4th of July

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As you can tell from the title, this is a bit late coming, but better late than never.

Fireworks excursion

The Independence Day festivities began with Ryan and I leaving the lab early around 4:30 to buy our cache of explosives for the night's festivities. We originally intended to head to a neighborhood near Asakusa that's well-known for its especially good fireworks, but figuring that there was no way we could make it all the way across Tokyo in time before the shops closed (one learns quickly never to assume shops to be open past 6pm in Japan), so instead we settled for the closer option of the Tokyo Hands in Shinjuku near Shinjuku Times Square. After wasting time with silly costumes and old school video games, we settled down to the task at hand and carefully picked out 7300Y (about $70) worth of fireworks. For any of you who know anything about fireworks, you know that $70 buys a lot of fireworks. So having bought our beloved hanabi, we jetted off to Shibuya to meet the crew.

Meeting at Hachiko

Worried that we might be the last ones to arrive, we ran out of the JR station to discover that we were in fact the first ones to arrive. Glad to see the Japanese' virtue of punctuality has been rubbing off. Tokorode, we waited around until Altobelli and later Dvir showed up, then began feverishly calling our mates coming from the suburbs to find out why they were so late. After figuring out who was coming, we decided to grab some dinner at a nearby ramen joint until they showed up. The ramen, as usual, was quite tasty, if a bit overpriced. Having met up with more of our group and feeling adequately satiated, we walked off to Yoyogi Park with the intention of blowing it to brightly colored smithereens in the names of our Founding Fathers.

Fireworks! Fireworks?

We finished the 10 minute walk to Yoyogi Park and met up with the last of our group. No sooner had we start lighting sparklers to help us get into the mood when the fearsome Tokyo Police showed up. Now, the Tokyo Police are hardly the LAPD. It's very hard to be threatened by officers who are in their late 40s, are smaller than you, are riding small bicycles, and whose only armament are glow sticks that look like toy lightsabers. However, our will to not get deported overwhelming our will to light things on fire (albeit just barely), we temporarily desisted our activities until Altobelli and his fluent Japanese skills ran after the cops to reason with them. About twenty minutes later he returned, bringing with him a mixed bag of news. Good news: we could light fireworks. Bad news: we could light anything that shoots things or that is overly loud. Zannen :-(. This came as quite a blow considering I had seen Japanese youths firing fireworks on multiple occasions with no intrusions from the police. Having later heard from other people about similar crackdowns, my current theory is that the Tokyo PD told its cadre of fearsome bike cops to be on Gaijin Alert Level Red. Being the non-confrontational group that we were, we obeyed the cops' orders with the lone exception of accidently firing off a Roman Candle because we mistook it for a sparkler. Note to readers: holding a Roman Candle like a sparkler is a very very very dangerous idea, but also very very amusing when the errant shots start singing people's hair. Being disappointed by the lack of aerial fireworks displays, we decided to shoot caution to the wind and fire off our biggest firework before hightailing it out of the park, providing a fitting tribute to the great American virtue of excess.

Final Thoughts

This experience was pretty interesting as it was actually the first time in my life that I'd ever really celebrated the Fourth of July. When I was helping organize the excursion, I had never really thought of it as a patriotic thing and more as an excuse to see the people who had moved out of the city and to see pretty bits of colored fire. As the night went on, however, I realized that while in Japan I had begun to identify myself more and more as an American than I ever had before. It's been an interesting experience and has really made me reevaluate the role of cultural and national identity, which has fit nicely with my recent bent on how important feeling attached to a geographical location is. But that is another story for another time and something I'm not particularly comfortable talking about in the format of a blog, so if you're interested in hearing me ramble endlessly on the topic, just ask and I'll be more than happy to oblige.

---Soon to come: Trip to Yokohama and (tentatively) Pretentious Movie Night #2, Shibuya Open Mic Night, and Hakone Trip. Chances are you won't be seeing those for a while given my previous track record, but I promise I'll try to get them out as soon as possible.---

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