Little kids’ drawing contests are just as much fun here as anywhere else.

Octopus is on sale. The seafood section of a Japanese supermarket boggles the mind and challenges the stomach. Imagine a free sample tray except instead of little sausages or pineapple or something, it’s whole baby squids. They’re not even tasty.

This is ojiisan’s 91st birthday cake. His name is Ichiro, and when baseball comes on TV he goes, “Ah, Ichiro!” When eating, he’ll bust out with “Ahhh, tastyyy” every 5 minutes or so. Otherwise he’s a pretty quiet guy. He’s been smoking two packs of cigs a day for the past 73 years. He might make a good anti-anti-smoking spokesman. Next to him is obaasan, his arranged wife from back when Japanese wore kimono every day and the USA was still “Beikoku”.

From right to left, because that’s the way they do things here: Tets’s dad, Tets’s mom, Tets’s aunt, Tets’s aunt’s friend, Tets’s mom’s mom, Tets’s dad’s mom, Tets’s dad’s dad. Got that? These are the people with whom I spent my weekend, going shopping a lot and doing chores like cutting down trees. It’s a little different from hanging out with goth-lolis in Harajuku, for sure.

I can’t even tell you how much prettier this is in real life. The petals were all blowing around like in an anime.

I went up in the mountains in Nagano this weekend with Tets’s parents and grandparents. We went up to this shrine where they had some kind of ceremony for the Nagano Olympics a while back and, because it was so high up, the sakura were blooming. I missed Tokyo’s sakura this year by about a week, and was considerably disappointed. It was pretty exciting to find that they’re still going on in full force up there.

Blurry goth-lolis I approached on Tokyo’s famously trendy street.

All right, I knew when I got my digicam that I was going to be taking photos of any goth-lolis I could find. One thing that I was afraid of, though, is that eventually I’d ask someone I’d already asked, and they’d say, “you already took my picture!” and I’d be all embarrassed. Well, This girl is the first I had the courage to ask, and no more than five minutes after taking this photo, I approached her again, thinking she was someone else due to some particular circumstances, and asked if I could take her photo. She was very sweet and polite about telling me that I had just taken her photo, and that, no, she was not a different person. Well, I guess I’m glad I got it out of the way. Here she is, thanks go out to her, the first in what I hope will be a long and glorious tradition of goth-lolis.

Girl wringing her hands on the platform. I think she may have noticed me taking this photo. Heh.

Sampling the new Clammbon re-mix album. Sadly, it’s not as good as I’d hoped.

Probably playing Traffic, the standard Palm-based, in-class time-passer.

Meet Tets. He was my roommate in De Pere, and he’ll be my roommate again in Shinjuku, once our apartment opens up. Until then, I’m staying here with his parents. Tonight he’s staying here, too, because he missed the last train home.

Wow, look, there’s a cat next to my bass. Wow. It’s totally out of context.