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Vending Machine Eggs and Fake Mt Fujis

ACAB continues to remain undefeated this trip - just some late 90s Lakers style domination here

B R

B R

— 5 min read

19 April, 2023 | Tokyo, Japan

Hell yeah it’s bike tour time. And what better place to meet and warm people up to biking around than the Meguro Parasitological Museum.

Gross as hell.

Usually these things meet up at the bike shop that runs the tour as a side gig or a particular exit of the metro system. I appreciate the boldness of grossing everyone out before hopping on bikes of really dubious quality and various states of disrepair.

For the first time I am really glad something isn’t translated into English.

Our tour guide was for this was a woman named KT and as it happens she hosts the only well rated bike tour in Tokyo I could find: the “One&Only Weird Tokyo bike tour”. It did not disappoint in this score.

Our first stop was an egg vending machine.

A thousand (1000) yen for a dozen isn’t bad. The posting on the side of the machine that looks like an academic paper basically is, or at least the abstract of one. The selective breeding of hens has been done to induce them to produce eggs that have hypoallergenic properties.

We also stopped by a vending machine that sold frozen dumplings and another that sells fish stock (with a small fish in every bottle); these were especially popular during COVID. But that paled in comparison to the next place KT brought us:

Look closely. Stare into the madness of what you find. Those aren’t giants in the background.
Now, I know what you are thinking and that was the first question KT got. These aren’t those kind of dolls. Arguably, these are sadder. While principally advertised to children (and child sized), KT made it clear that did not make up the bulk of their buyers.

As we rolled down a river path, we briefly stopped at a park on one of the banks and it only struck me when KT pointed it out - in all my time in Tokyo I had not basically seen grass. It’s largely not a thing.

You can also go tell someone from Tokyo to “go touch grass” but they generally can’t.

But I think my favorite part was visiting the fake Mount Fuji.

A steep climb.

It’s hard to understate how spiritually important Mount Fuji is. It’s considered basically a god and even has a modest cult that worships it as a female deity. There’s an expectation that everyone make a pilgrimage to the top, KT told us, and for a lot of people that would be difficult or at least extremely inconvenient. Like any good religion of sufficient size and age, practical solutions are devised. There are several dozen in Tokyo alone.

I asked KT the size of the smallest fake Mt Fuji in Tokyo.

We entered the nearby temple behind the…sure, mountain.

Crossing the threshold of these gates is meant to represent the transition from the mundane world into the spiritual or sacred. I’m not sure why there are like a dozen in some cases.
A note on biking in Japan: it’s pretty good. There’s almost no dedicated infrastructure, but the streets are just safer overall because they are nearly universally dominated by pedestrians rather than cars. This also calms the bike traffic itself - you don’t feel the need to keep up with (and dodge) the phrenic pace of automobiles.

One thing I’ll mention before moving on to the evening events is the answer I got from KT about why the Japanese never appear to wear sunglasses. It was pretty wild to see so many people suffering with the sun in a low angle toward the end of days. I had kind of assumed it was possibly a thing like Seattle with umbrellas (a weird, totally irrational cultural affliction) but no. “I would look suspicious to the police” KT said. Score one more for ACAB; just a nonstop series of Ws here.

Two nights before I met a lovely couple at the Eagle from Philadelphia named Josh and David. The remaining thing on their Japan bucket list was to rent a room and do some karaoke - an activity best done with more than two people. I was happy to join them, as I had intended on doing this as well (somehow), but my attempts to roll in the other fellas I met were not successful - Jason had to work in the morning and Chris was already on a cruise.

David could actually speak some Japanese and one of the ways he had become capable in it was by singing J-pop, which they apparently do around their home with some frequency
I’d say 95% of the songs used generic stock footage but sometimes you get the impression there was some human hand in the curation of which stock footage is used - such as here, where a very fake party exclusively containing women was paired with Love Shack.

Well that’s the email length limit. Tomorrow is 4/20 and I’m in a country that will absolutely throw you in prison forever for having any amount of the most harmless drug there is - time for a museum!

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