Only in Japan

As you can probably tell, I’m on a bit of kick of looking through old photos right now.  Here’s just a sampling of some of the more bizarre things I happened to encounter while holding a camera.  Enjoy.

Tokyo store front, July '08

Misakubo Disguise Festival '08

Osaka, November '07

Osaka local New Year's festival, January '09

Sign for a closed bar in Hamamatsu, unknown date

These Nights Had No Rest

 

3am, crossing a foot bridge in downtown Osaka while blissfully exhausted and hammered and glad to be here over anywhere else.

Honestly, there’s nothing quite like it: a sea of ever-moving patchwork-styled people flowing through open neon corridors all night long.  Carry your beers freely on the sidewalk, loiter as long as you like between point A and B, and dance until past first light: the bars don’t close until the last person leaves.  When you can’t stand anymore, crash in a coffin-like capsule hotel or any variety of love hotel, your sex themed from sophisticated to Santa Klaus, provided you can drunkenly convince the anonymous teller that you can speak Japanese.  Somewhere in the middle of it all, stop on a bridge over black water reflecting this world back at you, and take it all in.

Now that I’m back in the States, the heaviest my nightlife gets is a small bar in northeast Ohio.  I walk to the bar, I see a million people I know, a familiar bartender knows exactly what I drink, and I take in whatever the tiny brick room has to offer until 2am.  Then I walk home, rosy-faced and content with my best friends in the world.

I’m not even sure the two experiences are comparable.  It’s like leaping from one world to the next, with no overlap.  While Osaka (and nightlife in Japan in general) is expansive and over-stimulating, rapidly cycling through as much ground and people and booze and excitement as one can possibly consume in one night, nightlife here is tiny and intense, a shot directly to the blood of years of nostalgia and interaction.  Spending time with people you’ve known forever in a place you’ve spent more nights than you could possibly count inevitably gives a different experience.  Not better, not worse–just different.

In that sense, it’s one adjustment I haven’t had trouble making in coming back.  Sure, my social life has slowed down considerably, but what it lacks in quantity is made up for by deep roots.  In Japan, there is one default conversation any gaijin has in a bar:

Random person: Where are you from?
Me: America.
Random person: Oh, I see!  How do you like Japan?
Me: It’s great!
Random person: Do you like Japanese food/Can you use chopsticks/What do you think of Japanese men?
Me: Uh…
Random person: You are very cute!
Me: Thanks…

As you can imagine, it gets incredibly old, and fast.  One of the first realizations that I had upon going out back in the States is that I could talk to any person in the room, and the conversation would likely be unique, and even had the possibility of being remotely interesting.  It felt liberating in a way I can’t even describe.

But on some nights, I miss that pace–I miss the confusion and chaos, and even the isolation of being a clueless foreigner striding through the night blindly.  Not to say Japan didn’t have its dark moments for me, but… Those nights had no rest, but rarely did they leave me restless enough to look through old photographs and wonder what it is I’m missing.

Touch-Ups

Edited version. Photography by Sean Horrell. Fashion and editing by Sarah Mancuso.

Original photo, with no editing. Photography by Sean Horrell, fashion by Sarah Mancuso

Here’s one of my rare attempts at photo shop.  Sean took this photo on Halloween, in a brief shoot with quickly fading daylight.  I was really proud of the outfit (aimed to be a gothic lolita Harajuku girl), as I spent about a month and a half putting it together.  The whole outfit has about 30 pieces, bought evreywhere from craft stores to sex toy websites to facy jewelry stores for bridemaids’ gifts.  For the record, I made the lace collar and ribbon and yarn hair pieces, and did all my own makeup.

*Ahem*  Self-plug: over.

Anyways, I decided I wanted to try and touch some of these up, and so here’s my first result.

Sean gave me a few breif photoshop lessons before he left the house tonight, the most important probably being how to use curves and hue/saturation manipulation.  As you can see, the difference is kinf of dramatic.  Changes incude:

• Boosting blues
• Changing skin tone in neck, chest, and ears to match the face
• removing stray hairs on the face and shirt
• Changing the hue of the nail polish to better match the other blues in the outfit
• Removing the red from the whites of my eyes and below the nose (contacts and allergies, ack!)
• Sharpening and adjusting the overall brightness and smoothness of individual parts of the picture

I really am quite pleased with it!

On the List: Iceland

Sometimes I like prowling flickr photos of places that have randomly piqued my interest.  Although I haven’t talked about it much here yet, I’m planning on striking out to other corners of the world again in the reasonable future.  So, I’m starting to gather ideas of places I’d like to spend some time in, and thus “The List” is born.

So!  Iceland is on the list.  Just browsing the first few pages of the tage “Iceland” on Flickr, here’s a sample of what I see in it:

Uploaded by ladigue_99: Gullfoss – Iceland

Uploaded by Arnar Valdimarsson: Öxarárfoss in Iceland – Aurora Borealis

Uploaded by stuckincustoms

Uploaded by jonbaldvin: Dawn at Godafoss Iceland

I’ve always wanted to see the Northern Lights, too.

Himeji Castle

Japan has feudal castles, too! This was another activity that involved climbing lots and lots of stairs, and looking at really old things. But pretty old things. Here’s a couple of my favorites:

Main Tower


View from the top floor of the main tower.

Check out the FULL SET for more.

Ok, that’s all you get! I’m off to the States for the next two weeks! It’ll be the first time I’ve been to North America in a year. Looking forward to it; bring it on.

Fushimi Inari Shrine in Kyoto

Fushimi Inari Shrine

Fushimi Inari Shrine is perhaps my favorite place I’ve been in Japan so far. It’s a gorgeous hike up a mountain via a bajillion stairs through thousands of orange gates. The place has a certain serenity to it that I’ve found very difficult to come by on such an overcrowded little island of a country. Parts of it actually felt inhabited by something unseen, like small cities of quiet, forgotten gods. Which, I suppose, is more or less what a shrine is supposed to be.

A quiet stop along the way

The whole walk is actually quite long, and we didn’t do all of it. We made it to main landing on the mountain, from which you can continue on to do a 6km loop around the peak. I’d really, really like to finish the hike someday.

View of Kyoto from the main landing (sepia toned)

These pictures are from my visit to Kyoto with my parents in March. Go check out the FULL SET for pictures of the Gion district in Kyoto, Kiyomizu Temple, and the rest of Fushimi Inari.

Liam Cooke

Originally uploaded by ~inky.  Copyright Liam Cooke 2008 some rights reserved, for noncommercial use only.

My friend Liam Cooke does pretty things with a camera. Especially with futuristic/minimalistic stuff. Go look. Go enjoy.

Tokyo: A City Eye

I spent this past weekend in Tokyo with my good friend Sean Horrell, who is a great photographer, with an especially gifted eye for cities (and who is sadly nowhere on the internet, so I have no links for you). We went to see a concert, but the rest of the trip sort of unexpectedly turned into an extended photography shoot. Honestly, I’m usually crap at catching good things to photograph in cities, but in his company, I noticed loads of shots I probably would have skipped past otherwise. In that way, this shoot was really a group effort (and we shot lots of the same subjects, so having only mine up makes it feel half complete. I promise to badger him into at least setting up a flickr account).

Some samples from Shibuya:

Sean also spotted this row of mirrors that had been cleaned and lined up outside of a hotel, waiting to be taken back inside. It was an amazing find on his part:

We also found this amazing alley in Harajuku lined with murals:

Then we spent some time people watching from a restaurant on an upper floor of a building in Harajuku:

This is just a sampling of what I took. Look at the full set on flicker for the rest. The ones of alley are my favorites, by far!

Japanese Vending Machines 101

As per request of my friend NeoBokrug, I’m putting together a collection of photos of the weird shit you can get in vending machines in Japan. While I have yet to come across the infamous used panties for sale, there’s still an array of drinks and snacks that make me do a WTF face on a daily basis.

First of all, almost all the machines are for beverage vending. Most of them contain coffee, some sports drinks, various teas, a little soda, and the occasional weirdo random drink, such as the melon cream soda in the picture above (if you click on the photo above, I have the stuff labeled in Flickr with notes). Snack machines are much more rare, and when you do see them, they usually contain things like sweet breads and savory donuts. Dear God, how I miss being able to get a bag of Doritos from a machine. You have no idea, until it’s gone. But I digress.

Let’s take a look at some stuff from the vending machines in the school I work at. Took all these with my phone, so they’re not high quality, but you can get the idea.

DRINKS

Robot <3

To be honest, I’m not exactly sure what I was going for with these, but I knew exactly what the shoot should look like. I’m pretty fond of that little robot, even if it is a cockroach. I often turn it on and watch it walk around the living room, bumping into things and backing up and changing direction. It does the same maneuver if you make a loud noise in front of it, too. It’s a pretty cute little thing, and sometimes it’s almost like having a pet. Except unlike pets, I can’t kill it by forgetting to feed and water it. Hell, not even my plants are that easy.

And then there’s things like life-sized robotic girlfriends, which, as the article points out, takes one’s fondness for robots to a whole new level, but really for the same reasons. I like my robotic pet because I don’t have to *actually* pay attention to it or take care of it. Likewise, you don’t have to care for, talk to, listen to, get nagged by, clean for, by gifts for, or otherwise interact whatsoever with a robotic girlfriend if you don’t want to.

On the other hand, your robotic girl friend is never going to buy you a gift or give you sympathy when you get depressed about being a socially inept hermit. It kinda misses the point of human relationships altogether.

At any rate, I guess I was exploring how bizarre the concept of robotic affection is to me. I think the shots are beautiful and yet undeniably creepy at the same time. Any thoughts?

(And yeah, that’s me, and I took all the shots by myself without a timer).

I put eight shots on flickr total, if you want to see the rest.