the invasion of Japan
Episode 8
deconstructing buddha
The great Buddha of Kamakura is the largest in Japan and is considered to be THE Buddhist religious center for most of Asia. It's a few train trips away from whatever base I am on now, I forget, and a lot of walking down narrow streets but I finally arrive at the gate of the great Buddha and I am shocked to find out that it costs two bucks to view him. Apparently Buddha isn't all that much different from his Christian counterparts in America, he wants to get paid to pray.
The first thing you must do when entering any Buddhist temple is to wash your hands or drink from the holy water that is found at the gate flowing out of a sacred fountain. Everyone is doing it so I give it a go, because I am an ambassador of goodwill. Being the ambassador of goodwill is a hard job for me because I am sort of an ass most of the time. I gargle the holy water. This isn't seen as very funny by the locals but hey, what can they do, I have diplomatic immunity.
The Buddha is huge. He is forty-five feet high and sitting peacefully in the center of a large courtyard, which is filled with tourists taking photos of him and not Buddhists doing what ever it is Buddhists do at their religious headquarters. In fact, other than the Buddha, there is not much spirituality in this place at all, off to the right is a gift shop selling Buddha gear because Buddha gotta get his, and off to the left is a path to another, less expensive gift shop, the kind with stuff made in Japan... Korea - Keychains, t shirts, prayer beads, toy ninja swords, real ninja swords, ninjas and sandals. You can even walk INTO the great Buddha's belly from what would be his butt (if he ever stood up) it will cost you twenty cents. (cause, like I said, Buddha gotta get his) I did go into the Buddha and I finally found the validation about religion that I have always preached, he's completely hollow inside, just like every other religious symbol. Its traditional to leave money on the inside of his belly, so I leave some money and rub his tummy. This makes me feel like I am giving Buddha indigestion and displeasing him, but I am not going to miss out on this chance to do this.
The place is so packed with tourists that I don't really get the impact that I wanted from this excursion and I leave after only ten minutes, don't worry, there are twenty temples within walking distance of this shrine and I'm sure I will get some spirituality at one of them.
They all cost two dollars to enter. I see two. They each have a gift shop.
The show that night is a whopper. Great turn out and the place is packed with locals and military alike. Every woman in the room is dressed up very, very sexy and my first impression is that they are all hookers trying to score some action from lonely sailors, but it turns out that they are really here for the salsa dancing that starts right after my show. I guess I am hanging out after this show. The show was great, I slayed them all so I am able to walk off the stage with the monkey of the bad show from the night before well thrown off of my back.
The other comic and I are wandering around shaking hands, drinking a lot of free beer and drooling over the hot women salsa dancing. This looks like its going to be one of those orgy nights when, for some reason, we are taken by the enlisted from one our bar, to another bar where there are no women, only lonely sailors behaving badly. I am struggling with the logic of the move, but then I realize that I am drunk and I don't care. It's 9 PM.
Somehow or another, we end up in several different sailor bars before we are introduced to the master chief, the big cheese, the Buddha of sailordom and a few of his buddies. He's pretty young to be the master chief, but he's very cool to the other lower rank enlisted and he is surrounded by American women which makes him the person to know. He invites us to tag along with him and his group and we are off. Somewhere in the conversation I hear, "jazz bar" and I thrilled to think that I am going to a lounge. I much prefer quiet bars to loud ones.
We seem to walk for days before we finally get to a dark alley which we all start to walk down. No one in the group seems to mind this nor do they mind the nasty building which we walk into or the broken elevator we go down in nor the damp, dark hallway we find ourselves in. I am beginning to think that "jazz bar" is code for "whore house" or live sex show where a woman pleasures a horse or a Kumate fighting event. Under normal circumstances I would be very nervous, but I'm drunk and I could use some good equine entertainment.
The other comic and I are laughing and talking and don't see what the others are doing, but they seem to be talking to a man sitting behind a desk and they are pointing at us and the man is laughing and getting very excited. I never see this reaction as a good sign, but the man comes over and starts to shake my hand very vigorously. He leads me down a hall and everyone is laughing at me and my hesitation to this. The man opens a door and there.... Before me... Is a private karaoke room. The presidential suite of karaoke private rooms. It turns out that the master chief told the man that I am a celebrity (probably Scott Stapp) and this man is bending over backwards to accommodate me. Free private suite for as long as I want to stay, unlimited song usage, free beer and, if we want, women. In return, I have to sign a book that has other famous people's signature and I have to promise to send him a photo when I get a chance. Who ever I am, Iricho ain't got shit on me. ( he's not in the book, but Kenny Rodgers is)
There is a bar full of Japanese women dancing in salsa clothes and I am sitting in a private karoake bar, drinking for free with six unknown men and two lovely women and I am having a blast. Until...
The man from the counter keeps coming in every ten minutes with more drinks and the master chief asks him to bring something which I can only make out as "cool". It's a sake, the strongest in the world, why? Because it has a HA-BU snake in it. Before I drink it, I have to follow some simple rules. First - take one shot, wait thirty minutes, if you're awake or don't have a reaction, you can take another. Second - no more than two shots, a third drink and you have to have your stomach pumped or you will die. It's that deadly. It tastes like rose petals or the way perfume would taste if you were drunk enough to do it. I only do one shot, looking at the snake in the bottle staring at me the whole time.
I am so drunk I can no longer speak, sing, stare or fantasize. I have not felt this way in a long, long time. One of the women we are with comes up to me in a very seductive way, sadly I am too drunk to care. I tell her, I think, that I can't move and she tells me to drink something from a can, which tastes like a fruity soda pop. I am still drinking them when we leave, two hours later. It turns out that the contents of the can is some kind of elixir, not a soda and I am now feeling stoned, poisoned and drunk. The fellas bid us adieu and the other comic and I are sent out to the mean streets of Yokosuka to find our own way back to the base alone and completely lost and dying to boot. It takes what feels like hours of walking through hooker infested Yokosuka before we finally get back and getting through the gate was damn near impossible. We were so fucked up we were stumbling and couldn't quite remember our sponsors name or where we performed, all we could say is, "we're ambassadors". They let us in.
The next day I wake up to minutes before our ride is supposed to arrive to take us to the next base. The other comic isn't in his room and it turns out that he feel asleep on a massage chair in the lounge of the barracks. He scramble to get things ready and are dead as we are driven through Tokyo to Yokota air base.
Yokota has just seen a visit from Bushie the kid a few days earlier and security is tight. Very tight. So tight we have to have photos taken, back grounds run and are made to stand for another two hours for everything to clear just to get on base. Did I mention we are hung over, dehydrated, starving and have to potty really badly? Not a good mixture when you are trying to make a good impression.
The news as we arrive at the base is that there was a school shooting in Tennessee, bombings in the middle east, riots in Paris and Berlin and the democrats won some major battles in key states. Everyone on this base is emotional, which is foreshadowing the evening's events.
Show starts at eight. Bartender is there. I am there. The opener is there. The audience.. is not. I am contracted to do a show and it goes off for... no one. After the show, the other comic and I are talking when the drunk club manager approaches us and says, "I'm real sorry about this, I told you 8 and it was supposed to start at 9, can you go back up and do more time?" The second show starts for... no one.
I spend the rest of the evening talking to foreign women who have married service men and are now living on a military base without anyone to talk too. I can tell by the way they are talking that they didn't marry for love and they were hoping for a green card and a US mailing address, instead, they left their third world lifestyle for a life of imprisonment on a US military compound with no one around that speaks their language. In order to pass the time they are working at meaningless support jobs and proving my theory of body language. They don't speak English or Japanese or any of the other ten languages that are working around them. They stand around in silence and make hand gestures to each other. I find this greatly amusing and I think my trying to talk to them must be a nice break from the agony. They all miss home and hate their "stupid husbands", so they all sleep with black men and spend their husband's money on shoes and make up.
I am so tired from the night before that I am back in my room by 10:30. The bath tubs in Japan are man sized and I so I soak away what I can. Just seeing this tub would make a woman have an orgasm. It's huge and deep. The sides are two feet high and it holds twice as much water as American tubs. In this peace and comfort, I slip away from another night in Japan.
deconstructing buddha
The great Buddha of Kamakura is the largest in Japan and is considered to be THE Buddhist religious center for most of Asia. It's a few train trips away from whatever base I am on now, I forget, and a lot of walking down narrow streets but I finally arrive at the gate of the great Buddha and I am shocked to find out that it costs two bucks to view him. Apparently Buddha isn't all that much different from his Christian counterparts in America, he wants to get paid to pray.
The first thing you must do when entering any Buddhist temple is to wash your hands or drink from the holy water that is found at the gate flowing out of a sacred fountain. Everyone is doing it so I give it a go, because I am an ambassador of goodwill. Being the ambassador of goodwill is a hard job for me because I am sort of an ass most of the time. I gargle the holy water. This isn't seen as very funny by the locals but hey, what can they do, I have diplomatic immunity.
The Buddha is huge. He is forty-five feet high and sitting peacefully in the center of a large courtyard, which is filled with tourists taking photos of him and not Buddhists doing what ever it is Buddhists do at their religious headquarters. In fact, other than the Buddha, there is not much spirituality in this place at all, off to the right is a gift shop selling Buddha gear because Buddha gotta get his, and off to the left is a path to another, less expensive gift shop, the kind with stuff made in Japan... Korea - Keychains, t shirts, prayer beads, toy ninja swords, real ninja swords, ninjas and sandals. You can even walk INTO the great Buddha's belly from what would be his butt (if he ever stood up) it will cost you twenty cents. (cause, like I said, Buddha gotta get his) I did go into the Buddha and I finally found the validation about religion that I have always preached, he's completely hollow inside, just like every other religious symbol. Its traditional to leave money on the inside of his belly, so I leave some money and rub his tummy. This makes me feel like I am giving Buddha indigestion and displeasing him, but I am not going to miss out on this chance to do this.
The place is so packed with tourists that I don't really get the impact that I wanted from this excursion and I leave after only ten minutes, don't worry, there are twenty temples within walking distance of this shrine and I'm sure I will get some spirituality at one of them.
They all cost two dollars to enter. I see two. They each have a gift shop.
The show that night is a whopper. Great turn out and the place is packed with locals and military alike. Every woman in the room is dressed up very, very sexy and my first impression is that they are all hookers trying to score some action from lonely sailors, but it turns out that they are really here for the salsa dancing that starts right after my show. I guess I am hanging out after this show. The show was great, I slayed them all so I am able to walk off the stage with the monkey of the bad show from the night before well thrown off of my back.
The other comic and I are wandering around shaking hands, drinking a lot of free beer and drooling over the hot women salsa dancing. This looks like its going to be one of those orgy nights when, for some reason, we are taken by the enlisted from one our bar, to another bar where there are no women, only lonely sailors behaving badly. I am struggling with the logic of the move, but then I realize that I am drunk and I don't care. It's 9 PM.
Somehow or another, we end up in several different sailor bars before we are introduced to the master chief, the big cheese, the Buddha of sailordom and a few of his buddies. He's pretty young to be the master chief, but he's very cool to the other lower rank enlisted and he is surrounded by American women which makes him the person to know. He invites us to tag along with him and his group and we are off. Somewhere in the conversation I hear, "jazz bar" and I thrilled to think that I am going to a lounge. I much prefer quiet bars to loud ones.
We seem to walk for days before we finally get to a dark alley which we all start to walk down. No one in the group seems to mind this nor do they mind the nasty building which we walk into or the broken elevator we go down in nor the damp, dark hallway we find ourselves in. I am beginning to think that "jazz bar" is code for "whore house" or live sex show where a woman pleasures a horse or a Kumate fighting event. Under normal circumstances I would be very nervous, but I'm drunk and I could use some good equine entertainment.
The other comic and I are laughing and talking and don't see what the others are doing, but they seem to be talking to a man sitting behind a desk and they are pointing at us and the man is laughing and getting very excited. I never see this reaction as a good sign, but the man comes over and starts to shake my hand very vigorously. He leads me down a hall and everyone is laughing at me and my hesitation to this. The man opens a door and there.... Before me... Is a private karaoke room. The presidential suite of karaoke private rooms. It turns out that the master chief told the man that I am a celebrity (probably Scott Stapp) and this man is bending over backwards to accommodate me. Free private suite for as long as I want to stay, unlimited song usage, free beer and, if we want, women. In return, I have to sign a book that has other famous people's signature and I have to promise to send him a photo when I get a chance. Who ever I am, Iricho ain't got shit on me. ( he's not in the book, but Kenny Rodgers is)
There is a bar full of Japanese women dancing in salsa clothes and I am sitting in a private karoake bar, drinking for free with six unknown men and two lovely women and I am having a blast. Until...
The man from the counter keeps coming in every ten minutes with more drinks and the master chief asks him to bring something which I can only make out as "cool". It's a sake, the strongest in the world, why? Because it has a HA-BU snake in it. Before I drink it, I have to follow some simple rules. First - take one shot, wait thirty minutes, if you're awake or don't have a reaction, you can take another. Second - no more than two shots, a third drink and you have to have your stomach pumped or you will die. It's that deadly. It tastes like rose petals or the way perfume would taste if you were drunk enough to do it. I only do one shot, looking at the snake in the bottle staring at me the whole time.
I am so drunk I can no longer speak, sing, stare or fantasize. I have not felt this way in a long, long time. One of the women we are with comes up to me in a very seductive way, sadly I am too drunk to care. I tell her, I think, that I can't move and she tells me to drink something from a can, which tastes like a fruity soda pop. I am still drinking them when we leave, two hours later. It turns out that the contents of the can is some kind of elixir, not a soda and I am now feeling stoned, poisoned and drunk. The fellas bid us adieu and the other comic and I are sent out to the mean streets of Yokosuka to find our own way back to the base alone and completely lost and dying to boot. It takes what feels like hours of walking through hooker infested Yokosuka before we finally get back and getting through the gate was damn near impossible. We were so fucked up we were stumbling and couldn't quite remember our sponsors name or where we performed, all we could say is, "we're ambassadors". They let us in.
The next day I wake up to minutes before our ride is supposed to arrive to take us to the next base. The other comic isn't in his room and it turns out that he feel asleep on a massage chair in the lounge of the barracks. He scramble to get things ready and are dead as we are driven through Tokyo to Yokota air base.
Yokota has just seen a visit from Bushie the kid a few days earlier and security is tight. Very tight. So tight we have to have photos taken, back grounds run and are made to stand for another two hours for everything to clear just to get on base. Did I mention we are hung over, dehydrated, starving and have to potty really badly? Not a good mixture when you are trying to make a good impression.
The news as we arrive at the base is that there was a school shooting in Tennessee, bombings in the middle east, riots in Paris and Berlin and the democrats won some major battles in key states. Everyone on this base is emotional, which is foreshadowing the evening's events.
Show starts at eight. Bartender is there. I am there. The opener is there. The audience.. is not. I am contracted to do a show and it goes off for... no one. After the show, the other comic and I are talking when the drunk club manager approaches us and says, "I'm real sorry about this, I told you 8 and it was supposed to start at 9, can you go back up and do more time?" The second show starts for... no one.
I spend the rest of the evening talking to foreign women who have married service men and are now living on a military base without anyone to talk too. I can tell by the way they are talking that they didn't marry for love and they were hoping for a green card and a US mailing address, instead, they left their third world lifestyle for a life of imprisonment on a US military compound with no one around that speaks their language. In order to pass the time they are working at meaningless support jobs and proving my theory of body language. They don't speak English or Japanese or any of the other ten languages that are working around them. They stand around in silence and make hand gestures to each other. I find this greatly amusing and I think my trying to talk to them must be a nice break from the agony. They all miss home and hate their "stupid husbands", so they all sleep with black men and spend their husband's money on shoes and make up.
I am so tired from the night before that I am back in my room by 10:30. The bath tubs in Japan are man sized and I so I soak away what I can. Just seeing this tub would make a woman have an orgasm. It's huge and deep. The sides are two feet high and it holds twice as much water as American tubs. In this peace and comfort, I slip away from another night in Japan.
posted by Daniel Loomis | 5:01 PM
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