Archive for the 'Tokyo Blog' Category

Tokyo Blog Day Three - The Road to Chibita

Friday, November 3rd, 2006

My third and final day in Tokyo. By now I’d filled up another suitcase with the best souvenirs the world has ever seen, a few sex toys that would, if available here, completely empty the streets of teenage boys (and probably reduce street crime by at least 90 per cent) and two pairs of the best trainers in the world. I have eaten the best noodles in Japan (as endorsed by the emporer and prime minister), attempted conversation with the second most beautiful girls that have ever lived and I’ve seen cartoons that have made me physically sick. All that’s left to do is go to is play more Virtua Fighter 5. Not on my own, of course - with Chibita, the best Lion player in Japan and the best Virtua Fighter player in the world.

He’s not the best because he wins the most (though he does win the most), he’s the best because of the way he plays. He plays with style.

Style players are few and far between in fighting games, I find. There are people who are impressive, technically, but that’s different. To see the top tier Akira players in action when you know what they’re doing with the stick is just fucking off the hook. But even top tier Akira players have to respect Minami Akira’s stepping. When Minami Akira’s character on screen starts moving around, it moves beyond technical excellence. At once you can see that this is Minami Akira’s Akira, because he moves with style. Chibita’s Lion has exactly that effect on me.

We’ve arranged an appointment with Chibita in his arcade. His arcade. At this point I don’t know if this means the arcade he frequents, owns, or is known for being the champ of. I go for all three. We arrive in the relevant part of Tokyo via public transport (a Herculean feat in itself) and begin the search for Chibita’s arcade, Japanese-speaking friend on hand. We have around 30 minutes to find it before our allotted time. At this point we realise that there are NO STREET SIGNS in Tokyo. Not even in Japanese. Not that we know what street his arcade, Harris, is on. This is bad. We stumble around the streets looking for the landmarks in our abysmal directions as we attempt to “turn left at Seven Eleven” only to find that there is more than one Seven Eleven. We try to call Chibita but his phone is turned off. We find the same street three times in ten minutes. We stop for sushi (raw fish will show us the way) and eventually, and somewhat sadly, we give up. We collapse on the pavement nearly in tears, our hopes dashed, holding our heads in our hands. A gentle sob (strictly internal, we’re men afterall) and then we’re standing up, raising our fists to an empty god-less sky. But wait! What’s that? God has heard us! Within metres of us is a sign for an arcade on the third floor of a rather innocuous building – Arice. Arice! Not HARRIS, you dumbass! Arice! Arice! So we run, screaming, into the building and into the lift. We’re shaking now, half in jubilation, half in abject terror because we realise just how late we are. He is gonna be pissed. It’s bad enough that we’re foreign, let alone disrespectful and rude.

The doors open directly into the arcade and we bundle in, heads scanning left and right for a face we’ve seen a thousand times on screen but never in the flesh. It feels like we’re about to meet a movie star, except we’ll be trying to out-act the greatest actor that ever lived. He isn’t there. Which in retrospect, from a health point of view, was probably a good thing. The human nervous system is not designed to take the kind of strain Chibita’s appearance would have triggered at that point. We enquire and the technician tells us he hasn’t been in all day. His phone is still turned off, so we do what any self-respecting gamer would do in a Japanese arcade – we play Virtua Fighter 5.

Some challenges occur, we meet some of the local players and we even win some matches. I’m still having problems getting people to play me (apparently it’s my low rank, not my gaijin appearance) so Dan asks some Lion player to come over and play me. He says I’m a player from the west who’s come to Japan to look for serious opposition. He thinks it’ll be funny, watching a Japanese Lion player tearing me apart. He’s already done this with 3S - my Makoto lasted about 10 seconds. The Lion player challenged and I BRUCKED HIM PROPER! Manz headz was turning! Or something. Anyway, after totally destroying him he comes around the machines to say hi and we share an awkward ‘I don’t speak your language’ moment and then it’s gone. The next player beats me easily and I realise I probably was just given a match out of courtesy.

Several hours pass and it’s obvious Chibita isn’t coming. We’ve been done. He’s guided us to his arcade to spend money, like good little gaijin, and he’s not coming. We cry a second time (again on the inside) and we leave.

Several hours later and the phone rings. It’s Chibita! He’s apologising for having his phone off and not showing, he had to work (read that as: I got totally fucked last night and I’ve just woken up). He asks us to meet him at Shibuya crossing. And we’re off. It’s about eight hours since we first set out to find him, but if we can play him at VF even once, it will all have been worth it.

He’s there. And he’s FUCKING COOL. Cool everything, clothes, hair, boots, shades, everything. He actually is a star. He takes us to the nearby Club Sega and as we approach the VF machines there is a notable hush (which, if you’ve seen how little Japanese people seem to talk in public, is really quite impressive). We find an empty machine and put our money and data cards in the machine. It flashes up on screen that he is the current number one ranked player in Japan (hooray!) and that we are ranked really low on account of our poor 40 per cent win ratio. Which we knew already, thanks. And we play.

The words “we play” don’t really describe what happens, though. “Custer’s Last Stand” might be appropriate, but Custer probably managed to shoot at least a couple of Indians before he went down. Perhaps “Chibita plays” would have been a better description, because he seems to be having fun. Once he realises how slow our hands and reactions are, the real domination begins. He plays with class, taking advantage of the new cancels off the basic P combos and making VF look like Killer Instinct. He uses the knee a LOT. So I do now too. Several master classes ensue in which we realise the true depth of Chibita’s skill. It’s one thing to see him play against other top level players, and watch the speed and precision, but it’s quite another to be aware of our own choices, and to watch how fast his mind works as he makes decisions faster than we can input commands. Ten matches later and it’s all over. We have won nothing. We retire to a quieter part of the arcade and attempt to talk to Chibita, though by this stage we’ve lost our translator. We try to ask a question in English, which gets turned into French before Japanese (the worst time to play Chinese whispers) and the answer is predictably incomprehensible. Eventually one question gets through – “do you have any tips for a beginner?” His reply – “try to enjoy yourself.” We also find out he likes trance music. He signs some books, gives me his VF5 test location data card (OMFG) and we attempt and fail to invite him to dinner. So we make our farewells and leave, exhausted but elatedly so.

Later on I sleep, wake, get on a plane and fly back to London. Crying.

I really, really, really miss VF5.

Tokyo Blog - Dazed and Confused

Thursday, October 19th, 2006

At the end of my second day in Tokyo I had my one and only taste of Tokyo’s nightlife. Clearly one night that takes in two places that are filled with exactly the same crowd is about as unrepresentative as it gets, but there are a number of things you need to know if you’re going out in Tokyo.

The first thing, and DEFINITELY the most important thing you need to know, and what I didn’t know until very near the end of the night, is that nobody in Tokyo uses measures when they pour drinks. They just judge how much to pour. And if you want, you can ask for a strong drink and they’ll pour a bigger measure AT NO EXTRA COST. This is perhaps the ultimate score if you’re British, and is vital to our mission to be total pricks when on holiday.

The second thing you need to know is that nobody goes red there when they drink. Nobody. It is the only Asian country I’ve ever been to where the people can drink and not go red. I was fucking livid, I can tell you.

The third thing is that they can dance.

As an Asia veteran I am now quite accustomed to seeing an entire dance floor of people seemingly dancing with headphones on, each with completely different music playing at completely different speeds. It’s usually as if there’s no DJ in the club at all. The bass is turned down and the treble up, and the DJ will usually not bother beat mixing. Or he’ll try and scratch over the top, only his version of scratching is just to hammer the needle (or digital turntable) back and forth over whatever part of the track he feels like. Kind of like a metaller screaming instead of singing, but not in time with what the rest of the band is doing. They will also talk. This happens everywhere I’ve been - Hong Kong, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur - everywhere. But not in Japan. It was almost like being in a club in London, only the girls were at least a million times hotter. J-hot.

I’ll keep using that word and you can’t stop me.

So we started in a bar, originally sold to me by Dan as a party. A party where you pay to get in and then pay for drinks. So a bar, then. Filled to the brim with members of the fashion industry who, unlike their London counterparts, are actually very nice people. I’ve never felt so uncool and fat in my life. Which was a new feeling for me because obviously I’m REALLY FUCKING COOL AND NOT FAT. It was there I met Hashi (whose name I’ve definitely spelt wrong), a tall, skinny, bald (intentionally, I think) fashion stylist who has the best jacket I’ve ever seen. I say “nice jacket”. He replies “thanks, it’s really expensive.” More drinks (not strong yet, Dan will only tell me about that at the very end of the night) and then we’re off to the Dazed and Confused party, to drink with even hotter girls (if that’s even possible) and even skinner guys.

As we queue outside the Dazed and Confused venue we’re told by the bouncer not to say a word. There are signs up saying No Noise, which I giggle about quietly and point to. The bouncer rushes over and gives me The Look, so I realise they actually mean business and I shut the fuck up. Then we get inside.

Within the first minute I’ve seen the second most beautiful girl on the planet (after my girlfriend, obviously, who I still want to do the sex with after she’s read this) and then I realise she has a hundred twin sisters, all dressed differently with different hair, but otherwise being identical. The good kind of identical, obviously. At this point girls can argue that if they all look the same then they have no character and are therefore less attractive. If it makes them feel better. Then some dude strides over and introduces himself. He must be practising his English! And it’s not bad. So I talk utter bullshit to him for about 30 minutes (during which time I tell him we all see things in 4:3 ratio and English girls have their fannies on sideways) before Dan comes up to me and says “I can get rid of him for you.” So I go to the toilet and when I come back he’s gone. Dan says “I told him you were straight.”

Later on the next day we would meet a girl who thinks Dan and I are a HOT couple, and Dan would use her misplaced sense of sexual safety to hit on her and take her to dinner, even though she’s married.

Then we go home, because Sunday is Chibita Day - the real reason I’m in Tokyo.

Tokyo blog - day two

Wednesday, October 4th, 2006

I wake early and call Daniel, who isn’t quite ready. We agree to meet near my hotel in an hour or so and I arrive about 45 minutes early. I appear to be in a shopping area (which is going to be the focus of today’s activities) so I pop into a Levi Store. It’s kind of a cop out, but I figure having the Levis brand as a common point of reference should help highlight the differences between Japanese culture and our own. Plus, the girl I saw through the window was J-hot.

The shop attendant asks me something in Japanese, which I can’t reply to with anything other than “sorry, I don’t speak Japanese.” He goes back about his business. I pick up a gorgeous black t-shirt with gold roses on the front and proceed to the changing room. Seeing me, the shop assistant jumps in front of me and forbids me from trying it on. I am mystified and assume Daniel will explain to me why later (he can’t), so I leave. I pass a sports shop and head inside looking for rare trainers. No fewer than six men are lined up at the doorway and they scream something at me. I will hear this same scream (though at a pleasingly lower volume) at every shop I go into from now on, but for now I’m stunned. I mean that literally. I try to at least acknowledge the first one, but they start bowing and repeating the scream. I really don’t know what to do. I want to run past them but I don’t want to offend them. I don’t know what the right thing to do in this situation is so I stand there, staring at them, mouthing the beginning of words that I haven’t decided on yet. After about an hour (or a few seconds) I gather my wits and run past them. The shop is a loss, so I turn to look at the front door. They’re ALL STILL THERE, STARING AT ME. I run past them, really quite scared, and they shout something else. I shout back, “bye!” and make a highly undignified exit. I rush off to meet Daniel and we hit the shops, never once finding one as completely batshit insane as the this one.

We go to a regular high street footwear outlet and they have the sickest, rarest trainers you can imagine. Later on we go to a more exclusive trainer shop and I find that the trainers the Japanese covet are actually just the ones you find in our Foot Lockers here. In fact, the trainers I have worn to Tokyo are on sale, labeled as “Very Limited Edition”. In English, that’s how cool they are. I don’t buy anything, so we hit the arcades.

The arcades! MAN! Where do I even begin? Ok, for starters, the arcades that I visited there were huge. They all had several floors, each devoted to a specific genre or title. Usually the ground floor would be UFO catchers (which are all fixed, by the way - the strength of the claw is determined by how much money the machine has collected) and at least one other floor would be devoted to fighting games. Some arcades had entire floors devoted to Virtua Fighter 5. If they didn’t, their fighting game space was dominated by VF5. Why anyone would want to play anything other than VF5 I don’t know, but I guess they have to give the chicks something to do. During my three day stay in Tokyo I will spend around £75 on VF5, at 50p a go. If I lived there, I would easily spend more than that, forgoing things like food and water to play The Greatest Video Game Ever Made. My Lion card racks up a 40 per cent win ratio, which is about 30 per cent higher than I was expecting it to be.

At some point I must have left the arcades (why, Daniel, why?) because I also managed to visit Akihabara, where I had the Best Noodles In Japan, as endorsed by the emperor and the prime minister. I know a PR stunt when I see one, but I also know good noodles when I taste them, and BOY those noodles were the best I’d ever eaten. Even better than my step-mum’s pork ball noodles, and she’s been working on that recipe for decades.

Akihabara is often name-checked by geeks in the know (such as myself), and I was super-excited by finally being able to say “oh yeah, I’ve been there. It’s shit.” And I’d experienced Asian shopping before, in Hong Kong and Malaysia, but I figured that being Japan, things would be different. And they are, kind of. You still have poorly organised shops, and you still have over-eager shop assistants who call you in to shops from the front door, but in Akihabara they have megaphones. They will shout through their megaphone at you, at point blank range, and you won’t know what the fuck they are saying. Even if you speak Japanese. The only way to stop the painful noise is to get behind them, which means into the shop. Quite clearly the tactic is an effective one.

My Akihabara side quest (the main quest being to pick up an amazing DS Lite case and something to hold the carts in) was to find the sickest, most depraved Hentai imaginable, and preferably on UMD, since my PSP is Japanese. Ideally, I’d have found aliens with 10 penises raping eight-year-old boys who look like they’re in pain but secretly enjoying it (it’s no secret to me, obviously). What I found was much, much worse.

I’m quite down for the whole rape fantasy. I mean, it doesn’t get me off, but I kind of understand it. And I know girls who are also down for it. And I understand that the average Japanese male treats his girlfriend really badly. I also understand that they must, as a natural by-product of their shy and respectful manner, be quite sexually frustrated. I’m generalising, but the nastier side of Hentai seems like pretty good evidence that I’m right about at least some of the Japanese men. But how frustrated they can be, and how angry about sex and women, can only really be understood by visiting a Hentai store. You see, I thought that the raping of sub-teenage girls was at the end of the scale, and I was right about that. What I wasn’t right about was which end. By the time I reached the sick end of the shelves I’m picking up boxes with pictures of young girls covered in cuts, lyingunconsciouss in a pool of blood and semen.

I’m sure there’s a goodargumentt for allowing this sort of thing to release sexual tension in a safe way, but when it gets to the point where you need to be nearly killing a girl to get off, you are in WRONGLAND. And these things are available in shops that anyone can shop in. I saw several teenagers shopping who were definitely under 18, even taking into account how young oriental people can look. I can’t imagine how sex would be for a kid losing his virginity if his main exposure to sex has been these images for the last year or so. I wouldn’t like to be the girl, that’s for sure.

Then I buy infinity capsule toys, go to more arcades and then go back to my hotel. I need to get changed because tonight Daniel is taking me to a Dazed and Confused party (super-trendy models galore). But more on that later. This post is now huge.

Tokyo blog - day one

Tuesday, September 26th, 2006

Touch down! Blam, I’m in Tokyo. 11am, fully refreshed and fully in Tokyo’s time zone. No jet lag thanks to strategic use of sleep deprivation and Nytol. My first hint as to how the Japanese mindset operates happens as early as the baggage reclaim. Some markings on the floor around the revolving bag-o-returner ask people to keep a respectful distance to ensure more people can reach their luggage more easily. Amazingly, everyone does. Also amazingly, people keep all their gear behind them so as to take up as little space as possible as they crowd around this line. This amazes me (and I imagine would amaze anyone who frequently flies to and from Heathrow). It’s as if everyone actually wants the world to be a better place. Then I go hire a phone, have a heart attack at the price, then realise how little money it is (this will be a recurring theme as I attempt to convert yen into pounds throughout the trip), get on the bus and I’m off to TGS.

On the highways there is practically no traffic. This will also be a recurring theme as I travel around Tokyo, making crossing streets very easy and making breathing MUCH easier than is reported.

As we travel along I keep an eye out for a sprawling metropolis in the distance. I envisage a solid wall of concrete and glass marking the boundary of Tokyo, though I’m not sure if I’ll see the city yet, since Tokyo Game Show is not in fact in Tokyo. Of course.

I get to TGS, it’s very small, and there are no queues for anything bar Devil May Cry 4. Well, there are queues but we’re talking three or four deep. In three hours I’ve played everything I care about and seen everything else. Several things surprised me -

There were a LOT of US-developed games on show which quite clearly will never sell in Japan.
Microsoft’s games were everywhere simply because they had the biggest bags and therefore were clearly on show on people’s shoulders at all times.
There was NO COOL TAT on offer anywhere (wtf?!).
There were loads of mobile phone games.
Everyone was taking pictures of the J-hot girls, but nobody wanted to be in the pictures with them. It was a strange sort of voyeurism, with some guys being overheard saying things like “you were a Capcom girl in 2004, why the change?”
There really wasn’t any cool tat.

Then I meet up with Adrian, a friend of a friend who is fluent in Japanese and French, but alas not really English. He takes me into Tokyo on a train, when he tells me he is a drag-performer at his night, Tokyo decadence. As we travel along, I stare out the window as much as possible. We’re mostly over ground, and I’m hyper-excited about seeing Tokyo in the distance. We start to enter suburb type areas clearly defined by large areas of grassland and forest. No skyscrapers, no flying cars, no robots. No city. Soon we get off to change to another line. I ask how long before we’re in Tokyo. Adrian replies, “we are ‘ere.”

We’re clearly NOT in the largest and most technologically advanced city on the planet, but I don’t say anything. I put it down to his poor English and my non-existent French and Japanese. We change, I see some school girls who don’t look like as hot as I’d hoped (in fact, they look like, well, school girls, but more on pedophilia later), and then we arrive at my stop. I thank Adrian, get out, get confused at the barriers (which start open but shut on you cruelly if you have the wrong ticket, which I did) and then I’m outside. Outside into fresh air, wide open space, and what looks like the outskirts of a city. I think there must be some mistake so I drag my near-empty suitcase back inside and check the name of the stop, which is still Yotsuya. I am in the centre of Tokyo. I go back outside and take careful stock. The roads are HUGE. There is space everywhere. There is loads of green, very little traffic, and every person I ask for directions from speaks English (a statistical anomaly, perhaps). Later on I find out that most of Tokyo is like this - expansive, clean and really quite green. There is next to no pollution, no litter (and no bins either, which doesn’t quite add up), and transport and food are both very, very cheap. In fact, it’s possible to live in Tokyo for only a few pounds a day. Unless you play Virtua Fighter, that is.

In fact, at this stage I realise that everything I think I know about Tokyo is wrong. Very obviously wrong. Later on, Adrian tells me that the stories of Tokyo being massively over-populated and expensive and difficult to navigate are all propaganda spread by Japanese to keep out foreigners. I can easily believe it.

I check in to what is the biggest hotel I have ever seen. To get from the reception desk to my room takes nearly 10 minutes. There is a shopping mall on the first two floors of the hotel as well as countless restaurants. My room has slippers I can take home and a rubbish hairdryer. I chuck everything on the floor and race out to meet Daniel, who will ensure that over my three day stay I see and do everything in Tokyo that I want to.

We go to a restaurant with Adrian and his friend and a dancer called CoCo. CoCo tells me (via Daniel as she speaks no English) that next week she is having a catfight on stage at Adrian’s fetish night. I laugh and ask if it will be a real fight and she tells me it will. She makes clawing gestures and snarls. She asks me if I think she is cool (she is). We then grill our own meat on the mini-BBQ in the middle of the table and get drunk on sweet cocktails made from things I haven’t heard of. Then Daniel takes me to meet his friend David, who takes us to a Belgium-themed bar where beer is SUPER expensive and there are no J-hot girls to look at, so I retire to my hotel.

Thus ends my first day in Tokyo.

I’m back

Monday, September 25th, 2006

I don’t even know where to start. A proper thing later, but some random thoughts for now -

  • Chibita is basically the coolest guy on the planet, even though he likes trace music.
  • VF5 and the way the arcades and the scene work over there blew my mind.
  • Everyone in Tokyo is SUPER FUCKING STYLISH x infinity.
  • Taxis and transport and food in Tokyo are really, really cheap.
  • Drinking in nice bars is about as expensive as it is here.
  • Their super cool trainer shops stock our regular trainers and their regular shops stock the trainers we can’t buy for love nor money.
  • Clothes are really expensive. Well, nice clothes. Uniqlo is cheap, and much better than the version they’ve given us.
  • VF5 is amazing, though only Chibita used the new evade move on me.
  • Hentai does actually get so bad you feel physically sick just looking at it, and it’s not even remotely hard to get.
  • Tokyo girls are HOT but apparently shit in bed (they have a term there - mackeral - because they lie there like a dead fish).
  • People fall asleep on the tube within seconds of sitting down.
  • Their mobile phones also double as their oyster cards, but I didn’t see one person use it.
  • There seems to be no excitement for the PS3 at all.
  • Asking for DS Lite carrying cases in a hardcore gaming shop will get you laughed at, because the DS Lite is too new to be cool amongst the ‘real’ gamers.
  • The fascist political party openly drives around in vans with loudspeakers, broadcasting “foreigners get out” messages.
  • I take a size large when buying clothes.

Tokyo tube map

Wednesday, September 20th, 2006

Images haven’t imported, so I’ll fix this later. For now, imagine someone pouring a tin of rainbow spaghetti on to a piece of paper and then shrinking 10 tins of alphabet spaghetti and sprinkling them on top of that.

The Road to Chibita

Wednesday, September 20th, 2006

I am now officially really nervous about this. A trip to his arcade on Sunday is planned (does he own it? Run it? Is he the champ there?) and I know nothing about Japanese arcade etiquette. If I do Lion’s up+P+K and shout SHO RYU KEN! will he laugh or be offended? What if he gives me a round, am I allowed any jubilation at all? What if he doesn’t like me? What if we’ve got EXACTLY the same hair styles? What if he doesn’t like VF anymore? WHAT IF I WIN A ROUND?

No chance of that happening really.

Things I don’t know about Japan -
Do they have a seven-day week? If I say “Friday” will they translate that into their equivalent day of their seven-day week or do they just work non-stop until they die?
If you win in the arcades, do you rejoice? Do you keep your head bowed? If the other person wins, do you congratulate them, or will that embarrass them because then they are rejoicing? Is it like at a karate competition, only the other guy isn’t broken and bleeding at the end?
Do the girls have sideways fannies?
How tall are they? I mean, Chinese guys are tiny, but most Koreans I’ve met are huge. Like the dude in Lost. Will I be of normal size over there or what? I’m not planning on sleeping with the chicks cos I love my girlfriend very, very much, but I at least want the chicks to think “he’s probably got a big one.” If only because it won’t ever happen anywhere else (I’m half-Chinese).
Do they drive on the left or right (those that don’t have spaceships)?
Are they really that good at games? I mean, Chibita is going to trash me, but maybe I’ll get some wins against the henchmen.

Things I do know about Japan -
They are all really racist, even by my comedy standards.
Everyone can do karate really well.
They see things in widescreen.
They don’t have cheese.
They don’t like the PSP (and who can blame them?)
They go red when they drink (SCORE!)
They have a slight biological advantage at games over white guys because their eyes and brain can assimilate information over a larger area faster than the average honky - I don’t know how it works for black guys but Ryan Hart is pretty fucking sick. Let’s assume that means all black guys are good at games, because they always chose Guile back in the day and beat pretty much everyone.
The KFC is made from actual chicken.
Even if they can speak English, they won’t, so fuck off.
Not everyone is like Hard Gay.

Japan

Tuesday, September 19th, 2006

Japan is the ultimate destination for all gamers. No matter the market is shrinking, or that famous Japanese doctors were slamming games until they starred in one, or that everyone plays shitty traditional RPGs and nothing else over there. No matter they don’t play FPSs and they sleep with children legally. No matter that even though it’s ok to draw a girl being fucked by seven demons who have penises that are a hundred foot long but if you film a prostitute you have to blur the screen so nobody sees any genitals. The fact is - if you’re a gamer, you want to go to Japan.

I am a gamer, and I want to go to Japan. On Thursday, I *am* going to Japan. I will have the best three days I have ever had, and that includes the sex marathon I had in Ibiza when I lived there. I will probably not come back. Don’t be jealous. I don’t want you to be. Instead be happy, safe in the knowledge that there’s not a single person on this planet who would smile as much as I’m going to, and that fact alone is enough to make it ok that if one of us has to go, it’s me and not you. Though it would be better if we could both go.

Last night I couldn’t sleep. I lay in bed thinking about having my own personal robot, and how nobody drives cars and uses their own jetpack, and how my friend told me to try the KFC out there, because it contained actual chicken. I probably shouldn’t have played Samurai Warriors 2 till 1am but that was research. It’s important I know as much about Japan as possible before I go, and now I know that if I attack a man and his wife is nearby, I’ll get attacked in such a way that my body gets chucked up in the air and on the way down get hit four times in quick succession. So no attacking men unless they’re alone, but that’s pretty much common sense.

Oh, and because it’s not quite clear in this post - I’m well up for demon rape and sleeping with children.

STOP PRESS

My man in Japan is confident he can arrange a meeting with Chibita in which I get TOTALLY raped in a game of VF by him. Man!