Small cars advocating for cat heaven
Do Your Best!! -A Hackberry
April 16, 2023 | Tokyo, Japan
I didn’t even stay as late as the guys I met, but I still awoke bleary-eyed and relatively late. I asked the gentleman originally from Scotland what a traditional Japanese breakfast was. “It’s not really a thing” he told me, “they eat something small that would eat for any other meal basically”.
Not satisfied with this and wanting to keep my writing up, I walked to the nearest thing that looked like a cafe that was not a Starbucks; I don’t care if they are forced to pay workers well here, they can go fuck yourselves for all the union busting in the US.
On my walk over, though the small winding streets that make up the residential area I was staying in, I encountered a very large board, with a painted grid. Inside each of the boxes there was a number. I couldn’t discern any reason for this until my return in the evening (see below.
A small roll and iced coffee later, this procession greeted me as I walked out the door:
It wasn’t until a fair bit later, walking around Shinjuku, that I discovered what this was all about:
My goal today was the Meiji temple. A quick, and not too crowded, ride on their subway got me there fast. The station was a labyrinth but had exceptionally signage in English. The moment I hopped out from the station, I found a caravan of tiny little cars:
So yes, politics were afoot. It was local election time and I had now seen two out of the three Acceptable Places for Political Speech that I could eventually discern. What’s the second? This is that board I mentioned above, when I returned to my neighborhood in the evening:
The stuff on the far right, by the way, is information on the voting day, locations, and early voting information. Or at least that is what my translator app tells me. I’ll talk about the relative effectiveness of the translation apps in these environments:
This post is already long, so I’ll get to the actual Meiji temple in the next one, but I’ll just reiterate that I am showing remarkable constraint not taking pictures of every goddamned thing that strikes me as curious or novel while just wandering the streets of this place.
