Uchujin -The Blog

Quite a year that there 2011.

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Just a little timelapse sequence I threw together of the total lunar eclipse on 10th December 2011 as seen from Tokyo.

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Friday nights have always meant something special to me ever since those first illicit snakebite and blacks when I wasn’t old enough to get served in a pub.
The tradition of meeting with good friends over a few (really a few??) drinks and putting the world to rights continues even now so far away from those days as a fledgling alcoholic.
What that means in Tokyo is that I have been going, with an ever-changing group of friends (some dearly missed who friday isn’t the same without) to the same bar almost every Friday night for over 5 years.
It’s got to the point now where the bar manager and I know each other by name and he will move people off my favorite table when I arrive.

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For your Friday amusement.
Uchujin circa 1991
A suit I borrowed from Finian Lynch and proceeded to wear for weeks afterwards ;-)
(photographer unknown – but it was probably Finian or Muju)

A good and ridiculously talented friend ‘Muju’ recently hired me to do a few promo shots of his newest T-shirt designs (hand screenprinted onto climate neutral organic cotton T’s) but being the contrary trouble maker that I am I decided to make a promo video instead – a trick you can only really pull when the client is one of your oldest and dearest friends.

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Weird paste-up sticker seen in Kabukicho.
Just that.

Summer that is.

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Charlie Kirk a.k.a. “Two Cute Dogs” is a 37 year old oxbridge educated Englishman who has been living in Japan for the last 9 years. He has been taking photographs for about 2 years and has been reasonably happy with some of his pictures for about the last year. He recently quit his job as an obscenely well paid lawyer to take a shortish sabbatical in order to scare more people with his flash.

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Kenzaburo Oe (2nd from left) and Yamamoto Taro(right) lead the 19th September Anti-Nuclear march as it leaves Meiji park in Tokyo

The scenes that started in Meiji park around midday yesterday and continued through the day as a 50,000 people strong crowd, led by Kenzaburo Oe (winner of the Nobel prize for literature in 1994) marched through the streets of Tokyo to protest Nuclear power are quite simply the most impressive thing I have ever seen in Japan.
The exact numbers in the crowd are in dispute (Police-29,000 , NHK 60,000) but my estimate would be around 50,000. Consisting of a mainly older demographic that is sure to worry the politicians, there was none of the Police violence of last weekend’s much smaller but younger demonstration in Shinjuku and the overall police presence was much smaller.

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