The Pon

This week brought with it my friend Sam to visit me in Nagoya. Sam has featured in a couple of blogs so I wont bother with an introduction. He arrived Wednesday night and we went to a sushi place in Sakae to meet my friends Callie and Eri. After some lush sushi we headed to our favorite bar the Hub to get some drinking going.

After a few we headed to Club Wall in Sakae to see my friend Kana doing some hip hop dancing. Kana was the chick me and Callie met a few months ago dancing outside a skyscraper. Tonight she was going to be dancing with her mate on stage and I had been looking forward to this for quite a while as shes well good.

After getting lost for a few minutes we eventually found the place. It was an underground hip hop club, and on the stairs was a couple of Japanese guys, one of whom was a singer who went by the awesome name of “Sly Dog”. After chatting to him for a while we went inside. There was a DJ playing decent hip hop and after about 30 minutes the acts came on. First there was an MC, then Sly Dog took to the stage and sang a few songs which were well Boyz 2 Men esque, and after that there was another MC, this one by the name of Pon.

This guy was fricking nuts! Imagine if you will a 30 year old slightly overweight Japanese man wearing an outfit which looked like someone had vertically cut a red suit and a white suit in half, and put the 2 halfs together. Not only that but his act involved him half rapping, half randomly screaming at a high pitch. One of his songs involved him rapping over the YMCA song although for the chorus he tried to get everyone to sing “Y-M-C-Pon” (which I don’t need to tell you didn’t really work). Also when he got really hyped up, he stood on this stool on stage and after about 3 seconds went face first into the floor.

Needless to say after this spectacle Kana had to follow up with something pretty special. After Kana`s act was up (which was well good by the way), the club went back to the standard hip hop DJ and dancefloor mode. This gave me the chance to meet Pon and find out a bit more about his life. I found out he is a 30 year old salaryman by day and an MC by night. I still couldn’t really tell if his act was meant to be funny, but it was well worth the price of admission, that’s for sure.

The club closed at 3 but the first train was at 6, so me, Sam and Callie headed to Karaoke to sing our time away. After warbling our way through masses of quality songs including the 1979 German Eurovision entry “Moskau”;(http://www.youtube.com/watchv=jH8gtrD4_C4&feature=related) we said our goodbyes to Callie and headed back to my apartment.

The next couple of days were not particularly interesting although I did show Sam my favorite café, the Yeast Paradise and of course Osu.

On Saturday I had to go to work but left Sam to his own devices, so he could go to all the touristy places without me having to tag along. This included the castle, Atsuta Shrine and downtown Sakae.

After work I headed back to meet Sam. We were going to be meeting up with some of my friends and he was already an hour late so I decided to go without him and leave the apartment door open and my keys inside. This was a great plan until I remembered the downstairs door which requires a key to get inside, but not to get outside. Unfortunately I remembered this just as the door closed behind me, meaning I was locked out.

Being the only gaijin in my apartment block means Im regarded with suspicion anyway but now I had to skulk around in the lobby waiting for someone to come in so I could tail gate them in. I didn’t have to wait long and around 10 minutes later a middle aged woman came into the lobby. I made a faux attempt to look for my keys and she eyed me carefully. She wasn’t going to open it for the likes of me.

After what must have been a full minute it was obviously getting awkward for her as well, so she just got her own keys and opened the door. The door is an automatic sliding one which closes about 5 seconds after the person using the key opens it. I waited about 4 seconds (hoping she would be round the corner and halfway up the stairs by then), then I quickly jumped through the sliding door straight into her disapproving and slightly scared looking eyeline. I wished her a good evening then calmly walked up the stairs trying to not look too suspicious. She most probably then called the police, but I haven’t heard anything yet.

Anyway I got my key and got out of there. I met Sam, gave him my key and then headed into Sakae to meet Callie and her friends Emi and Sayaka. After meeting up with Sam a few minutes later we headed to a Yakitori restaurant nearby. Yakitori is a restaurant specializing in a kind of barbecued chicken, and is typically served with beer. We had some awesome food, including Yakitori sticks (kind of like a shish kebab), pork shish kebab, this barbecued chicken skin stuff, this fried pregnant fish thing (so its kind of like the taste of fish, together with the taste of fish eggs). This was quite tasty although I felt a bit weird eating a pregnant anything. Its just somehow….wrong.

Anyway we also got loads of Unagi dons, salads, Nabes, fried burdock, and more variations of fried or barbecued chicken. After the meal we headed to the Hub to meet some other people including my friend Neal, Japanese Bob, and Texas the MC. In addition to that we also met a few more of Callies friends. After a few drinks we eventually left and headed to the infamous ID café. ID is a place full of gaijin and the sleaziest kind at that. Whilst its not a regular for me, I do think it should be experienced at least once so I decided to give Sam that opportunity. The entrance for ID is 3000 yen but this brings with it 4 drink tickets.

At the door all the gaijin got padded down for knives while our Japanese compadres walked through freely. Once in we headed to the top floor which was a hip hop floor. ID has five floors although despite this it does tend to get ridiculously crowded. The hip hop floor was almost impossible to move on and the group quickly got separated. After thinking about trying to look through 5 floors of ridiculousness I decided it would be quicker to use mobiles. Altho no one can hear phones, text messaging is always an option. Eventually I managed to find Bob, and we set off to find the rest of the group. Slowly but surely we gathered them whilst drinking and dancing. By the time we had everyone back together there was only about 5 minutes of the club left (it opens at 11 and closes at 2).

On the dancefloor and later in the locker room, we met a load of other gaijin (some from Britain, France, Australia and America) who tagged along with us when we left the club. They were all kind of safe although we all went our separate ways when our crew decided to head to club Domina for some House/Techno. Domina wasn’t too packed, and the music was pretty good. After about an hour Neal realized he`d lost his keys so we ended up going on an epic journey round everywhere we had been that night to find them.

Having no luck, we headed back to Domina for the last 15 or so minutes. When it got to 5 we headed to Dennys to get some breakfast. Unfortunately it was too early for the breakfast menu to have started but Dennys being 24 hours meant that it wasn’t a huge problem. I got this massive salad with some fried shrimps which was an awesome end to the evening.

After that we went home and slept most of Sunday.

Ok that’s about it for this week. Next week Im going to a Korean style dinner party so expect a load of food pictures as usual. See you next time!

Peace out

Jack