Fukuoka slash New Year's

Fukuoka is the biggest city on Kyushu. It's a great place to go if you like getting free packets of tissues. Tissues are often used as advertising media in Japan, since some public bathrooms don't have toilet paper and it's good to always have some on you. People pass the packets out on the street, either with flyers or with mini ads tucked into the package. Sometimes you can also get free beauty samples in the same way, from workers just passing them out on the street.

Anyway, Ed and I were in Fukuoka on New Year's Day and the next few days after that. On New Year's Day in Japan, it seems like people are still hanging around at home, eating traditional foods. Most of them are dried or pickled, dating back to when people didn't have refrigerators and most stores closed on the day. They also eat things like sushi and sashimi, and mochi, that awful rice dough I got to pound with a mallet in Kumamoto. Glob, I hate Japanese food. Anyway, people are all about the firsts of the year--first trip to a temple or shrine, seeing the first sunrise of the year, first tea ceremony, and especially first shopping sale. I don't think the stores were open on the first, but on the second, it was frigging crazy.

We were walking by one of the big shopping centers, Tenjin Core, looking for some lunch or something, and there were so many people on the sidewalk that we accidentally got herded into the building. Here's a video of what happened. Notice the signs that force you to go one way, the packed escalators, and all the security dudes with megaphones.

Here's a shot of the sidewalk once we escaped through a different door. The cones are there to make a special line to get into the store at the front of the building. The place is so packed in the main corridors that you wouldn't be able to get to the door of this particular shop, so they made it its own entrance. Jeez.

Here's a shot of the exit-only that we took. You can see the jammed crowd inside.

When I first visited Fukuoka in 2009, I was only there for three nights, and there was a music festival happening all over the city. Consequently, Fukuoka seemed like a pretty cool place. I didn't realize that it's actually not all that cool to visit when there's no festival going on. It's mostly just full of giant shopping centers, which are filled with expensive stuff. It also has a good nightlife, it seems, with tons of bars and clubs, but almost all of them have a pretty high cover charge for absolutely no reason (i.e. there's no band or DJ there to justify charging customers to hear). There are a number of museums in Fukuoka, and we did manage to get to the Asian Art Museum after it reopened on the 4th, but other than that, they were all closed when we were there. So we spent most of the time just walking around, looking at stuff.

Here's a picture of Ed disrespecting a temple.

We saw Fukuoka Tower, but didn't go up there.

The tower has a special photo selfie spot, where you can put your camera on this little shelf and set it to take your picture, with the tower conveniently centered for you.

Here's the tower from afar. Nice view.

The reason we were by Fukuoka Tower was because Ed had read about this place called Robosquare, which has a bunch of robots that you can interact with and see demos of and stuff. This being Japan, we thought that would be pretty amazing. It was not, however. I had this image of an outdoor square, with like life-size robots doing stuff, and little robots wandering around doing stuff, and all that kind of thing. But in reality, it was just a room with a bunch of crappy small robots. At the entrance, there's a Hello Kitty robot that can respond to some simple commands like "What time is it?" (in Japanese), but it didn't move or do anything else. Siri is waaaay more advanced. Some of the other robots were just animals that moved a little and were soft, so people in nursing homes, hospitals, etc. could have something soft to touch and talk to without the risk and maintenance of a real animal. Basically, the most advanced robot in there was about that the level of a Furby. So if you're planning a trip to Fukuoka, I suggest you skip Robosquare.

Blah blah blah...


Easily the best thing we did in Fukuoka before Ed went back home was to visit a cat cafe. But that's a helluva lot of photos and videos, so I'll do that one next time.

Fukuoka Hotel and New Year's Eve

On New Year's Eve, we moved on from Kumamoto to Fukuoka, on the northern coast of the island. I had actually visited Fukuoka before, for a long weekend with some friends when I was living in Korea. So I was sort of familiar with the city. Anyway that's not important. What's really important is that I had booked us for five nights at the Fukuoka Best Western, because it was reasonably cheap and in a decent location. I had read the reviews about the hotel, and pretty much everyone said how ludicrously small the rooms were, even by Japanese standards. But both Ed and I figured it wouldn't matter, since we'd be out of the room most of the time.

But man...

Our room so small, it's a quarter hallway:

Our room so small, it's got a SEMI-double bed:

 Our room so small, it only fits half a chair:

Our room so small, the clock numbers have to be stacked:

Our room so small, we only get half a tissue box:

Our room so small, the fridge is just a door:

Our room so small, we get a trashcan off a Starbucks counter:

But we managed, of course. The bathroom was nice, anyway. Here's a picture of us after visiting a couple bars on our first night--which was New Year's Eve, as I mentioned.

As a side note, in Japan, they don't go out drinking with friends on New Year's Eve. They stay at home with family and eat soup. The noodles in the soup represent the crossing from the old year into the new. They also watch music and dance performances on TV, part of which we saw at one of the bars. Some people visit a temple or shrine at midnight, and at that time, Buddhist temples ring a bell 108 times, to represent the 108 shittiest earthly desires. It all sounds boring without alcohol.

Kumamoto Castle

Man, this thing is killing me. I was having some neck problems for a while and then I was on vacation for three weeks, and now I'm struggling to recall events that happened like ten weeks ago.

Anyway, the whole stupid reason that Kumamoto was on our travel itinerary was because of Kumamoto Castle, supposedly one of the best castles in Japan. But when we got there we found out that it had just closed for New Year's and would not reopen until after we'd moved on. So I was pretty pissed about that. However, it was easy enough to get onto the castle grounds and take pictures from the outside. Let's just hope the inside is wicked boring.

I think this is the first part of the castle complex that we saw, and we were able to enter through a big gate somewhere.

Here is the main building in the castle from inside the gate, slightly photo-bombed by Ed.

It had a few satellite buildings like this:

And walls:

Then we got closer.

We tried to take a few selfies with the tower in the background, but Ed's giant head kept getting in the way.

Eventually he figured it out, though.

Here's the side of the building.

Then we were walking through some park or something and looked at it from a long ways off.

We did a nice selfie, then some that I ruined.

 Then I must have been confused about something.

So now I'm getting my timeline confused, but at some point, we were wandering around Kumamoto, looking for the one museum that didn't explicitly say it was closed around New Year's. We got a little lost and were walking in some quiet area when I heard a little cry and my Kitty Alarm went off. Then we found this desperate kitty, who was crying nonstop and needing love. We stayed with it for a little while. Ed thought maybe the kitty had lost its peeps. It even followed us a little bit when we finally had to go. I hope that kitty found its peeps.

 Here is an expression of my defeat when we finally reached the museum, which I think was a samurai museum, after like an hour of walking or something, only to find it closed. WAH' waw.

Something I Saw on TV

So tonight I decided to turn on the ol' Japanese TV while I was making my supper. Usually I don't do this because Japanese TV is really terrible, at least the basic channels we get here at the dorm. The shows are mostly studio group talk shows with the same people on every time, I think, and they just talk about inane shit and watch demos and videos of other stupid stuff and react to it. It's so simple that even I, with my limited knowledge of the language, can understand a good portion of what's happening and what's being said.

But sometimes if I'm waiting for food to cook, I'll see what's on. Tonight on one of these stupid shows, a group of four people, three kids and an adult, were watching videos of these new inventions. The inventions were crazy.

The first one was a trash can that can move around and catch trash that you throw at it. The video was of a young geek (otaku) trying to draw some manga (comic book), but he kept messing up and had to throw a page away. He crumpled it up in the typical TV way, and tossed it blindly behind him. Then the trashcan slid about three feet from the other side of the room and caught it. Then he did it a bunch more time, with the trashcan moving all over the place to catch his papers. Then they showed that you can attach a sensor to your wall, which tracks the trash as it goes up, and figures out where it's going to land, then it sends the trash can to that spot. It didn't look perfect, because I saw the paper hit the rim once, but I imagine it catches stuff most of the time.

So the first reaction to that is of course, OH MY GLOB THAT IS AMAZING. But then the second reaction is, wow, that is really useless. Then the third reaction when they show you the price on the screen is, JESUS FUCK that's not even remotely worth it (about $500).

The second invention was actually quite useful, though. And simple. It's just a wide inflatable cushion that you put under your futon. Quick note here: In Japan, a futon is not a convertible bed/couch with a crappy mattress. It's a thinner version of that crappy mattress, which is traditionally put on the floor to sleep on, but nowadays is put on top of a Western-style mattress. So you could put this thing under it with no problem here. Anyway, you put the cushion under the futon at shoulder blade level, uninflated, and it's attached to an electric air pump and presumably an alarm clock. When it's time to wake up, the cushion inflates, lifting your futon and your upper body into a wicked arch. So you have to get up, unless you're really stubborn and curl up at the lower half of your bed.

The third invention, however, is neither cool nor useful, though. It's a fridge with a camera inside it at face level. Below the camera is a light display, which makes a square. When the lights make a square, the fridge is locked. In this demo, the studio group had to guess how you got the fridge to unlock. A couple people guessed that you had to do some sort of dance move, one boy guessed that you need a verbal password, and the last girl seemed to have guessed right, which was that you have to smile. Some sort of facial recognition software measures the intensity of your smile, too, so you can't do one of those obligatory flash smiles that I throw around at people. It's got to be 75% of maximum or greater, according to the animation. If you smile widely enough, the lights form a green smiley face and the fridge unlocks. That is retarded.

Side Note

The other day I was out grocery shopping and there were two white-kid mannequins with giant creepy plastic smiles modeling school uniforms for the upcoming academic year (Japanese school begins in April), and the boy mannequin had been pantsed. HA HA HA.

Kumamoto Zoo and Botanical Gardens

So as I mentioned before, one of the only things open to do in Kumamoto was go to the zoo, which was conveniently located on the tram line. Despite my standard inability to get out of the house before three, we managed to get there before lunchtime.

For cats, tail up = happy. For lemurs, hard to say.

Number of fucks this hippo gives: zero. The hippo's name is Momoko, and because I have two students named Momoko, I happen to know that it means "peach flower." Good name for a giant ugly crotchety animal.

Ed and Momoko are bros. This was taken before we learned the hippo was a chick.

Rhinos have big square heads.

I was trying to head butt the rhino.

One of my students this year looked like a capybara.

Really, she looked remarkably like this picture. I wish I could show you.

For lunch we found a fast food joint that had this sinister ET with chibi-Pooh. Chibi is an art style used in anime and manga that depicts characters as small and cute. Nice juxtaposition here.

Also, this:

I see Apple has made its way to the zoo.

This is me being very excited about the snow leopard. It was very cute.

Nothing like the back of a lion.

Here's a bear. I felt pretty bad for it. Of all the animals in pretty small cages, this one seemed the most distraught about it.

Also, it seemed that there had been another bear who had died. People had left flowers and some honey in memoriam.

Momoko, continuing to give zero fucks.

In the zoo, it is unacceptable to climb fences and stick your tongue out at the animals. You must stand away from the fence, holding your hands placidly behind your back. B-boy style acceptable.

Swan babies are called cygnets. I had forgotten that. The cygnets of black and white swans look similar, I think.

This animal is BORING. Unacceptable.

It is also unacceptable to kick cans at the bears, for they will cry, get wounded, and sprout wings and a fluffy tail.

We kept seeing these smoking stands with poetry on them. It's hard to know if it was intended as poetry in Japanese, though.

This guy.

I think this is one of the many types of pheasants. That's crazy man.

If you feed a pony, your finger will explode and you will cry. Your pigtails will try to escape your head. The sight of candy in a plastic bag will cause the bear's stomach to emit radio waves, which will embarrass the bear.

There was a petting zoo in the zoo. As a result, I got to pet this pony.

They also whipped out a bunch of guinea pigs for little children to pet. I was offered a try, but I'm not that into guinea pigs. They just fearfully say "weet weet" and poop on you. Hence the little white towels on the children's laps.

This is the Friendship Pavilion, for some reason.

Here I am shaking hands at the Friendship Pavilion. That's how you make friends.

After that, we wandered around the botanical gardens for a while. Outside, there were some fruit-bearing trees, and I picked a kumquat offa one, even though I figured you probably weren't supposed to do that. But when I ate it it tasted really bad, so I spat it out on the ground. Ed seemed to think that whole series of actions was very American.

Then we went into this building and looked at some photographs of the zoo and walked around the greenhouse for a bit. There was a waterfall.

Then I took some selfies and Ed was very surprised.

He photobombed me once.

Then there was this tree.

Then I kept trying to take some more selfies in front of these cool leaves, but I kept doing it too fast, and they all came out a blur of plant art, so then I took this sad selfie, but it doesn't look particularly sad, because I was in a hurry and I didn't have time to make it look sincere.

Cac and balls, HA HA HA.

I forget what the premise of this photo was, but it turned out nicely.

This is a view of everything we saw, from above.

We seriously almost left the zoo without seeing some important animals. The Ape House was disguised as a restroom and nursing area, so we didn't realize that if you went up the outdoor stairs and followed a path of painted footprints, you could actually see some apes. The chimps seemed kind of listless, though, and we didn't see their feeding show or whatever because we didn't want to wait around.

I don't really like banana that much, but I like it as a topping on cereal or ice cream.

We had seen the flamingos from afar, but it was through the ape house that we were able to get up close and take pictures.

Then we passed Momoko again, giving perhaps one fuck.

Then we started talking about Thundercats.

Then we saw the penguins before we left. We had tried to find them before, but their habitat was cleverly hidden.

Suddenly, a penguin shot out a nice stream of piss, and I took a picture of it dissipating in the water.

These penguins seem very happy, but they might not really be happy.

The End.