Whoops, it’s been a while since I’ve done a writeup. Time to catch up. The hard part about these writeups is I can’t give away tooo much info, otherwise the actual TofuguTV video and writeups won’t be as interesting, but hopefully I’ll be able to do something inbetween. Day 3 is where the fun starts, too. P.S. One of the sections below might not be safe for work. Everything is censored very liberally, but, you know, just a quick FYI.

Meeting Up With Shin-Chan

A few times on this trip, I have someone to travel with. The first person I met up with is someone we’ll call Shin-chan. This dude is hilarious – we had a lot of fun going to interesting places and seeing interesting things together. He also held onto the camera for parts of the trip, which means I got some different video. Anyways, let’s get right to it.

Sex Robot Museum

You voted for it, so this is what you get. The first episode of TofuguTV is probably going to be here. I have no idea how I’ll do it, to be honest. Do I censor everything and replace the sexy moaning with my own voice? Or, will it not get deleted off YouTube if I put a NC17 rating on it? I have no idea. Normally Tofugu is pretty kid friendly, so I wonder what I’ll end up doing. Maybe this can be an “extra” episode, or something… Starting off TofuguTV strong with Cat Island seems like a winner, to me. We’ll see.

The Sex Robot Museum did indeed have some robotics going on, but it’s more inline with the robotics of the 80′s (Space Mountain, Disneyland + lots of sex?). About half of the things moved, and half of them didn’t move. The ones that didn’t move seemed to be more likely to have voice acting, which only makes one feel more uncomfortable.

The really funny thing is that this place is in Nikko, which is famous for having awesome hot springs. Of course, instead of going to those awesome famous hot springs, I went to go see this. Seriously, if you ever come to Nikko, you should probably make sure you hit the hot springs first, and this second. Although it was pretty interesting, make sure you do the other stuff too. We only had a couple hours in the area, sadly. We had to move on towards Cat Island before it got too late.

Cat Island, Tashirojima

This is probably the one you’ve all been waiting for. I’m not going to give away too much right now as to what happened / where we went, but it was definitely pretty awesome. The cat side of things was a lot of fun, but I felt a bit sorry for the people. According to one (old) lady we talked to, there’s only about 70 people living there now, which is down from 100 a couple years back. Though, we did meet one guy who was probably in his 20s or 30s, so that’s good. Maybe the whole cat thing is working, though only a little bit. Almost everything was closed, except for one little store.

The only open store (on the day we were there)

Definitely a lot more people come through here in the Summer, but I thought winter was nice too. It’s a lot easier to take pictures of cats when you don’t have other people around. I’d say there were only 3 or 4 other people who came to the island with us. It was nice and peaceful.

Of course, there were plenty of cats, though we didn’t make it in time to see “the feeding” which is apparently an old lady who just feeds the cats (and then they zergling rush her position).

We made it through and around the island pretty easily in one day. It’s not all that big, and we were able to hit the big land marks, like a couple temples, the Cat Shrine (Neko Jinja) and of course, all the cats.

Cat Shrine (Neko Jinja)

These pepole like their cat pictures

You can stay here, as long as it’s not Winter (they close, because very few people come to Tashirojima in the winter)

I have a ton more pictures, and I’ll upload higher res ones next month, when I do the TofuguTV episode for Tashirojima, but for now, I hope you enjoyed this little teaser. Tashirojima (Cat island) is the first in a series of animal-related episodes. It just kind of ended up like that, I have no idea why. Animals are awesome, I guess?

Leaving Cat Island

After leaving Cat Island (there was only two ferries that day, so we couldn’t stay long too long) we headed back to Sendai (where we stayed the night before Tashirojima) to check out the “illuminations” (that’s Christmas Lights in Japanese) that we missed the previous night. I guess I don’t see what all the hubbub is about when it comes to Christmas lights in Japan, but I guess Japanese people like pretty, shiny things, so it kind of makes sense.

After checking out the illuminations, we went to eat. Shin-chan researched an awesome ramen place. It was, indeed, very good. I missed good ramen sooo much. Portland definitely doesn’t do their Ramen right.

From there, we made our way back to Tokyo, where we parted ways. After a quick sleep, I made my way up to Nagano. What’s in Nagano? You’ll have to wait a bit to find out…

Anyways, it’s like day 10 now, but I’m going to work on getting the other days up here in the next few days. I’m getting super excited about working on the video portion of TofuguTV here, pretty soon. First episode should come out in January.

P.S. You can get a lot more updates on TofuguTV by following Tofugu on Twitter.

P.P.S. Oh, Facebook works, too.