Erica and her new boyfriend atop Shinjuku station.


I'm sure all you 2nd year, 3rd year and not-recontracting Aomori JET's are dying to read about what happened at this year's thrilling re-contractor's conference in Tokyo. Well I just got back, and boy do I have stories to tell! Okay, that's a lie. I really didn't do much of anything to be perfectly honest. I went down Saturday and hoped to meet up with some of my new found Tokyo friends, then drink the night away. Unfortunately, they were all busy, tired or not accepting calls from pay phones for fear of ex one night stands trying to reach them. Not having a keitai in Tokyo is a real bitch. So Saturday I just wandered the streets aimlessly, and found myself in Ikebukoro. It started to rain and my feet were beginning to hurt like Hell, so I decided to call off my plan to drink the night away and checked into a cheap business hotel. Saturday I spent the day walking around alone some more in Ikebukoro. I visted this ghetto aquarium on the top floor of the Sunshine City building and looked at cars at this big ass 6 story Toyota showroom. Later I checked into the Keio and went to dinner with my roomates Sunil and a dude from Hokkaido named Mike. We went to 'Alcatraz', otherwise known as the real 'Ghost Town' with Sunil's kanajo Erica and a bunch of their cosplay friends (in full cosplay gear I might add). Alcatraz is one of Japan's famous 'theme restaurants' where the waiters are dressed in sexy costumes, and you eat dinner in jail cells. Just the place for cosplay fans I guess. At the top of the hour is 'show time'. In Hirosaki's Ghost Town, show time involves monsters running around in the dark and scaring people. This is pretty tame compared to the Tokyo version. In Alcatraz, the monsters pull women out of their jail cells, lay them on the floor, spread their legs apart and sexually assault them with a light up, rotating dildo! Don't believe me? Don't worry, the video is coming soon.


The next day was the start of the convention, and my feet were still killing me. In fact as I write this my right foot still aches like the dickens. I don't know why it hurts so bad. I tried finding someone to massage it, but the masseuses in Shinjuku only seemed interested in massaging other parts of my body. Instead of blowing off the conference as was suggested by many of those that attended it last year, I decided to go to all the dumb seminars mostly because my feet were in no condition for doing much else. That night I hung out with Gavin, Stef and eventually Marc. Marc and I even shared some fun drunken bonding at a bunch of dive bars before I left him in the streets so I could run back to the hotel to take a leak. The next day was more seminars and more drinking. This time the drinking was at a beer garden above Shinjuku station. Then lots of aimless wandering, culminating in nothing special. I went to bed at midnight, while other JET's drank it up all over Tokyo. I was kind of jealous, but my feet were in no condition to take me to Roppongi or anywhere else. What did kind of bug me however was when the partying moved to the apartment directly above my room just as I began to doze off. For two or more hours I had the pleasure of listening to drunken JET's laugh and scream at the top of their lungs. Despite the many layers of drywall and flooring, I could still clearly make out what was being said and by whom. I won't name names, but rest assured they will pay for disturbing my beauty sleep. The disturbing scene that I found in the morning made what happened that night pale by comparison however. When I awoke, I noticed Sunil was gone and my other roomate passed out on his bed. I also detected a rather odd smell in the air. The mystery of the strange smell was solved when I went to bathroom and found THIS! Jesus, what is that stuff???? It's too dark to be vomit, but it's all over the place! How do you manage to get shit on the walls for Christ sakes? Explosive diarrhea? How hard is it to sit on a toilet anyway? Good lord. I then found a note on the table from Sunil asking whoever made the mess to clean it up. I guess Sunil isn't responsible... or he's trying to cover his tracks. Actually, I'm sure it was Mike because he stumbled in around 12:30 drunk as Hell, and then left for more drinking and Euro Cup watching. I thought after Niseko I had seen it all, but I was wrong. The horror.. the horror..