So you will understand my glee when last week I along with some friends rented a car and drove a couple hundred kilometers north of Tokyo to Nikko. Nikko is a town that caters to tourists, and can best be described as Japan’s Pigeon Forge with a little less class. The primary draws are ryokans (a Japanese bed and breakfast), strawberries, and Edo Wonderland. We stayed in a ryokan, we ate a beautiful Japanese dinner, we picked strawberries, and we soaked in the onsens (hot springs).
I went with my new buddy Brent and his girlfriend along with Rio and Rie, a couple more friends of mine. Here Brent and I pose next to what will likely be the inspiration for my lower-back tattoo -- a character with a head shaped like a pork dumpling.
Here we are eating dinner at the ryokan. Brent and I discussed at length the probable complaints by the dish washer at night when he's lying in bed with his wife: "That son-of-a-bitch Marty over at the ryokan shot me down again today when I suggested they put the wasabe on the same plate as the sushi! He just said 'That's just how it's done...like I said last time Jose, if you have a problem with it you can take it up with Chip'. But Chip's a bigger asshole than Marty! He's such a freakin' Japanophile that even mentioning paper plates gets his panties in a wad."
Brent nearly ruined a perfectly delightful meal by learning the hard way that you are supposed to wear underwear beneath your kimono when dressing for dinner.
With Rio and Rie, smiling through the searing pain in my legs that always follows my sitting on the floor for more than 5 minutes.
Thankfully we went to Edo Wonderland, an authentic reproduction of what Japan would have been like before the Meiji restoration in the 1800s and before Japan was opened to outside influences, but apparently not before corndogs.
I’ll spare you the suspense, Edo Wonderland was AWESOME! We got to see a well choreographed stage production of what I think was called “Middle-aged guys in ninja outfits getting paid slightly more than what they’d make at McDonald’s to do a much riskier job that makes them comedic fodder for assholes like me”. The title left some things to the imagination, but I think the writer was attempting to say more with less.
Like everything in Japan, the actors took this job very seriously. [here fact ends and fiction begins -- for those lacking the ability to recognize sophisticated humor] In fact, during the performance of the second show entitled “Guy in black pajamas twirls plastic samurai sword while looking very serious” I inadvertently chuckled, for a long time and from a very deep place in my belly. Well this really upset Gary the Samurai and he stopped the “show”, gingerly sheathing his sword as if remembering that time that he’d nearly opened his femoral artery with a careless swipe of this butter knife.
“Eraso-ni iuna-yo?” said Gary (“Who do you think you are?”).
I stood up, yelling “Warawaeruna-yo. Konjo nashi!” (“Don’t make me laugh. You don’t have the guts!”)
“Konjo-wa arusa!” (“I’ve got guts!”)
Breaking into English I stood up, and revealed that I was wearing a full samurai outfit. “Wrong...you DID have guts.”
And almost immediately, with a cool swipe of my bare hands -- like a man calmly reaching into a microwave for a Hotpocket -- I eviscerated him. Gutless Gary stood there for a full 15 seconds trying to wrap his mind around the series of events that had led him here. Here, to being bested by a gaijin. Here, to me holding his dimly beating heart in front of his slowly dilating eyes. And with that, the blood ceased to flow to his head and he collapsed into a heap on the ancient tatami mat.
Luckily, one of my friends had a camera and captured a portion of these events for posterity. My only prayer is that the authorities do not find this and present it as evidence at my inevitable trial in The Hague.
You can click on the picture to take a closer look at the fury in my eyes.
Tokyo Drew, over and out.
