tokyo's not all dirty...

and these people aren't really sleeping on the subway in mid day...they're just faking it for my benefit...

(i have that 500-yen umbrella!)

besides them, there were other parts of tokyo that were just as pretty in a relaxing sort of way

these are the famous cherry blossoms, or sakura, all over japan...suck it, d.c.

 even the ground is pretty in this city...

of course, there are always a couple of d-bags who have to ruin it for everyone else...

but wait, this girl isn't a d-bag at all...she's clearly asian, however...can you tell how i know?

other pretty things in tokyo include the signage and ads for girls in english...

and here's something else we found inside a store where my little friend rosie shops...can someone explain what's implied by this very helpful(?) drawing of the durex condom?

getting back to subways, though, look at how mike cleared out this car after eating too much sushi...

he didn't go to japan alone...

that would've been piggy of him.

so this is the part where i show you pictures of what tokyo looks like. lots of tokyo looked just how you would imagine it to if you had any imagination at all...

busy streets, tall buildings, lots of lights, guys giving peace signs to random tourist photographers...

 at one point during our walks, i saw some girls that would put my students to shame...

first of all, their uniforms are actually uniform...and second, they wear them! all the time!

of course, some girls wear other costumes instead...

some even wear them on the street to lure men into maid cafes that are rampant in the akihabara area of tokyo...

sorry for the blurriness, but as soon as she realized i was snapping shots of her, she ran away with her little stuffed pal and hid behind a phone booth 'til i was gone. 

this wasn't the only interesting thing we saw in akihabara, though. here's a guy playing a game where, if he's good enough, he can win a pervy little body pillow cover with a prepubescent girl on it made for hugging all night long...how sweet...

poor guy...maybe he needed one of these...

in a different part of town we saw a group of nerd girls on the street that were somehow different from the ones we saw in school uniforms. they were also quite different from the body pillow girls. these so-called nerds walk around in packs mostly in the area known as harajuku, and they're so common they have a name. the japanese call them otaku...

that girl in the middle looks like someone i know...

the best part about female otaku is that they like to read super-hot boy-on-boy manga, and we found one of their favourite hangouts...mainly because of the hundreds of comic books like these...

i know at least one person who would've enjoyed a book or two...