PRISON JAPAN / day three
SATURDAY, MAY 19, 2007 ---- The Tedium of Time.
Menace and Cristal Meth hijinking just before our holiday in hell
Menace the TV and porn star on Japanese TV in 2006
sO Its the night before my departure and I am madly trying to finish a) a feature film "Meat Pie" and b) a trailer for Van Diemens Land (RIP). I get to like 7am and my computer completely packs it in and I am forced to leave with a) nothing. Oh well. My first stop is Tokyo, Japan. What a city. My brother lives in Kichijoji a cool suburb of the capital, with his wife Yuko and my two nephews (their kids) Orlando and Noah. I love these guys, they are so edible and adorable. I arrive and take it pretty easy, these flights, even the short ones, seem to take it out of me. I spend the first night hanging with the family. The next day we go to the park. The next night my brother organises a BBQ in honour of my brief stay. Its loads of fun. There's this guy called Dennis there, who grew up on the wrong side of the tracks in NZ. He seems to have come out of it pretty well, with the exception of being a pot dealer and porn star in Japan. He is a lot of fun and talks some serious shit. My old university brother, Rob Sullivan, is also at the party. He also resides in Tokyo, avoids work, leads a lackadaisical life and doesnt mind smoking the Merrry J's with Dennis. Its a lovely party accented with a crazy Japanese mama and other groovy "geijin" (foreigners, or the literal translation - 'aliens'). As the night transforms to day we insist on partying on at a Karaoke joint. Dennis had passed out with his kid, but I wasnt having a bar of it and dragged his arse out onto the street (literally). After puking his guts up and then some we hit the karaoke joint in a session of memorable performances, which left the tables upturned, the Japanese mama soaked in beer, a kiwi lass stripped to her brassiere and every body minus a voice from excessive amounts of screaming aka singing. That was fun.
The next evening we venture to a nearby suburb to wreak some more havoc. The morning wash up saw two of our party incarcerated for the following 16 days, for what? Allow me to retort... The night started gently and sweetly. An old girlfriend of mine, Miho, had come over with another old Japanese friend, Taku. Taku and his girlfriend brought the yummiest strawberry shortcake with them, cakes can be quite an epic work of art in Japan. We then descend into one of a million beautiful Izakaya (restaurant bars) in Tokyo. The style of these places is just amazing and its just so cool, to hang, eat and drink in them. After a scrumptious time, we left our Japanese friends and went to meet up with Dennis. He was in good form and the night started with some pot smoking sessions (I got high on the vibes as I dont smoke) in a pool hall. Dennis managed to get the entire establishment stoned. We then hit the streets and began accosting sweet little Japanese girls. Dennis is the self declared king of pick up artists and Rob calls him "the real Maniac High." He actually has two kids and a wife, but in Japan this sort of behaviour is quite the norm (think hostess bars and love hotels). Needless to say we didnt get far and dropped in on a noodle bar diner. A kind of Japanese McDonalds. There was a gang of cool rockabillies hanging tuff so we started chatting and ended up hanging tuff with them for a while. Dennis couldnt control his scebe (dirty old man) behaviour and I was forced to drag him off a couple of the nice girls we were sitting with. At one point he wedged his hand into this girls crutch and I couldnt work out if she cared or not, apparently she did. Dennis had been throwing beer and water over me for most of the night and after one cup of water too many I got revenge by tipping half a plate of meatballs over him. Unfortunately a few balls landed on the girl that had been groped and it was the last staw. She started balling and I was thinking "Surely she's not crying because she got meatballs thrown over her." Dennis chased me out of the restaurant with a jug of water and kept running. 'Where's he going?" I thought. Chris cottoned on and also skipped the joint. The only person who hadnt realised we were doing a runner was Rob and he was busy emptying pockets looking for yen to pay for the dinner. Chris and Dennis begrudgingly went back to cover the food bill and were themselves accosted by the group of Japanese rockers who werent happy with Dennis for his wandering hands or any of us for letting them wander. The girl was now a mess and ran off crying as the boys and other girls scowled at us in departure, "You could have stopped this," said one rocker who refused to shake my hand. "Anyone for Karaoke?" We hit this K joint and walk straight into some rooms, without paying, to begin the singing madness. The Karaoke Kids running the joint eventually escort us out and I whisper to them to turn a blind eye. 'How long do you want to stay?" they ask. "Just an hour." Ok. So we sneak back into the room and let rip with some Franz Ferdinand, Arctic Monkeys and other raucous tunes. Chris orders a round of beers and another before I pull the plug and suggest we leave. Dennis makes an early escape and we encourage Rob to get a headstart before Chris and I complete the runner. So Rob leaves and Chris and I sing a farewell tribute then bail. Unfortunately we find Rob hovering in the hallway and have to force him down the stairs. I smile at the front desk guy and start running. We are all fleaing up the street hotly pursued by the Karaoke Kid. Again, unfortunately, Rob lags behind and is snared by the Kid. Chris and I continue running and break to discuss saving Private Sulivan. "You go back boy, cause I've gotta catch a plane to Cannes today." 'No you go back boy, cause I have to live in this town." I find myself walking back to pay the bill and bail Rob out, but as I turn the corner I notice that a couple of Japanese bills (cops) had already entered the debate. I walk up to Rob and the Karaoke Kid and suggest I can pay the bill. After a split second the Karaoke Kid realises I was another one of the perpetrators and yells at the bills to arrest me. The little bill comes agressively towards me and I could kinda tell that he meant business. I exit stage right and am now being spritely pursued by a little Japanese bill. I catch up with Chris and strongly suggest we start running. When he sees the little cop behind me he comes to his senses and jogs off in his flip flops (not the best escape footwear). The little cop is no match for these athletic geijin and weens behind. We tac left and right and bail over a couple of fences. We stealth across a few more and then hear the sirens of cop cars. Its on. This crime of $20 is perhaps the greatest ever committed in this region and the local cops who are well over staffed have the scent of geijin on their tongues. I look over a fence only to see two cops fly past on bikes. Shit, the place is crawling with them. I lie low and somehow lose Chris behind a fence. I eventually sneak off and weave like a maze maker through the back streets of Tokyo, turning left and right for several miles. Thank god the sun has risen and the Japanese machine has begun. I waltz into a train station and wait the longest ten minutes of my life for a train to come. By a bizarre coincidence the station I had stumbled upon shared my surname. Meidaimae. I had long regarded this station as it was at a cross roads of two important and often used train lines and it shared my surname with a preface of Mayday. Another twisted moment had occured there 10 years earlier when I had looked across from the platform only to see my ex girlfriends mother Sally looking right back at me. To make matters worse she was standing next to my ex girfriend Hana. It was pretty bizarre."Hi." Eventually the train came and I found my brother asleep on his futon in Kichijoji. I departed for my next country of adventure, Estonia, which is where my good surname,"Mae," actually comes from.
Estonia is the tale of a girl, Marija Simona Simulynaite. I met this girl exactly one year previously in Vilinus, Lithuania. I have never met anyone so captivating in all my life, or someone so entertaining. You can simply bathe in her company and she will tell you fantastic stories with glorious passion and gusto. I fell in love with her that night and also with her friend Margarite who was quite the opposite of her, but enchantingly beautiful. We spent the night with other fantastic friends of theirs, wandering from cafe to club till the break of dawn. I was still married at this point in time and apart from this 'affair of the mind' nothing physical developed. We all said goodbye, swapped emails and disappeared. I contacted Marija back in Oz and started a plutonic, sporadic, correspondence with her. A few months after I separated from Marta I asked her out on a date and said I would meet her anywhere in the world. I was already coming to Europe so she was not too far out of the way. We arranged to meet in Estonia on 15th of May, in Tartu, at 7pm, at the bus station. The night was fantastic, she was every bit as captivating as the last time I met her. We ended up back at her flat and she played me her favourite operas and symphonies. She is a ballet dancer, studying theatre directing and quite the classisist. I think she is the coolest person I have ever met. In the early hours of the morning I said "I want to kiss you" and she told me "I dont even want to touch you. I want to water you like a plant and watch you grow. Sure we could kiss and have sex, but so what? To me whats important is the feelings." Normally this type of rejection would be upsetting, but it wasnt at all, it just left me more enamoured of her. We hung out together for the rest of the day and then I left to Poland.
Poland, or more specifically Warszawa, was as sad as it always is, the only happiness I felt was the relief that I would never have to live in this town and may never be back again. I was visiting the family of my recently separated wife. They are the nicest people in the world and it was with great sadness that I was visiting them to say goodbye. I would see them again, but not as their son. To my surprise they werent having a bar of my goodbyes, "To jest Wujek Garnet (This is uncle Garnet)," they told my nephew Stasz. (Mind you everybody is an uncle in Poland, but it still felt nice to be included as family). My Polish mum is soo nice, so loving and caring and sweet and sincere. My Polish dad is like Roberto Benigni in "Life is Beautiful," always smiling, laughing and so generous.
London. I spent two days in London at this crazy one year course I am doing, which was just long enough to get food poisoning and wipe me out of my first two days in Cannes...
PRISON JAPAN... PRISON PLANET.
Contact the author Rob Sullivan at coderot@gmail.com. All comments will be published at the bottom of this page.
Anticopyright August 2010.
For a Japanese language guide to Japanese lockup, click here.
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