Iga-san,
Hello, it’s already our last exchange. Winter’s coming, and it’ll be next year in no time. I’m already looking forward to the season when I can wear just a T-shirt. But like you say, cigarettes are very enjoyable in the winter time. Another thing I can never get enough of is the oasis-like feel of going from the cold outside into the warmth of an izakaya, with the smell of hot sake, etc.
So I don’t wear T-shirts with graphics on them much these days, but in the past I used to wear a Down By Law movie T-shirt I bought in a video store in Koenji. And I wore a long-sleeved black T-shirt printed with Machizo Machida’s album title Hona, Donaisee Iune [So what do you want me to do?] until it was almost falling off me. That reminds me, there was some interview recently with people wearing Che Guevara T-shirts in which they were asked if they knew who he was. There were quite a few people who wore the T-shirt and didn’t have a clue. On the other hand, I like that ‘so what’ attitude of wearing a band T-shirt and openly not knowing the band. The band T-shirt I used to wear was a Velvet Underground one (not the banana one but the one with the photo of band members on it). I was probably a bit too full of myself in those days.
Oh yes — as I was writing I just remembered that when I was an elementary school student, my aunt brought me back a sweatshirt from the UK which had “BBC” written on it. When I wore it around Akihabara once, I was surrounded by 5 or 6 delighted foreigners all saying “Look, BBC!”, and saying stuff to me. Of course at the time I had no idea the BBC was a British broadcasting company, but thinking back now they were probably people from the BBC. It would have been exciting if they’d been Monty Python members or someone like that, but they probably weren’t. So I admit I too used to wear clothes without knowing what was written on them. Sorry!
I’m intrigued by the idea of ramen with pickled ginger. I personally love pickled ginger. But still, why pickled ginger, I wonder? There’s a sushi place in Asakusa that does great pickled ginger. They hand-pickle it. But I also like the ready-made cheap pink stuff.
Anyway I’ve been thinking about where we should go drinking next, and it’s got to be Shinjuku. We could start in Nishi-shinjuku, then barhop around Kabukicho, Golden Gai, Sanchome etc., and finish up in Arakicho where manga artist Toyo Kataoka hangs out. A cross-Shinjuku night. In any case let’s meet up, drink, smoke, talk our heads off, sing, and get raspy voices the next day.