i jumped into a cab yesterday in tokyo and guess what the taxi driver asked me? “hey, are you from Taiwan?” what? that’s the first time. usually people think i’m from the philippines.

i’m getting to know my way around tokyo. kind of a cool city that sleeps millions. oh, check out my designer bag on the taxi seat.

no, i’m not homeless. this is the way i carry things around with me. just stick my stuff in a plastic bag and i’m ready to go out into the town. haha.

a hundred dollar breakfast? yeah, this is inaida-san style breakfast.

last night was pretty fun as far as i can remember. if you saw what i ate and drank, you would kill me. haha. ginza night!

jiro-san is a cool fisherman. he takes me out when ever i’m in wakayama. after we dove this day, he opened his fish box and showed me what he caught earlier that morning.

then he took out his net and filled up a bucket. this is hamachi!

after he filled it up, he said “here you go.” wow! fresh sashimi for the night! super nice fishermen. thank you jiro-san.

then we went back to yamari and another local fisherman came over and gave us some fish. gosh, the people in wakayama are so nice!

sawara or ono! we took all this fish along with the oysters we caught to ushio restaurant that night and had a fresh fisherman dinner with some cold draft beers.

here’s the master with a 100 kilo wild boar he caught. huge monster!

then he cooked us some wild boar sukiyaki. it was so good!

another surfer/fisherman earlier that day gave us this fish too. i don’t know what it’s called but it was super good!
well, i’m going to eat some sushi tonight and get on my airplane. hopefully i’ll get lucky and get a business class flat bed seat. i had a great time here in japan and once again, i want to thank everybody that made this trip so special. see you back in hawaii. sayonara

Thank you Takamisan for the morning photo of my favorite mountain, Mt. Fuji.

photo: toda
the reason i came to japan this trip was for this event. i know how important it is to get the fukushima kids back into the ocean that too so much away from them. i didn’t want to miss it and i’m glad i didn’t. yumie-chan and kiri-san did a great job in putting this school together. good job girls!
after the event, i was planning to stay in japan for a few days and hopefully surf a typhoon swell. no, i don’t have any control of typhoons. they come when they want to and go any direction they please. my friends in hawaii tell me they want to come to japan for a week and surf a typhoon. i tell them, no way. you have to put your time here and be super lucky. well, this time nobody could have been luckier than i. the typhoons sent perfect swells in both directions straight to the spots i wanted to be. the waves, the wind, and the weather was perfect. and now that i’m leaving today, guess what? the swells are all but gone. i come back here at the end of this month and if i score good waves, great. if not, great too. i just love being here and hanging out with my friends. but for now, my fun time is over. heading back to hawaii tonight and i’m looking forward to my own bed and my broken car. haha.

photo: matsukawa
guess how long this barrel was? 53 photos long. yeah, matsu took a 53 photo sequence of this barrel and i’m super lucky to be able to relive it. even if won a million dollar lottery, i wouldn’t be this happy. it was my moment i came out of an amazing tube. a moment that i will never forget.

photo: matsukawa
whenever i’m in wakayama, i always asked renosuke if he wanted to go surfing with me. he would say “no.” but this time when i asked him, he didn’t say anything. to me, that means “yes.” so we grab a board and head to the beach. now i have a new isounora beach partner. a new surfer is born! go-renosuke!
**click here for YAMARI BLOG for the rest of the photos!