Sign out front. Nice 80s styles. Design a manga character thing.
DORAEMON ALL OVER THE WORLD OMG.
Me and Lena decided to take pics at the 'standing and reading corner.' I chose the comic I'm holding cos it's called DOPE, how could you not, and Lena chose hers cos "it has a monkey on the front". Both excellent reasons.
Silly amount of manga books. Korean versions of manga. Exhibition gallery. Slightly naughty comics from back in the day.
We'd hoped to visit Fushimi Inari (the temple with all the red gates) but we wouldn't have had enough time to do the whole thing before it got dark, so decided to leave it for next week and headed off to Osaka instead. Went to the Umeda Sky Building, two massive buildings connected on the 40th floor with an incredible view of the city. (the pic is between the towers looking up.)
Click on this to see a full panorama, taken with my shitty camera but it gives you an idea of the view from the calmer river side.
On the way down, they had a poster for something, with a token weird looking blonde foreigner on the front. I started to moan about how Japan always often uses weird looking foreigners for ads and stuff, as if they can't tell who is actually well presented which is odd cos Japanese people (especially compared to the foreigners who actually live in Japan) in general are more stylish and so doing this sort of makes them look bad, when i saw THIS GUY.
Thanks for undermining my argument, guy. Even his pretty rude trainers don't make up for the mickey hood.
While on the way to dinner, we passed this excellent love hotel. It's Christmas everyday at Chapel Christmas!
In the tapas bar where we had dinner, they were playing Studio Apartment's album (including the beautiful 'We Are Lonely" - seriously check this tune). That's one thing I will miss when coming back, hearing amazing music in places you wouldn't expect. It seems like there is no real underground here, everything is valued. In a standard department store, maybe the equivalent of Debenhams, I heard a Yam Who remix last week. All cafes that I choose seem to play Jazz... I don't know if they all just do or somehow the kind of place that a person who likes that sort of music would pick happens to be the sort of place that the owner would want to play that kind of music... either way I LOVE it.
Then it was off to what is probably my only Japan 'tradition' so far, drinks at Bandwagon then off to club Noon for FREEDOMTIME.
My hero, Yoshihiro Okino from Kyoto Jazz Massive, recognised me by face! I guess cos I've been at so many of his nights, all the FreedomTimes since i got here, Cool to Kool in Kyoto, Tokyo Crossover Jazz festival and at his record store, and said hello most times I could. Dude CAME OVER TO ME and shook my hand and said 'thanks for coming from so far away'. (Last time I was in his record store I told him I live in Northern Hyogo.) Lena teased me about being a bit starstruck by him, but seriously, like from the age of 14 in my room in Harrow going what is this music? its heavy!! to finding out about this whole jazz/future jazz/crossover scene to coming Japan and one of my heroes recognised me by sight? Serious.As Shuya Okino (other half of KJM) DJ'ed, Clara Hill, beautiful female vocalist, did a live PA of 5 or 6 tunes, starting with her tune with Shuya, then some stufff from her albums, I think my favourite was Nowhere I Can Go, her tune with Atjazz. She has an AMAZING voice, when she started we were sitting upstairs and I thought that she hadn't come and they were just playing the tune. That was fun.
Then Afronaught jumped on the decks and took it all broken, of course played all the old Bugz classics but some wicked new stuff as well. Yay for Osaka. Yay for Freedomtime. Yay.
Just as a side note, the visuals at Freedom Time, projected on a large screen above the DJ booth, and on various screens in the bar, are always amazing. It's done by 'moss design unit' and the guy brilliantly calls himself 'mossolini'. Always some abstract visuals, snippets from obscure movies of nature, cities, far out stuff. Anyway this time, during one of the most bugged out broken tunes Afronaught dropped, mossolini was mixing images of young children running super fast in an African village with... the penguin dance from Mary Poppins.
Love it.
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EDIT: just found a video of the Tokyo Crossover Jazz Festival I was at last month. Anyone who likes jazz, check it, Sleep Walker and Bembe on fantastic form.
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