September 23rd, 2003
Kickin’ it old style
Aha..aha…uhuh..ha. Amusing doesn’t begin to describe Tuesday’s holiday festivities. So late last week I took another stab at contacting my friend Yusei who went to CMU with me. His parents and sisters live just down the road actually near Rainbow Bridge, so after meeting them at graduation, I was attempting to get in touch with them again. By a stroke of luck it all worked out and through a quick volley of bilingual emails, we set a date and got together yesterday evening for tonkatsu at the much talked about Katsugen. The food was great.
When I first came to Japan last year for the International Workshop on Entertainment Computing in Chiba, I took a day early on and visited Tokyo proper. At the time, this wasn’t the best touristy kind of thing to do as the area around Tokyo station itself is rather upscale and full of huge corporate skyscrapers. Nice but not the first thing you want to do. Anyway, visiting yesterday, I was quite taken aback at how wide and tall everything was, in contrast to the older districts of Harajuku or Koenji. Tokyo station itself was designed by mega-architect Frank Lloyd Wright. [see below] All the financial buildings surrounding it are just massive. Anyway, we visited the area around Tokyo and Shimbashi ekis.
We got to see them filming a tv drama on the street, though I’m not sure which one. It was pretty ghetto actually and everyone looked like they were late 20s. Weird. We had 10 dollar cocktails on the 45th floor of some impressive building in a restaurant called The Oregon Bar & Grill that smacked of any number of overpriced places I was taken to when working for MSFT. It was nice, it’s staggering, you look at the Tokyo skyline and it reaches forever and then you realize you’re just looking at the southern tip to the bay, like 11% of the bulk of the metropolis.
Afterwards, deciding it wasn’t late enough we went karaoke-ing, which I was hesitant about at first, since usually I’m with some girl my age that I’m getting soused with. But Yusei’s mom is really a character. She has boundless energy that I have no idea as to its origin (she replied to my thank you email at 2:00a), and never seems to allow a dull moment in conversation. Anyway, she really liked my rendition of the drunken Pioneers party classic “Sweet Caroline“, so I had to reprise it for her at the end of the night. The most fun I had though was our ending duet (completely impromptu) of “Woman of Osaka”. I had never heard the song, and its got your standard traditional Japanese up-and-down the scale action. But wow! It was a riot, I’ll have to remember that song and improve my knowledge of popular Japanese music and reading the teleprompt.
Yusei’s mother suggested that I hang out with his sisters and company when they go kicking around. Hmm…
