So there we were, Judy and I, last Friday night on our way home after having dinner with my second cousin and her husband from England who were in Tokyo for a single day on their way back from a trip to Australia. Transferring from the Hibiya line at Ebisu station, we walked up the escalator to the crowded Yamanote line platform, where who should we happen to see, but…

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How about some more shoddy pics from Nikko?

These’ll be the last, I promise.

Judy and I had a very “Japanese” weekend this past weekend. On Saturday, we took the 2.5- hour train ride up to Nikko to see some of the sights and take a bunch of crappy photos of the autumn foliage. Despite the fact that it was rather bone-chillingly cold to the extent that we had to plaster our bodies with heating pads in order to avoid losing limbs to frostbite, we had a pretty nice time up there.

On Sunday, we went to an enka performance in Shinjuku starring enka god Hosokawa Takashi. The first half consisted of a play of some sort, but I’ll be honest: I gave up trying to follow the archaic Japanese after about five minutes and spent the rest of the time fighting to stay awake. The second half was a solo concert by Hosokawa, which, to my complete surprise, I actually found kind of entertaining. That guy can do some wild stuff with his voice, let me tell you!

Judy was given the tickets for free and the person from whom she received them even arranged for us to meet Hosokawa after the show, which actually turned out to be far less awkward than I had expected. We had a brief introduction, posed for a photo and then he wished up happiness in our upcoming marriage and we said goodbye.

It’s been a while since I’ve put any new photos up, so I thought I’d post some of the aforementioned crappy photos from Nikko, even though they’re really nothing special. One of these days I’ve really got to take a photography class or something. Or just give up trying. Anyhow. . . .

Well, The Japanese Tradition: Sushi and Hard Gay videos are all back online. Generous thanks are due to one and only Daniel Drucker for kindly informing me of the existence of Coral Cache, which has allowed me to put the videos back online and (hopefully) not have to pay any more than the $16.61 in extra bandwidth fees that I’ve already been charged.

Oh, and just in case anyone thought I was joking about the inordinate number of visitors recently finding their way to this site via web searches for “gay,” here are the Search Query graphs from my web host’s stats from the past three days:

November 14

November 15

November 16

Interesting, to say the least.

I’ve actually come to find quite a bit of enjoyment in discovering what sorts of search keywords lead people to this site. While I don’t check the logs as often as when I first began polluting the internet with textual excrement, doing so always offers me a fascinating and highly amusing look into the depravity and licentiousness that define the human race, and honestly makes me feel pretty good about myself due to the fact at least I’m not as whacko as some of you are.

I’ve previously posted some common search words that frequently bring visitors to this site, but in light of the recent gay video searches, I thought I’d go through the list that I’ve been keeping for the past year or so of the most disturbing and revolting queries this site has received and post a few of the gems. Behold:

· nude meteorologists

– I don’t know why, but something about the combination of those two words totally cracks me up.

· where to find girls who like to give men blow jobs

– Along with the origin of the universe and the meaning of life, this must surely rank as one of most pondered questions in mankind’s external existential quest for truth.

· why do men find breast fondling interesting?

– Yet another question of the ages.

· i want someone to fondle my breasts in vancouver

– Don’t we all?

· effects of excessive breast fondling

– Hmm, I’m sensing a theme here.

· nude pictures of girls with camel toes

– Wait a minute, if they’re nude, how can they have camel toes?!

· old jap nipples

– I honestly don’t know if I can think of anything more disgusting than this.

· pictures of old fat women in bikinis

– Oh wait, yes I can.

· drawings of nintendo girls in panties

– Ooo, Princess Peach, sexxxy.

· morning musume using the bathroom hentai pictures

– I don’t know about you, but I certainly can’t think of anything hotter than cartoon drawings of young girls emptying the contents of their bowels. (NSFW!)

· forced salad tossing

– Toss my salad, bitch!

· what is reaming the anal area of women?

– A good time.

· photo sex women between 10-12 years

– This one came from Saudi Arabia, no less.

· photos of naughty celebrities wearing schoolgirl outfits

– Gee, cliché much?

· sexual fantasies about matronly middle aged women

– Paging Dr. Freud…

· scaring the shit out of your wife at 2:00 am

– Now this guy sounds like a fun person to live with!

· how to become a slave in japan

– Get a job at a Japanese company. (*rimshot*)

Man, there is nothing quite like entertainment at the expense of those who are even more fucked up in the head than you are.

Update: The Hard Gay videos are all back online.

Update: The sushi video is back online.

Well, it finally happened. A combination of that sushi video I posted in July suddenly being direct- linked on dozens of blogs and forums and an inexplicably enormous number of people recently finding their way to the Hard Gay post from September via Yahoo!/Altavista video searches for “gay” has nearly sucked my month’s allocation of bandwidth dry.

Now, seeing as I’m not exactly thrilled about the idea of paying for additional bandwidth, I’ve decided to temporarily take the videos offline. I apologize for the inconvenience, but with the wedding (and due date for payment thereof) now nearly a month away, I’ve been trying to limit extraneous expenses. The new billing cycle begins on the 25th, so I’ll put the videos back up on that day and hopefully by then everyone will have decided that I’m a total prick for taking them down and will have subsequently vowed never to return to this site, thus solving the bandwidth issue.

To anyone who hasn’t seen the videos yet, I’m sorry; I promise I’ll put them back up on the 25th. Your patience and understanding are greatly appreciated.

As are very large monetary donations.

Just kidding.

As for the folks relying on Yahoo! to find videos of “gay,” I really feel that I must inform you that there have got to be at least a gazillion better places on the internet to find gay porn. Of course, being the glorious specimen of heterosexuality that I am, I don’t have a clue as to where, however I might recommend refraining from furiously masturbating over short grainy clips of dudes reaming each other in the ass for a few minutes to educate yourself about BitTorrent technology and, for crissakes, Google.com. You’re very welcome.

Japan’s cultural obsession with cute characters is known the whole world over. From popular icons like Hello Kitty and Gloomy Bear to lesser-known but equally ubiquitous corporate mascots, the general attitude seems to be: if you want people to look at something, stick a cutesy face on it.

During my recent visit to the hospital for some x-rays, I happened to spot of an example of this that really pushed the limits in terms of the kawaii-ification of something otherwise exceptionally mundane. Meet Stomach-kun:

Okay, I made the name up, but this is a real character found on an instructional poster for a barium x-ray exam (for those lucky bastards allowed to drink the stuff instead of having it forced up their nose). Now, I’ve seen lovable, doe-eyed characters in product instruction manuals, rubbish disposal guidelines and even insurance forms, but this is the first time I’ve witnessed this phenomenon extended to something so patently un-cute. But heck, who says internal organs don’t deserve to be adequately represented in kawaii culture? Now that I know how cute my digestive system can be, I feel much more inclined to take better care of it. I don’t want poor Stomach-kun to suffer!

This past Saturday, Judy and I headed out to Chiba to check out the 2005 Tokyo Motor Show. I suppose it was just as was to be expected: insane crowds, girls in skimpy outfits, creepy men with fancy cameras taking photos of nothing but the aforementioned girls in skimpy outfits, insane crowds, and did I mention the insane crowds?

Oh, and I think there may have been some cars there or something, too.

Truth be told, it was a bit disappointing. The first time I went in 2001, I had been in Japan for two months and it was a really exciting event for me (just as pretty much everything else was at the time, including mundane things like going to the supermarket and discovering a porn vending machine). Now that I’m no longer that wet-behind-the-ears young lad with eyes filled with wonder and have since withered into the miserable, embittered bastard who posts on this site, enduring the typical tourism-in-Japan routine of pushing my way through a throng of thousands of Japanese people in order to get a quick look at something that isn’t all that great in first place has kind of lost its excitement.

I suppose that the most amusing moments of the Motor Show were had witnessing particularly brazen examples of creepy men reeking of desperation unabashedly snapping dozens upon dozens of photos whilst the subject of their attention, some vinyl-clad race queen, stood in awkward pose with an incredibly forced smile concealing her seething contempt for the pathetic, ill-smelling lechers crowding just inches around her. I swear, degenerates can get away with so much in this country.

I’m not going to bother posting any photos from the Motor Show since everything I took was crap (crappier than usual, that is). For anyone interested, photos of the cars can be found here and photos of the girls can be found here. Enjoy!

I find myself perpetually amused by the level of cluelessness demonstrated by middle-aged men in Japan. Clueless geezers can be found in every country, of course, but societal factors in Japan seem to leave the average middle-aged guy in a position in which the majority of his needs are met by those below him in the hierarchy (his wife, children, underlings at work, etc.), with little need to expend any effort on his part, resulting in an awfully high concentration of grown men completely incapable of completing the most basic of tasks. This phenomenon isn’t something that only punk-on-a-lark foreigners such as myself gripe about, either; in fact, characterizations of stereotypical oyaji featuring the requisite cheap suit, thick glass and bad comb-over, have a long tradition in Japanese comedy routines and on television.

I bring this up today as reference to an amusing incident that took place in my office this afternoon. The bucho (department manager) got up from his desk and walked over to the corner of the office where the coffee maker and electric kettle sit and lamented out loud the fact that there was no tea and that he didn’t know how to prepare any. Immediately, the youngest guy in the office jumped up from his seat and offered to put more water in the kettle, to which the bucho responded with the a mere grunt and went back to his desk.

About 30 minutes later, the bucho once again got up and went over to the corner, at which point paused and said, “Oh, I see you didn’t make me any.” The young guy raced over to the corner and apologized for the fact that although he had put water into the kettle to boil, he had failed to thereafter prepare a cup of tea for the bucho. The bucho, however, responded, “I don’t want tea, I want coffee,” prompting chuckles from other people in the office who had heard him not half an hour earlier explicitly ask for tea. Now, this young guy can be a bit cheeky and has a good rapport with the bucho, so he quickly pointed out that the he had indeed asked for tea.

The bucho, never one to admit a mistake, came back with this gem of an oyaji-ism: “When have you ever seen me drink tea, you idiot?! I want coffee!”

The confusion cleared, the young guy then went about preparing a fresh pot of coffee while the bucho went out to the balcony for a cigarette.

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And with that, I have wasted three minutes of your time. Thank you for playing, please come again.