Brian's Japan Adventure

December 2^nd, 2007 

A Boring Sunday with a Violent and Dramatic Climax.

I’ll keep this one short. I did the “McLibrary” run this morning. I was playing with my Palm Pilot last night and wanted to see if I could download anything fun for it. No, I din’t find anything all that interesting. I did pick up some e-books in “Mobipocket” format. I’ll make a note of it here if that turns out to be worthwhile or not.  I posted my Friday and Saturday blogs as well as the glossary. Then I answered a few emails and was out of there pretty quickly. 

I stopped for lunch at Freshness Burger on the way home, as it has been a long while since I went there. The hamburger sandwich was so big I had to use a knife and fork in order to eat it. Even if I could have picked it up without it falling apart, the grease would have gone everywhere. The burgers at Freshness Burger might be “fresh,” but by no means are they even remotely healthy. Since Freshness Burger is very near the train station, I thought Id take the train home today rather than the bus. Sigh. I had to wait 35 minutes for the train to arrive; they run a very slow schedule to my part of town in the middle of the afternoon. I’d have been better off taking a bus. 

Once returning to the station, I walked across the street to a little Mom & Pop Stationary shop. Granny & Gramps would be more accurate in this case, as the proprietors were probably old in the days of the samurai. I see them sitting in there day in and day out, hoping someone will come in and buy some paper or a pen. Once again, I wonder how anyone makes a living in these little shops. I go in for some little black flashcards that I saw once before. The flashcards are 68Y for a pack of them. I picked up three of those, a couple of pens, and a clipboard. I don’t have any special plans for the clipboard, but they are always handy when you need one. The old lady had trouble getting the rounded-edge flat clipboard into a plastic bag. Dunno why, it’s as simple as it sounds. They probably hadn’t invented bags yet when she was trained for this job. 

Then it was home to make flash cards. I made a set for this new chapter and the previous one, which I think we went through a little more quickly than I would have liked. Hopefully they will be worth the effort. Vocabulary words are starting to get a little ahead of me. 

When I finished the cards, Marc came in and turned on the TV. He asked if I wanted something to eat later, as he was going to cook something. I warily said, “OK” and waited. 

Wherein We Witness A Classic Struggle Against Evil Forces. 

While we were waiting for dinner to finish, wrestling came on.  No, not sumo, this was professional wrestling, just like in America. HA!  It was great; this is what wrestling used to be like in America before it got too stupid to watch. The first match had one guy who was as big as a house who walked onto the stage in a big warrior mask that obscured his face. He stomped his way to the ring like an oversized sumo wrestler, and he was very tough looking. Then he lifted the mask off his head and he had this fierce round sumo face and a little baby’s pacifier in his mouth. We laughed for five minutes at that.  When the match started, his opponent hit him and hit him with no effect; if you remember Andre the Giant, this guy is really every bit as big.  He walked around slowly, not moving hardly at all except to swat away his insignificant opponent.  Finally, the opponent jumped up and kicked him in the face, knocking “the pacifier” out of his mouth. Wooeeeeie! He got all red-faced and stomped around; he had been “pacified” for a reason!  He chased the little man around the ring and eventually just squashed him. American wrestling needs more fun gimmicks like this guy’s pacifier and less trash-talk. 

Then there were several reasonably normal matches. Then it got strange. There was a guy in a big costume like a baseball team mascot. The mascot walked around behind some “bad guy” wrestlers and somehow got challenged. The big fluffy mascot-man then got all smokey and “transformed” into a masked man in a body suit. The audience got to hear him speak in a high-pitched anime voice (voiced by someone off-screen). The character jumped around and got his butt kicked. 

Then it was time for the main event. This was just great. The “Hero” was Hustle, half of a man & wife duo called “Love and Hustle.”  The “Villain,” as best as I could tell was an evil alien. He wore a strange-looking outfit, and moved his head in strange ways with eerie music. There’s nothing that unusual so far. But this guy was straight out of a comic book (or anime). He pointed his finger at his opponent, and (through special lighting effects) blasted him with a shock wave that threw him out of the ring. The effect was very well-done. I’m not sure, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone in American wrestling demonstrate actual magic or alien powers. Heh. The fight continued with the hero hitting the super-strong alien again and again with no effect. At one point, the alien shot his shock wave at the hero and missed. We saw the shock wave cross the auditorium and hit a cameraman whose shirt exploded in a burst of sparks and then fell to his death twenty feet below. That got another five minutes of laughter from us. Finally, Hustle lay there beaten, the alien man pointed his finger at his head and was building up a big charge to finish him off when… 

Yep, you guessed it! The “Love” half of the team appeared on stage and screamed something at the alien, distracting him. The alien fired his blast at her, but she held up a shield (shaped like a heart of course) and reflected the blast back at him, but injuring herself in the process. The alien staggered, confused. The hero stood up and did a flying drop kick at the alien, whose chest exploded with all kinds of fireworks and sparks. The bad guy staggered for a bit and then fell to the ground, apparently dead.

Then there was a long period of “blah-blah-blah” when Hustle crawled over and helped Love up. I couldn’t understand a word of it, but I’m sure it was some kind of inspirational “you’ve got to survive” cliché crap. As they helped each other off-stage, the camera cuts back to the bad guy, who crawled, “Terminator-style” to the center of the ring and blasted a hole in the middle of the ring, crawling through and making his escape to plan his revenge. Sure it all sounds like a cartoon, but I just cannot imagine anything this elaborate or funny happening in American Wrestling today. I am a former wrestling fan, but I have to say, it’s gotten stupider and stupider over the years. Not that it was EVER intelligent entertainment, but it at least used to be fun. 

And Then Marc’s Cooking Makes Me Decide To Give Up Eating.

What he made was some kind of boiled steak and tofu thing over rice. It was all more or less OK except the tofu. I am not a big fan of tofu, at least not the way he made it.  It had the texture of soggy bread mixed with a double portion of snot. Nope, it was not yummy at all. I ate a lot of rice. 

Then I go into my room and listened to more of Walden (chapter 10), when the narrator starts talking about food. He explains the benefits, as seen in 1856, of being a vegetarian. He makes many good points, and I may have been especially open to that line of thinking considering Marc’s cuisine.

I’ve always thought being a vegetarian would be a very healthy way to eat, and it sure can’t hurt my health any, right?  As I think more about it, it really might be easier here than in the States, simply because I have so few choices anyway. Co Co Ichiban has vegetarian curry dishes. Big Boy has a salad bar (somewhat puny, but it’s there), and even McDonalds has salads. Not only that, but I’d have an understandable reason for avoiding the inevitable fish dinners over the holidays. Tomorrow’s a Monday, a perfect day to start something like this, and I don’t even have any meat in the house that I have to “make gone” first. No excuses, no delay. Tomorrow it is! Yeah, I know tofu is a vegetable, sort of; I’ll just skip that one.

And now that I’ve told the entire Internet about my plan, I have to follow through, or at least make a serious attempt. If I actually follow through on it for the rest of my trip, that’ll be three whole months to get used to it, which will make it easier to keep up when I go home. If I give it up, then…I’m not really out anything.  But this trip is the biggest opportunity I may ever have to implement personal changes, so it would be stupid not to try to make as many improvements for the better as possible.

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