This is in case I don't have your email address, but you talk to people who do, and might get all offended you were off the list. Get off my back already!

So, a lot of you have been bugging me for another funny email, sorry it's taken so long, but I've been pretty busy lately. If I haven't been calling various law enforcement agencies on my boss, shaking him down for hush money, or vandalizing his offices, I've been sorting through my every material possession trying to make a backpack sized lump of the most vital stuff, and deciding whether any of the rest is worth its weight in outrageous shipping costs.

Anyway, despite my boss' nearly constant fuckering*, I have managed to have some fun/adventures/what have you.

Went to Japan in late July, and like, whoa. It's like, if everyone in Korea sobered the fuck up, gained about 20 IQ points, bothered to learn anything at all about the world around them, stopped living like they're just waiting to die, put on some damn makeup, and took a God damned driving lesson already!

Part One: The Landscape, oh my God, the Landscape!

Most people don't care to know this, but there was a war here fifty years ago. Of course that's what the memorial plaques say. Looking at the place, I would have placed it about 4:50pm last Tuesday. Every animal larger or less elusive than an alley cat has been rounded up and exterminated either for food or to be ground up into hard-on powder. There is literally no wildlife. A bird was singing from a rooftop yesterday. That's rare enough to warrant comment. Homes are built as though for refugees. Four story concrete boxes with no ventilation or insulation are thrown up in a month, by workers who don't know enough to put in earplugs to work a jack hammer, not lift a palette of bricks with their lower back, or avoid light switches when painting, and then are torn down a year and a half later, when what amount to damp, sweltering caves built by idiots for some reason become unliveably foul, mouldering, crumbly hovels. The flora is a bunch of straggly pines, never more than 30 feet high, never wider than two feet in diameter, most usually held up by ropes because they'd been transplanted within the last year because Koreans believe in something called Geomancy. I'll let you look that nonsense up, I couldn't do it justice. Let's just say the man they elected in a landslide in December had his family's corpses exhumed and reburied in a "luckier" spot to help his chances in the election. Everyone knew this and no one cared, and then acted surprised when he turned out to be a complete twit. What I'm trying to say is there's no place in this country that hasn't been fucked with, at least not for the better.

Japan, on the other hand, was not only bombed flat but nuked twice, and besides the ruins of the A-bomb Dome in Hiroshima, I'd have been hard pressed to find any evidence. The landscape is beautiful, the farms have variety, not just endless plains of one crop for miles, countryside houses look like Asian versions of Amish country and the cities have buildings with angles both obtuse and acute! Imagine! We climbed Fuji, and I've already gone off on what a nightmare mountaineering is in Korea, so I'll just say that everyone was unfailingly, infuriatingly polite (We never successfully yielded right of way. Some how they can spot a courtesy from twenty paces and beat you to the punch every time.), while there was litter, people cared enough to chuck it into inaccessible and hard to see parts of the mountain, instead of just dropping it anywhere, and the drive to the trailhead went through some of the nicest, lushest, most diverse forest I've seen since leaving Appalachia behind almost a year ago now. (Correction: -temperate forest- Thailand and Laos were pretty nice too) It was restorative being in a place where the biggest douchebags were Americans, as God intended.

I guess Buddhists are way better at meditating than anyone else, because their temples are nowhere near as relaxing as a Shinto shrine. We went to one on an island in Hiroshima, and it beat the ever-loving buhjeezus out of any Buddhist temple I've ever been in for being a calming, meditative place to just wander around and wish I hadn't left my frigging camera on a bus to Jeonju two months previously on my way to what had been described by Koreans as a "Cherry blossom festival" which turned out to be the equivalent of a local fire company's shitty summer carnival, without the rides or funnel cakes, and a lot more reeking pots of boiling bugs. So equanimity's not my thing, so what, wanna fight about it?

The cities were really nice; expensive, but the quality of everything was so much better than in Korea you hardly cared. We ate mostly out of 7-11's and I think I was better nourished on my fish-rice ball/fruit juice/bread and cheese/Mystery Box Prize diet than I've been since I left Bangkok in February. I should explain here that if you spent more than 700 yen in one go in a 7-11 you got to reach into a box and pull out a coupon to get something in the store for free. There's a minors box with candy, coffee, etc. and an 18+ box which I generally frequented. Among other things I got an object lesson in ignorance being bliss, when having learned to read Japanese meant that the label on the "health drink" I was given told me I had just downed, among other things, 3mg of "neekohteenoo". I don't smoke. Also I got a can of "Can" brand drink, which was basically a can of straight vodka someone had squeezed about four whole lemons into. After "Can" we were pretty well scared straight. As for accommodations, we slept everywhere from internet cafes (very nice) to pod hotels (very cool, but noisy, and kinda gay) to public art (surprisingly comfortable, and cops are too polite to roust you) to a love motel. Love motels in Korea are concrete boxes where you get one dingy room for extremely cheap to be used for... (imagine slapping the side of one fist with the palm of the other hand, that's been my favorite description so far, from the desk staff no less) if you're Koran, or just flopping if you're a Westerner. In Japan, they look a set from You Only Live Twice. The room had a sunken zen rock garden, above which the living room was suspended on comfy bamboo mats, the bedroom had an enormous, laundered, king size bed, there was a bathroom for brushing your teeth, one for the toilet, and one for the shower, a minibar stocked with seriously good booze easily stolen enough to be essentially free, and a TV with the most emotionally scarring porn I've ever seen in my life. It only cost around twice what you'd pay in Korea. And while we're on the subject of quality, the sushi was frigging amazing. We decided to wait until Tokyo, to go to Tsukiji Fish Market to have any, and God what a good decision that was. The equivalent of $40 bucks got you, fresh from the docks twenty feet away, three slices of sashimi, a tuna roll, 11 pieces of the most delicious, fresh (in one case still alive) frigging fish that ever existed, and great sake to wash it down with. Best meal I've ever had, and I've been to Italy and Thailand.

Part Two: The Women, oh my God, the Women!

My main beef with Korean women is that if they hatched out of effing pods they couldn't be any more conformist. In the summer time everyone wears big baggy tshirts covered in atrocious Engrish, (i.e. "The God of Surfing has gotten off inside of me" - I'd sell my firstborn to Rumplestiltskin for that friggin' thing) and tiny little booty shorts (Great for the first week or so, then you become that tribesman from National Geographic - surrounded by topless women but, you know, so what?) In the wintertime, ridiculously long hoodies that go down to the knees (think garbage bag), the same damn booty shorts, and long socks and fuzzy underwear - to keep warm, obviously. Add in the hairstyles, all one of them, and the fact that they act like retarded 4 year olds because all Asian men are secretly beastiality-ophiles who don't want a woman so much as a dog with unthinking loyalty so you don't have to worry about being cheated on when you go out to fuck hookers, and no introspection so they don't raise hell about what bullshit it all is, and you have an entire nation of women doing their best to look like everyone else. Or to put it another way, average.