Australian Teenagers Drunk and Disorderly in Japan!
Is what the headline might have read.

When I was 15 I went on a school trip to Japan. I'd been learning Japanese for 3 years and this trip was comprised of about 3 classes from the Yr. 10, 11 and 12s. Some of my other adventures from that trip can be found here.

We had a month of homestay with our "brother school" near Osaka and then about 3 weeks where the teachers had to go to a conference in Tokyo - woo-hoo, unchaperoned!

Of course I fell in with the bad crowd straight away (maybe they fell in with me..) - as we were exiting Narita Airport we discovered everything could be bought at a vending machine. Everything.
Thus began our nightly routine of buying a bottle of cheap, shitty sake and a 5L keg of Asahi between the 3 of us.

We ended up in Hiroshima for a couple of nights. We spent the day at the Peace Museum. Want a quick way to turn a gaggle of noisy schoolboys into a group of quiet, sombre young men? I'd start there. The thing that stuck with me was the granite stoop where someone had fallen as the flash had happened. Their silhouette is raised nearly an inch above the rest of the steps' rock that was burnt away.

Cheap gyudon dinners and then down to drinking and becoming obnoxious Aussie teenagers. At about 0300 we were staggering back to our ryokan thru the Peace Park when we came across a young couple canoodling - hence our need to repeatedly ask them "Omeko suki deska?" which literally translates as "Like fucking?".
Then we find the saxophonist. This guy is standing on the edge of the park practising his cyclic breathing by blowing the same notes for minutes at a time. At first we're asking him "Okama?" or "Faggot?". Then we stop to listen.

Long, careful notes played over 5 to 10 min at a time. The only sound apart from the sax is him breathing gently thru his nose. Over the next few hours it's just us, quietly passing a bottle and cigarettes around with him. Occasionally he gave us little ditties, sometimes he blasted through long rambling Coltrane pieces.
As the sun came up and the city began to wake up he launched into a haunting solo which had us mesmerized. Until we realised that it was "Wind beneath My Wings". Then we stumbled home.
tl;dr? - Even if Bill Clinton plays 1, saxamaphones are the shizzle, yo.
Length? - A 3 tatami room is exactly that. 3 teenage males cannot comfortably fit into a 3 tatami room.
(Misery McUglywife an attention seeking sociopathic fuckstain., Sun 17 Feb 2013, 6:57, 1 reply)

Hiroshima? Fuck 'em if they can't take a joke.
Manchuria, Nanking, Unit 731, The Burmese Death Railway, The Bataan Death March, and the continued refusal to acknowledge their war crimes.
The Tokyo Firestorm and Hiroshima and Nagasaki were their own damn fault.
Frankly, I think Truman should've let LeMay carry on.
( stuj (^(^;;^)^) GO TEAM SPIDERS!(^(^;;^)^), Sun 17 Feb 2013, 21:09, closed)