Homeless Japanese Hold Blackface Michael Jackson Dance Party

The September issue of MADMAX Magazine contained a short article on, as the title suggests, a group of homeless men who dress up in Michael Jackson costumes and hold dance parties in Shinjuku's Chuo Park.

Thrilling! Say Beat It to your Bad Life!Japan's ongoing recession has left Shinjuku's Chuo park flooded with homeless. Our reporters happened to be interviewing three such homeless men in their fifties when word of Michael Jacksons's death came in.

When Michael fever was taking the world by storm twenty years ago, these men still had a respectable job and roof over their heads, rocking with the King of Pop every step of the way. They, too, once glittered like a rhinestone glove.

However, as if in response to the sudden drop in Michael's popularity, Japan's economic bubble, along with these men's lives, went POP! When the smoke cleared, they found themselves living on the streets.

"Michael's gone..." The stunned mourners decided then and there to fill the void MJ left behind. After they scrubbed the filth from their bodies and traded in their ragged clothes for flashy costumes, all it took was a little face paint to transform them into the Jackson Three. They just needed a dance floor to return to the days when they shimmered brighter than any disco ball!

The vigor of youth soon returned to their sweat-drenched faces as they cut a rug to all the Michael classics. "Now that we've come this far, there isn't anything we can't achieve!" The three have sworn to carry out Michael's comeback for him, dancing on as the King of Pop watches from his throne in heaven.

My first reaction to this was "Oh no! Blackface!" The story is actually kind of touching, though. 90% of me suspects that these dudes were just put up to this by MADMAX's staff, but 10% of me really wants to believe that they are legit.

If you go out to buy a copy of this for yourself, be forewarned that MADMAX's normal content involves yakuza killing reports, motorcycle gang interviews, hyper-violent manga and a ton of porn, not to mention 1000s of perverse advertisements that blow the porn out of the water. I may have to post some of them in the near future...

Chirashi of the Dead

From our personal collection, here are a couple vintage Japanese movie fliers for Romero's Dead series.

The graphic violence depicted on them must have been as shocking to people at that time as the fact that Japanese movie ticket prices haven't change at all since 1978 is to us now!

While Dawn of the Dead was just called Zombie here as it was in Europe, Day of the Dead got a much cooler name: Food for the Dead! The catch lines on these were beefed up for the Japanese market, too. The one on Dawn reads "Give us meat, YOUNG meat!" and Day says "The living have become prey to be hunted down and feasted upon by the returned dead."

More to come soon!

Naoki Urasawa Interview-Part 2

Were back with Part 2 of the CasaBRUTUS interview with Naoki Urasawa. Read on and see what kind of 20th century boy the author was in 1970.

PART 2: The Future That Never Came/Urasawa on Urasawa


Tokyo, the Ever-Changing City
The Tokyo featured in 20th Century Boys has undergone dizzying changes to become the Tokyo we know today. Some people say the past was better; some people say there’s no time more convenient than the present. We are complacent to live in the city, but what are we to hold onto for support in this storm of change?

When I was young, Japan was doing everything it could to become the future. ‘Goodbye poor Japan, hello bright tomorrow.’ Look at how much Shinjuku alone has changed. Shinjuku Station West Gate Plaza was developed in 1966, and the Keio Plaza Hotel was completed in 1971. West Shinjuku wouldn’t recognize its former self.

At the time I lived around Fuchu City on the Keio Line. Fuchu was just like the town in 20th Century Boys—grass fields everywhere, forever. The Keio Line that ran straight into Shinjuku was my train to the future. I still think that as an adult. Before the train reaches Shinjuku, right around Hatsudai, it travels underground right quick. Entering that tunnel made me feel like I was in the future. When the blackness of the tunnel breaks away to the sprawling metropolis of the subway station, it felt like the city of the future had come!

There’s also the ventilation towers scattered around the Shinjuku Station West Gate Plaza that are cut at an angle like a stalk of bamboo. The same design appears in Osamu Tezuka’s Phoenix. He must have been inspired by these ducts. Things like that helped me believe that I was living in the future. Every time I went to Shinjuku, I became a child of the future. I would go the ever-growing rows of skyscrapers and gaze upwards. With my face pressed up against their walls, it created the illusion that the buildings were bent, looming down upon on. It almost made me faint. That’s how children of the future get their kicks (laughs).

It wasn’t until later I realized how off base I was. I believed I was a child of the future, but it was never so. I was only fooling myself. Coming to terms with the illusions you create for yourself is an important part of everyone’s life, I think.

Moving slightly off topic, you know the famous manga, Star of the Giants? It was serialized in Shonen Magazine from 1966 to 1971, and at the time we took it very seriously. It’s not like now where you laugh at it as a self-parody—when trouble came knocking to the protagonist’s door every week, we were there to answer the challenge with him.

When you reach a certain age, you have a sudden moment of clarity. ‘How does that make any sense? It’s not like that in reality!’ The more you pick it apart, the more of a joke it becomes. But chew on this—what you’re laughing at isn’t the comic itself, but rather the you that used to read it so earnestly. And now we’re back to laughing at the dead joke that has been picked clean. It's the same with Tokyo. I’m not laughing at a Tokyo that didn’t turn out to be the future city I envisioned, I’m laughing at myself for being naïve enough to believe that I was a child of the future. That’s the clincher. If you can’t laugh at yourself, it stunts your perspective.

As I said earlier, I don’t think that things used to be better. I’m excited about moving towards the future because I don’t want to go back to the time where everything was underdeveloped and shoddy. Entertainment wasn’t as vibrant as it is now, either. For all its imperfections we made an effort to make it work. We used our imaginations to make it interesting. Nowadays you have everything given to you. While on one hand its nice to have, on the other I don’t know how kids who haven’t trained their imaginations are going to manage. I always make this a point when I talk to students—The light of each star may look the same, but they are all of different ages. Develop the sense to discern between them. Light released hundreds of millions of years ago has the intensity to suppress light that's mere hundreds of years old. That’s what we call lasting star power.



Kenji is Naoki Urasawa?

Kenji, the main protagonist of 20th Century Boys, is a loyal friend who wouldn’t think twice about sacrificing himself for justice. Given the overlap between their age and experiences, it seems natural that fans would come to the conclusion that Kenji and Urasawa are one and the same. How much of the manga is based on Urasawa’s actual life? Or is it a complete fabrication? We explore the connection between Kenji and Urasawa by listening about the man’s childhood in his own words.

Is Kenji me? I tell people that about 10% of the story is autobiographical. Playing T-Rex in the school, the reason I started guitar—the manga is based on a lot of these personal experiences. But that doesn’t make me Kenji. Our personalities are totally different. Actually, I feel that I connect more with Otcho. But I can also understand how Yoshitsune and Friend feel to a certain degree. When it comes to the characters’ emotions, Kenji is the last one I could relate to. Kenji is very on the level! I’m more of a smart ass (laughs). I considered making Kenji more of a smart ass as well, but the main character has to be likeable. That’s why he's always a straight shooter.

My family was fairly hectic as a child so my parents didn’t have time to look after me. All I'd get was a few volumes of Tezuka manga, and then I was on my own! Drawing manga was all I had. I was told not to play with other kids in the neighborhood and wasn’t let outside, so I named my reflection in the mirror Mr. Smith. He was a foreign spy (laughs). Mr. Smith became my playmate.

Then when I turned six, I was thrust unceremoniously into elementary school. There were so many kids! Up until then I had been surrounded by only adults, so it was frightening being around that many kids. One day during arts and crafts the teacher told us to draw a picture. I was already doing manga at my young age, but I caught myself—I couldn't draw that kind of stuff at school! I ended up copying the other kids drawing messy round faces with messy round eyes. I remember thinking, “I can’t stand out; I can’t be myself.”

I hid the fact that I drew, but that kind of thinking gets you bullied. So I drew manga for the head bully. He praised me, "Man, you’re awesome!" We became friends of sorts, and the bullying stopped. I became part of the ‘in’ crowd. I used manga to keep myself safe (laughs). Manga became a means of communication for me, but I never thought about becoming a manga artist. Even though I was a child myself, I thought that having dreams like that was childish. But now that I think about it, in my composition class I always wrote ‘manga artist’ as my future dream. I was driven by peer pressure. Always doubting myself, I looked to those around me for approval.

Somehow that kid was given the chance to be a real manga author and now is lucky enough to enjoy a wide readership. But that doesn’t change my personality. I wonder how much meaning the manga I write has. And I still can’t believe the situation I find myself in. Honestly, the world won’t be swayed either way if I write or don’t write manga. That’s why if I slack off I forget about manga completely. Given the staggering amount of people that want to draw manga, it’s practically a miracle that I have people knocking on my door to write. All I can do is work hard so that they come, and to make sure that they keep coming. These job offers feel like they’re coming from another planet. If I don’t keep myself to a strict schedule, I know that the sloth in me will rear its lazy head.

Naoki Urasawa Interview-Part 1

This month's CasaBRUTUS is a special issue on 20th Century Boys! Among other things, it shows Naoki Urasawa's manga studio and storyboarding process, his solo music project, and explores the connection between Japanese architecture and culture during the 1970's.

Buy it here on Amazon!

I've translated their interview with series creator Naoki Urasawa. Follow the link to Part 2 at the end of the post!

PART 1 : Naoki Urasawa on the Current Generation/The Death of the Silver Age

Naoki Urasawa’s 20th Century

In 20th Century Boys, Naoki Urasawa paints the landscape of a Japan long since gone. Grandma and Grand pappy’s candy shop, snot-nosed elementary kids running amuck… Yet Urasawa counters, “I don’t miss any of it for an instant. We say people were better to each other back then, but I say that’s BS!” The ‘good old days’ of 20th Century Japan will have to find somewhere else to stay.

Let’s say someone commits a terrible crime. Prime time news picks it up and drills it into your head that humanity has reached a new low. And the viewers will eventually come to believe this. But is there any truth to this claim? Looking at the big picture, Japan was far more turbulent before it became a prosperous nation. There have always been terrible crimes, the kind that make you question society. I’ve always thought that we need to approach these things with a cool head. In 20th Century Boys, you can feel my annoyance towards the golden oldies that have become walking clichés. It’s like, “what do you want to wind the clock back for? Leave me out of it!”

In a side-by-side comparison, my generation stands head and shoulder over the current young generation. I’m well aware of this. This is my pet theory, but there’s no sense of cultural change after the 90’s. Conversely, the 60’s were all about change. I mean, the Beatles were releasing two new albums per year! Last year’s stuff was already ancient history. Compared to that tidal wave of innovation, what’s happening now is just paint-by-numbers rehashes. I feel sorry for the young generation chasing our ghosts. My parents’ generation didn’t fare much better. They had to rebuild from the ruins of World War II. They were dealt a bum hand.

This makes me and my generation an extremely lucky one. The seeds of post war culture sprouted with high economic growth and were eventually cut down when the bubble burst. We were there to experience it all. Other generations can’t touch that. We’re so far on top it makes me feel guilty (laughs).

Even so, I wish I had been born a few years earlier. The deciding factor of whether you qualify for this Super Generation is if you remember the Tokyo Olympics and World Expo. I was four during the Olympics. A tad on the young side (laughs). If I had been three, four years older then I would have been born in Showa 30 (1955), and wouldn’t that be something! Keisuke Kuwata, Suguru Egawa, Mitsugu Chinofuji, Sanma Akashiya—their generation made modern Japanese culture what it is today. If I were born too early before Showa 30 I would be in the post-war rubble; if I were born too late I would be overpowered by the Showa 30ers and subsequently cynical. Showa 30ers were the ones who really got to see culture cycle back on itself. I’ll never get over my birthday (laughs).

As a member of the lucky generation that was with postwar culture from the ground floor (despite the slight age discrepancy), I want to say this to the young generation: Bust your ass! You’re never going to take our crown if you keep copying our material that’s past its sell date. Make your own culture, something that sets it apart from postwar culture. And do it in a new way! Do something that will make us shake our heads in disgust. You gotta make us mad; make us say, “What the hell are you kids thinking!” Because right now I already know what you’re thinking. Your jokes are played—we wrote them! I want you to move on and create something completely different. Like when the Beatles burst on the scene, or when Presley shook us with his hips. It’s on your generation to call down the lightning.

The World Fair Was the Turning Point

The Osaka World Expo, 1970.
Taro Okamoto’s Tower of the Sun, which still stands tall in Osaka　as a symbol of Expo '70, along with works by world-class architects and artists including Kenzo Tange, Kisho Kurokawa, Tadanari Yokoo, Kunio Maekawa and Junzo Sakakura battled one another with the exhibition grounds as their arena. During its half-year lifespan, the expo set attendance records with a historic number of 64,220,000 visitors. The intensity of the crowd was suffocating. Expo 1970 plays a major part in 20th Century Boys, but what does it mean to the author?

I was in the 5th grade during the expo. Just like Kenji, I wasn’t able to go. To paraphrase my folks, “it costs too much and there’s too many people” so I was dragged to Katsuura beach instead. When we arrived I stomped and protested, “This isn’t the expo!” There was nowhere that I had to go to more than the expo. I still think that to this day. It was the kind of thing you’re supposed to go to, but I couldn’t. I’m still sore about it (laughs).

Yet if you were to ask me why I absolutely had to go, I have a hard time coming up with a clear answer. In the manga there are scenes of the characters discussing how they had to see the moon rock, or whatever cool thing at each pavilion. I’m the same way, simply listing off the things I wanted to see. But that’s not the reason I wanted to see them. It’s difficult to consolidate the intensity of the expo;20th Century Boys marks my attempt to.

My involvement with the script for the film adaptation was the natural progression of this. I wrote personal anecdotes and the public zeitgeist into the comic—I was the only one who could transfer them to film. There is a fine line between manga and film, but I think I managed to keep the feeling you get after reading the manga in line with the feeling you get after watching the film.

For me, everything before and during the 1970 expo is the past, and everything from 1971 on is the present. There’s a strong divide between the two epochs. Everything pre-1970 is in sepia, everything after is in color. Lets say I’m looking at the movie section of the newspaper. If it says ‘made in 1973’ after the title, then it's in the present. If it says ‘made in 1966’ it’s prehistoric (laughs). The divide is miles wide to me.

That was about the same time that the future changed from silver to white. Nothing says ‘the future’ like rocket ships, and rocket ships all used to be silver. Then in ‘68 Stanly Kubrick released 2001: a Space Odyssey, and they changed to white overnight. Legend has it that Kubrick made everything on the set silver. In the middle of production he took a trip to NASA and saw that everything was white. Not what he was expecting (laughs). So when he got back to the set he had everything remade white. That’s how the future went from silver to white for us. Silver refrigerators scream pre-1970’s to me.

There needs to be an incorruptible binding in place to hold the past and present together where they split around 1970. I think that binding is the expo. 20th Century Boys has been translated and published in a number of countries, and received top honors for Best Series at France’s 2004 Angouleme International Comics Festival Paris and Barcelona have both hosted major expos in the past, right? That sense of excitement is close to home, they can vibe with it.

In retrospect, that special feeling that enveloped Japan in 1970, that feeling of expectation and excitement for the future, strongly resembles the feeling we had going into 2000. For my generation, the 21st century started in 1970.

Continued in Part 2.

The Last Accessory You'll Ever Need: Kawaii Gravestones

Japanese graves tend to adhere to a tasteful and compact design, their elongated headstones adorned with flowing sutra. Likewise, a red capped Jizo statue means you have stumbled upon a child's grave. But Japan has since modernized, loosening Buddhism's mortuary monopoly.
Stone carvers use sculptures of famous characters to show off their skills and capitalize on the pop culture market. While a familiar sight at playgrounds and day cares, these adorable scamps can occasionally be caught moonlighting as grave markers.

I have no mouth and I must scream.

His pocket connects to a 4th Dimension of oppressive darkness.

Possibly the worst selling Anpanman figure to date.

Of course these pop grave stones are far from the norm, but it's all about having options! Special thanks to the blogs I cribbed these images of Hello Kitty, Doraemon, and Anpanman from.

Galaxy Ginza

Title: Galaxy Ginza (ギャラクシー銀座)
Serialized in: Big Comic Spirits (2007-2008)
By: Kenichiro Nagao
Genre: Midnight kiss


1. Punk rock
2. Scathing Social Commentary
3. Dirty Jokes
4. Drug fueled P.R.A.N.K. calls
5. Randomly Inserted Hyper 70s Psychedelic art
6. A Hero for the Masses

Galaxy Ginza contains all this and more in the first 11 pages, which I was nice enough to translate into English!

The first two volumes of this have been out for a while, but when I did an English search for it to see what other people thought of it, I couldn't find anything. Instead of writing a review, I will let it speak for itself. Click on the thumbnails below to read the first chapter.











The series goes on to include:

7. Choir Girls that Repeatedly Swallow/Puke an Alien to Hide it from the Government
8. Host Clubs that Send Over Retro-Hunks on Locomotives
9. Feminazis with Erotic Body Paint and Accompanying Guitarists
10. Many more Dirty Jokes
11. Power
12. Corruption
13. Lies

.... and way more!
If you need any other reason to pick it up, give it up. Everyone else, buy it on Amazon so I don't feel so guilty for posting it here!

2009 Kanazawa Film Festival

Following the precedent set by 2007's Seishun Grindhouse and 2008's Filmageddon, Kanazawa's film festival series continues with 2009's New World Order Survival Handbook. Showings coincide with the five day holiday and run from September 19th to the 25th.

This year's films are broken into four categories and each day is punctuated with special events and guest speakers.


WORLD OF THE FUTURE

How does our present stack up against the filmmakers who captured it as their future? Revisit the past future with 2001: A Space Odyssey and AKIRA, then brace yourself for a triple threat from the master of industrial imagery, Sogo Ishii, in the form of Asia Strikes Back, and The Master of Shiatsu, and his German rockumentary 1/2 Mensh.

CHARISMA

The mad dreams of men born from insatiable egos and accumulated power made real.
See Fitzcarraldo, the rubber baron who moved a ship over a mountain. Journey deeper into the heart of darkness with the extended Apocalypse Now: Redux. Go back in time with 2004’s historic dramatization of the great king of Macedonia, Alexander.

RELIGION

No new world order is complete without a religion to pacify it. See how belief can both unite and unmake societies in Shaka, the 1961 epic depicting the struggle between Siddhartha and the holy Brahmins of India circa 500 B.C., Essene, a documentary following the lives of monks cloistered in a Benedictine monastery,
The Terrifying Revelations of Nostradamus(ノストラダムス戦慄の啓示), a disaster film spanning nine dimensions of destruction, and The Human Revolution (人間革命), which follows the formation of Japan’s most infamous and influential new religion, Soka Gakkai.

NEW WORLD ORDER

Find out who is responsible for this charade we call civilization in the 2005 remake of War of the Worlds, conspiracy theory fueled Zeitgeist and its sequel, and The Gate of Heavenly Peace, an expose covering the Tienanmen Incident with interviews by participants and eyewitnesses.

In Terrifying Girls’ High School Classroom (恐怖女子高校　暴力教室), director Norifumi Suzuki brings us back to reality with a tale of high school girl gang bangers who unite to revolt against their corrupt, perverted headmaster. Memoir of Japanese Assassins(日本暗殺秘録) stars Sonny Chiba and is a cinematic retelling of assassinations that have shaped Japanese history. Lazarus (ラザロ) follows the psychopathic heroine Mayumi as she takes in girls who have fallen to the bottom of the widening crack between the haves and have-nots and trains them to eat the rich and kill for money. Finally, the American documentary FRAG blows the lid off the insanity that is professional gaming.

EVENTS

Talk Show
Rapper Utamaro from Ryhmester and self proclaimed Satanist/trash horror editor Yoshiki Takahashi (personal site, NSFW) team up to discuss the current sad state of affairs as it applies to society and film. While Utamaro might seem like an unlikely candidate, his Cinema Hustler film critic podcast is the real deal!

Metropolis Orchestra
Revisit the Fritz Lang classic accompanied by a live musical performance including accordion, piano, contra bass, and handmade instruments.

Mystery Outdoor Showing
What are they showing? It’s a mystery! First come first seated, so be sure to snag your spot early.

For more information check out the official homepage. The website is currently only in Japanese, but information in English should surface in time.

HOUSE

Title: HOUSE (ハウス)
Distributor: Toho (1977)
Director: Nobuhiko Obayashi
Screenplay: Chiko Katsura
Genre: Fever dream horror

Japanese cinema played by a different set of rules 30 years ago. While the past decade has seen unknown directors breaking into the industry via V-cinema, during the 70’s it was unheard of for an independent to receive big studio distribution. Directors were bound to their company, more senior staff than creative visionaries.

This makes Nobuhiko Obayashi’s work on House all the more groundbreaking. Obayashi started his career directing commercials featuring foreign celebrities and music, which was visionary in it self. Check out his Mandom commercials featuring Charles Bronson as a professional outlaw/professional beefcake or Thomas the Tank Engine chugging along to Ringo Starr.


Colleagues begged Obayashi to create a film that could compete with big-budget Hollywood blockbusters. With Jaws as the baseline, he dreamt up the story of group of girls who visit an old house in the country, only be devoured in turn by the house itself! The execs loved it, but the in-house directors didn’t want their names to be associated with such a ludicrous concept. After a two year marketing blitz including a radio play and novel, the studio broke down and made history by allowing Obayashi, an outsider, inside their closed system.

For those of you who gauge their horror by the body count, House provides a full cast of seven girls to be minced and mangled in increasingly creative ways. Our young idols include Fancy, the spoiled heroine; Fanta, the romantic; Melody, the musician; Kung-Fu, the sporty one; Brain, the studious one; Mick the stomach; and Sweet, the girl-next-door. Going by the characters' names alone you can see why no one was willing to step up and direct. Our first clip starts out slow but establishes the victims and Obayashi’s unique humor.



Once the girls arrive in the countryside they are greeted by Fancy’s aunt, whose health has been deteriorating since her fiancé was lost in WWII and is now confined to a wheelchair. It soon becomes apparent that something is amiss as the girls begin to disappear one by one.



The other girls laugh off Fanta’s story and return to the joys of simple country living. Still, as the bizarre occurrences escalate they can’t shake the feeling that something is watching them, and notice it odd that the aunt is beginning to reclaim her youthful vigor.



All bets are off as the house enters full-on murder mode. Director Obayashi treats the film as a stream of vaguely interconnected commercials, making sure that each scene is packed with the same amount of visual pizazz as a 30-second TV spot. The computer effects in House are laughable by today’s standards, but at the time they provided Japanese audiences with a horror fantasy land never before captured on film.



Pouring over the aunt’s diaries, Brain puzzles together the house’s terrible secret: That the aunt actually died long ago and is trying to possess her niece, Fancy! The omnipresent white cat Snowball is the source of the house’s power, but does this knowledge come in time to save the girls?



Is House a haunted house film? Slapstick comedy? Teen idol romp? Obayashi was more concerned with making an enjoyable film than a cohesive narrative, and his unorthodox vision shines through in every schizophrenic cut and maniac effect. House is a labor of love and a perfect example of ingenuity born from technological limitations. If you don’t dig the animation overlays and hokey blue screen graphics, you’re as bananas as Mr. Togo!

Tokyo Spectre Brigade (1)

August in Japan means 5 things: a week off of work, ramune, watermelon, taking 4 showers a day, and GHOSTS! This posts kicks off our first in a series of 心霊スポット(haunted spots) reports.

For our first outing, we decided to go all out, visiting the abandoned Fukiage tunnels in Ome, Tokyo. According to our source on Japanese hauntings, this place is supposed to be where it's at. Unfortunately, no ghosts were there along with it.... More on that at the end of the post. Here's what we found:

The road leading to the first of two tunnels. Yes, it is still daytime.... We figured we would hit the weaker of the two tunnels during the late afternoon to build up our courage.

"Beware of female phantom"

Enter at your own peril!

One of the biggest collections of awful graffiti in Japan. The scariest thing about the tunnel was that if you stand at one end and your friend talks to you in a hushed voice from the opposite side, you can hear them as if they were behind you talking into your ear.

This is the phantom we were warned about earlier. Mineral deposits and mold vaguely resembling a woman with long black hair wearing kimono or the restless soul of a scorned woman?

Michael Jackson's new haunt? This was embedded in the wall of the tunnel, below it in the mud was a pair of women's tights.

This tunnel is over 100 years old and is imfamous as one of Japan's most haunted spots. After climbing a (small) mountain, sneaking past the Japanese version of the house from Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and trespassing on government land, we found that the city had recently sealed the place up for good. Despite DrSenbei's lackadaisical rattling of the huge padlock on the door, this pretty much brought our day to a close. Whammy!

Conclusion

If you live in the Kanto area and want a good excuse to get out of the city without having to go to another temple or shrine, this is your place. I might have sounded cynical in my captions, but the tunnel really was rather spooky and fun, ghost or no ghost. We took turns walking through it alone, and I have to admit that I kept looking over my shoulder and getting freaked out by the acoustics. That, plus knowing that I was somewhere I shouldn't be, made me feel like a kid again in the best way possible.

You can take a bus almost directly to the mountain with the tunnels, but I really recommend walking there to get the most out of the mountainside. Here is a MAP.

Ome is also famous for it's Showa era Japanese Cinema Street, where you can check out all sorts of vintage movies posters and the like. More info on that at this guy who I don't know's blog.

This is Not Budokan

The Stalin- Allergy

Shigeru Mizuki X Supa Resque Wears

Distributer of oddball import and domestic apparel Supa Resque Wears has teamed up with legendary manga author Shigeru Mizuki to bring us a series of yokai themed tees!
This guy's backstory is more sci-fi than horror. A man abandons his family to escape from his debt, only to be propositioned by a scientist who offers to pick up his tab if the man will have his body converted into an undying vessel for the purpose of deep space exploration. The man agrees, but upon returning home one last time before jettisoning into space, his family flees in terror at the sight of the monster he has become!

Oh, poor Fushigi-Kun! Are your limbs made out of rubber? Clay? Not his most popular character, but classic Shigeru all the same.

Check out their online shop for order information!