12-8-2000
Just finished 10 days biking around the fairy tale city of Kyoto, forgot for a while i am a tourist.. I sit in my capsule hotel, number C254, 2m3, it could have been on a boat, a train or inside a submarine or spacecraft, but this is downtown Osaka, the second city of Japan, with an economy bigger than Australia. Enough neon signs to take night pictures without flash. Sushi restaurants with conveyor belts, game parks with aquaria full of fish, turtles, and lobsters fighting against electronic arms. The young crowd is extremely fashion minded here and appears to have enough funds to express themselves, dark tan and long blond hair (boys and girls!), surf shirts and miniskirts. Present and past fit well together in Japan, beverage machines in temple gates, geishas in phone boxes, those blond girls with sea-blue eye shadow in kimono and wooden slippers.. I walk passed a bar where Shakira, the Colombian nightingale, is playing, and talk with Ricardo, a easygoing Brazilian who has been working in Japan for years. He doesn't really like it but the money is good, especially his hobby as a porn actor. He shares a dark apartment with some other young Southamericans. His bar shift ends and we go looking for another place. We pick up a Brazilian friend of his, who spends half an hour on makeup without much result. Finally we enter one of those rare foreigner bars, where a Canadian chick covered with Japanese signs dances on the bar with a chain. It does not take long before Ricardo and his friend are joining her. I talk with 2 Korean and Japanese girls, they take me to a dark Korean bar. The narrow streets of this entertainment district are full of futuristic buildings without windows, and with more bars than floors; on my own i would never have found those interesting places. Outside again the sun has appeared a while ago, but this is the opening night of Robert's bar, American Beauty, he could not throw his last customer out and does not want to go home anyway. After his international career as a model, he has big entertainment plans now. Proudly he explains the references in the decor and plays Pink Floyd on request. Next to me two Korean eyes shine in the candle light, 'Well she's a tough nut to crack', laughs Robert..

Go West

Tom Tobback © 2000