Its a Miniature World

The Meguro Museum of Art is currently holding an exhibit called Paper. If you happen to be in Tokyo this summer its definitely worth a stop. 

Meguro, Japan

From the Ground Up

Tokyo, Japan

Unrinal Video Game

So at one point I thought Fire Yuko was going to be the wildest thing ever to appear on Travelingmanjoe. Today a bathroom break in Akihabara changed that after according to the game, hurricane level forces were unleashed.

The game, made by Sega and called "The North Wind and Her" works by you directing your pee flow to the red dot inside the blue circle inside the urinal. The more directly you hit the dot and the longer you pee affect whether or not you level up. In the game leveling up is marked by an increase of wind in the game. I am not sure how far the game goes, but did go to some effort to really need to go to the bathroom before shooting this video in an attempt to get as far as possible in the game. 

If you choose to watch the video, just accept the fact that I was peeing while shooting it and you might want to mute the video for the first 5 seconds. 

So what happens after you unleash such a pee pee force in one contained place? The toilet thanks for you keeping the place clean and asks you to come back again; that's literally what is says below.

 Akihabara, Japan, Where Else Could This Have Happened?

The Slow Eye

Looking at the world, let alone Tokyo can a times be an act of visual cryptography.  Take the picture below for example. Its an old bridge (this point in the river has been a crossing point for almost 300 years, though the bridge is not that old). Then there are train tracks, new buildings and of course tree's.

A nice junction of old and new makes such a nice picture. However when I took the time to look closer, I realized this point is where three separate train lines cross over one another. The JR Red, Yellow, and Orange lines all cross in the picture in front of you. 

So I wondered, do all three trains ever cross one another at the same time? For nearly an hour I stood on this bridge drinking canned Hi-Balls, attracting the attention of the police, and generally loitering just to see if the three trains did indeed cross one another all at the same time. 

When they did, for the first time in my life I wished I'd had a better camera. The light was so so and my hand-held only could do so much. However if you look, all three trains are there.  

Then there was the train ride home. The picture below just looks like several bored Japanese people on the train, right? Well turns out there was more to it. The twenty minutes I spent on the train showed me that three of the four people in this picture were related to one another.

Once the women in the yellow left, it became apparent that the man was the son of the older women in the middle and the daughter-in-law was the woman on the right.

Look at the body language even in this picture. The daughter-in-law despises the mother in law. How can you tell? Look at the way her body and face are pointing. She wants nothing to do with the mother-in-law. While she cannot run away from this situation, she can first use the women in yellow as a buffer and then her body and eyes to turn and look away.

Look at the son-in-law. He knows his wife hates this situation, he is trying to look at her without looking too obvious to his mother.  However the mother-in-law see's it all. Her eyes tell the viewer she knows the silent dance going on around her. Stranger still, she is in control of the entire situation whether she knows it or not.

Who knows why she hates the daughter-in-law, yes I said hate, but she has the power to turn the entire situation around. And that is the scary thing about power. At any moment she could realize what she is doing here and put aside whatever she harbors against the daughter-in-law and the situation would heal itself.

We create our own little universes within ourselves, family, and friends. We can choose to bring negative or positive emotions to these relationships. It is true that events in our lives will color and shape the lens through which we see this world. But the strangest thing about this reality is that no matter what happened in the past, you can still take over and focus that lens and color

Another way to put it is from the words I saw on a t-shirt today: "Bad dreams come from here". From where you ask, from you I say, however that is the same place good dreams spring from as well.

Shinagawa@Night

Tokyo. We all know Tokyo. What does a license plate read on a vehicle in Tokyo? The Kanji on the top says Tokyo東京, right? No it doesn't. It says Shinagawa品川. The literal translation of which means the place where the rivers meet.

Shinagawa, Japan

Osaki@Night

Funny to see a propaganda poster of the Japanese Prime Minster on the same wall as an advertisement for a part-time hostess job paying $50 an hour.

The poster itself says nothing about working at a hostess bar. Rather it says, part-time jobs paying $50 an hour. Its taken me nearly 6 years to finally be able to read into and understand the context of an ad like this, because you not only need to be able to read the characters, you also need to understand what a hostess bar is.

What is a hostess bar? This should explain it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Host_and_hostess_clubs

Osaki, Japan