Day 6 "Japanese Bling"

American "bling" is quite something to behold.  It combines fine jewelry, masochistic pride, hip-hop culture into a big hulking piece of useless accessory that is both shiny and annoying.  How something can be both shiny AND annoying to a man is beyond me.  I guess we can thank trendy egotistical hip-hop for that.

Not to be outdone the Japanese also have their own little eyesores that is meant to show how much better you are than everyone else.  Take this house for example:

This house is covered in solid gold.  At first I thought that it was made of solid gold but the thought of building a house of that really soft and malleable metal would probably make the house crumble on itself.  Upon further questioning I found out that this house is only covered in gold.  Yep, just covered in gold... sitting there... no one around...

So after they dragged be back onto land from the pond and I woke up from all the tranquilizers they shot me with I realized that trying to steal away a Japanese landmark just wouldn't be right.  Still it did remind me of Master P (a rapper) who has a solid gold tank.  At this point I'm really starting to miss home.  This feeling doesn't leave me until they feed me again which would be 2 hours from now.  Oh the tragedy.

Another nice and traditional Japanese stereotype we saw was the "sand garden."  It's basically a little plot of land that you can't use, step on, grow anything, etc.  All you can really do is pile on more sand, take a rake and comb it to make it resemble as much like water as possible.  This is supposed to calm you down.  The American equivalent may be the "reflection pool" or a nice stream in your back yard.

Not to sound like too much of an ignorant American but how are you supposed to be calmed by a plot of land that you can't use, where you spend hours working on something that can be ruined by a nice gust of wind, in a country that can barely afford the land space for an alley to cut from on street to another?  Honestly, you can't grow anything in it because the land has been salted to hell, and because it has that design you can't play any beach volleyball or build a sand castle.  Yeah, I'm an ignorant American but at least I have fun doing those things.  More fun than say yell at mother nature every time the wind blows messing up my "pond."