Tour- Tokyo

Continued from previous post

Superfans at the train station again from Nagoya to Tokyo

This time they even got my autograph

As soon as we got off the train, we would be lead by our tour guide to a van, which would take us to the hotel, where our room keys were waiting for us. It was such a luxury to not have to worry about the logistics of traveling.

We stayed in the heart of Shibuya

Tokyo was far more touristy than the other cities we had been to.

I was curious to try a "California Burrito" in Japan. It was good.

4 seater bar on a street of small one-man operations, a Yokocha Alley.

All band/crew dinner

Mason (guitar), Fritz (drums), Bob (Bass)

I went out for a walk around with Bob and Greg after the dinner

A reminder of home

I turned a corner in Shibuya on my way back to the hotel one night and saw this picture with a sign I recognized, of a hoagie place in Venice. Then I recognized my friends Ali and Hank were in the photo. Then I realized my friend Aidan had shot it.

Second-hand electronics store

I had been searching for this Pastels CD for years. It was in its original Japanese packaging.

I went to meet my friend Yuki in the really chill Koenji neighborhood

Yuki was sitting at an art show, so I met him there

It was inside this building that he had been helping some guys renovate.

The artist was actually this American guy Luke, who manufactured a line of plastic toys.

Talking to Luke, I found out that he had lived in Santa Monica at one point.

The building was on a commercial strip of small shops with apartments on the second floor for the shopkeepers.

Luke gave me some of his plastic toys as a keepsake.

Yuki's new friends Luka, Claire, and Cleo came to visit the show.

They were also American

We went to dinner down the street afterwards, at an Okinawan restaurant.

Luka was just visiting Tokyo, but decided to organize and install an art show while she was there. She invited me, it was in a few days on my last night in Tokyo.

I had never eaten most of the food we ordered, but I loved it. This was bonito on bitter melon.

Cleo, Claire, and me

Luka, Yuki, and Fiona

We discovered all these small-world connections.

I took the train back with Claire and Cleo.

The band traveled with an insane amount of gear. Each guitarist pretty much had a different guitar for each song in a set.

I spent a lot of time hanging out with Sammy, one of the guitar techs.

Mark, monitor engineer

The first show in Tokyo

I spotted the superfans I'd met at the train station near the front row.

After the show, one of the managers said someone had left something for me. It was a flash drive.

I realized it was from Jimi, who showed me the photos he'd taken of my dad in 1994. He'd compiled all his photos of my dad over the years for me.

He included all the photos he took that day at the station. My Dad and Fritz (drummer), the only one still in the band.

Valerie Carter (singer, died in 2017)

Dianna Cohen and Jackson

Mark Goldenberg (guitarist) and Kevin Mccormick (bassist).

I had recently seen Kevin when he came to visit my dad, a few weeks before he passed.

Fritz Lewak (drummer) and Scott Thurston (multi-instrumentalist).

I couldn't believe how young they all looked.

It was so different now...

Jimi had even met my brother, when he came on tour with my dad in middle school.

Chavonne and Dad in 2008.

Photos from a show in Hiroshima, 2017

I was so moved to see these photos of my dad that I never knew existed. I never saw Jimi again, and I wish I had gotten the chance to tell him how much I appreciated seeing these photos.

I had one Japanese friend who lived in Tokyo, also named Yuki. I'd met and worked with him years before in LA. He happened to be hosting a DJ set at this underground bar called forestlimit.

Yuki and Con, who performs as ARTHUR. Con was visiting Japan and Yuki invited him to do a DJ set. I was a big fan of his music, and had seen him play live in LA a few months before, so I was really stoked to hang out with him.

Con and Yuki's friend Shu

Con and me

This guy was serving soup at the show

Other Yuki came out to the show too! We were dancing with these guys, who went to school in Tokyo

There was another group of westerners in the club, they were from Dublin. They were musicians and decided to move to Tokyo, which was inspiring to me.

Yuki and I walked to the train together, just making the last train before they stopped running.

I took a train to an outer neighborhood to visit the Tokyo-Edo Architectural museum. It was about a mile walk from the train station.

I loved seeing this suburban sort of neighborhood, in contrast to where I was staying in Shibuya. It felt very quaint.

One of my favorite things about Japan was how the zoning allowed for shops and small restaurants to be located nearly anywhere in the middle of a residential neighborhood.

The Edo-Tokyo Open-Air Architectural Museum was a big campus within a park, where old buildings had been relocated and restored.

This mock commercial street had shops filled with period-goods.

After the museum I visited Yuki again at his apartment in Koenji.

It was the only time I got to see inside an actual Japanese home

I loved the small appliances.

Yuki had only been living in Japan for about 6 months. While he was there he began applying to architecture grad programs. He had just heard back and was accepted at MIT. Which meant that he would be moving again soon.

He had stumbled upon these guys working on this old building in his neighborhood. He poked his head in and somehow got involved in the project, which was turning the old house into a book shop and art gallery.

A sketch of the design for the renovation.

This sketch shows the block, which includes a bar (at left) run by the same people.

They were saving all the old lumber to reuse.

At a little bar in his neighborhood.

On the train to Shibuya

We met up with Kimi for dinner. Kimi was a close friend of my high school friend Seiya, who had been living in Tokyo when he died in 2022. I had always wished to visit Seiya in Japan, so it was special to hang out with one of his friends.

Kimi was great. He'd actually gone to art school in LA. Now he works in film in Tokyo. Yuki and him actually had some mutual friends.

My friends Maggie and Annakai from LA happened to be visiting Tokyo at the same time

We walked around Harajuku

And then we went to the art show Luka and Claire organized at Claire's apartment.

I had to leave in the middle of the party and run to the concert venue a mile away to catch the end of the last show in Japan.

As soon as I got there I was thrust out onto stage.

They were doing a round of applause for all the crew that had helped on the Japanese tour, and brought them all out on stage.

I stayed for the encore, then ran back to the art show at Claire's apartment

When I got back, the party had spread outside.

I met a bunch of interesting young people living in Tokyo.

I met these two, who had actually gone to RISD and had a bunch of mutual friends with me.

After the party we ended up hanging out outside the Family Mart down the street. There were a bunch of skaters there.

I asked the skaters if they had known Seiya, who was a skater, and it turned out they all did. Daimon pulled up his shirt and showed his tattoo of Seiya's art he got over his heart after he died.

I was ecstatic to meet Seiya's friends.

We spent the rest of the night partying.

Even Con showed up

Con and Luka

We went to a club across the street, on the 7th floor of a building. People kept buying me drinks.

At 3 am, my friend Eris from LA walked into the club. It was so unexpected. I had no idea he was in Japan.

I left the club with Luka and her boyfriend Kintaro, who was from New York. They were staying out all night until the morning trains started running again, so they were down to walk with me to my hotel.

At 4 am we ran into Mason, the guitarist in the band, also drunkenly wandering the streets after the show.

We all got ramen at a real midnight diner.

The next day we left Japan for Australia.

And the Japanese crew led us right to our terminal...