How to scare a Japanese sarariman

Question of the day: What's the best way to scare a Japanese businessman at 4:30 in the morning? Got it yet? Apparently the best answer is to have a gaijin suddenly stumble out of the bushes in front of him. In the dark. With a camera.

So the next question is why was a gaijin hanging around in the bushes, in the dark, with a camera? Well it's a combination of events really.

Normally when I travel I don't get hit by jet lag much. Last time I went to Japan I got over the jet lag in a single day and it was a simple thing to do. For that trip it was a 9 hour difference forward, and I was going east. This time around, while it's a 13 hour difference forward I figured I'm going west this will be easy enough. At this point you're probably pointing and saying "wrong", and in fact you would be right.

The jet lag kicked my ass (for about the first 4 days) and consequently on the second day there  I was up at 4 am (along with 11:30pm, 1:00 am, 2:30 am, you get the idea.)

"Well I'm up", I thought, "I may as well do something useful. I know, I'll take my camera for a walk."

Just before the trip I'd made a new purchase of a nice prime focus 1.8f 50mm Canon lens for my camera. For those that don't speak photography what this basically means is I've got a lens that, while it doesn't zoom and is fixed, is very good in low light conditions due to its speed.

So armed with my camera and my nighttime shooting lense, I went out for a walk.

This leads me rapidly to the bushes incident. It's not really as exciting as it sounds. I like taking semi-abstract images and I'd found a good set of lit balconies that from the side made a nice shot. Due to the fact my camera lense was of a fixed length, I had to move myself to frame the subject as I wanted, hence the ending up moving into the bushes in order to get the shot. This lead directly to my emerging from the bushes in front of a, probably drunk, Japanese businessman and a cry of "ohayou gozaimasu (good morning)." The reaction was a startled yell followed rapidly by the loca moving away from the foreigner at a much higher rate of movement that they had previously been doing.

In all fairness, a Japanese policeman on a bicycle had seen me moving around in there only 30 seconds earlier and didn't bat an eyelid.

Incidentally, this is the photo I was trying to get. I just liked the pattern of the balcony lighting on the building.

Light patterned balconies