June 2007 issue

This month, I thought of a message for musicians who have given up on vintage instruments, thinking that they are out of their league and irrelevant.

Vintage is not everything, but it is something you would like to use. Somewhere in the back of your mind, you must want to play those instruments that were created by imported craftsmen half a century ago and are still alive and kicking today.

It's just that the price is no longer affordable.

But, gentlemen, I want you to sit back and think about it. I want you to look back on your life.
Everyone has had an experience in their life where they can't believe that something like this could ever happen.
Yes, I know,
You never know what life has in store for you.

You never know what will happen in your life.......! ... (How positive!).

I tried to express such a message as "The guitar you have been longing for, delivered to you from the sky (heaven)! I tried to express such a message as "The longed-for guitar that came from the sky (heaven) to you! Did you get the message?

The situation is exactly like a Telecaster that just fell from the sky.

Too aggressive?

We now live in an age when airplane parts are falling through the roof. And we live in an era when yellow dust from China is falling on Japan.

How can we be sure that gifts will not fall from the sky?

The story is set. How should we describe it? A happy present falling from the sky! The discussion turned to how to capture the "happy present" in a photograph.

Let's drop it from the sky.

What?"

The guitar.

Idiot.

but we are the ones who even made fighter planes appear. We don't give up even if ordinary people do!

Let's do it!"

We are strong. We're strong!
So where do we drop it?
The roof!
Or we could look for a tin roof..."
Road!
It's hard to drill a hole in concrete.
Then, the beach!
"Oh, that's good! That's good, let's go there! It's really not that funny.
It was a piece of cake.

In order to find a beach, I called a friend of mine and asked him about it. He told me that there is a wide sandy beach in Miura Peninsula. I immediately inspected the site with Google Earth.

It looks good, so we'll leave next Tuesday. The meeting was dismissed!

Wait a minute, what about the guitars?

No way I'm going to stick a vintage guitar on the beach. Unfortunately or fortunately, there are no replacement guitars in the store's merchandise. Then one of them said, "I have one, a Telecas."

"You don't mind?"

What's wrong with it?

I was moved.

Your words about risking your life for this shoot were true....
But I can't be crying in a place like this.
Well, then, I guess the guitar is a done deal."
We're going to have two shovels. What, one for the military? What's that?
Oh, well, whatever, as long as we can dig.
By the way, it's boring to just stick a guitar in the sand, isn't it?
I think it's boring enough, but I'm going to ask him.
Let's make the surface of the earth explode as if a meteorite had fallen.
That's a bold idea.
It's hard to make an explosion, but I'd like to have the feeling of a freshly fallen meteorite.

How about filling the room with smoke from fireworks?"

I see. Realistically, I'm thinking of a snake ball. The kind that emits smoke while emitting feces like that.

But do they sell them nowadays? Snake balls.

As we were having this exchange, the office manager said something to me.

'Why don't you just use dry ice?'

Oh, that's great! I didn't know you had such a talent. I'm going to use that.

You have really hit on the stereotype that smoke comes from hot things. We had been thinking with our heads as hard as stones, but smoke can also be produced from cold things! Come to think of it, we used to play with dry ice.
We gathered at the restaurant at 9:00 a.m. that morning, packed our bags, and set off for the Miura Peninsula.

It was crowded in Tokyo, but we had breakfast at a service area along the way when it was starting to get smoother.

Each of us saved our energy for hot dogs, menchikatsu sandwiches, and pork cutlet sandwiches while sipping soy milk lattes, our bellies growling with anticipation.

Now, just after 11:00, we arrived at the coastline. We continued on Route 143 with the ocean on our left. Oops, I had to buy some dry ice.
We went to Miura-kaigan station and went to a nearby supermarket.

No...no...no...no...no...no...no...no...no...nowhere!

We had no choice but to go to the police box and ask.

"Dry ice? Oh, I think it's at the FUJIYA restaurant, but it's not open right now because of the commotion.

I thought it was a good idea to find it in a cake shop, but there was no cake shop there.
Oh no....

Then he pulled up the phone book. I prayed and searched and found only one cake shop.

 

We got in the car, typed the address into the navigation system, and drove for 20 minutes. In a warehouse district of a certain port, he found a sign.

When I ran inside, the owner's father and mother were having a meal...curry today, right?♪

I bought 4 kg of dry ice without even saying hello.
I told the woman, "Oh, thank goodness, I came all the way from Miura Beach to buy it,

She said, "We're cheap! Even people from Yokohama come here!
Women who grew up on the sea are very manly.

We hurried back to the beach, found a deserted spot, parked our car in a parking lot on the other side of the street, and stepped onto the beach.

It had been many years since I had walked on sand.

We picked a spot a few meters away from the beach and began to shovel out the sand with the shovel we had brought with us.

As my acquaintance had said, the sandy beach here at Miura Beach is very wide and sparsely populated at this time of year. Then three men with shovels and guitars appeared and began digging out a hole.

They were receiving strange stares from the locals who were strolling along the beach.

When they had dug about 50 cm into the hole, they suddenly thrust the head of their guitars into the hole.

Incidentally, this is a rare Fender Japan Telecaster with a bright red PU guard, which is not visible in the photo.

Even though he said he would return the guitar after cleaning it completely after the photo shoot, it must have been an indescribable feeling. Thanks> donor.

Well, the guitar is pierced. Now it's the smoke's turn.

I poured seawater into a bucket and poured it over the dry ice I just bought.

Dribbling...

It seems that just pouring water on it is not enough.
We dug another vertical hole near the guitar head, just big enough to hold a bucket, and pushed in a bucket full of seawater. Then we threw all 4 kg of dry ice into the hole.

Gobo-gobo-gobo! ...

Oh, great! Smoke is coming out...!

We are excited like children.
We can't be all that happy, because we don't know how much smoke we're going to get.

When I tried to take a picture, for some reason the wind started to pick up. It was unavoidable because we were outdoors, but even a slight breeze would blow the smoke away. Therefore, I took pictures from various angles while listening to the wind.

When the dry ice smoke was lessening, we finished shooting, took a few shots of the surrounding area, and pulled the guitar out of the sand.

Suna~dara~ke.

I stuck it in without any tricks, so it was in a pathetic state.

We immediately took the guitar to a nearby public restroom for the cleaning process. The sensation of rinsing the guitar with water was indescribably strange, like when we used to stuff dead insects with firecrackers and light them when we were kids. Well, I'll bring it back to the store and clean it afterwards.
I packed up my camera equipment and other things into the car and headed for Tokyo.

I thought I would go to a restaurant near a fishing port, but I wanted to enjoy the local seafood.

I ordered a sashimi set meal, a grilled fish set meal, and a grilled meat set meal (why meat?).

 

Whenever I am away from the city, I try to eat local food as much as possible.

 

 

 

 

It took much longer than I had planned, so I decided to leave early.

I was relieved that I was able to take the photo safely, although I was annoyed by the traffic jam on the way back.