The shop had a shelf and a little table in the back, where we saw about 100 notebooks filled with visitors’ comments and drawings. Some people wrote for pages and pages, some people drew huge, pro-quality fan-art, and some people even stapled in original, full-color, astounding works that they probably spent hours working on at home. Most entries had some sort of little drawing at least, like the Sakura-donating-blood in the entry above ours. My entry, in the middle, reads: “I came from America to visit this shop! It’s even better than I’d imagined. I’m not very good at drawing, but if I was, I would draw Kouran and Hanabi. Sakura Taisen is the greatest; keep up the good work. -jetfuel” Andy took like half an hour to draw his huge ST/USA flag, featuring stars in the colors of the characters from each game. While he was drawing I made my way around the store about ten times and agonized over which goods I wanted to buy. Eventually I decided on a nice Sakura Taisen t-shirt, Kouran pin, file, and zipper-dangle-thing, and a Hanabi laminated card with a love-detector thingo on the back, which I use for a bookmark. We then drew ourselves saluting the flag, made our purchases, and headed across the way to the Sakura Cafe.

Sakura Taisen dolls and models are abundant. I’m working on two of the steam-powered-robot models you see on the bottom shelf.

For only several hundred thousand yen, you can have this life-sized model of Iris. Behind her are very expensive costumes from the stage show.

How many video games have their own toaster? Do you understand how much of a legacy this is?

Well, we finally made it to the Sakura Taisen shop after about a year of wanting to visit. It was even wackier than we’d hoped. That a niche video game can have its own store and cafe open year-round pleases me much. If you are so inclined, you can spend 8000 yen on a model of your favorite character, or several tens of thousands of yen on a replica of Erica’s machine gun from Sakura Taisen 3. If you’ve got time to kill and you want to read about just why I like this game so much, there is a [stupid essay][1]. [1]: http://jetfuel.metalbat.com/sakura.txt

On our way to the Sakura Taisen shop, we were pretty hungry, so we stopped into a McDonald’s to relive our old pastime of having cheeseburgers. What we didn’t know was that we were entering one of the remaining stores in McDonald’s failed “McDonald’s Dining” experiment. They set up a few stores with nice decor and an upscale menu, in hopes of attracting a more choosy demographic, perhaps to compete with nicer places like Mos Burger. Instead they got a place where you can pay way too much money for way too little food. I suppose it is like Mos Burger in that you spend 1000 yen or more and still feel very hungry after you’ve eaten.

Here’s that hustling, bustling joint Shinjuku Station. This is during one of its less busy times of the day, and this is just one tiny part of its truly huge underground complex of tunnels. It’s like a small city.

Lots of people hear “ramen” and think of 11-cent Maruchan instant ramen packets at the grocery store. As you can see, those are to real ramen what Spaghetti-Os are to a real Italian pasta. The egg is my favorite bit. Now I am hungry.

The ramen joint we usually patronized was closed throughout the duration of my stay, so we had to find another high-quality place. We decided to give this place Kohran a try, mainly because it had the same name (phonetically, anyway) of my favorite Sakura Taisen character. Andy had always avoided it because he never saw anyone eating in there, which I found to be very Japanese of him. Japanese seem to judge ramen places based on the length of the line waiting to get in. If I ever open a ramen shop, I’ll make sure only to have one table and no inside waiting area; I’ll make a killing! Despite Andy’s apprehension, when we went in, we found that it was actually a nice place with a friendly dude and a solid bowl of ramen.

More testament to the idea that in order to create an artistic picture, all you need is a lens flare. This is the main street nearest Andy’s place, near the Matsuya where I accidentally left my digicam overnight. Thanks to the stupefyingly honest citizens of Tokyo, I was able to walk in the next morning and claim my brand-new 27,000 yen camera. Amazing.

Here’s the inside of the Yodobashi Camera. This is pretty much what all major electronics stores look like: very brightly lit, lots of signage, and lots of little kiosks with all the products lined up side by side.

This is what a Japanese arcade looks like. The machines are sit-down, your opponent sits on the other side where you can’t see, and there are actually so many people in there that you can’t move. Andy is playing some Virtua Fighter 4, for which you get your own identification card to insert into the game whenever you play. It keeps track of your stats, and you can earn stuff for your character as you play more and more. You can also go online with your phone or computer and check out your stats and find other players in your area. Apparently you can also earn turf by beating people who hang out in certain arcades around Japan. A whole culture has built up around the game and it’s just fascinating to me. There was a guy there whose character was named, “Le Big Mac”. Pulp Fiction fans around the world, unite.

When I buy video game systems against my better judgment because of Andy, it rains. This is right after I bought my red-and-black Game Boy Advance; we went to Yodobashi so Andy could pick up his silver one and so that I could get some accessories, and while we were in there it started pouring. It’s fun to watch Japanese people avoid the rain as if it would melt their flesh.

We went into the “nice” cheap sushi joint pictured in [this old context photo][1], and man oh man could we tell the difference. Plates were between 100 and 350 yen, which is pretty pricey, but it was quite worth it. I’m sure this looks gross to a lot of people but the thing you are looking at is vying to be my most favorite food of all time. Mmmmmm. [1]: index.pl?767

This is the pillow Andy always uses for sleeping and for leaning against during our epic gaming sessions. Boy, I wonder what Andy’s up to these days. I bet all his fingers got chopped off in a freak pencil-sharpener incident and that’s why he hasn’t been able to send me a simple “I’m alive” email in the last month. Or maybe the reason he hasn’t been able to send me an “I’m alive” email is because he’s _not_ alive.

Between Andy’s apartment and the station is this little shopping street called “Niko Niko Road”, where there is a Lawson convenience store and some little restaurants and food stores. Back between two buildings is this little unmarked booth which opens at night and stays open pretty late. Every now and then you’ll see someone walk up to it and make some sort of transaction. We have no idea what it is, so we made up an elaborate story that it’s where freelance assassins can bring the heads of various important people and collect their bounties.

Here’s our meal of yakiniku. You get all these raw meat bits and stick them on the flaming-hot grill thingy. Before you freak out, family members: yes, that is a beer. Andy makes me drink beer when we eat yakiniku. Bleh. This is kind of our special-occasion meal; we had this for Christmas and for Thanksgiving last year. The wagyuu we got, while expensive, was probably the best meat I’ve ever had. They do not mess around when it comes to beef.

This is pretty much an average train-inside. Sometimes there are few enough people that you can sit down, sometimes there are so many people your feet are barely touching the ground, but usually it’s about this crowded. You eventually get used to holding a book or a Game Boy right in front of your face with your arms pressed against yourself, and some people can even sleep standing up.

The wall store is an essential part of any East-Shinjuku game-shopping run. I don’t think I’ve ever known of anyone actually buying anything here; Liberty down the street has a much better selection and better prices. But the charm of a store that actually has no inside, that consists entirely of a wall on the side of a building, is hard to resist.

Ah, Trader. As far as we are concerned this is the heart of Shinjuku game-shopping. The West-Shinjuku game-shopping loop starts and ends with Trader. This tiny little shop contains a lot of products and has some surprising deals. It was here that Qiang, Sean, and Drew finally convinced me to buy a Dreamcast and the first two Limited Edition Sakura Taisen games a year ago. This time around I had a similar obsessing session about the red-and black Game Boy Advance SP Limited Edition that comes with Bokura no Taiyou. I wouldn’t have gotten it, but Andy was urging me to play Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles (which requires a GBA for each player) with him. Even then I was still reluctant until I found Digicommunication used at Sofmap just down the street. That’s the game Qiang showed me that made me want a GBA in the first place, and I couldn’t resist any longer. I don’t even like Digi Charat, but a game in which you run a character-goods shop is too neat. So I bought it all, plus Made in Wario and Sakura Taisen GB. I’m weak.

Here’s Andy’s good buddy Gou on the platform at Higash-Kouenji, Andy’s station. I used to come here almost every day to play Sakura Taisen at his apartment. I even got myself a teikiken (monthly ticket thingo) that claimed I lived here, so that I could come to Andy’s place more cheaply. Gou hung out with us a lot during my trip this time. We played THE CHIKYUUBOUEIGUN, a part of the SIMPLE 2000 series. This company puts out very basic-quality games for 2000 yen; usually they’re board games or sports games or whatever, but this time it’s a defend-the-earth-from-50’s-style-monsters game. The game’s simplicity is charming and the crappy gameplay is addictive. Gou works at the One Piece store in Ikebukuro (I love that a comic/anime/game can have its own store; more on the Sakura Taisen store later) so for homework we watched One Piece anime episodes with him. It’s actually quite good stuff. Gou and Andy are movie buffs, so we also went to see acting/directing legend Beat Takeshi’s latest, Zatouichi, on its opening day. More on that later, too.

This is Andy’s apartment building itself. Tons of these little six- or eight-room apartment buildings are scattered around Tokyo. Well, just one of them would be “tons”, but I mean there are a lot.

This is the view from Andy’s apartment door. Tokyo is like the Universe: it looks exactly the same from all locations and in all directions. This could be pretty much any part of Tokyo, because I think there are no zoning regulations; people can just build whatever they want wherever they want to build it. It didn’t take us long to get back into our routine of waking up pretty late, venturing into Shinjuku, wandering around all day, finding dinner, and then coming back for all-night video game sessions, with breaks to visit the Lawson for snacks and drinks. The reason I haven’t posted any of these Japan pictures yet is that I was supposed to introduce an all-new version of the site that would include Andy’s own pictures, taken with my old digicam, alongside my own. We even took pictures of each other taking pictures of each other with our digicams, and those were going to be the first two photos on the new version of the site. I rewrote the whole site and moved all of the old data into a MySQL database and everything, but for some reason I haven’t heard from Andy even once in the two weeks since I got back. I’m playing a little game in which I try to see how many times I can email him before I finally get a response. I finally broke down and re-modified the site back to just feature one photo at a time. Oh well, at least it’s running on MySQL now instead of text files.

After dinner we took the car for a drive around the Tokyo metropolitan area. Cars are not nearly as ubiquitous in Japan as they are in the USA, so driving is something of a rare leisure activity for many people. Much like Leslie and I used to do back in high school, we just picked a direction and drove until we had no idea where we were. I think we eventually ended up in Saitama. The whole time I was looking out the window and freaking out about mundane little things that I missed about Japan. We passed a store with a huge orange sign, “DOG WIZ”, but I was not able to get a proper picture of it. That would have been a good one. Andy also told me all about how he’s become a super-important guy at Tecmo, and about all of the upcoming projects he’s been heavily involved in, about none of which I’m allowed to tell anyone.

Andy convinced me to come out to Japan at the beginning of September. I took some time off of work (I now have negative vacation hours), ordered a ticket, and went out there. I’d been really missing Japan since the very day I came back in January. Everything I saw had me feeling pretty nostalgic: “Ohhh man there’s a Mos Burger! Augh, look at the vending machine! I love those vending machines!!” Andy picked me up at the airport in a rented Subaru and we went to pick up his friend Gou in Kinshichou (Japanese joke: the town where everything is prohibited!). We then headed right for Shinjuku so I could pick up a nice new camera with which to document my trip. It only took me a couple of minutes of browsing at Yodobashi Camera to choose an orange Sony CyberShot U-30. From there, we went to this nice Chinese restaurant. You think you’ve had sweet & sour pork, but look at this: it’s the real thing. Man oh man was it tasty.

Because of some reasons, Andy had a big box full of Japanese games for various consoles sitting around in North Carolina. Because the three people I hang out with most were all in Japan this past summer, Andy decided to have his buddy send me all these games to keep me from getting too bored. His friend got sick and it took a while, but the games finally showed up, and there really are a lot of them. Now I have mountains of PlayStation, Dreamcast, Saturn, N64, SNES, and even Neo-Geo games in my apartment. There were about ten worth keeping, and at least one truly awesome game (Kita e for Dreamcast, from Hiroi Ouji and Red, the creators of Sakura Taisen).

Much of my life is work now, but much of work goes on behind closed doors and involves secret computery stuff. I would love to take photos of some of the stuff in our data center, but I don’t think ShopKo would appreciate having images of our infrastructure on the web. Here’s one aspect of work that’s not so sensitive: Jon chilling.

Andy, one of the coolest guys I’ve ever known, sent me this care package of games to keep me busy while girlfriend Hiroko and roommate Jon and friend Peter were away in Japan. I’m going to paste in my impressions from the email I sent Andy shortly after receiving them (with helpful references to which game is which): This is the slowest day of work I’ve had since I was the lab attendant at St. Norbert on Saturday nights. I thought I’d tell you my first impressions of each of the games that arrived yesterday. These will be in the order I played them. Sakura Taisen mem card _(lower-left, pink case and pink card)_: seems slightly more compact than the Sony one. The pink label bits are inside the clear plastic so they’ll never get messed up. The stickers are very nice; I just hope that my writing doesn’t smudge on them. It’s understandable that they only had the six original girls, but I wish I could have had a Hanabi sticker for my 2nd mem card. The holder is cool and my PS1 card fits in there too, and I’ll probably use it from now on, even though there will rarely be any time that I actually need it. I can’t imagine when you would be carrying 4 memory cards but not carrying 4 games to put the cards in. Heh. Roommate Novel Satou Yuka_(upper-left)_: Paging through the manual I found something that, like photos of voice actors, will never appear in US game manuals: a sheet of stickers. It looks like some of them were made to fit on a VMU so I might stick one on there. I actually got pretty into the game before I realized that I should be trying out all the other games. I was kinda surprised by the novel format… I guess I knew when I saw the title kind of what it would be like, but it’s a lot better than I’d expected. I actually tried this one first because I thought I would like it the least (outside of Crazy Taxi, anyway). But the novel format doesn’t hurt it much at all. The voices and the art are quite good. It’s also interesting to have a gal game with only one main girl. It remains to be seen whether you’ll also be able to go after your female childhood friend, or whether she’s just support. It looks like this will be the game I try to get through first. It seems the most straightforward. Basically the idea is that you live out in the inaka, your parents are outta the country and you have the whole house to yourself, when a distant female relative arrives and asks to stay in your house for the summer. Then hijinks ensue. Moero! Justice Gakuen_(right-center, orange)_: It’s really nice to have a Justice Gakuen game on a recent system. The old games were fun but the graphics were pretty painful. Now the models look really smooth. It looks to have nearly as many options as Nekketsu Seishun Nikki 2 (the one game with the most options I’ve ever seen), but the high-school sim has been replaced by some sort of board game. Qiang says it’s his favorite game of all time, though, so it’s probably pretty high-quality. The new girl who fights with a violin is right up my alley. Kaen Seibo_(top-center-right, girl with outstretched arms on yellow)_: This seems to be the most grown-up game of them all. The opening song is pretty awesome, and the art is really nice. The game itself starts with many screens of difficult(visually and linguistically) green-on-black text. The game system itself looks really deep and interesting. I’ll probably save this one for later because it’s so involved. I think I’ll really like it though. Abarenbou Princess_(bottom-center, PS2 game)_: Tom showed me the first half hour of this game but I’d forgotten how cool it is. Its anime-like touches and little friendly touches are awesome. I was laughing out loud a lot at this game. You played through this already, yes? This will be a game that I’ll have to include in my Japanese game-demos for people, along with Rez, Ikaruga, and ST3. Roommate Novel Inoue Ryouko_(top-center-left, girl on white)_: I thought this was the earlier of the two Roommate games but research proved me wrong. So I’ll be starting with the other one. I didn’t spend a ton of time on this one because it was pretty much the same as the other but with a different story. It looks pretty good though. Shenmue II_(left-center, cream)_: Well, it’s pretty much Shenmue, except it’s in Hong Kong and it’s got a couple of updated features. I didn’t get too far into this one because I want to save it for when I’m really ready to dive in and get engrossed again. I’m sure it will be awesome. Yume no Tsubasa_(upper-right, girl on green)_: I was a little pissed at this game because it kept going to the next line of text faster than I could read it. Turns out there are two modes, one where you hit the button to advance and one where you just watch as the words go by. You can change modes on the fly, and you can change the auto speed too. This seems to be pretty much another visual novel, and it’s made by a company that seems to specialize in them. There is lots of omake and cool features like custom window colors, the ability to go back and read (and hear) all of the text in the game that you’ve seen so far, and more. They (KID) had some promotional stuff for their other games like Ever7 and Memories Off. If this game turns out to be awesome I’ll probably ask for those games too. Crazy Taxi 2_(lower-right)_: yet to put this one in. Maybe it was the excess of Crazy Taxi 2 promotional kiosks everywhere I went, but for some reason I don’t feel excited about this game. For 300 yen, though, you can’t go wrong. Not included in the email was Rez _(center)_, the PS2 version of which I already had. Hiroko picked up the Dreamcast version for me, and [hachi][1] bought my PS2 version. Awesome. [1]: http://www.kuiki.net

I was thinking about picking up a new TV to replace the old junky one we had, and thanks to some sale-timing issues and the ShopKo teammate discount, roomie Jon and I were able to procure this nice Samsung flat one for a decent price. When Matt and I got it home from the store, though, after precariously strapping it into my open trunk by one corner, it didn’t fit in our entertainment center. I noted the apparent providence of the ShopKo final return center sale only two days later, and went in search of an appropriate television-holding structure. There it was, the last remaining one, already assembled for display, huge, lovely, and $46. _Then_ while Bryce (local kid named after 3D landscape-rendering software who terrifyingly reminds me of myself at age 11 and invites himself over frequently) and I were setting it up, we realized that without a switcher box, it would be a nightmare to manage all of our inputs. So we took a little trip over to the mall and got a game-switcher at GameStop ($20 very very well-spent) and another PS2 S-video cable ($2 well spent). Now we have all of the games and everything hooked up and all of our media fits inside the cabinet. Whee.

On my way down to Oshkosh to hang out with [hachi][1], [ovaltine][2], and [deus][3] to play [DDR][4], there was a really violent storm that reduced visibility to about one yard. This is the view coming out of it. [1]: http://www.kuiki.net [2]: http://www.freshlydead.com [3]: http://www.celestialfactions.net [4]: http://freshlydead.com/photos/ddr/?M=D

I was pulling these out of the fridge when I realized that most people in the world probably have no idea what they are. I sure didn’t, until I came to Wisconsin. These are cheese curds. They are cheese at some point in the cheese-making process before it becomes cheese. They are tasty, and are supposed to squeak when you eat them. I guess there are some things about Wisconsin that would be interesting and new to outsiders, after all.

Here’s the Genius Bar of the new Apple Store. It’s neat.

The weirdos on the left here are bicycle activists, and the weirdos on the right are Apple aficionados. I came down to Chicago to see the opening of the Apple Store on Michigan Avenue. This was one of the first stores that Apple announced, and I’d been planning to apply for a job there _to make money for my year in Japan_. To give you some perspective, I got back from my year in Japan seven months ago. So it’s been a while. Anyway, I called up Brad and asked him to accompany me. I thought that after having conquered the Tokyo train system, getting on the CTA Orange Line to go downtown would be a piece of cake. Well, it’s hard to find places when there are no informational postings whatsoever. We eventually got there and found a line going around the whole building twice. Brad held our spot while I went to Walgreens, where the rudest clerk I have ever been “served” by sold me some pretzels and pop. While we were waiting in line, this huge bicycle herd came through. We were yelled at, “WHAT ARE YOU WAITING IN LINE FOR!!” dozens of times as the cyclists went by. Apparently on the last Friday of every month they ride through Chicago weaving in and out of traffic and yelling about how awesome bikes are. It was a pretty weird clash of subcultures.

They were giving away [iSights][1] at the opening. They had these boxes full of folded slips of paper, on very few of which were printed some winning message. Some of the Apple employees were handing them out like nothing, and some others would scowl at you just for coming near the box. We didn’t win one. [1]: http://www.apple.com/isight

Here’s Tony, rhythm guitarist for [Shattered Angel][1], diagnosing my crappy joystick. I bought it at GameStop in Appleton; the guy was raving about how they only have one SKU for returned joysticks and so I could get this great expensive stick for only $15. I bought it and was really excited until I realized that down and left were really dull and you had to slam the joystick to get them to register. Tony, a gaming expert, took the stick apart to find the problem. We tried to fix it with some tape, but there was no hope left for this stick. I ended up buying _another_ one from a _different_ GameStop for the same $15, but it too had down/left problems. How will I ever get good at Guilty Gear XX? Jon destroys me in that game daily. [1]: http://www.shatteredangel.com/

This photo comes to you courtesy of my sister Katy. She encountered these resplendent creatures while on vacation with her family in Michigan. Remembering my photos on this very site of similarly-wacked-out specimens in Tokyo, she stopped them for a picture. Apparently they were very enthused that someone had taken notice of them. I’ve spent the last two weekends at home. That is, I’ve spent them in the Chicagoland area, and have split that time between my home and the home of my friends Brad and Jeff. Much video gaming has transpired. I’ve gotten my nephews pretty into Capcom Vs. SNK 2 and Moero! Justice Gakuen. It was when they asked to play some games with me that I realized how much of my games require lots of patience and/or reading. They kept asking me to beat up the old ladies in Shenmue, or to skip past the “talking parts” in Sakura Taisen. I hope that someday at least one of them will be able to appreciate these games. I really like the idea of being something of a video-game mentor to one of them. According to my sister Clare, her son Aaron is a near replica of me at the same age, and is probably my best bet for a protege. Anyway, until then, the more action-oriented games are plenty of fun.

These guys swear at you while delivering your goods.

Many, many people came out to see Pearl Jam. It’s fascinating to me that they remain as popular as they are after all these years, without being in the media very much if at all. My surprise at their popularity is not due to any lack in the quality of their music, though; they really rock.

I’m not sure why.

After a 12-hour night shift, I immediately got in my car and drove down to Chicago to catch the flight to Detroit for MacHack. Then after 3 straight days of that, I flew back to Chicago and was picked up by my cousin Stephen at the airport to go up to Alpine Valley and see Pearl Jam. They really put that place in an out-of-the-way area. This is pretty much what it looks like for miles all around.

Heh.

Many geeks with many Macs. This is a small fraction of the number of geeks with Macs in attendance.

Peter, Mike, and I, three Mac geeks, made the trip to Detroit for [MacHack][1] this year. It was pretty cool, though all of our hack ideas, including rearranging the coins in the fountain into a Mac OS logo, failed. This is our room. [1]: http://www.machack.com

Roomie Jon, buddy Peter, and girlfriend Hiroko are all in Japan. I’ve spent my summer more or less by myself, which is kind of cool but mostly crappy. Andy has gone beyond the call of whatever to provide me with fun stuff do do, but I’ll get to that in a later photo. The day I took Jon and Hiroko to the airport, we found this collection of Magic cards just sitting outside one of the doors of our apartment building. When I got back, it was still there. I grabbed the cards and left a note saying that I had them, and to come get them. When I came home from work the kid living downstairs came for them. He was mildly grateful, and apathetically accepted my invitation for a few games. His apartment was the kind of nerd-nest I thought only existed in my imagination: D&D books, Magic cards, and fantasy novels scattered everywhere. The kid himself wore a faded Darth Maul shirt, a sight that almost hurts my eyes just to see it. I tried to engage him in conversation while he tore me apart with his perfectly formulated decks, but he deflected all social contact in favor of talk about the game itself. I left, defeated in both the contest and in my attempts at friendliness, offering halfheartedly another game someday. I didn’t even get a reward, either. I could’ve kept ’em all.

It’s been a long time since I last posted and there is really a lot going on. First of all, I’ve kind of graduated from St. Norbert. I technically still have two credits to earn, which I’m working on now, but they let me participate in the ceremony. Now I’m working at ShopKo (Shop-Knockout as my sister Katy calls it), in Operations. It’s not exactly the job that I interviewed for, and they’re not sure when I’ll be moved over to that job, so for now I’m monitoring batch processing and mainframes for 12.5 hours a day, sometimes at night. It’s very stressful and leaves me with nearly zero hours to work on my own projects. It pays the bills, though. I’m starting to wonder if part of being grown up is not having time to do things you like. I really hope that’s just a misconception. Anyway, work hasn’t yet worn down my soul to the point where I can’t appreciate a mini-meadow of dandelions next to the highway exit.

THE AMERICAN DREAM: SORRY, PLEASE TRY AGAIN. This is from the inside of a box of Kellogg’s Product 19, which I think might be the coolest-named cereal there is.

Wayy up at the top of this dome in the Art Center, there’s an electrical outlet. Some day I want to go up there and plug something in.

Here’s Hiroko’s lithography of me, in the process of being prepared for printing. It’s a very complicated procedure that still baffles me, involving lots of different chemicals.

These are the iBooks we used for one of the presentations in our CS350: Event Programming class. Look at all their majesty!

This is one of the oldest buildings on our campus here at St. Norbert. Apparently it used to be a high school. Now it’s the mostly-unused Pennings Activity Center. We came over here to watch the electric-train-based capstone presentations by this year’s Computer Science majors.

Our friend Tomoko met a guy who fought in World War II in the Philippines. Apparently he killed some Japanese soldier there, and found this flag in the dead guy’s helmet. He took it and kept it in hope of someday returning it to the dead soldier’s family. Now it’s Tomoko’s task to try to find this dude’s family based on the faint writing on the blood-stained flag. Written all over the flag are phrases of encouragement like _hisshou_ (certain victory) and _hyakusen hyakushou_ (one hundred battles, one hundred victories). On the left is a map of exactly where this guy was killed. This stuff just radiates history.

These are some ladybugs that I found lounging around in my brother’s garage.

This is some 20-something-years old bike that my brother restored for use by his kids.

This is terrifyingly hilarious.

I love these things.

I’m not entirely sure what this thing is. I went a little too far on the way to my brother Dave’s house and came across it out in the middle of some farmland. It looks like some sort of deconstructed water tower.

Here are Jon and Sangik playing Go on our new set. After we went to all that trouble to build our own Go set, our friend Taira came back from Japan and came by with this very old, very expensive Go set. He told us that he didn’t need it anymore and that we could have it. We were appropriately speechless. It is _nice_.

This is what my Algorithm Analysis and Advanced Data Structures class looks like. I’m pretty graduated now, and I’m still not sure how I feel about not ever having to take another class again. I guess it’s kind of like coming back from Japan: I thought it would be some big deal but it ended up just feeling really… normal.

We stopped for some Culver’s on the way back up to Green Bay, and there was a huge ol’ fire blazing right next to the street. Turns out it was lit on purpose for firefighters’ training.

As a kid, I used to walk up to this bridge quite a bit. I’d then climb down to the creek and follow it to my godfather’s house. There was one backyard that I’d pass that had what seemed to me like a ton of playground equipment, and for some reason I equated it with Wonderland and was equally intrigued by and terrified of it. Anyway, Hiroko and I took ten of my thirteen nieces and nephews up to this bridge to throw twigs into the creek. I remembered a lot of my childhood as I hung out with my nieces and nephews this Easter weekend. I thought back to the times I spent with my own cousins, and tried to equate everything I was seeing in these little kids to something out of my own past. It’s weird because I feel like I’m now a part of the grown-ups in my family, sitting around in the living room and talking calmly, but I also still feel like one of the kids, more than willing to go build Legos or sneak away from everyone and just read my book somewhere. I hope I don’t ever lose the connection I still have with little-kid-me. One thing that has been bothering me is whether these kids have as many chances to be creative as we did. Growing up, my cousins and I had intuitive, simple devices like tape recorders, analog video cameras, and Macintoshes with which to create our own worlds. Those tools played a huge part in shaping the kinds of people we grew up (are growing up) to be. Apple’s iMovie would be great for any kids today looking to make their own movies; I know that we at age 12 would have given anything to be able to do with our analog Handycams the things iMovie does. But there isn’t a single current-generation Macintosh among any of these kids’ families. I also wish there was still a programming environment as brilliantly simple as HyperCard for these kids to discover. We made dozens of games of epic proportions in HyperCard, but I don’t know what a kid would use to make a game today. It’s actually really worrying me that the best chance they might have to get into this kind of creation might be some crappy BASIC compiler on Windows XP and Microsoft Movie Maker.

…Well?

It was foggy/cloudy.

This is the Chicago Board of Trade, in case you have an affliction that prevents you from reading text encoded in JPEGs. I used to work here, at an internet company called YesTrader. It was certainly fun and beneficial to work at a dot com during the bubble thingo, and to get out before the place imploded. Hopefully my time there counts toward my required regular-job quota and now I can move on to the fun stuff early. Right?

Here are some anti-war marching folks in downtown Chicago.

Here’s the train I used to take every day downtown to work. I’ve spent many hours writing, working on sites, listening to MDs, or watching anime on this train. Today, though, Hiroko, Sangik, and I have come downtown for fun and to get their Amtrak tickets. I’d be going with them on their train trip across the USA this summer, but I am rather in the hole that you get in when you don’t have any money, or when you owe other people money that you don’t have.

Out the headache-green-tinted windows of the Metra commuter train, you can see hives of humanity much like the ones in Japan. I think this is probably my favorite hive of all. It’s got to be the bleakest architecture I’ve ever seen, though some other downtown Chicago buildings can compete.

I’m in an Evolution of Jazz class. It was the most interesting-sounding GS10 course available. One day this trombone dude by the name of Paul McKee, from the apparently-famous Woody Herman band, came to talk to us. He told us about struggling as a jazz musician, and then jammed a bit with our professor and a few members of the SNC Jazz Band. It was neat, but not nearly as cool as the End-of-the-World final concert of Nihon University’s Jazz & Fusion club at last year’s culture festival. I’ll never forget those folks stomping around the tiny little makeshift coffee house, yelling, playing, and crying that this was the last time they’d ever all play together. That kind of thing’ll blow your mind.

One of the main differences I found between life in Japan and life in the USA is this: in Japan, you walk there, or you take the train; in the USA, you drive. I suppose if you live in a particularly rural area of Japan or a particularly convenient urban area of the USA, this is not always true, but it’s very true in my experience. While carrying my camera around the streets and rails of Japan, I found plenty of neat things to photograph. Now that I’m back here, though, it seems that half of the interesting things I see are out my car windows. I’m trying to make it a habit to keep my cammy at hand when driving, now. Hiroko and I came back to Chicago for Spring Break. Our friend Tomoko is moving to California, and needed a ride to O’Hare Airport. The day before she left, St. Patrick’s Day, actually, we went to Woodfield Mall in Schaumburg so that the girls could buy smelly bath things, and I could ogle the new PowerBooks and receive new rubbber feet for my own at the [Apple Store][1]. This weird license plate was photographed exiting that mall’s parking lot. On the way back, we took a wrong turn and ended up at Mitsuwa, the Japanese mall that we’d wanted to visit but didn’t know exactly how to get there. [1]: http://www.apple.com/retail

Tokyo does not look like this. One of the reasons I thought it would be a good idea to continue posting photographs is that perhaps the place where I’m from could be interesting to someone. At first it seems obvious that no one would want to look at pictures of Wisconsin because, come on, Wisconsin is _normal_. But Japanese reactions to our huge open spaces with nothing but cows and barns for miles made me realize that as interesting as Tokyo is to Midwestern USAmericans, perhaps the USAmerican Midwest can be to Tokyoans. On my [personal site][1], I have a links section that contains a heading for “Masterpieces”. Just recently I’ve found a new link to add to this tiny list, and it’s to [Tokyopia][2]. The site itself is nice, but what I really dig are Tim Rogers’ “Adventures in Tokyo Wonderland” articles. They have the same rare atmosphere that keeps me up reading helplessly all night. [1]: http://jetfuel.metalbat.com [2]: http://www.tokyopia.com

One of the first things I did when I got back to my own house for the first extended visit in a year, was to set up my old Macintosh Plus and see what I could still do with it. My cousins and I created many megabytes of adventure games and assorted other diversions, and I wanted to know how much I still had and how much could be salvaged. I’d love to make a CD containing all of our old games and some sort of emulation environment that would allow us to play them. That’s my must-preserve-and-encapsulate-everything instinct. Anyway, at some point the old Mac Plus mouse and my iPod got next to one another, and as I was packing up to go back to Green Bay, I saw them sitting there together like old friends. For a moment, I could feel the progress of one brilliant company’s industrial design over the course of almost 20 years. The two devices serve completely different functions and come from different decades, but the simplicity and sense of purpose that distinguishes Apple design are apparent in both of them. They are sturdy, with no unnecessary lines or excess features. You put one of them in your hand and within thirty seconds you understand what to do with it, and then you can almost forget that it’s there. I can’t even tell you how much I love Apple.

This is the press they use to make lithograpy-prints at school. I’m happy to know that big iron machines like this are around.

Hiroko likes to pick up Japanese fashion magazines whenever she can, and she did so when we went down to Chicago last weekend. Over the years I’ve found myself paging through them more than once. My favorite is Non-No, and I’ve become fond of one of their regular models, Mori Kimiko. Hiroko’s roommate Tomoko knows this, and took a photo of her photo while Hiroko was borrowing my camera. So here she is. If you think it’s bad for me to like her, you should hear the number of guys Hiroko fawns over in a day.

This is the process of fixing my lung. In the upper left picture, my lung is the thing on the bottom, and the inside of my chest wall is the thing on the top. As you can see, there is a bunch of air in between them. In the second picture, the doctor is touching my lung with a metal thing. In the third, he is scraping the heck out of my chest wall with a sharp metal thing. In the fourth, he has sprayed talc in there to irritate the tissue. Apparently, when they suck all the air out, the scraped-up and irritated tissue will heal up in such a way that it fuses to the lung, preventing it from collapsing away anymore. That’s the idea, anyway. I hope it works.

I spent week in bed at the hospital. Many nift people came to visit: my parents, my brother Dave and his family, Hiroko, Tomoko, Jon, Peter, Peter’s surgeon-dad. They bore gifts as varied as Cheez-It, Kit Kat, Twilight Zone DVDs, Mad Libs, and the first book in George R. R. Martin’s _A Song of Ice and Fire_, which is highly recommended. I’ve always been interested in microcosms, like long plane trips and schools after-hours. My hospital room was the tiniest microcosm: me phasing between sleep and reading, with morphine on command after my operation, nurses coming in and out, delivering food and such once I was allowed to eat, visitors coming in to listen to my drugged-out babbling. It was an interesting week.

I have a thing with my left lung, where it likes to collapse. Well, it _tends_ to collapse. If it liked collapsing, it probably wouldn’t hurt so much every time it collapsed. The first time was a couple of years ago when it just up and collapsed on me at work, and I had to go into the hospital to get the escaped air sucked out of me through a tube. Actually, after I had been in there for about a day, someone walked in, looked at the sucking device, acted surprised, and then plugged the device into the wall. No kidding. It happened a couple of times in Japan, and I was treated by a Dr. E. Honda. Some will find that hilarious. When it happened again upon my return, I was advised by my friend Peter’s surgeon-dad to get myself admitted to the hospital. There they hooked me up to a variety of devices. This is the view from my window, as photographed by my dad. St. Vincent Hospital is rumored to be the tallest building in Green Bay.

Now that I’m living with Jon, I’ve been doing a lot of cooking. Jon is a healthy person, and likes to make his own meals when possible. So I’ve learned much from him and his George Foreman Grill. That thing is great. If you have some food and you want it to be hot, you can like just put it on there and it will get totally hot. Anyway, here’s an onion that Jon cut into a neat cube-like shape.

These are the goofiest grapes.

Hiroko goes to figure-drawing and portrait-drawing classes each week at the University of Wisconsin, Green Bay. One night she invited me to her figure-drawing class, where I got to draw a naked guy. Allow me to remind you that I have interest in neither drawing nor naked guys. Anyway, it was not for naught; as I got this fascinating image of the inside of the elevator there. The handprints in the wall-carpet all around you make it very creepy.

Our school just replaced most of the computers in its labs. The Blue-and-White G3s and Indigo iMacs were replaced with eMacs, and the ugly old crappy beige Compaqs were replaced with ugly new crappy gray Compaqs. I love how computer companies look at Apple and go: “Oh man, they’re silver now! We gotta make ours silver!” “I thought they were supposed to be candy-colored and translucent!” “No that was last year! Hurry up and make our computers silver!” “Uh, wouldn’t that cost us money?” “You’re right, just mold our existing front panel in silver plastic and put it on the same box as before.” “Yes sir!” Anyway, this is the mountain of styrofoam packaging from some of the Compaq equipment we got, that was out in the hallway of our computer science building for a few days.

I’m living with my friend Jon here in Ashwaubenon, Wisconsin, though our address says Green Bay. Jon, thanks to the anime and comic _Hikaru no Go_, has gotten quite interested in the game of Go. Jon consistently destroys me, but I reciprocate in Capcom vs. SNK 2 on PS2. He built this board and I picked up some crappy glass stones to use on it. We prefer creativity to quality; I replaced our toilet chain with a rope of duct tape.

Here are [Hachi][1] and Brian trying to re-assemble all of the Evangelion capsule toys I gave them. I’m back in the USA, and it’s less weird than I thought it would be. Most times I feel like I never left, except now I have all of these little toys that I’ve accumulated. I guess I always acclimate to my surroundings quickly, no matter where I am. As the weeks go on, though, I find myself missing Tokyo. I’d love to walk down to Shinjuku and battle crowds; I’d love to go into Matsuya for a plate of 290-yen curry; I’d love to walk past a shop and see Matsuura Ayaya singing on a little TV. Just being in Japan is an adventure, while just being in Green Bay is just being. Both have their merits, but the grass is always greener on the other side and all that, though grass isn’t something I really associate with Tokyo. You know what I mean. [1]: http://www.kuiki.net

Some of you know that my stay in Japan was only planned for ten months. Some of you also know that those ten months are up. It’s terribly sad to leave behind the people and places I’ve known in Tokyo and around Japan, but there’s also a lot waiting for me back in the United States. The nice thing about going abroad is that I was able to become acquainted with a new place. The sad thing is that from now on I will no longer be able to stay in either country without missing the other. I’m not sure what’ll happen to this site now. I could just leave it, in hope that I’ll be back again soon. I could continue taking photos of “the little things” here in Wisconsin, but I’m not sure how much fun that would be for you guys. Let me know if you have an opinion. Either way, it’s been a lot of fun being in Japan and a lot of fun showing it to you. Thanks for checking it out with me.

These chemical bottles with assorted names and notices written on them are in the next room over at the Photo Club. I’m sure they’re very important and very toxic.

Tets had me bring his name-stamp in to the Photo Club room one day. He’s the president of Photo Club and they needed his stamp for something. Maybe you already know this but in Japan it’s much more common to use a tiny little stamp instead of a signature. Everybody has one by the time they’re old enough to be needing to sign things, and they’re these custom-carved little intricate stamps that come in a nice case with a red ink pad and everything. These stamps are called hanko or inkan. I wonder if it’s harder to forge a signature or to steal a hanko. Anyway, when I got there there was no one around, and as I let myself into the club room and snuck around, I could hear some music playing from deeper inside. I knocked on the darkroom door several times but got no response, so I went inside and found an empty darkroom with “Let My People Go” playing on a boom box at maximum volume. It was weird. I snapped this picture and made a quick escape.

Check out these dwarves.

Classic [Engrish.][1] [1]: http://www.engrish.com

A masterpiece. I feel honored to have come across it.

For new year’s in Japan they have this dancing dragon thing that will pretend to bite your head, which indicates that the following year will be a good one for you.

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.

This is a hive of humanity that I pass on my way to the station every day. I’m always impressed by the efficient little microcosmic living spaces humans create. Every single one of those windows has someone’s life story going on inside every day.