I've seen a lot of Japanese rocking out lately, and I don't mean in general (although they sometimes rock out in general), I mean with actual instruments on actual stages.

It has been my experience that if you go out for drinks on a Sunday you will almost always have a better time than if you did it on a Saturday. This Sunday was no exception. Bryan Holzer managed to get ahold of several free tickets to a "Female Rock Battle" in downtown Toyama, and seeing as how I like females, rock (and rocks, come to think of it), and battles, I knew that there was practically no way I was going to be dissapointed. True to form, it rocked. Hard.

I believe the rule for the concert was that the lead singer had to be female, but other than that, no holds barred. There were six or so different bands and each put on a thirty minute set. It had everything from pop to punk, and beer. Lots and lots of beer.

The first act was this pop girl that had a great voice and turned out to be fifteen. Pretty rockin', but not that rockin.

Following her was a hardcore punk girl that dressed in a leopard print maid's outfit. Believe it or not, she did not actually rock that hard.

After her, however, people seriously started to rock. The third band was actually made up of the owners and workers of a bar we like to go to called "Burning Rocks." How could they not rock!?! The woman lead singer had to have been about 45. Her daughter is graduating from Bryan's high school. She gussied herself up in a golden miniskirt and fishnet stockings and belted her heart out. Her husband, the bassist, had hair down to his lower back and wore ball hugging jeans and boots with six inch stilleto heels.

Here is a picture of the dude rocking his face off.





Now you take one look at that picture and then look me in the eye and say you don't want to go out drinking with that fella. That's right, you can't. He just rocks that hard. His band is called "Axbombers" for crying out loud.




After Axbombers, this lady strode out on stage surrounded by five men dressed up like dictators.



She herself wore leather riding boots, a harley hat, and spiked bracelets. They called themselves "Yuki's Academy." Pretty rocking so far right?






But get this. She is Adam's JTE co-worker! So when she isn't wearing leather and tearing it up to a bitchin' rendition of Sweet Child of Mine in which their ridiculously rocking guitarist (also a teacher, the timid dude in the back) absolutely nails Slash's riff, she is dressed all prim and proper, teaching 15 year olds how to conjugate verbs. I don't think I need to impress upon any of you how sweet that is.





After Yuki's Academy there was this band called "The Electrics" which actually had a female lead singer, a female bassist, and a female drummer. Here they are:






These cats were Dick Dale surfer music rockers. The guitarist would play really fast, classic surfer music, and every 20 seconds or so the lead singer would scream. Not sing, per say, just scream. This is actually a hallmark of the music itself, perhaps it is meant to give the impression of what it might be like to be caught in a huge wave whilst rocking. I might scream too. Needless to say, they were impressive, they even played that one Dick Dale song that Quentin Tarantino made famous in that one film he made where everyone kills each other whilst talking about things that are totally random and unrelated. (cough)

There were other bands, but I was pretty rocked out by then.

And then today I saw another Japanese guy rocking in a totally different way.

Apparently today the Iwasehama train line switches from diesel to electric, or from electric wiring to grounded current power, or some such nonesense. No big deal, right?

Wrong. To the Japanese, it is a very big deal.

It is such a big deal that, even on Sunday morning (and probably earlier), when I was coming home on the 6am train back from a night out, I saw six or seven Japanese people taking pictures of the train on their way to work. At the time I had no idea what they were doing, and just thought them all insane.

It is such a big deal that the kindergarteners of some Iwasehama school made a big collage picture of the old train model out of hundreds of origami paper cranes. It is displayed in the station.

It is such a big deal that today, the last day of the old train model, there was a stage set up for musicians to play live shows, to say goodbye and thank-you. To the train.

Here is one such musician, on platform eight outbound to Iwasehama. Rocking in honor of the train.



















There were several people actually filming the train leave the platform. It wasn't even the last departure, it was just a departure. All told, there were perhaps fifty Japanese on the platform at the time filming and taking pictures of everything from the train's headlights to its interior, and even its schedule.

Now I myself have a certain tendency to get nostalgic, but this was a tad ridiculous. Or perhaps it was a tad rocking?

Like so many things in life, it probably was a bit of both.