Japan Journal: Nobuta

 After two weeks of being in Japan, we are so happy to back in the USA! Don’t get me wrong, our trip was the bomb – but you can only eat ramen noodles and tempura shrimp for so long, right? We went out there for work (filming a convention & a documentary) and were overwhelmed with how much we were able to see while we were there! You never know if you’re just going to see the inside of your hotel room on some of these trips – so this trip way exceeded our expectations! The first day (Friday)  we were supposed to rest, because we had a big week ahead of us – but what did we do instead? We toured the city! We kinda hated ourselves quickly afterwards. We filmed the convention on Saturday, then for five days straight we took a flight to a different part of the country to film. We were SO exhausted – a couple nights I do not know how we made it through.. Especially with jetlag. I’ve never felt like I could fall asleep while standing up like that before! Ha! Anyway, our first day we flew to Nobuta, and it was pretty hilarious. We had this whole japanese production crew with us (make up artist, lighting guy, translator… you name it!) and my understanding of the shoot was way different than what they were having us film at the beginning. The bus-van we were in pulls off the side of the road, as our translator tells us to film this ‘mountain range’ (hills in my opinion) – I was SO confused & we were a bit humored by it. My understanding was that we were coming just to film interviews of people, and that was it – what are we going to do with this random landscape shot? Haha whatever. No one could really explain to us what they wanted the final video to be like, so we just trusted & went with the program. It started to make more sense as days went on, and it ended up being way sweet! Each morning we would wake up in a complete different part of the country to film the famous landmarks of that city before we did interviews. We got to see some pretty awesome stuff. In Nobuta we went to this museum where they make these giant floats for Japanese celebrations – it was unreal how they make them! We went to this huge underground fish market too, that was oh so stinky (just looking at these pics make my nose hairs burn). It was insane to see the things they sold there! Octopus, squid?? Sure, I’ll take it. I actually tried octopus, and will never again. It’s like chewing on a rubber band that you can’t quite swallow fast enough. I tried to enjoy it, but just couldn’t do it. However I did enjoy the Dumplings, Tempura, ‘Hamburg’, Mochi, and chunky juices there though. And never once reached for a fork over chop sticks – I made myself proud! But we’ll chat more about japanese food later, for now I should probably get to bed –  I’ve probably written way too much. Ha! More to come soon! 🙂Enjoy your Memorial Day!

5 Comments

  1. May 28, 2013 / 12:36 am

    oh stinky japanese fish markets 🙂 they're quite the experience. We took a field trip to the big one in tokyo every year and had to be there by like 5 am to see the auctions of the huge HUGE fish (far bigger than any of us little kids :P)…love seeing all these pictures!

  2. May 28, 2013 / 1:37 am

    Oh Hailey! I'm in love with your work and your blog.
    You inspire me so much to follow my dream of being photographer and everything that contain a camera lol. When I come back from my mission I'm going to buy a cool camera like yours haha!
    Japan looks so fun!

  3. May 29, 2013 / 3:19 pm

    Yay, you're baaaaaack!

    Your trip sounds wild. I thought the jetlag from California to New York was rough, so I can't imagine how sleepy you must have been. Also, octupus?! Eeek!

    Keep the stories coming 😉

  4. May 30, 2013 / 6:37 pm

    hahaha. sounds accurate. all my international filming with NGOs end up something along those lines, especially haiti… another story, haha. cant wait to see the films girlie!

  5. June 1, 2013 / 9:43 pm

    Sounds like so much fun!!

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