This is the big gate thingo at the edge of Tokyo’s Chinatown. The nikuman you can get there is second to none. Mmmmmm.

Japanese people are apparently subject to the same overcrowding even after death.

Hiroko and I took a “marine bus” one day on the way back from Odaiba. It was neat.

If you are at all interested in Japanese comics, perhaps you’ve heard of the Comic Market, or Comike (I’m not sure where they got that abbreviation, either). For three days, twice a year, thousands and thousands of geeks converge on the Tokyo Big Site convention center to buy and sell homemade comic books of surprisingly high quality. This is a tiny, tiny fraction of the people in attendance, at the cosplay square. It was a truly overwhelmingly geeky experience.

Hiroko came back to Japan on Christmas. This is the first Christmas I’ve spent away from home, and it’s really weird. Apparently KFC has convinced the Japanese that it’s traditional to eat fried chicken on Christmas, and encourages people to reserve big buckets of it ahead of time. Christmas cake is another apparently invented tradition. I have no idea what’s going on there. Anyway, here’s the blurry display board at the airport.

Much of my life for the past couple of months has consisted of hanging out with Andy. Much of my time of hanging out with Andy has consisted of playing video games. It started when I introduced him to Xenosaga, and then escalated into my picking up a used Dreamcast and the first two Sakura Taisen games. As you can see, we now have the Dreamcast, Sakura Taisen with Visual Memory Unit, Sakura Taisen 2 with Puru Puru Pack, Sakura Taisen 3 with music box, Sakura Taisen 4 with cell phone straps, Sakura Taisen Online with keyboard, the official Sakura Taisen controller, Shenmue, Sonic Adventure, Space Channel 5, and Sega Rally 2. The current state of the Dreamcast allowed us to get all of this stuff for quite cheap. Andy knows everything there is to be known about Japan. He’s also fluent in Japanese and will probably end up doing translation for a game or comic company. If that’s not awesome I don’t know what awesome is.

Japan has some cool ways of celebrating Christmas.

I was surprised and very pleased to find that Apple has set up this lovely kiosk on the southeast side of Shinjuku station. A girl came up to help me, but I explained to her that I’m already very, very into Macintosh. I got the impression that I’d been a Mac fanatic for longer than she’d even known what a Mac was. She had me take a fun little survey, though, that was like, “are you considering switching to Macintosh?” I laughed.

Three dudes I know from IRC came from Singapore and stayed at our apartment for five days. We wandered around Tokyo and did a lot of video game shopping. Here we all are at the shrine. Left to right, it’s me, Drew, Qiang, and Sean. We had a considerable amount of fun.

One of this cat’s favorite places to hang out is here on the ledge of the guard’s booth at the entrance to our campus.

Tokyo has a huge number of stray cats. They like to hang out in places like our school’s campus. This one white cat is around every day, basking or napping or doing any of the other really intense things cats do. It seems to have some kind of relationship going with the guard dude you see coming out of the library.