The Laos Festival Sucks
Not the place to be- unless you like to watch horrible dancing to the worst music in Asia“What a letdown this was” 32 year old Sumiyoshi Kon and his new bride Mariko drove into Tokyo to attend the second Laotian Festival in Yoyogi park.
Sumiyoshi had a bad Thai Curry and Mariko went outside the park and got a giant wiener “ I was planning on introducing my wife to the flavors and culture of Laos. I backpacked through in 1999 for a month and missed last years festival”. The estimated attendance for the least popular event all year in Yoyogi Park was actually down 35% from last years - and last year was raining! The average time spent at the festival was only 6 minutes. The other festivals average about 2.5 hours. Most guests seemed irritated by the music and left quickly to shop in Shibuya or Harajuku. 'Worst festival ever' was the overall feedback given to Yoyogi Park Special Event Coordinator, Manabu Takeda , over the 2 days.
“ I'm going to have to seriously re-evaluate the demand for this event next year. It might be more suitable for a more local area outside of Tokyo. I may have fucked this up.I tried. I really did. People might have just been too exhausted from the Thai festival last week that saw record numbers of visitors. They can't all be hits” 
Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz Unfortunately for the Kon's , there was nothing very Laotian at the festival other than a few sad sack diplomats, a couple of B level 'talent' and awful Laotian pop and folk music.What is Laotian food? Who knows? There was certainly almost none to be had here, there were plenty of Thai shops serving shitty food leftover from last weekend that would never be acceptable in the restaurants they represent. There was an Indian shop that only had Butter Chicken or Keema curries and the usual assortment of Yakuza run yakitori, takoyaki and American dog type overpriced and unsanitary crap.
The week old Pad Thai being sold to the chumps looking for something LaotianThere was one actual Laotian shop, where attendees were given the chance to try staple dishes like sticky rice and larb,that are served with various bland herbs, greens and spice-less spices. Grilled ping dishes are an example of a popular cooking method, and are better to be missed. The ping gai (grilled chicken gizzards and assholes) ping sin (grilled meat by -products) and ping pa (grilled,rotting fish) served with a generous amount of spoiled greens and downed with ice cold Lao beer that even paupers in Laos won't touch- If it's really cold you can't taste it. One dreadlocked Japanese fellow griped, “ I tried a bit of that Laos type food and it was really, really awful. I only had a bite and had to give the rest to the crows. I still can't get that taste out of my mouth.”
" We only moved 13 CDs all weekend, fucking illegal downloading is killing the Laotian music business"The Laotian tourist Board saw a grand total of 28 guests all weekend at their booth. Not one person booked or seriously considered a trip. The festival is a half assed platform for several organizations to help spread awareness of Laos and the various social projects in which it participates and no one really gives a flying fuck about. The Laos Embassy in Tokyo had information booths overstaffed with middle aged Chatty Cathys that were nearly empty.
This MILF wasn't there. This shot is from 2 weeks earlier at the same location. A couple of Laotian craft and CD shops also had no customers. In addition to tourism information organizations and travel company , HIS Travel had 2 part time staff on hand to answer questions about getting to Laos, places to stay and things to do. One of the girls confided in me that “ I don't really know much about Laos, we actually don't sell tours there but this a good place to get potential customers for other Southeast Asian markets” 
This set of juggs was not at the Laotian Festival either. They're from the Thai Festival the week before.If you were looking to get more involved with NGOs and NPOs to get laid, this was the place to network with other such dullards who care about that sort of shit.
The slim pickings today cause this smooth playa to conciet defeat and lower his standards and actually talk to a woman over 30.Unlike the One Love Jamaican festival, where people actually have fun , the music is cliche but good and muscular, black men from the area military bases can clean up from their liberal Japanese fans, there was nothing cooking here.A large, African American soldier loudly complained, “ I came here for some pussy! Nothing here but suburban families, dorky dudes and chicks with hairy armpits and bad teeth! These bearded white boys in sandals here think this is 'My Darling Is A Foreigner' or some shit! Last week at the Thai festival , that was the shit , yo. I macked on some shorties!”
The Laotian Festival is for the birds.....Mind numbingly boring speeches by people of Laotian descent and talentless Japanese children dancing to shitty music were the only entertainment. Everyone in attendance looked depressed, goofy and probably is considered ugly even in Saitama....
Fuck Laos! I'm gonna get me some real food!
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This petite princess actually had a very cute face.
Although midgets are now quite popular in Japan, they weren't always. In the mid 1800's they were well know as corpse robbers, usually stereotyped as common criminals and usually barred entry into many shops and restaurants.In the 1800's Japanese medical schools had a severe shortage of cadavers, the only source of them was executed criminals or non Japanese Asians that died in Japan and either couldn't afford a cremation or had no one claim their corpse.Unlike the west, in Japan 100% of bodies are cremated. A handful of very wealthy Westerners are buried here, and only in a few Western style cemeteries around Japan. While in Europe, fresh grave robbing was a fairly common way of supplying cadavers to medical schools, Japan had almost no graves to rob.
Now well compensated for her meaningless office job and ability to bring her company good luck, her ancestors had it rough.
This is where the midgets got the bad rap. From 1840 to 1864 a crime ring of 6-8 midgets routinely robbed crematoriums of the dead in Japan. The funeral business / crematoriums, as in the west , are usually operated by some level of organized crime. Several death related businesses where connected to supplying the little gang of creepy midgets .The group of diminutive, sausage fingered thugs supplied medical schools, private researchers and fetishists all over Japan with corpses for years. The families of the dead assumed the ashes they got back were their loved ones but if you went to one of the funeral homes connected with the cunning runts, chances are you got just regular or animal ashes back. As if stealing bodies wasn't bad enough, the little creeps were also charged with stealing jewelery and extracting the teeth of the corpses and supplying dentists with the teeth so they could fashion morbid, realistic dentures for Japan's upper class.
Where's the fire, little man? As usual, midgets always seem to be in a rush.
The wee Japanese of Tokyo were nothing but common thugs in those days. Their motive, simple greed. But what of the buyers? Who were the upstanding members of society who would commission the theft and mutilation of someone's dead mother? It was the deans and management of the corrupt, new industry of for -profit medical schools! “He must mangle the living if he has not operated on the dead” is an old saying that is a mantra for medical students worldwide, Japan was no different.
These two creeps really hate midgets, almost as much as they hate women, they wouldn't give up their seat to the little lady- despite being in the women only car.
The only reason they were ever found out was more greed and bad timing. The gang of drunken midgets showed up at a Yokohama medical college in front of about 25 students and their parents at a ceremony with a cadaver at their little feet. They loudly demanded a big payment for the body and got it- with all the witnesses watching. They told the students that the cadaver's relatives had sold them the body- though this was and still is, given the Japanese public's abhorrence of dissection , a very unlikely scenario.
The heavily bruised, well dressed, toothless corpse, it turns out, had been a lodger at a sleazy boarding house run by one of the dwarfs who died from unknown reasons. The man died in one of his small rooms and was unable to come up with the money for the nights he stayed. The undersized landlord was not one to forgive debt and came up with what he and his gang thought was a fair solution. Thus giving the unlucky lodger the opportunity in death to pay off what he neglected in life.
Probably off to meet his much taller date, he hustles though Shinjuku Station like a bat out of hell.
The students and their parents, being from good stock , sensed foul play and alerted the authorities. After a 2 week investigation, the midgets where all arrested and publically hanged within a month. The crimes and punishment were one of the biggest domestic stories of the year and gave all of the little people of Japan a bad name for the rest of the century.Since then, all of Japan's cadavers come from China, where life is cheap and some grubby fingered midget over there is making a profit.
Fuck these little piece of shit delinquents, I got a Salmon Panini to feed my much taller than average frame.
