Japan, chicken, and vinyl record players: part 1

I am sitting in an internet cafe right now, contemplating my course of action over the next few days.

On 90 minutes sleep, I woke up on Thursday morning, mostly packed and with an hour to get ready to leave. I finished packing, showered, and made it out to the bus stop, catching the airport bus and arriving at the airport 45 minutes before takeoff. The flight was only an hour and a half.

I arrived in Osaka, which is Japan's second largest city, at noon, on a blustery cold day. I swam through the crowds of people exiting and hurried to customs, filling in my immigration card on the way. I received a 90-day visa from the lovely lady at the counter, who was also kind enough to take a photograph of my face, and fingerprint me (she thought well enough of me, at least, to skip the anal cavity search).

After spending an hour wandering into various shops and looking for signs of my varied destinations, I finally found the Korean embassy. The flag hung limply in the wind, two guards in front of the stairs, like the flag, relaxed. I slipped past them with a nod. Inside there was a woman who spoke very good English, and my first thought was that I wondered why she was sent to Korea's Japanese consulate branch.

As I sat down at the computer there and checked my e-mail, hoping that my visa number had arrived from the Seoul Immigration Office, I glanced at the clock. It was only 3:00 p.m. I was already exhausted. I clicked away, confused momentarily by the keyboards, and discovered that no, my visa number had not arrived. I left the consulate a few minutes later to get a bite to eat.

I spent the next several hours in search of a) an internet cafe; and b) a decently-priced hotel. Neither were in great supply, it seemed. In my quest for the latter, I stumbled into a place called Hotel For You, which promised a 5,000 Yen room (about $50), which, while not cheap, seemed reasonable. Except it turned out to be a brothel, evidenced by the flyers inside which promised a girl -- admittedly they were quite cute, some of them -- for a low price. Sheepishly, I walked out, smiling serenely, forgetful at the moment of my exhaustion.

It took me 3 hours to find a hotel for the night. There were other places, but they were already booked, and they were prohibitively expensive, too, if I was to stay in Japan for more than two days. The place I found was a capsule hotel, which reminded me, strangely, of the movie The Fifth Element.

I decided enough was enough, that I was staying in. My feet ached. My backpack felt like a ton of bricks. I kicked off my pants and lay down gently on the pillow. The instructions for the alarm were all in Japanese, but fiddling around I figured it out. I figured out, too, how to turn on the television, and change the channels. The last two channels were only Japanese porn, which, I discovered, is censored, making it hilarious to watch all the movements, and not actually see much. The censoring, though, was poor -- The Jerry Springer Show does a better job obscuring things -- so I could actually tell what was happening, for the most part ("Is he using one finger, or two?") which only made the fact that somebody decided to censor it more hilarious.

Only a few seconds later, and I decided to turn off the TV. I grabbed about for my book, which I had started on the plane: Jesus' Son, by Denis Johnson. After finishing a good 30 pages, I laid back again, turned out the light, and went to sleep, not to wake for 12 hours.