Roppongi/Recovery
We made our way to Shinjuku again on Saturday night, and met Robert’s friend Alex, the Spanish Goth, who was sporting some ultra-styled Robert Smith-esque hair that evening. Then it was off to Roppongi by subway, for the Midnight Mess event. Once in Roppongi, we wandered down the main strip, which was filled with Gaijin looking for nightclubs, and stopped off at Starbucks for a quick recharge/hair and makeup session. I saw a couple examples of the Japanese trend towards trying to look like a California surfer: dark, dark tan and bleached blond hair on Japanese kids. It actually looks very unhealthy and unattractive. We saw the Tokyo Tower from a distance, down towards the other end of the main strip, as we left the Starbucks…
Around midnight, we left the main area of Roppongi and arrived at Midnight Mess, which was held in a tiny little bar several blocks away from the main action of the nightclub district, on a tiny little side street. I say tiny, but the bar was far bigger than either Mother or Kuraneko, thank god. There were quite a few more Gaijin in attendance here than at any of the other events we’d been to. We saw Shisen, who Emily had met at Gold earlier in the week, with his boyfriend Shibiru. They had matching “fashion” contacts in, and were having a great time dancing. We also saw two gothic girls who had been at the Head Power show earlier in the week. There were a few other interesting folks there, like Mike from San Francisco, or Spit, the large guy with the fishnet top. Or the girl with no pants and a ringmasters jacket, hat, and cane, who greeted everyone as they entered.
But the real life of the party was Maya, who showed up a little later on in a patent leather maid-style outfit, with a very short skirt, and very little else. She pretty much got the whole whipping part of the party started, using Yvonne the Gaijin’s whip. Everybody took turns flogging Robert and Spit for a while, and just generally living it up.
The party raged for quite a while. The music was actually an interesting mix for a goth club. There was a lot of the harder-edge industrial type of music, and also a fiar mix of early, poppier goth music, like the Cure, and even some decidedly non-gothic music, like U2 and the Buggles. Quite odd. Emily and I fell asleep on the couch at some point, and woke up around 7am, when things had pretty much wound down. At that point we caught the train back to Iriso, and watched all the lightly snow-dusted fields and roofs flit by.
We napped a bit once we got back to the house, then packed up and got the house cleaned up and gave Robert the money to pay the Ushio family with. It ended up only costing us 2000 yen a day to stay there! so only about $140 total! And that’s including all the times they had us over for breakfast, and dinner…They were such an incredibly generous family, and we’re lucky to have been able to stay with them.
We took an express train to the airport, and saw some beautiful countryside, and bamboo forests, on the way. The flight back was actually shorter than the flight over, apparently owing to the wind direction, and the fact that we were flaying against the Earth’s rotation this time. And crossing the date line during our flight meant that we left at 6pm on Sunday, and arrived at 10am, also on Sunday. Weird. But when we arrived back in California, we realized that we didn’t have a key to get back into our house, and both our roommates were gone! So we had my parent’s pick us up at the airporter drop-off in Petaluma, and slept at their house until Keith got home for the day and could let us in.
We then proceeded to sleep for about 20 hours straight.
The trip was way too short. But other than that, it was amazing. I can’t wait to go back sometime. I’m gonna miss the amazing transit system, the heated toilet seats, the hot drinks in vending machines….ahhhh!
More later. Japan report over. More pictures to come, perhaps.
