Japan: We were taken care of very well by our Japanese label "Imperial Records" and promoters "Smash". Everything thing was sorted out for us and left us free to have a good, stress free time in Japan. Tokyo is an amazing city. The city is very clean and safe. The shops all have their own identity, unlike our mall mentality in Canada....not many cookie cutter stores. We stayed in a district called Hirijuku. Everybody was dressed up...the fashion sense here puts ours to shame. Everybody's dressed like a runway model. We had a press day during our stay as well and the interviews were fun and strange.....we had an interpreter to middle man the conversations. I'm rambling....but that's okay. After the press day, Brad and our manager Dan flew to Fukuyoka for additional press and an acoustic set. On the night Brad was in Fukuyoka, Ryan and I walked to a district of Tokyo very close to Hirirjuku called Shinjuku, where we heard the night life was alive. We walked through the redlight district, where for some reason we were like wounded fish in a shark tank. We were mauled by big guys in leather trench coats who kept trying to literally pull us into "sex dens". We quickly got out of the area and found a normal bar. We met some cool people there and ended up going to a punk rock bar called something like "Rock and Roll Mother"...I can't remember the name exactly. It could maybe hold 10 people....Seriously! We kept drinking beer and ordering songs off of a menu full of punk songs. No food or drink menu....just a song menu. We screamed Clash, Television and Generation X songs with our new Japanese friends, then cabbed back to our hotel at around 3am. Oh, I just wanted to tell you about a strange fast food item we ate here....everybody was eating these saucy looking soft ball sized dough balls in a small cardboard dish, so we ordered one. It was a cheesy dough ball filled with what can best be described as potato custard, sliced up hot dogs, squid, and a small golf ball sized soft boiled egg....I don't know what kind of bird it came from. Drizzled on top of the ball was something that looked like thousand island dressing. It didn't taste very good, but it was an experience. -Adam.
The show itself was worth the 14 hour plane ride. The room was full of people singing along to our songs. It's the first time that we've been in a country with a different language that knew our songs. Very fun to do. -Ryan.
