japan is fucked up!

also best 小籠包 in Yokohama would be something I'd be interested in knowing. I used to know about 15 years ago but shit changes.

I'm here until the end of the month

Remember dudes, for relaxing times, make it suntory time : )

all other times strong zero 9% ume

closest station to me is minowa, a three minute or so walk away, thirty seconds to yoshiwara, ten minutes to asakusa.

i know shonan fairly well, as i lived in kanagawa when i first got here and rode my bike down to hiratsuka and enoshima quite often. i went out to kanagawa at the end of last week and went to sagami lake, which looks like the abandoned hotels/failed tourism project landscapes further west. i rode a boat shaped like a whale.

http://wrestlingclassics.com/cgi-bin/.ubbcgi/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=print_topic;f=9;t=021257

Rikidozan was a bully who hated any American who couldn't make him money. He was on drugs & alcohol & loved to bash Americans or anyone weaker than he. He was killed as a result of a knife wound that he received in a fight on 12-8-63 at the New Latin Quarter, a famous night stop in Tokyo. It was not a mob hit. Rikidozan had more than just mob connected, he was part of a gang & a member of the yakuza. Organized crime financed JWA in those days. On the night he was stabed he was sitting around throwing coasters at a black american band, drunkenly yelling "Neeruro go homu. Sonnabeech". Riki got up & started talking to a women in the door way to one of the restrooms. A 24 year old member of a rivial gang, Katsushi Murata, tried to squeeze by Dozan but bumped into him. Words were exchanged & Riki sent the kid flying with a right hand. Rikidozan jumped on top of him, crazed with anger & drugs, and started hitting him with blows to the face. Murata grabbed a six-inch hunting knife he had on his belt and stuck into Rikidozan's belly. The wrestler stood up in pain & Murata fled. Riki went back to his table & drinking companions & forced his way on to the stage, wair he sang "Mack the Knife". "There is a killer in the house, look at what he did to me!", he said as he opened his jacket to show a bloodly chest. He was taken to a clinic that night & to a American hospital the next morning. He had surgery, & was doing well, but against Dr.'s orders started drinking & developed peritonitis. He had a second operation & 4 hours later was dead. Doctors later claimed he died from anesthetic. Some Japanese would later claim that Dozan was killed by the American CIA.

After leaving the New Latin Club, Katsushi Murata had gone with his mob boss & 3 others to Riki Apartments to apologize and negotiate some sort of monetary settlement before turning himself into the police. Murata waited outside Rikidozan's penthouse in the parking lot, while the boss went inside. He was confronted by an angry band of gangsters loyal to Rikidozan. Murata allowed himself to be slashed in the face and chest with butcher knifes, but when his companions were attacked Murata reacted & cut a foot long gash in the abdomen of one of the attackers. Japanese prosecutors charged Murata with murder & found him guilty of manslaughter & sentenced him to prison for seven years. Murata always claimed self-defence. Later Katsushi Murata rose high in the ranks of the Sumiyoshi. By age 50 in the mid 80's, he had his own sub-gang. A great honor. Every year, on the day before the anniversary of Rikidozan's death (done not to upset the family) Murata would go to the Riki's grave in the Ikegami Honmonji Cemetery to bow and pray before the life-size bronze bust of the wrestler.

#OnThisDay in 1963: Rikidōzan dies from complications from a stab wound he suffered in a Tokyo nightclub. He was just 38. RIP [thread] pic.twitter.com/r9uBriWZTI

— Allan (@allan_cheapshot) December 15, 2017

on a night when bob sapp literally fought a grizzly bear (sneaky promotion for a boxing card) and uchimura teruyoshi brought his youthful swagger to nhk's flagship new year's eve roundup of enka, sexy zone and parodies of tv shows i've never seen, it is sad that the story of the night is an aging kansai hooligan and comedy elderstateman hamada something donning blackface.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jGUtXtKALb4

浜田君焼きそばを食べろ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e8RCIEK3h8I

japanese tv sux balls.

https://i.imgur.com/OmOLhnB.gif

in other news from new year's eve tv, we saw this guy's dick.

i've watched that gif countless times and i'm still not sure what i'm seeing there.

That is a peculiar looking organ i must admit

Hey were all きれい in our own way

upon further inspection, i believe he had the prudent forethought to bag the head and shaft in some kind of flesh colored possibly nylon sack.

pictures from my phone vol 3

http://imgur.com/WClocsd.jpg

i forget how to do this

http://imgur.com/xYHcYDQ.jpg
http://imgur.com/9lKSaWD.jpg
http://imgur.com/2Rgv0MQ.jpg
http://imgur.com/Sn6C8aL.jpg
http://imgur.com/Daz9M5R.jpg

Cool shots

What’s your go-to canned coffee these days?

craft boss black or the georgia japan craftsman

http://imgur.com/TuFz2MFp.jpg

http://imgur.com/TuFz2MFp.jpg

well golly
https://imgur.com/TuFz2MF.jpg it's there anyways

Noted.

What’s the latest, D?

hey, nothing. im committed i think to living in tokyo for the near future. i moved again, between asakusa and ueno. its a danchi so the rent is shockingly low, populated exclusively by 80+ year old women, a few chinese families. chill neighborhood and not too far from our old place near minami senju. kid got into daycare.

right now its sanja matsuri and those tattooed short skirt men are drinking strong zero, pissing in parking lots all across this half of taito ward.
i was forced to wade into it on my walk to buy snus at the tobacco shop beside maruetsu in asakusa and got a brief taste of it.

Really want to try strong zero

Man, how great is this, what a life!

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/2018/05/15/farewell-doreen-simmonds-85-year-old-nottingham-conquered-japans/

pictures from my phone vol 4 mito morning
https://imgur.com/h4501uL.jpg
https://imgur.com/KuWrPoF.jpg
https://imgur.com/h7l13yj.jpg
https://imgur.com/SmYzgKa.jpg
https://imgur.com/WbbsJXP.jpg
https://imgur.com/ocmi5oi.jpg

it's true that anywhere outside of central tokyo excepting osaka and parts of the next ten biggest cities not including satellites of tokyo is dreary

No way, Kanazawa is great

Hell no, Gifu motherfucker!

If you choose to get a place on the border of the country/city you get some real beautiful places

Right now only thing holding me back from living in japan is the japanese working environment

The work I’m in is not available to english speakers in japan (not even western companies), as you’d need to be fluent in japanese to take on that job over there

xpoost
kanazawa is a theme park
gifu is a suburb of nagoya

i'm exaggerating and i didn't mean dreary as absolutely negative. i love to stroll abandoned arcades and deserted red light districts. much of tokyo is dreary in a pleasant way.
most of the country that i've seen is beautiful and worth visiting, probably especially if you're not into big cities.

another intense gallery... that soapland shot is terrifying.

https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/queen-chateau-soapland

woulda loved to attend one of those back in the day

there are still a few in la

for science, research and reporting to the p01ic3 of course

Nice shots D

pretty massive earthquake in japan

and the west reporting erroneous and incomplete reports

smdh

6.4 is what I saw earlier on the USGS site

6.6, Hokkaido. houses buried in landslides, 2 reported deaths already

http://www.asahicom.jp/ajw/articles/images/AS20180906002535_comm.jpg
from the Asahi Shimbun

I missed the recent Kansai earthquake by a day and I’m in Sapporo in a couple of weeks. Sooner or later I’m going to be caught up in one of these, which is a pretty sobering thoughts.

Is the rain from typhoon jebi a factor in the landslides or just a coincidence?

Does dylannnn still post here?

Planning for 2+ week work trip. Last time I commuted from Chigasaki to Shibuya which was a little long but the family was stoked on the beach.

Was considering Karuizawa but that may also suck in the coming months, might be better to stay more local? I used to randomly hang in Tokorozawa back in the day and kind of have a fondness for scraping the edge of the outer suburbs. 2LDK mansions are surprisingly cheap on airbnb.

Haven’t seen him in a while but I thought he moved to china?

I found Ueno pretty easy to stay last time. It's the opposite side of the Yamanote line but there are straight-across trains from Akihabara. But Ueno Park and the museums etc around there make for nice variety, and the place has a good feel.

i'm in beijing a lot these days but still based in tokyo!

i hate leaving this particular ward in tokyo, so i base this mostly on transit. i don't see a commute from karuizawa working... i just looked up the transit situation and you'd have a tough time making it under 3 hours once you came into ueno or tokyo station on the hokuriku shinkansen then transferring to the yamanote. hakone or ohiradai, anywhere out there, not quite as pretty as karuizawa but you're on the odakyu line, one train to shibuya, get there in an hour and a half. you could even go somewhere way up in tochigi and get in easier than from karuizawa, still in some pretty mountains and not far from the water. how about along the ibaraki coast? i was going to recommend hiratsuka or somewhere else on the shonan coast (or down the miura peninsula) for good balance between city/ocean/mountain, but chigasaki is right there.

if it's the city, maybe kitasenju? it's a happening neighborhood suddenly and easy to get into the city but remote enough that it feels like you're in chiba. akabane out in kita ward, if you like that showa atmosphere.

In my much more limited experience, I second Ueno and Okachimachi.

Kitasenju look interesting.

I get to spend a couple of months in Tokyo next fall. My wife is going to be a visiting scholar at Keio, which apparently comes with an on campus flat.

i live just north of ueno station, and i'd recommend getting just a bit beyond the area, especially if you're staying in an airbnb. just the sheer number of tourists staying around here, the hundreds of hotels and airbnbs and other quasi-legal minpaku, all the tourists flocking to asakusa and ameyoko and the zoo, it can be offputting, i think.

if not kitasenju, then maybe minami senju or nihonzutsumi, a fascinating neighborhood that has a history as a center of labor struggle, outcastes, day laborers and homeless and plenty of charm still left, fairly welcoming because around 2008 world cup and before, hostels started to be built, business hotels, slowly being gentrified as the flophouses and business hotels are being converted to hotels catering to chinese tourists and suburbanites move in from chiba, still close enough to asakusa to walk down (five, ten minutes) and see the northern half of that area, yoshiwara, kappabashi etc. eat on the arcades around sensoji at dusk when the tourists have left... or around the triangle formed by nishi-nippori, nippori and mikawashima stations, right in the heart of gritty shitamachi, very quiet especially as you approach mikawashima, and yanaka ginza and the yanasen area are just to the west, but easy to get in and out. or further west, machiya or oji or otsuka, so you can stay in a chill neighborhood, ride the city's last streetcar around, but still hop on the yamanote to get to ikebukuro or shibuya or wherever. or even across the river in sumida ward, still in the early process of being gentrified (because it's going to be underwater when the big one hits and the alluvial soil liquefies), plenty of charm, museums and parks and good restaurants.

I have been a visiting scholar at Keio with an on-campus flat but it was in Hiyoshi fwiw. Though then you’re close to Yokohama which for livability I might prefer to Tokyo?

I find the areas around Ueno very sympa, Asakusa and even over the river toward the sumo stadium. These areas are older but seem somehow very solid, if that makes any sense.

Hopefully I will be going to Kyoto in April.