It's getting cold in Tokyo

I have been in Japan waaaaaaaay to long. Today while walking to work, I was looking down at my phone, reading text messages like most other Japanese. Suddenly, I heard this wild honking from a car and I looked up, and found that I was in the middle of a busy street that I had just jay-walked my way into, and I bolted to the other side of the street before having my head dashed apart. Crazy.

Blogging is tough when you have so damn much to talk about that you just don't know where to begin. I think that's the reason I stopped for so long. But I have to talk about my wedding. I have never been a big fan of weddings. Call me cynical if you want (I prefer pragmatic), but I have always felt that weddings were mostly a formality....a necessary evil that requires a lot of time and effort and resources that might be better spent towards buying a house, raising a family etc etc. And so when it came my turn on November 1st 2008, I expected nothing but a big fat chore and a big fat bill at the end of it. What I got instead was a big fat revelation...people were there to celebrate us. They were actually, genuinely happy for us. I was unprepared for the outpouring of love and support that came from every direction....literally from every time and place that I have ever existed...messages from all over the world wishing me well, from people I haven't seen and haven't been in touch with in decades.

I remember when I first started studying photography around 8 years ago. I bought a book at Chapters, and one of the first things I read was that the lense looks both ways; a photograph says as much about the person taking it as it does about the subject. That means that, when you take a picture of something, what you are really recording is your feelings towards that thing. So a phtotograph is a reflection of yourself and your feelings. I was thinking about this while being bombarded by all of this love and happiness at my wedding. Is this love also a reflection of the love we have shown to others over the years? Have we really touched the lives of so many people? At that moment, I became overwhelmed with emotion and had to shut it all down. I am a guy, after all, and it's not in my nature to cry, especially in front of other people and ESPECIALLY at my own wedding. But I can tell you for sure I became a little less cynical that day.

The wedding ended with people picking Noriko and I up and throwing us in the air and yelling "万歳!!!!!!" several times, with My Bloody Valentine's "Sometimes" playing in the background. It was melancholy and surreal and f#$king awesome... best wedding EVER.