Sculpture Safari

One of the coolest things about this place is the public art sprinkled around the city like a civic engineer's version of exotic spices. Now, I put it that way because the sculptures are all quite strange, and tend towards the aesthetic of objects once used in ritual sacrifices. It's like Hamamatsu's city planners went on an artifact-finding expedition into the deepest regions of the human soul, the heart of darkness, if you will, and emerged clutching Kurtz's, misshapen, blackened head and the physical manifestations of the darkness that warped his heart. There are also some really cute statues of kitties! But honestly, the art, and in some cases, the architecture, is a (potentially unwitting) tribute to all things mysterious, pagan, and hierophantic, which is all like the coolest shit ever, so here's a little tour through the Kabbalistic wonderland I get to walk every day.

This, folks, is the Babylonian ziggurat where I go to work every day. I feel like many recent graduates find themselves waking up at an unreasonably early hour, trudging to work through a fine mist of reality-induced depression, looking up at a non-descript, boxy, twenty-something-story pile of poop of an office building, and then maybe sighing once before dragging themselves into an elevator, and sitting down behind a desk to do whatever they do for eight hours. I, too, find myself crawling out of bed at the unreasonable hour of 7:30, but instead of a bland, pile of poop office building I get to climb the steps of an obsidian, triangular temple to Asherah, peeling back sacred veils with every step upwards to reveal the increasingly more sacred mysteries of the Japanese system of Bureaucracy before reaching the sixth floor where I pass into the air-conditioned inner sanctum of room 4, take my seat around the rectangular tables of Enki and proceed to… well, compose internet blog posts for hours on end. Sometimes I play cards with the other priests. We also nap. It’s a very spiritual life.

Continuing the tour, this is the bizarre idol enshrined at the entrance to my building. I’m not entirely sure why anybody would want to pray to Earthworm Jim’s disembodied head, but you don’t put something on a pedestal of three circumscribed triangles unless you plan to bow down to it.

I’m not sure exactly whose nightmare this thing stepped out of, but the artist has somehow managed to fuse into one nefarious being the uneasy, inhuman attributes of marionettes, stone golems, headless robots, and valley girls. Notice how it seems to be trying to use the giant arrowhead thing behind it like a scratching post with its right hand while its left hand looks ready to morph into a big fat “L” and fly up to its forehead at any second? Too bad it doesn’t have a head. Whatever, Major Loser, I can’t even imagine the identity issues this thing must have. To fry you with my laser fingers, rip your head off with my claws, summon the creatures of the earth for a rocking sylvan tea-party (hey, I never said it couldn’t be friendly), or just sear you with icy disdain and simplistic catchphrases? This one’s complicated, that’s for sure.

Nothing funny to say about this, it's just a sweet photo. See my shadow? You can almost imagine a council of ghosts sitting on the lighted seats, just breathing peace and quiet into the night sky. It's a pretty calming place.






This place is gorgeous too. Last boring photo, I promise.

Now, this place does confuse me a little bit. What is a creepy, ominously lit, faux-gothic cathedral doing in downtown Hamamatsu? Is it the ancestral home of a local warlord with a European complex? A medieval themed restaurant? Perhaps the place where they're going to film the live action version of Sleeping Beauty? In a sense it's all three. Well, maybe not so much the first one, but bits and pieces of the other two. It seems to be a universal human thang to want to make one's wedding a magical, exciting production, and it's no different on this island. If you're willing to shell out the cash, you can get married on the top floor of the ACT tower, the tallest building in Hamamatsu, in the Sky Chapel, a room painted to look like it opens into the heavens and is decorated in the puffy cloud sort of way that would suit a visiting choir of angels. A nice place to tie the knot, closer to God so that he can hear your vows better, I suppose, but if your wallet isn't quite so fat, or maybe if you take a slightly darker view of the almighty, you can get together and get legitimate in Wedding Central Park at the Castle Perilous. I didn't go inside, but I imagine it's done up in tattered tapestries, guttering candlelight, cobwebs, and the scent of Satan that only an old Catholic church can provide. Of course, it's not really a Catholic church so they probably won't get that part quite right, but I do think I heard the vampiric stylings of My Chemical Romance coming from inside, so at least the soundtrack is spot-on.

I saved the best for last because this is the fucking shit. What the fuck is this supposed to be??? Somewhere on their journey into the human heart the engineers of Hamamatsu uncovered proof of the the existence of aliens! Because this technology is far too advanced for even the Japanese. Flanked on both sides by some sort of runic inscriptions that must have been designed either by Neo-Futurists or creatures from the planet Zebulon is the real prize of the city's public works projects, the creme de la creme of Hamamatsu's collection of obscure, fabricated archaeology. Backlit by what can only be described as the eery green light from some unknown, otherworldy isotope is... well.... it's fucking like.... it's kinda like The Cube but it's circular, and there's pieces missing.... And it's not very well hidden, so Megatron would have found it a long time ago.... Wait, that's it! It's not The Cube, it's a Transformer that got stuck in mid-morph! No, that's not right. See the green crystal thing in there? Maybe it's a Jabba the Hut sized interstellar turd encased in carbonite? Too easy? Yeah, I'm not even really trying anymore. I don't know what that thing could possibly be, I'm defeated by it, but I'm also entranced by it. More research is required, I think. Did I mention that it's right in the middle of the train station?