Riuva : Research Institute for Unicultural Visual Arts

We all love Cross Game right? It pretty much romanticised the Batting Centre and I was pretty interested in trying it out, since we don’t have those in Singapore. I know you guys in the US call them Batting Cages, and have them all over the place, but we once had an American who tried to open one in Singapore and the government didn’t give him a permit, probably because they feared people would get killed by the flying balls since Singaporeans are retarded and probably need guidance and legislation to stay out of the way of round objects flying at 120 km/h.

Yeah so one of my objectives in Japan was to enjoy an authentic Japanese batting centre experience, and I found one a short 3 minute walk from Waseda. To put it simply, it’s really fun and exciting, and probably way too difficult for a non-baseball player. I am a lefty and had no choice of pitching machines, since all of them were set for righties except one aptly dubbed the "Miracle ball 80-100 km/h", which was the only one with space on the right side of the home plate for lefty batters. Hence I didn’t get to try the faster pitching machines, sadly. Despite that, I still failed to connect properly with most of the balls. The vast majority were either foul balls or complete misses, with about 15% being proper drives or grounders and a couple of flyballs. Each 10 or 15 ball set ( I can’t remember the exact amount) cost 300 yen. You can get a 4 round ticket for 1000 yen. This is seriously expensive. Nevertheless, it was quite fun and I don’t think I’ll be setting the Koushien alight anytime soon.

Before that we went to a cat cafe, one of the new trendy things to do in Tokyo. The basic premise of the cat cafe is that it’s a cafe, spaciously designed, with lots of nice, well-trained and pretty cats. You pay a cover charge, depending on the store and for a fixed time, get to mingle with the cats and pay for cat food to feed them with. It’s really expensive as well, for 1 hour, 2 drinks and a little container of cat food, we paid 3000 yen in total. But again, it was a great experience. I’ve never really petted pure-bred cats much, only strays, since I used to volunteer in the SPCA. The well-groomed cats feel really nice to stroke, sort of like high-grade carpet.

You might be wondering what happend on day 9 and 10! Basically I went to Akiba on both days. The coverage is too massive so I’m putting it off until I can find some time to do it properly, since that is our area of interest. On Day 11 I went to Yokohama, which basically looks exactly like Singapore’s waterfront. I mean, at night, it’s almost a carbon copy, with a giant ferris wheel as well! I’ll do a post on that as well.

Tiger cat

The work here started for real, so it’s not all just play anymore. We’re now doing this 27-man report, which will be submitted to some UN conference, as well as the journal of Sustainability Sciences. I think it’s going to be shit, since we’re sort of in a holiday mood and there’s just too many people in the group. So we got split up into 4 groups, with 3 large ones doing agriculture, water and urbanisation issues, while the Team Overlords, which includes myself, who are the elites of the 5 nations represented at the seminar, carry whips and smack people who slack off. The main topic is on Energy, but it’s really disjointed now because the professors set the topics and people just randomly decide to do shit.

Villain cat

Basket cat

Fur cat

Shakey hands, pawpads aka nikutama are awesome.

Wolf cat says "Roar!"

"I want this leg meat now!"