w00kie’s ramblings

I went to see Sumo 2 weeks ago for the second time since I'm in Japan. This time around, I was sitting in the boxes on 1st floor (really just a tatami with 4 thin cushions) instead of far out in the poor people's late gaijins' cheaper seats on 2nd floor.

Of course, I had to take some stupid photos while I was there. Later we went to eat ちゃんこ鍋 close to the sumo stadium. This is the traditional food of sumo wrestlers, specifically designed to maximize protein intake, i.e. make you fat! I have to say it was quite good but eating this everyday is basically long-term suicide...

So I'm back from Hiroshima as you must have seen in the little Twitter column on the right. Had good fun with the girlfriend, here's a quick roundup:

Friday - arrived at 4PM, saw Spiderman 3 (was kinda lame), ate Italian
Saturday - went to Iwakuni to see the 錦帯橋, nice bridge, ate yakitori and drank 日本酒 in an izakaya near 本通

Sunday - picnic by the riverside with homemade bento from Aiko's mother, dinner with family for Mother's Day, ate stuffed duck neck (French food I received last week)
Monday - walked around 平和公園 and Namiki-dori all afternoon, my flight was late so I missed the last train home and had to sleep in Tokyo

I'm leaving in 20 minutes for Hiroshima to see my girlfriend. I'll be there until Monday night and will get back to work on Tuesday morning.

With the nice weather, I'm hoping we'll get to make a nice picnic next to one of the many rivers in Hiroshima. I'll try not to catch the flu this time...

I've started using Twitter today and implemented it on my blog's sidebar with the cool Twitter Tools plugin. You can see my latest entries to the right, under the search on the main page of the blog.

I'll use that to post all the one-liner updates that I never bother to post here for fear of breaking my pretty blogging structure. It's also usable via my keitai so I can post on the go.

You can see my twitter profile and add me if you'd like. If you plan on signing up, be careful, I can see it becoming really addictive.

Last week was Golden Week, a bundle of national holidays all packed in the same week: Constitution day, Green day, Children's day and the new Showa day. This last one is in honor of the previous emperor's birthday and is a big hit among Japan's extremist population, which I like to call the Black Suits.

Last year I witnessed a huge delegation of black vans shouting propaganda in Shibuya. So this year I thought it'd be cool to go see what happens in Yasukuni Shrine on that day.

I was a bit disappointed, the shrine itself is a lot smaller than I thought and there were no black vans to be seen, nor threatening crowds. However, while waiting for a friend to arrive in front of the entrance, I finally spotted a group of a dozen black suits with their token buddhist bracelets. Two of the elder ones split up and came straight at me and my friend:

Old black suit: Do you speak english? Do you speak english? (with a more or less threatening tone)
Me: Yes I speak english, 日本語でも
Old black suit: 本当？？ (with a smile on his face)

They got much friendlier when I replied to them in japanese. They asked us why we came to 靖国神社 and I replied that it was very famous, hearing about it all the time on the news, so we wanted to see for ourselves. I didn't bring up the fact that we came just to see people like him though... They said "Have fun!" and left.