What’s worse than having to work on a national holiday?

How about having to work late on a national holiday?

Yes, while most people in Japan were off enjoying the first day of spring, yours truly was stuck in the office with the rest of the worker drones until the late hours of the night. Even the slave drivers who share a building with my company and whose employees never seem to go home had the day off today (the lucky bastards). My colleagues, of course, toiled on, silently patting themselves on the back for being “hard workers” for working on a national holiday. I, however, could not enjoy the same smug satisfaction, as I don’t subscribe to the typical Japanese belief that working longer = working harder.

Anyway. . . the weather was pretty nice last Saturday, so I headed over to Asakusa to play the part of a tourist and do a bit of sightseeing. I took way too many crappy photos, and I’ll probably put a few of them up later this week (consider yourselves forewarned).

In the meantime, here’s a photo of a tonkatsu (breaded pork cutlet) shop in my neighborhood that, through a humorous example of poor planning, appears to share neon sign space with a soapland offering bath play for ¥10,000 (about US$95) plus a discount for early morning customers (doors open at 7:00am).

[For anyone who doesn’t read Japanese, the two red portions read ソープランド (= soapland) and とんかつ (= tonkatsu).]