Birthday Party and Day in Iwaki, Fukushima!

6/2/2017

This weekend my friend Liang was celebrating her birthday, so I made my way down to Iwaki, Fukushima to join her in her celebrations.

She had her birthday party in a local Indian restaurant, Purnima (or Purunima.) This place is pretty famous in Iwaki for having delicious Indian food and having a friendly owner. The owner’s name is Baba. I learned that many JETs have their birthdays at Baba’s because he is super friendly, speaks English very well, and gives these super long, heartfelt speeches.

I arrived to the party a little late so I only caught the tail-end of Baba’s speech. But I still heard nearly ten minutes of it. Apparently he will give 30 minute + speeches on a regular basis. When I entered the door he called me “stunningly beautiful.” I thanked him and he asked me to sit down. About five minutes after I arrived, Cormac arrived at the party in the middle of Baba’s speech too. Baba greeted him warmly and shook his hand, but then Baba got distracted and continued on with his speech while still holding on to Cormac’s hand. Cormac stood next to Baba holding his hand until the end of the speech. It was a funny kind of awkward. An entire room of foreigners listening to a speech while Cormac stood behind Baba and just held his hand. Another person at the party, Chais, attempted to distract Baba at one point in an attempt to get him to release Cormac’s hand, but it did not work. It was pretty hilarious.

 

And this is the Birthday Girl giving her speech. It was much shorter.

After the speech, Baba told us that he loved meeting new people, talking with them and learning about their lives. He said he would like it if everyone who attended the party would set aside a short time and come talk to him one-on-one. After that we were allowed to eat some of Baba’s delicious Indian food, all vegetarian from what I remember. 

I socialized with many people, including people that I had never met before. I had so much fun talking with everyone, I had a great time.

At one point in the night I found myself talking to a guy named James. James is a pretty nice guy and I think he’s pretty cool to hang out with. Sadly, he made himself a social pariah this year with his open support of Donald Trump. I personally don’t care who people do or don’t support politically. I don’t care enough about politics to give two shits. But a lot, and I mean a lot, of people on the JET Program this year were bothered by this and refused to socialize with him and talked bad about him behind his back. I felt sad about this. Nobody deserves this treatment, regardless of whatever politician they support (imho.)

James is in the blue shirt on the right.

I got talking to James and found out that he is a Pagan/Wiccan believing person, although he doesn’t associate with any particular religion. It is more like he picks what he likes from various belief systems and combines them into his own spirituality.

Being a lover of religious studies, I spoke with him for a long time learning about what he believes in and telling him stories of my own dabbles in the occult. He’s a pretty interesting dude.

At one point I had to pee and on the way to the restroom I saw that the line to talk to Baba was currently empty, so I thought I would make my time to talk with him right after I got out of the restroom.

I greeted him and his first question to me was my name and where I lived in Fukushima. I told him, but that was the last question he asked me. He then went on and on about how beautiful I was that I started to become a little uncomfortable by it.

He took a selfie with everyone at the party. This was before he made me super uncomfortable.

He told me that I needed to go to France and become a model. He said that Tokyo would also work as well, but I should really do it in France. He said that walking down the street I would get offers to do modeling shoots from strangers with business cards, and that they were totally legit. I should trust them and they would help me get a modeling career. I told him that I thought that in the best case scenario the photoshoot would be a scam, or dangerous in the worst case scenario. He told me that I shouldn’t think that way, that most people are good and honest and that I absolutely had to trust people like that. I had to tell him that I would definitely do that someday in order to leave the conversation. I was so uncomfortable by this point.

I appreciate that someone finds me attractive, but on the other hand I was offended that that was the only thing Baba saw in me. He asked other people about their lives, about their ambitions, about their opinions, but for me he only saw my face. He saw nothing else in me as a person. I left that conversation feeling pretty hurt and annoyed.

When I returned to the table, James was being pretty cold towards me, for reasons I won’t get in to. So I left him alone for a short while so he could calm down a bit.

When he had cooled off a bit, he showed me his tarot cards and he did a reading for me. It was pretty fun and interesting. It was during this time that Cormac went to have his conversation with Baba.

James and I talked a bit more about the occult for a while, until it was time for me to leave. Cormac and I were staying at my friend Mitch’s apartment, so we left together to walk to Mitch’s apartment.

It was on the walk back that Mac told me about the disturbing conversation he had with Baba.

Now let me say one thing. Mac and I had joked that “by looking at the way we interacted at the party, you would have thought we didn’t know each other.” This is because we barely talked to each other the entire night. Not for any other reason than we were busy talking with people we don’t get to talk to often. Just keep this in mind.

Mac said that when he went to go speak to Baba, they talked to each other for a bit, and then the conversation turned to me. Baba said he knew some rich Arabian men and that he could totally sell me to one of these men and he would split the money with Cormac. He said it as a joke, but What The Actual Fuck?!

Baba doesn’t know Cormac, and he would not have known that Mac and I knew each other by the way we interacted at the party. So, Baba asked some random guy at this party, with no obvious connection to me, that he’d like to sell me to some Oil Baron and split the money.  It really makes me wonder if he made this joke/offer to other random people at the party. Is it just me, or does this sound like he is only “joking” because he thinks nobody will take him up on this offer and is just testing the waters with people? ‘Cuz that’s what I think right about now. Even if it was a joke, it is freaking disturbing and not funny at all. Considering that he wants me to trust all photographers who want to make me a model, and sell me to a rich Arabian, I just think Baba wants to get me into the sex slave trade, one way or another. So I would like to say one thing. If any pretty girls go missing from the Iwaki area, please look at Baba first. Just…. Fuck.

So we walked to Mitch’s house and socialized for a while before retiring for the night. Over all, I liked socializing with people and seeing friends that I don’t get to often see. But my night was seriously tainted by Baba and by the thing with James that I don’t want to get in to (I don’t want to publicly shit on James.) I can’t really say it was a great night. It was mostly disturbing and agitating.

6/3/2017

The next morning when the three of us awoke, we got ready for the day and decided to go grab some breakfast from a bakery down the street from Mitch’s apartment called "Bakery House My Tokuji". It is the type of bakery where they make a variety of bread foods and desserts. You walk in, grab a tray and a set of tongs and go around picking the foods you want yourself, you then take your tray of food to the register, they wrap it up in paper for you and you can take it with you.

We decided to eat breakfast at the bakery, they have tables outside the entrance on a small porch in the front of the building. I decided to get this big, BIG bread roll with ham and cheese wrapped in a spiral inside the large roll. It was absolutely massive and I was only able to eat half of it, so I wrapped it back up and was able to eat the rest of it later in the day. But it was freaking delicious!

While we were sitting there, there were a couple of kids at the surrounding tables with their parents and they were very vocal about their surprise to see a bunch of foreigners in public enjoying a meal. They were not rude, and the parents were doing a good job of educating the kids to be nice and to treat us (foreigners) with the same respect they would treat anyone else with.  At one point I dropped something on the ground and turned around to pick it up. While I was doing so I caught the eyes of the kids and waved to them, they smiled and waved back. They were cute and the family was nice. It made me feel good to hear a Japanese parent explain respect to foreigners to their kids.

After we were done eating we walked back to Mitch’s house and grabbed our stuff. Mitch had other plans, so he refused to join us in our adventures around Iwaki this day. So we said our goodbyes and made our way to Iwaki’s Aquarium called Aquamarine Fukushima.

Aquamarine Fukushima is a very large aquarium with many large tanks and attractions.

The aquarium has a few big rooms where there are trees and plants and dirt and rocks that make up the nature “themed” rooms. The tanks in these rooms are ponds in between the rock walls and the tree roots. It is a creative way to display fish tanks and I liked it. 

There were also a good amount of large tanks full of fish. There is a tank that you can see it from above/body height looking down and it is full of silver fish swimming in a large circle. You continue through the aquarium for a while and you pop out at the bottom of the tank looking up. From here you can still see the silver fish but you can also see the tank is full of rays. This tank also has a large triangular walkway where you can walk underneath the tank, look up and see all the fish inside.

I love this picture.

There is also a large tank full of at least two sea lions. They were active when we were there. The male was absolutely massive! He would swim around his tank, breach the surface and roar! It was such an amazing sound! I stayed in the area watching them for longer than any other place in the aquarium. I loved hearing the sea lion roar and I lingered for quite a while.

There was a building off to one side of the aquarium that had some Fennec Foxes, beetles and snakes. This was a building to show some animals from the Middle East. This building was here in the first place because after the 2011 Tsunami disaster, some rich men from the United Arab Emirates donated a lot of money to repair and expand the aquarium. Not only are there displays of animals from the Middle East, but there are also posters and information on the walls of the building that explain the culture, food and clothes of the Middle East. It was not too interesting, and the foxes were sleeping when we were there, but it was cool anyways.  I got this picture of a fox while it got up to shift its position and sleep more.

There were a few other types of fish in the main building. 

There is a tower at the aquarium where you can take an elevator to the top and look out at the ocean, the docks and the surrounding area. Here are some pictures of the view.

On the way out we walked through a room that was closing down, but it had a small tank close to the floor that had sea creatures you could touch. It had lobsters (why would you have these in a petting tank?!) as well as starfish and some pokey, black Sea Urchins. The lobsters scared me, but I was able to pet along the back by the tail, steering clear of its claws.

After we were done we ate some food from the café in the aquarium. Mac got some curry and I got a doria with lobster meat on top. It was quite good.

On the way out we walked through this room that had tanks with curved sections so you could stick your head “in” the tank. 

There was also a lobster and eel tank where you could craw through a hole under the display and pop up under the rock and see the lobsters and eels up close. 

I didn’t know there could be blue lobsters before. I guess I always thought they were black or brown before, but I didn’t know about bright blue. I thought that was fascinating.

There was also a good amount of "Engrish" at the aquarium. Always good fun. 

We spent a long time in the aquarium looking at all the animals and fish and views. We took our sweet time. We had initially intended to go to the fossil museum after the aquarium, but the aquarium was so fun and interesting that we felt no need to rush. We spent about four hours or so there, and I don’t regret it at all. So fun!

After the aquarium I wanted to go see a Shinto shrine near the sea on the north side of Iwaki, the name is (波立薬師, Hattachiyakushi?). I drove past it on my way to Iwaki the day before, and I had driven past it once before while returning from Tokyo back in January. (Most of my photos of this shrine are missing.)

We arrived and walked around the grounds for a short time. There was a monument to one side of the shrine that told the reader about how the shrine was badly damaged during the 2011 tsunami and how it had been remodeled. The roof was especially damaged and had been repaired. The top of the shrine and pieces of the shrine that were recovered after the tsunami were moved over to the side in a small memorial. Its' a neat looking memorial, but that photo is sadly missing.

There were also quite a few statues of frogs at this shrine (photos also missing.)

From the shrine you can see across the street, on some rocks leading out into the ocean from the beach there is a torii gate. It has a path you can walk along to go to the torii gate, but we could not get there because the bridge you need to cross above the street was blocked off and a sign said it is dangerous to cross on it. So we just looked at it from a distance.

We walked around to one side and I saw some ema hanging from a rack. They were all different, they were blank plaques and had their own, different designs painted on them by individuals. A few of them had a picture of the torii gate sitting on the rocks out in the water.

A few had pictures of flowers and other various things. I liked seeing the unique art on the emas.

The sun had set while we were at the shrine and the sky was quickly growing dark, so we made our way back to the car and started driving back to Fukushima City. We had to get a good night’s sleep so we could wake up early to go to our plans the next day.