The Kids: Mine and Not Mine

It's become a sort of tradition to at least try to have a "Détente Night" whenever I go to Japan, which means my going out to dinner with my ex-wife, my son, Tai-chan, and her kids by the dick that fathered the kids, then left on some business trip with some slut golddigger and quite literally, never came back! Meaning that he left my ex-wife and the kids he'd fathered, with no knowledge of his whereabouts nor any means of support for his own children.

This, my friends is a regrettably unremarkable example of Japanese maledom -- meaning, it happens all the time! Nothing to see here, folks, move along, move along!

So understandably, these little children must be deeply confused and warped -- who wouldn't be, if you were abandoned absolutely without a trace, only to grow up with no memory of a "father" who presumably lives on somewhere in Japan? No doubt the monstrous amount of guilt this would provoke in any sane individual will eventually come bubbling to the surface of this man's addled cerebral cortex -- or whatever misshapen object that stands in for one, and one day he will come crawling back, begging for forgiveness.

Well, can't say my ex and I get on like houses on fire but I can't help feeling really, really badly for these two little kids who are my son's brother and sister, so whenever I go I try to make them feel loved at least by me, whom they only know as "Daddy," and they seem to be happy whenever I do show up, which is again regrettably only once a year.

Well, the Ex doesn't have wads of cash lying around, so I took the kids out to an outdoors-type mega-outlet and let them roam wild and choose what they wanted -- for the little boy, Kōta-chan, I bought a cool snorkel, and for the little doll, Kahō-chan, I bought I-can't-remember-what.

My son, Tai-chan, has already received his customary expansive gifts -- a bike and an ultra-cool guitar amp -- so he was totally taken care of for his 13th birthday.

We all five of us went to dinner on a Friday night to one of those amazing sushi palaces -- factories, really -- where everything is so smooth and automated that it makes McDonald's look like Abe and Amy's Homemade Pies.

And here is the stitched-together result. See the beautiful cake we got for Tai-chan in the last minute of so of this video. As usual, if you want this in all its 1080p glory, watch it on YouTube (click the YouTube icon at the bottom right) open it to fill the screen and make sure the little cog is set for "1080p HD".)