Here's a weird thing I brought back from Japan. Bidding for the merchandising rights is well underway. You should know that the three tanks are brothers and the same one is always attacked by the cat.
As a result of my father-in-law climbing onto the roof of his house through a second story window during a rainstorm, I spent a lot of my trip in a hospital in Himeji. When not watching him attempt to lower his brain age, I visited the "Language Cure Room," where I learned doublethink and Fox Newspeak.
Himeji is famous for two things: Himeji Castle and yakuza. (A 16-year-old boy stabbed his mother in the throat in a local restaurant on Tuesday, but I am told this sort of thing happens all the time.) Whenever I return from Japan, people invariably ask me, "Narraptor, did you see any yakuza?" Indeed, I believe I did!
The alleged sighting took place a few hours away in the bar of the Osaka Ritz-Carlton. It's the type of place where grapefruit juice costs as much as a cocktail, and where the lounge singers amuse barflys by singing, "Welcome to the hotel...Ritz-Carlton!" After their opening performance, they announced that someone in the room was celebrating a special birthday. Someone just turned three!
Sitting next to the woman holding the birthday boy was a Japanese man wearing a white suit, impassively watching as everyone clapped along to the birthday song. Now I'm not saying that just because he took a kid to a cocktail lounge for its third birthday means he's a gangster, but at the very least he wanted us to think he was one.
I made a point of renting Miike's The Great Yokai War while in Japan, forgetting that it came out on DVD in America a few weeks ago. My wife translated all but the last 15 minutes for me, and other than the mysterious philosophies of the bad guy ("To destroy the evils of truth and love!") I think I understood everything. For those of you who don't know, Yokai is basically a Japanese Labyrinth or Mirrormask, but the monsters come from real folklore. And it's got a giant mechanical hellforge that allows the antagonist to merge kappa and tengu with discarded motorcycles and the like to create demon bikes and helicopter Terminators with chainsaw arms.
Will someone please watch it with the subtitles on and tell me what the ending meant, other than "I'm Takeshi Miike! Ha ha!"
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