actual, no-fooling advertisement on the CHUO train. The caption reads, ON OCTOBER 2008, IN FRONT OF SHINJUKU STATION, THE FIFTY STORY KOKUN TOWER WILL BE COMPLETED!
after i got done laughing my ass off, i had to think about whether this ad was intentional or not. i thought long and hard on the matter.
reasons why it is probably not intentional: no respectable ad company would put hard-core porn up there.
this is clearly just some ad exec having a subconscious gay attack. after he gets fired for approving this ad, he’ll finally confront the truth of himself, and then start showing up at department h.
reasons why it probably IS intentional:
I mean, fucking COME ON.
Why not plant a forest on the other side for some pubic hair????
get some fir trees in there. some sprightly oaks.
eventually, after thinking really slowly and deeply about it, i decided that the ad was NEITHER on purpose NOR an accident. in my imagination, here is how it went down. So to speak. the client rejects all the good ideas that the copy-writers come up with. More zazz! More zip! Eventually, one particularly pissed-off copy-writer submits THIS ad as a sort of “fuck you, enough already” statement to the client, who immidiately screams I LOVE IT.
after that, this is going to seem really tame, but i think you guys need something to cool yourselves down:
nice houses!
above, what seems to be a UFO made of air conditioners landing on the roof of a Shibuya building.
above, this spectacularly ugly, third-world street is in Koiwa. If this is what japanese suburbs (koiwa, kawasaki, chiba, saitama) are like, no wonder they got all kinds of juvinile delinquency problems. in addition to the insane wires and poles and clutter, the whole neighborhood, streets, sidewalks, buildings and all, . . .THE WHOLE PLACE IS POURED OUT OF ONE SINGLE GIANT BLOCK OF GREY CONCRETE. you can’t even find weeds growing through cracks in the sidewalk. it’s a wonder kids aren’t shooting AKs over there.
below, Shinjuku station around closing time. After the customers leave, the JR guys have these crazy-ass Zamboni races. The top 3 contenders are already lined up on the starting line. Can you imagine that shit? They’re all drunk as HELL, too. I bet they use the train-announcer PA to provide commentary on the race. I mean, how could they not? IT’S ORANGE JULIUS BY A NOSE, WITH PINKY PRIDE CLOSING IN, GREY MATTER TO SHOW, AND INTO THE TURN . .. OH THE HUMANITY! PINKY PRIDE WIPED OUT! TOO MUCH SAKE.
SAPPY BERRY bODY TUBE!!!!!!!!!!
ozack . . .. the country-fried taste of the Ozarks mixed with the tangy taint of the bozack.
ad : “you got your scrotum in my hillbilly!” “You got your hillbilly in my scrotum!”
client: “no, no! more zazz! more zing!”
soap dispenser. what the fuck is ASEPSY??
above, a shopping mall in Koiwa. I bet they sell donuts!
spanish salsa pizza Pringles. i have no idea what that even means, but every time i see them, i think of that song Spanish Castle Magic. not the hendrix version. the MDC version, of course. Then i think about MDC doing commercial jingles for pringles, then i write an angry letter to Maximum Rocknroll.
Anyway the point is, Pringles debuts like 2 new flavors a month in Japan that are never available somewhere else…
it’s like the whole country is a research facility for testing new chemicals!!
At this point Pringles has obviously run out of ideas and they are just mixing together whatever they had left over in the vats.
“We got some salsa chemicals over here, boss!”
“we still got half a vat of pizza-molecules that isn’t totally radioactive.”
“Whaddaya waitin’ for, boys, mix that shit up! we need those vats for the new Tunisian Avocado Lobster experiment!”
above, “Snoopy Beef” brand dog chews.
below, warning at Inokashira station: beware of upskirt photos.
What’s really weird about this is, it’s on the DOWNSTAIRS escalator.
Think about it.
Speaking of illegal acts, here is view from the 9th floor of the “KAN” shop in Shibuya, facing CLUB SEGA. - the 9th floor wall is all windows,floor to ceiling. Did i take this picture because of the beautiful view?
no.
I took this picture so I could remember exactly where this bit of sidewalk is.
If you can stand on this exact stretch of sidewalk on a weekend night, and look up to the 9th floor window, you can bet you will see shennanegans.
Try finding THAT in your lonely planet guidebook.
Above, this shit was funny because the WHOLE STREET, for kilometers in either direction, was just like this photo: bikes parked in front of “NO BIKE PARKING!” signs. even more ironically, the fuckin signs wasted more sidewalk space than the bicycles themselves.
above, plainclothes policemen, at the Akihabara weekly street fair- where there are usually lots of otakus doing street music, performance, and cosplay.
background: a week before this picture was taken, the mass media went to the Akihabara street fair and caught some girls flashing panties. so now the cops had to shut down ALL performances while the media had their feeding frenzy. Basically the shop owners were marching around with signs reading “no performances! If you want to enoy this neighborhood you have to pay money to us. Shop and go the fuck home! No human contact! No making friends! above all, no cutting out us, the middlemen!”
Even though the flasher got arrested the day after she perpetrated the crime, they STILL had cops down there, a week after the incident! and not just uniformed cops — they had 3 undercovers, too!
Seriously - undercover cops for a flasher investigation. huh? like, in case that one chick was just part of a, i don’t know, part of a CELL of flashers or something? Still lurking around, waiting for, what, some sinister exhibitionist mastermind to utter the code word that would activate them? Were the fuckin’ undercovers going to, like INFILTRATE the flasher cell? that is usually what undercovers do, right? infiltrate? sheeiit — now THAT would have been a glorious use of taxpayer money, right there. A bunch of naked middleaged cops walking around akihabara trying to entrap people into joining a sleeper flashing cell. <_<
