So, it has been awfully quiet the past weeks hasn’t it? The reason is very simple: Vincent was visiting! So no time for blogging, but all the more time for sightseeing, partying and discussing every woman walking by in that beautiful secret language called Dutch!

The day V arrived, he was exhausted. Assuming he would be, I hadn’t planned anything special for that day, so we just went to an izakaya to eat dinner and drink a bit on his safe arrival. While eating and talking, the drinking a bit, turned into drinking quite a lot and after leaving the izakaya nice and drunk, we decided it was time to get more f#cked up and headed for a pub. Along the way, we bumped into some random Japanese people, so we joined them, until they ran off to catch their last trains. We left shortly after that and returned back to my guesthouse to play some Naruto on my Nintendo Wii! We played until about 4 in the morning, which we totally regretted when we woke up the next day, but still, it was very fun!

That day, Monday, I took Vincent to yoyogi park, where we chilled a bit and slowly got rid of our hangovers. After hanging out at the park, we went shopping a bit in Harajuku. Since Vincent really wanted a Billionaire Boys Club t-shirt, I took him to the store, where he bought one, that turned out to be slightly too small. But still, nice incentive to loose some weight, huh!? (OOOOOWwww)

That evening, I had a training session planned in the “open dojo”  with Tosh and Mariko. I took along Vincent and Ramiro (a Dutch guy living in the same guesthouse). It was very fun to show some of the roppokai aikijujutsu moves to V and Ramiro. For me it was even more fun to see how someone who isn’t trained in aikido or aikijujutsu reacts to the move. While they don’t flip like we do, the moves do work, and totally got them off balance. Especially Ramiro’s reactions were fun to see, total surprise every time he somehow ended up either on the floor, or totally off balance. Check my move btw!

The next day, it was time for our first true trip. Tosh took us by car to Mount Fuji! Revered by all Japanese, this mountain was on my to-do list for a long time, but I just hadn’t come around to visiting it yet. We left around 9 in the morning (would’ve been 8, but Tosh ran into heavy traffic…) for the three hour drive to Fujisan, as it is called in Japanese.

When we got there after a 3 hours drive,  we couldn’t see a thing… Somehow, it was very cloudy that day, and the ENTIRE freakin mountain was covered in clouds, hiding every last part of it from view. Tosh was very disappointed and impressed at the same time, “how can something so big just disappear!?”

However, when we drove up to the halfway point, fuji gogome, we were able to catch a glimpse of the peak. We walked around gogome a bit, venturing a small way up the mountain, where we quickly discovered snow! So of course, boys will be boys, soon a snowball fight was in full effect.

After the fight, we walked around some more, before we decided to head back down the mountain to check out one of the lakes surrounding it, Lake Motosu-ko. Tosh took us to the actual spot where the Fujisan picture found on 1000 yen bills was taken. So that was quite fun to walk around and see for ourselves. We headed down to the lake, and enjoyed the view and silence for a while, before returning back to the hustle and bustle of the city.

On Wednesday I had to pick up my passport at the Chinese Embassy, since I applied for a Visa for my week’s stay in Beijing (I got it!). The Embassy is in Roppongi, so since we were there anyway, we decided to visit Roppongi Hills. This area has been designed as a work/living area for busy people. Large buildings, and modern statues fill the landscape here. The best is the 54 stories high building, which provides you with an excellent view of Tokyo!

After Roppongi Hills, we started preparing for our rail trip to Hiroshima, Osaka and Kyoto. We got our rail passes at Shinjuku station and headed back home to start packing for the 7 days of travel. After packing we watched some video and went to sleep early.

Thursday was the day to go to Hiroshima. We had a 5 hour train ride ahead of us anyway, so we knew we wouldn’t be doing any serious sightseeing on the first day anyway.Instead, once we arrived and were checked into our hotel safe and sound, we quickly headed into town to find us some food and drinks. Unfortunately, since it was Thursday, and raining on top of that, going out in Hiroshima proved a bit of a challenge. So around 2 we returned back to our hotel to catch some sleep.

When we woke up, we headed out for our main reason for coming to Hiroshima, the A bomb dome. This dome is the one building near the center of the blast that remained afterward.  The remains of the building have been preserved throughout the years, and will be preserved forever. It is a very impressive reminder of the horrible events that took place on that day.

However, what really got to us were the images found in the memorial museum, near the dome. Seeing the images of the impact, reading the stories of burned children somehow managing to get home, only to die there in the arms of their parents, and looking at the images of the horribly burned victims, it really left it’s impact. I truly hope, no nation will ever be so stupid as to use a weapon as horrific as this one.

However, being the down to earth Dutch guys that we are, we couldn’t help but feel a little bit uncomfortable with the purely victimized role Japan portrays here. Of course, the bomb was horrible, but let’s not forget Japan wasn’t exactly known for it’s gentle tactics either. It was an all out war and all sides committed horrible acts in the process. It would’ve been nice to see some of that back at an exhibition like this as well. Nonetheless, it was a very impressive museum, which finally managed to truly shut us up for a while (which, by itself, is already quite a feat I must say).

After the atomic bomb memorial site, we went to see the Hiroshima castle. Obviously, the castle is a replica of the original. Inside is a museum, and surrounding it is a nice park, with all kinds of reminders of the event, like statues and foundations of former military buildings. Although still ok to look at, it’s obviously not as impressive as the A bomb dome and surroundings.

At night we tried to find a nice place to party again (it being Friday and all), but unfortunately because of the heavy rain, all Japanese people were being boring apparently. Every place we entered was next to empty, so we were walking around kind of lost and confused about the absence of any good party. However, suddenly we heard some very promising music coming from some basement we passed. We decided to check it out and walked straight into a small techno party!

Did I say small? I meant, tiny!  Some 8 people inside, most of them being the djs spinning the records. The records they were spinning were excellent, however, and the second dj truly kicked ass. So we spent quite a while there dancing and chatting a bit with the few people hanging out there. Oh, and, nice hiding of the wires…

Next up, Osaka! But that’s a story for a next post .

As stated earlier, my mum visited me in Japan last week. She arrived on Friday the 30th of May and went back home on Sunday the 8th of June. Which, of course, meant I had to show her everything I could in just 9 days.

We started off in Tokyo, where on the first day she rested a bit in the afternoon. Flying for 15 hours did leave it’s marks. After resting, it was time to introduce her to her first real Japanese food, Shabu Shabu! She also had to learn how to eat with chopsticks, so that was quite a funny sight for me to see. It has something endearing to see your mum trying her best and proudly showing every piece she managed to pick up successfully (usually dropping it in the process .

The next day it was raining heavily, but that didn’t stop us from visiting the Meiji Shrine near Harajuku station. It was a shame though, that I couldn’t show the cosplayers, because there weren’t any! Even kawaii fashionists stay inside when it rains. Although the shrine is a very nice site to walk around and admire, it wasn’t the main attraction of the day.

The main attraction was of course my training at my Japanese dojo, followed by the usual dinner and drinks with sensei! As soon as sensei heard mum was visiting, he immediately pulled out his agenda and settled the matter. The first Saturday I had to show the dojo and training to my mum. It was very fun and fortunately she was allowed to take pictures during practice, so I finally have some training pictures!

Sunday we went to Nikko, where a lot of beautiful sites can be found. Temples, shrines, nature, the works. We walked around the temples and shrines all day, climbing a lot of stairs while doing so. Luckily mum’s muscles held out, so we could reach every point we wanted with relative ease.

After wandering around the temples for too long, we missed our last bus back to the station. So we decided to look for a taxi stand somewhere in the area. Luckily, we didn’t find any and ended up walking back all the way to the station (about a 40 minutes walk). But what a walk it was! The scenery was excellent, especially when we reached the river, and found Nikko’s holy bridge.

We left Nikko around dawn, so we arrived back in Tokyo around 9. Needless to say, we were very hungry by then, so we immediately went for dinner. I decided to go for Yakiniku, where you can grill your own meat and vegetables. Little did we know that we would walk into some kind of party. A large group of Japanese youngsters were drinking heavily and, as quiet as Japanese are when sober, so loud they are when drunk. So mum got a good view of the “other” Japan. People sleeping in the restaurant, puking their guts out, shouting and singing aloud. It seemed like fun.

Luckily about halfway through our dinner, the party moved elsewhere and one half of the group carried the other half out of the restaurant. Mum being slightly in shock (but in a good way), we finished our dinner, after which I brought her back to the hotel. The next day we left for Kyoto and Nara, but for those adventures you’ll have to stay tuned…

My friend from Japanese class in Amsterdam, Balazs, had sent me the contact details of Saki-san, a Japanese girl who currently lives in Tokyo. I contacted her, and last Saturday we went on a date. However, since we would meet at 2 in the afternoon, I of course still had time to go clubbing on Friday. Artem met up with us during dinner, after which we went to Harajuku, where I tried to buy the shoes I really wanted at the time.

Unfortunately, they didn’t have the shoes I wanted in my size, so instead we just went for some crap. With crap, I of course mean the icecream wrapped in crêpes they sell everywhere in Harajuku. It is a very popular snack, where you can choose a, usually sweet, filling, which they roll in a warm pancake. Although I went for ice cream, it is also possible to get a cheesecake filling, or even ceacar salade. Although I don’t think I’ll ever try it with anything other than ice cream.

Outside the crapshop, we were fooling around a bit, of course impersonating Arnold, the governator, badly (get down!), when two Japanese women walked by. The look on the face of one of them was awesome. We were fooling around, totally ignoring everybody around us, making way too much noise for Japanese standards (read: the average noise people make in our metros). The look the woman gave us was one of: “what are they doing, oh they are gaijin, pfff,” as she strolled by disdainfully.

We went to our guest house, to start the alcohol consumption required to guarantee a good night of partying. Back in the guest house we were basically bullshitting the whole time. Making fun of everything and everyone we could, as much as possible. Around 12 we left our house to catch the last metro to Shibuya, where we were planning to go to Club Asia.

When we got to Club Asia, the party seemed to suck a bit, so we went to another club across the street. It promised hip hop, rmb and dancehall, and boy did we get it. Inside we found a small, but tall club. It had a small area where we entered, then down the stairs we found an even smaller area where people could chill a little. Downstairs was the biggest area, where there was room to dance. Being the amazing hip hoppers that we are, we kinda stood out of the crowd, which consisted mostly of blinged out Japanese and Black people.

We had loads of fun and were even surprised by a performance by a Japanese rap group. This was awesome, because just before the group started, the floor was packed with guys trying to get girls, effectively blocking everybody from doing any dancing or whatever. But as the group started to do their performance, all the guys suddenly left, and we found ourselves standing in the middle of a crowd of chicks, with hardly any guys around!

So we partied like crazy, but unfortunately none of us managed to “score.” Although Artem was doing pretty good with a girl we met their, who eventually took us to go and eat something afterwards. The place we went to eat was filled with drunken Japanese people, all enjoying their selves very much. The food kind of sucked though, and it was very expensive, but we had fun nonetheless. After dinner we took the metro home, where I quickly fell asleep. Time for the blind date!

At two o’ clock the next day I arrived at the starbucks where we were supposed to meet. I was a bit worried I wouldn’t make it in time, because I left my house kinda late that morning. Luckily, when I arrived at Shinjuku station I received a message from Saki-san that she took a wrong train and would arrive a bit later. So I quickly ate lunch at the starbucks, and when I finished she arrived.

Saki-san is a very sweet girl, who grew up in Kobe and is currently living with a friend just outside of Tokyo. Which meant that she didn’t have a clue on where to go either. She called a friend, and we decided to go to Shinjuku park. This is an awesome park, located about 10 minutes by foot from Shinjuku station. Inside they have a Japanese style garden, an English style garden and a French style garden. We walked around the Japanese part of the garden for over an hour, seeing some amazing sceneries, koi fish and an awesome Chinese building.

After the park, we went for some coffee near the station, were after a while we were joined by Seiko-san, after which we went for dinner and drinks. We went to an Izakaya, a Japanese restaurant where you simply order a lot of small dishes, which you share with everybody. Meanwhile you are basically drinking as much as you can take. It was very fun, and the food was great. I drank a traditional Japanese drink, which was quite strong, but very tasty!

After dinner, we met up at Shibuya station with another friend of Saki-san, Maki-san (do you still follow?) and a friend from my guest house, Swaroop. After a lot of walking around, trying to decide where to go next, until Swaroop led us to the hub. The hub is an English styled pub which was very fun. It was interesting to see though, that you couldn’t just sit down wherever you wanted, you had to be seated by the waiters, or keep on standing around.

After the hub, we missed the last train for Roppongi, so we didn’t go clubbing. Instead we went for something to eat and drink some more. We hung out with the girls until about 3.30 in the morning, when we decided to call it a night. We went outside and walked straight into a blizzard (well almost, it was snowing), and took a cab home. The next day I woke up quite late, to find a nice white view outside my window, and the sounds of children playing in the snow.