so we stayed on a while, and near the end they gave us each a free shot of a hemp infused native African drink that came out of a bottle full of what looked to be woodchips. It was very kind of them to offer us the free drinks, and we took them graciously, but they were, unfortunatley, godawful. Like I said, woodchips. Also, as a cherry on the cake, the Japanese bartender threw up in his own mouth right after taking the shot. He quickly covered it up with his hand but not before a fine little spray hit me and Bryan. We all had a good laugh, but after the bartender pukes you know its time to leave. We went to sleep around 8am, and got up at 11am to leave for our train home.

On the train home I tried very hard not to move, put on my headphones, and listened to Enya. Thankfully, her melodic humming, and her magnificent synthesizer work mercifully lulled my frazzled body to sleep. I listened to five straight albums of Enya and awoke when we arrived back home.

In conclusion, I feel I should say that if I continue to maintain this caliber of nighttime activity whenever I go outside of Toyama, I will surely die. I was happy when there, and glad when it was done. Just like life should be.