1st, it's the month in which my birthday falls! Happy b-day me! And there are several other people I know who share the same birth month, for example: mornin, Mrs. dude?, my mom, my g-pa, and John Lennon.
There are also a bunch of activities that go down around here during the month. I know I need to do some other posts that chronologically went down before, but I wanted to capture these moments before we've passed Halloween.
Most of the best stuff went down at the beginning of the month, namely the week surrounding my b-day.
Oktoberfest!
If you don't know what it is, I'm not gonna explain it all, just click this! The best one to see here in Japan is in Yokohama(横浜). More specifically Sakuragicho's(桜木町) famous red brick warehouse(赤レンガ倉庫) down near Chinatown(中華街). This year's event was held from the 3rd-13th, and it pretty much goes off around the same time every year. I recommend it very much! It's a great chance to taste some real beer. I made my way around to several of the booths as always. I ended up downing about 5 liters of delicious German beer ranging from hefeweizens to stouts.
They were all pretty tasty! Check out some picture from the festivities:
Where was I? I don’t know, so I’m gonna wing it. Well, after my b-day and getting my sweet new lenses in my glasses (thanks mornin!), I headed over to Chiba and Makuhari Messe for the 2008 Tokyo Game Show for my first time. I must say… it was less than exciting. I guess it’s because it’s Japan and Japan is an RPG crazy nation and I am not an RPG crazy kinda guy, but it just wasn’t so interesting for me. Here’s a shot of the inside:
There were a few cool looking games on display, but really I’m into sports games, namely football, and football is a next to non-existant sport in this country. There were, of course, a ton of people in cos-play but for the most part I didn’t recognize most of them. I did see Chun-Lee and Ken from Street Fighter,
but the best was when I was heading out I ran into a couple of guys dressed up, one was Indiana Jones, and the other was the hero from God of War (probably the best PSP game ever made), Kratos. Peep it here:
After I made my way home, mornin and I rode our bikes over to Ikegami for the Oeshiki of the year! An Oeshiki (お会式) is a Buddhist memorial service, famously for Nichiren （日蓮）(don’t feel bad if you didn’t know, most Japanese people don’t know). There is a really big one at the Ikegami Hon-monji （池上本門寺）temple in Ikegami and this was the 2nd year in a row that I’ve been. Last year I went with AOS, Mrs. AOS, and deuce and it was a great time. This year after walking around with mornin for awhile, we were joined by melting faces. There were soooooo many people. Oodles and oodles of peoples! The place was stooped crowded, but I stocked up with beer and was good to go, and got really drunk by the way. There celebration is to remember the founder of Nichiren Buddhism, Nichiren who used to roam my area, in fact Senzokuike （洗足池） is named after him having washed his feet there supposedly. Many followers of the Nichiren sect, from all around Japan, congregate at Ikegami hon-monji to remember the man. They play music and parade through the streets pushing carts that have 5-storied pagodas on them called a "mando"
and twirling these stick like things with streamers hanging off of them called a "matoi".
It’s quite a spectacle. It’s also a lot of fun! After taking in some of the excitement of the parade, we made our way to the back of the temple in an effort to pay our respects, however a jerk guard said that we couldn’t get in that way anymore because it was too crowded. After arguing with the jerk for some time I said F it and made a double move past another guard looking the other way and with melting faces and mornin in-tow we wound our way to the front of the temple, waited in line with about 20-30,000 people and then proceeded to the main temple where we were able to pray and hear the beating of the big drum along with the preist reciting sutras. It’s all a big hub-bub that is spread out over 3 days, culminating on the of 13th of October, the day that Nichiren died. It’s an experience that shouldn’t be missed, especially if you live here in Tokyo. 
It was a good 727th Oeshiki! Here's to Nichiren!I’m hoping that next year dude? will make some travel plans to come over near the beginning of October so that we can at least take in Oktoberfest and the Oeshiki, and maybe hit up the Tokyo Game show too. It’d probably be a lot more fun with some more people along for the ride.
