Fukuoka was the chosen location for celebrating the completion of our first quarter at APU, and Fukuoka was the place we found ourselves bright and early on a Thursday morning after a 2hr bus ride through the boondocks of Kyushu. It was Ting, Satoshi, and I’s first time in Fukuoka. It was just like any other big city, pleasantly beautiful so long as you didn’t look too closely.

We had the run of the place for two whole days and must have walked 40k easily once everything was said and done. My pictures from the trip are reflective of my mood at the time, which is to say, light-hearted.

That is by far the strangest pair of mannequins I’ve ever seen…

Other than just getting the hell out of Beppu for a couple days, we were there to shop for loved ones, and in doing so we hit nearly every damn store worth mentioning in the entire city. In fact we ran out of stores to hit above ground…

…so we had to head into the byzantine catacombs beneath the city in search of further goodies.

For whatever reason, I ran into 3 excellent statues of a type on this trip. The first being those crackhead mannequins, the second being this totally awesome one-armed Lego Boba Fett.

And the third being my beloved Colonel Sanders… Santa Sanders? Colonel Claus?

Christmas was in full-force everywhere we went. The holiday has been whole-heartedly adopted by the Japanese, who were wise enough to leave out all that silly Christian nonsense and just focus on the good ol’ Pagan aspects like Santa, the Christmas Tree, and showering your buddies with presents. I like the idea that a Pagan winter holiday that was co-opted by the Church has been once more refined by another culture which has excised the religious overtones. Sort of back to square one isn’t it?

In order to periodically rejuvenate ourselves during our pedestrian travels around Fukuoka, we stopped in at the occasional arcade. The introduction of home entertainment consoles in America began the perpetual decline of the arcade as a teenage destination. Not so in Japan. Despite being the home of everything Playstation, arcades are alive and well. They also operate quite differently from their American counterparts. Arcades typically have three sections – the “claw” / foto booth area, the classic arcade area, and the medals area. In America we have claw machines, nothing special there, but the art has been distilled down to pure brilliance in Japan. This arcade had over 40 different claw machines offering everything from stuffed animals to cereal by my count, and I would only consider it a medium-sized establishment.

Then you have the main arcade section, which is generally for boys. Here you’d find your shooting games, your fighting games, your “joystick” games – you will also find the greatest game in the world – the Taiko Drum game.

The premise of the game is simple – pick a song, arm yourself with a pair of batons, and kick ass like only Tommy Lee knows how.

The long and short of it is, I absolutely love this game.

Let’s examine the extreme close-up to see just how much…

When everything was said and done, I had achieved the Holy Grail of videogaming, the event to which every gamer aspires, yes folks, through the sole act of kicking ass at that game I had actually worn a hole into my flesh. Fucking awesome!

The real story of the trip was yet to come, however. We decided in advance that in order to save money we would stay at a capsule hotel. For me, at least, there was also a certain amount of curiosity involved as I had learned about capsule hotels during my Japanese studies but had never had the… pleasure of staying in one. I cannot vouch for Europe, but I’m pretty sure these things don’t exist anywhere in North America. The premise is simple – if the bathroom and shower facilities are removed from a standard hotel room, and belongings are left in a locker, all a human needs to sleep is a rectangle roughly 3x3x7ft long in which to lay down. Having thusly greatly reduced the volume one person requires, a freaking ton of people can be lodged in a very small space.

At our capsule hotel, for roughly $27, we each checked in and secured a capsule(tube). We were issued a key to a locker on the locker floor in which to keep our stuff, and everyone baths and brushes their teeth, etc., in a communal bathroom on another floor. The particular hotel we stayed at initially(more on that in a minute), had one floor of lockers, one floor for the sauna/bath, and five floors of capsules. By now you’re probably wondering what they look like, well here you go.

Each hall has a double row of capsules running down each side, allowing perhaps 300 people to sleep in the volume that would be taken up by 5 American hotel rooms – seriously. If you ask me, it seemed an awful lot like the legendary Space Seed episode of Star Trek.

Lastly, inside each capsule, just to make you feel at home, was a small TV, radio, and for privacy you would pull down the shade at the end of your tube, no doors.

Now for the fun part. After initially surveying our sleeping quarters and tired from a long day of walking and shopping, we elected to go change into our awesome hotel-provided jammies and head to the ofuro(baths) to get cleaned up and unwind.

Unbeknownst to me at the time, as I sat on my stool slowly washing myself in preparation for entering the ofuro, trouble was brewing. Finished with the cleaning part and ready to soak in that gloriously hot water for a loooong time, I made my way to the ofuro, which Satoshi was already enjoying.

Before I could begin descending the steps, a hotel attendant scurried over and muttered a long sentence into Satoshi’s ear, who then immediately frowned. It seemed, as Satoshi explained, that we had to leave on account of my tattoo. I then asked the hotel attendant directly if we had to leave only the ofuro, or the entire hotel. And in an irritatingly polite tone he told us we (all 3 of us) had to immediately leave the entire hotel. No tattoos allowed.

Here in Japan the vast majority of tattooed individuals are gangsters, and having your hotel associated with gangsters can be bad for business. Understanding, but still extremely annoyed, I proceeded to ask the man the following rhetorical questions:

“Obviously I am from a different country?”
*yes*
“So obviously I am from a different culture?”
*yes*
“So obviously I cannot possibly be Yakuza?”
*yes*
“And yet I still have to leave?!?”
*…….yes*

You suck dude, fo’ real. In any case, we got our money back. The only way my tattooed ass was leaving that building without my money was under police escort…

We eventually made our way to another capsule hotel, and this time made damn sure to keep my ink covered up. This second hotel actually had “No Tattoo” signs all over the place. The first hotel had no such notifications, had we known we would have taken pains to be discreet. So yeah, I can now say I’ve quite literally been thrown out of a hotel for being a hardcore mobster – a good story, no?

All in all Fukuoka was worth the effort. By the time we returned at midnight Friday my feet were killing me, but I had found awesome gifts for everyone in the family and had enjoyed my time away from APU and Beppu, even if it did mean getting quite abruptly tossed from a hotel. Not a bad couple of days…