It’s 10 o’clock on Sunday evening and I’m just on the way home from seeing Kyoto Sanga play out a fairly dour 1-1 draw for Cormac and my last Sanga match (for a while, at least). The Sanga goal was a comedy moment as the whole other team were on the sidelines for some water leaving Andre, the Sanga striker all alone. And he nearly messed it up. I’m feeling sleepy since last night was my leaving do, as organised by the Rock Communers, and I was up early-ish for a last bit of recording. 2 songs by Hanshin Tigers, the band I was playing in with Atsutoshi. It’s been sad saying goodbye to everyone here, and him particularly. He was off home to Osaka after the recording and that’s that…

Last night was great fun though. Loads of the graduated former-Communers who I hadn’t seen in ages turned up - 2 even came from Tokyo, one on the overnight bus which was delayed for 8 hours because of a traffic accident! We began at 6pm in Hoppy for unlimited booze and food, went on to another izakaya bar place after (where I managed to make a wee speech!), then back to our mostly empty flat.

I was given loads of nice presents, a picture someone drew of me that everyone wrote stuff on, a snare skin that everyone signed. Deadly. I’d been afraid I’d be late for my own party since I was in the (now Niall-less) Kanazawa earlier in the day.

Taka, my Kujira bandmate, has a solo ambient music project called Hakobune that has gone down well in arty circles, so he was asked to play at a place in Fukui prefecture called the Kanaz Forest Of Creation. It’s an art-themed public park in the middle of a forest. The organiser and his wife picked us up from Kyoto Station on the day prior to the party and drove us up in their volvo. Not many volvos doing the rounds in Kyoto.

In the middle of the park is a lake with the wooden piece above, then these treehouses were being built amongst the trees. There was a big museum building with a Hello Kitty exhibition. I wanted to go to look for stuff for Giita there, but even though it opened until 5, they wouldn’t let anyone in after 4.30…

It was scorching hot, but cooled down a little after sunset when Taka took to the stage in front of 100 or so people wearing luminous wristbands as tickets. His music and the sounds of cicadas and insects all melted together. Worked really well.

There was an unlimited booze do afterwards, so we hung around talking to people while dodging the enormous insects (Aoyanagi, the organiser, found a 4 inch mantis and held it up to my ear to hear it’s squeak, then placed it carefully on a bush). I ended up DJing with Aoyanagi at the end for some reason, then we all slept in a wooden museum building. The following day we took down tents and dissembled the stage in extreme sweaty heat, then set off for Kanazawa since Aoyanagi and his wife wanted to bring us to the Contemporary Art Museum. I’d been there before with Giita, Niall & Cormac, but this time we were given free tickets and a guided tour. I enjoyed the Grayson Perry stuff more than I thought I would and found a room with a big skylight that I’d not seen before…

As time was going on, I began to panic a little about being late for my own leaving do. I’d told them I needed to be back in Kyoto by 5, but there was no rushing them. Eventually I ran off to get the train on my own. 40 euro or so, but necessary. By the time Taka and Kuma got back to Kyoto and came straight to Hoppy they were over an hour late. Even when I came in 3 minutes early, I found 9 missed calls on my phone as people panicked about me not making it in time. I’m known as the chikokuma (lateness devil!) already, but that would have been unbelievably rude. All worked out though. So now I’m knackered and have to go home to empty the fridge and get the furniture ready. A secondhand place is collecting it all tomorrow and paying me zero yen in return. But it all needs to go, so…. Sigh. Night night!

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 12th, 2007 at 9:29 am and was written when Joss was feeling jumblings.