Day 2

Woke up at seven after being up for more hours than I can remember. Not being able to sleep, Lucas, Andy, and I decided to venture out and see some sights. Wandered the streets of Akasaka for a few hours, discovering the TBS building, which is a large television company over here, but not related to Turner Broadcasting as far as I can tell. They make a program called Iris which looked quite exciting, and have a strange pig creature called boobo as their mascot. They also have two massive Ultamen standing guard nearby, and a jumbotron screen playing craziness that I can't even begin to describe.

Following this, we regrouped with the rest of Golden Robot Army and went for ramen, which was the best bowl of noodles I have had to date. Then it was time to gather up the bands gear and drag it through three different subway lines to Shinjuku to the club they were playing at. Having disposed of the gear, we wandered the streets till show time.

At this point let me bring up the subject of smoking. In some neighborhoods here it is forbidden to smoke outside on the streets, and you can only smoke indoors in bars and restaurants that allow it. On the other hand, these people can smoke! This I discovered at the show later in the evening, when every person in the room was smoking a cigarette at all times, and they had a smoke machine pumping out billowing clouds of the stuff during most of the five bands that played. My two personal favorites for the evening were S.H.E. and toitoitoi, whose singer was like a Japanese Bjork of sorts, and whose parting words to me as we left at the end of the night were “Goodbye, I love you.”

Then it was time to drag all the crap back across town before the last train, which was a bit of an adventure in itself, but we made it with minimal difficulties. Then a few of us were off to get some sushi and beer at about 1 a.m., and then sleepy time.