Happy Birthday Me...

Turned 25 the other tuesday. i'm not one for big extravagant birthday parties (i held my 21st in dingy sticky-floored Whelans in Dublin, where we all got trashed on jack and coke and bounced up and down to some half-decent alt rock for a few hours), and this year is no exception. The big difference with this year is that my low key celebrations were largely conducted in Tokyo. How fucking cool is that?!?!?!?!?!? But did we go for the traditional gaijin celebration tactic of getting wankered at a random foreigner-filled club in Roppongi? Oh no no no no no. Instead, we decided to take a trek to some of the shall we say weirder attractions that Tokyo has to offer, starting with the Parasitological Museum.

As the name suggests, Tokyo's Parasitological museum is dedicated to all things tapeworm and tropical. Though there was no English translation on any of the displays, the museum really did exactly what it said on the tin - in that there were jars of enormous worms and bugs that formerly inhabited a number of unfortunate hosts, from fish to birds to dogs to humans. The museum had several effects on me - apart from making me feel itchy when i looked at all the pics of the poor buggers who had their skin torn apart by skin bugs, i was terrified, fascinated, amused, bemused and downright entertained all at the same time. And though i couldn't be as empathetic to the case study of the man who had a parasite in his bollocks that caused them to swell and drag along the ground as the lads were, i still got my money's worth. Definitely one to recommend if you're ever in Tokyo on a rainy day, especially to look at the visitors' book to see all the weird little cartoons of people with parasites that former guests have doodled. Priceless.


After an hour of worms in jars, we headed on to an exhibition of photographs by Japanese photographer Hosoe Eikoh. The guy basically invented that whole skin-on-skin guess-the-body-part united-colours-of-benetton-ad-type-black-and-white-skin-together thing. He's most famous for the book of avant garde photos that he took of the writer Yukio Mishima, but the collection had stuff that he'd done throughout his career, and it was wonderful to see. One photo really got my attention, of a girl eating an apple. Seriously, eating an apple never seemed so erotic till i saw that photo.


After the exhibition we had to do something to keep ross interested, so we headed to the Yebisu Beer Museum. To be honest, i don't think i looked at a single thing there, i just swanned through it looking for the bar. and i wasn't disappointed - i got my sampling tray of 4 of Yebisu's finest brews including the bog standard lager, the weissbier, the red stuff and the black stuff, or watery guinness as i like to call it.

Then we found a random izakaya for some food and more beer (in substantially larger glasses, thanks be to jesus), threw some tasty j-food down us, and sprinted to shinjuku loft for a gig. Went to see OOIOO and Deerhoof play - Japanese/American noise rock at its very best. so i had possibly the weirdest birthday celebration i've ever had, but thanks to the power of tokyo, it worked out pretty well in the end. man i love tokyo...