Stealing. With honour.

I found a samurai sword in the garbage yesterday. No, I’m not talking about a little plastic toy sword that’d you find at Toys ‘R Us, I’m talking a full-size 4 foot long “I’m going to slice off your face, motherfucker” style metal sword. In the garbage. No, I couldn’t believe it either. I was so baffled that I had to call Dave and let him know. The conversation went something like, “Hey dude, do you think I’d get arrested if I tried to bring a samurai sword on the train?” “What?” “A samurai sword!” “What? You’re shitting me?” “Yeah, I totally just found one in a garbage pile on the street. What do reckon?” “Wrap it in newspaper.” It sounded like a good idea, so I wandered into the nearest convenience store trying to look inconspicuous. Inconspicuous, right. A six foot tall gaijin carrying a sword, noone’s going to notice that, brightspark.

It was pretty late by that time and most of the newspapers had sold out, so I grabbed the only one on the shelf and took it the counter. When I got outside and sat down to wrap the sword I realised that the entire inside of the paper was covered in ads for sex-lines and brothels. So now I have a partially newspaper-wrapped sword with pornographic advertisments on the outside jammed into the top of my bar and I’m getting onto the packed train filled with salarymen on their way home for the night. Thankfully everyone ignored me, the standard tactic for Japanese in a “I’m not sure what’s going on, but if I ignore it maybe it will go away” situation. I was on a train the other day and there was a kid with down syndrome running up and down the carriage screaming and sitting on people and noone even blinked. It was just like he didn’t exist and neither did I. Me and my sword were happily ensconced in the Slartibartfast zone and I was quite happy there.

I now have a samurai sword and a healthy collection of sex numbers in the corner of my apartment. How cool is that?

Posted in Japan on Wednesday February 16, 2005.