Neighbours

I live in a quiet neighbourhood within a fairly quiet city. There is a part of the downtown area that stays busy late into the night, but for the most part, when I walk down the streets of Iwaki after 8 or 9 o’clock, there are very few people on the road. Even Friday and Saturday nights are quiet.
My apartment is generally very quiet as well. Some of my neighbours in the building across from me moved out recently. There used to be a young couple with a small boy living there, but now there’s just a clothing rack full of dresses and a small stereo component lying on the floor. They were the few people that I would see come and go during the day, although I was never outside at the same time as them, so I never got the chance to say hello. Now, I rarely see any of my neighbours. The parking lot only ever has about 7-8 cars in it and whenever one of my teacher’s drops me off, he always asks me, “why are there never any cars in this parking lot?” One of these days I’ll have an answer for him.

I live in a corner apartment, so I only have one neighbouring unit, which I know people live in because every weekday I can hear someone coming home and punching in their door-code just before eleven o’clock. They also play a lot of video games, which I know because their living room is on the other side of my bedroom wall and I can hear them playing whenever they’re home. There’s also someone who lives below me who I saw shortly after I first arrived in Japan. He was parking his bike beside where I usually park mine – under the stairs, when I rode up behind him and said “konichiwa.” After glancing at me, he quickly jumped around the corner and went into his apartment.

I sometimes see people coming or going in their car when I’m also coming or going, but I rarely see anybody face-to-face to say ‘hi.’

The other day it rained all day only to let up in the evening when I went to grab some groceries for the next day. Walking through the streets at night is usually quite nice because it’s so quiet – kind of like when it first snows and everybody stays indoors. On the way back I noticed that the lights from all of the buildings and streetlights were reflecting off of the pavement very nicely and I could see white clouds hanging low in the sky; I had a feeling it would be a good night to take some photos. I spent about an hour walking up and down the streets of my neighbourhood and got a few good shots. There was still a light drizzle, which got on my lens, but the light reflecting off of these spots I don’t think was a total loss. A clean lens might have been ideal, but the raindrops added a bit of a cool effect.

***As usual, please click on each photo to see it in a larger/better format!***

Tokyo Part I: Night in Ueno

Janice and I just got back from Tokyo today and we’ve spent the evening cooking up a stir fry and settling back in – well, me settling back in, and Janice finally settling into her new home for the next 6 weeks.

I spent a bit of time in Tokyo when I first arrived in Japan for orientation, but I was pretty busy with seminars and being incredibly jet-lagged that I didn’t see much of the city at all. Over the last few days, we ate fantastically, saw a ton of Tokyo, walked for hours, and took many photos.

We stayed at a hotel close to Ueno Station, which is a pretty central hub on the Yamanote line. After picking Janice up at the airport and bringing her back to the city to find our hotel, we had a sushi dinner and walked around Ueno for the evening. We ended up in the park with a small bottle of sake, taking in the busyness of the city, and enjoying the clockwork of trains coming and going from the station.

It’s a bit difficult to take good photos in a city that is so vast and so busy – especially when trying to see as much as possible in about 3 days. In many places, it’s about impossible to even stop moving because of the crowds of people moving you along. Many of the photos I took were at a very high ISO, wide apertures, and slower shutter speeds. I often just had my camera at chest height and shot blindly at anything and everything.

These are some shots from our first night around Ueno.

Iwaki Music

I managed to finish half of what I wanted to accomplish today. I did a major overhaul of my apartment to get everything cleaned up. I bought a few dishes, guitar strings, bus tickets for next week’s trip to Aizu, and acquired a library card. I spent most of my day with a buddy who speaks very good Japanese, so it made buying bus tickets and getting a library card quite easy. I was secretly hoping that I would have to go to the bus station on my own to challenge my Japanese abilities, but at least now I know that I have the right tickets and when to catch my bus.

We went to a guitar shop to buy a case for a guitar that he recently bought. I noticed quite a while ago that my buddy had long fingernails on his right hand. Several years ago, I would have figured that this guy was either into drugs or was a bit dandy. Since I started playing guitar, I’ve learned that people with long nails on their right hand are usually classical guitar players. I’ve never met someone my age who’s been into classical guitar seriously enough to grow their fingers long, file them into proper plucking form, and use glossy nail hardener to keep them from chipping. I don’t think he uses the hardener anymore because he is a bit out of practice, but he was still able to rip up a few pieces in the store. I wish I could play like that.

In the store we also met a couple of young guys who were dressed like musicians. The one guy looked like he was about eighteen, wore a blazer over an Oasis t-shirt and had his hair down over his eyes. He came over and started talking to us, which when he realized how terrible my Japanese was, he mostly talked with my friend. He told us to come to his show that he was opening tonight at a club called the Sonic. He even said that he’d put us on the guest list.

I had heard of the Sonic as a place for live music and had ridden by it on my bike a couple weeks before. It looked dark and seedy – a place for my kind of music. The walls were painted black and had event posters tacked all over. Weak fluorescent lights and a few hanging light fixtures definitely added to the seedy atmosphere. The walls and floors were scuffed up as if, over the years, a lot of musical equipment had banged in and out of the place. People are still allowed to smoke inside bars and restaurants in Japan, and there was a constant haze that hung up around the lights. I noticed we turned a few heads being the only two gaijin in the building.

We got our tickets and entered a sort of pre-show room, where bands hawk their wares. T-shirts hung on wire stands; CDs and posters strewn about tables; profanity scribed across all of the walls. The place smelled more like rock and roll the deeper we went.

The next door took us into the show room. The place was tiny, but it was lit up for a rock show and the music was loud. There were only about 40-50 people in the room, but because it was so small, it felt crowded. The guy we met at the music shop was playing, and he ripped it up pretty good. He played a real dark and heavy sort of Oasis style of music. He had told us that he was really into British rock. We arrived midway through a song in the middle of their set and they were playing a heavy grungy song. I think both our eyes went a little wide at first and we each had a shit-eaters grin on our faces throughout. The front man probably weighed about 90 lbs, but he was throwing his body around and wailing away on the microphone while he thrashed his guitar, building to a climactic finish, where afterwards, the crowd… clapped politely. My friend called it the kind of applause that you would see at a golf tournament, and it was pretty standard for each song that all the bands played – very odd and out of place compared to what we were used to at a rock show. During the songs, some of the crowd would get right into the music – I almost had to dodge a few roundhouse kicks from the front. The screamo singer would especially get the crowd going as he’d walk into the audience. But between songs, he was the nicest gentlemen while he announced their next shows – very soft spoken and polite.

We watched three bands before leaving for another engagement. All three bands were great. The second band was a screamo band and the third played sort of a Franz Ferdinand, almost Kings of Leon style. I got to see big Marshal stacks, Gibsons, an ESP, and a Telecaster with some killer guitar players behind them.

Now, sitting at home, with my ears ringing, writing this blog, picking photos to use in this post, I miss the Wail. Check out their show if you’re in Vancouver: http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/event.php?eid=127594807644&ref=ts

I really wish I had my Nikon with me – and maybe a new wide angle lens of some sort, but my cybershot managed to get a few decent shots.

Storefront Photos

I received a care package from home the other day – sort of a life boat/get out of jail free card for me. The main item in the parcel was my backup camera, which it looks like I will be needing in the near future as my main camera decided to abandon one of its buttons unto the city of Iwaki like a surgically removed wart. The camera has the scar to prove it. Sometimes I worry about the button, out there all alone in downtown Iwaki with no camera in which to belong. I’m sure that it’ll find its way. In any event, my camera needs fixing, which in Canada, I know takes at least a couple of weeks for just a diagnostic and a cleaning.
Another teacher gave me a ride home because balancing the box on my bike would have been… maybe not impossible, but at least damnedly difficult. This also gave me an excuse to walk back to the school in the dark and to take some photos of downtown Iwaki.
These photos are of some wares in a shop window. I’m glad I took them because the lights were off on my way home.