Irrelevance Glorified

Back in November, I used up some of my vacation days and visited Japan. Not just on a whim, mind you; when I travel, I travel to visit people. In this case, it’s my good friends Yusuke and Tomoko, old compatriots from High School (Yusuke) and undergrad (Tomoko). While I flew in from San Francisco, another friend from undergrad, Becky, flew in from Boston along with her boyfriend Steve. So in many ways, it was a little reunion with a lot of my favorite people.

While there, I was hosted by Yusuke and his wife Megumi, who did a great job accommodating my clumsy American ass in their typically small Japanese apartment. I also got to hang out with their dangerously adorable child Itsuki. How can adorableness be dangerous? Cute enough that she could take your stuff and break it and you would find it endearing. During the week, I spend most of my day traveling through Tokyo with Becky and Steve. I have been in Tokyo before, in 2006 and 2003 (apparently, I visit Japan every three years, like a fat and more frequent version of Halley’s Comet), but this was my first time acting as travel guide. Incidentally, I have decided that I am a qualified expert on Tokyo. And by “qualified”, I mean that I must significantly qualify that statement with caveats. If you took all the people in the world who have ever traveled to Tokyo, and then you remove all the Japanese people and all the people who have spent more than 6 weeks there, and then remove all the people who can actually read, write, or speak Japanese, out of all the people who are left, I probably know a lot more about Tokyo than most of them. So yeah, expert.

Why has it taken so long for me to post? I had vague expectations of actually annotating and geotagging the pictures before posting them, but now I realize that is just a pipe dream, and I should post it and get around to labeling pictures when I get around to labeling them. It also doesn’t help that as much as I like Flickr, their maps for Japan really really suck. Since I grabbed Yusuke’s pictures as well (he has a nice camera, so his pictures actually look nice, and they are actually of people), there are a lot of images, so I’m not posting them all on this page. So there is just the slideshow below and a link to the Flickr page.

The general narrative is that there are a lot of pictures & videos of Itsuki, since she’s distilled cuteness (she enjoys cats, stairs, and phones). In fact, people have commented that my videos have a “Jane Goodall”-esque quality to them, as if I’m filming animals in the wild. That’s probably just as well, since she can’t understand me and would just take the camera from me if she knew I was filming her. There are many pictures within Tokyo with Becky and Steve. We traveled to Takao-san, Kamakura, and Oyama, but spent most of our time in Tokyo. We visited a cat cafe, so that’s where the cat pictures come in. Tomoko got married way back in March 2009, but she and her husband were nice to hold off a wedding reception with their friends until Becky and I could visit, so that’s why we’re all dressed up.

Flickr set here. Feel free to check back every few weeks to see if I’ve put in descriptions and stuff (Ha!).

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