Okay, this is the first random photo that will be posted while I am on holiday. Let’s hope it works.

The photo is of a public toilet in a small park that I happened to pass on my way home after retrieving my confiscated bicycle (for the second time).

In case anyone was wondering, no, I didn’t, um, put the facility to use. The smell was bad enough from where I stood to snap the photo that I dared not get nearer.

My apologies once again for the dearth of posting as of late. My boss is on a business trip this week, and while I thought that would mean a breezy time at work, in fact it has been quite the opposite. Not only have I been swamped with several big translations all due tomorrow, but my office is also being host to a new intern from Thailand this week and I have been assisting with her training.

In addition, I recently downloaded obtained by legal means (*cough*) the full three seasons of The Family Guy and have been amidst the throes of an unrelenting addiction. I haven’t laughed this hard in ages! However, the culmination of these and additional factors have left me unable to fulfill my duties as the operator of this infantile and wholly inane weblog, and thus I hereby regretfully submit my resignation.

Just kidding.

Actually, starting this Friday, the Japanese holiday season known as Golden Week will be upon us, and I will be taking advantage of the much-needed five days off from work to get the heck out of town and live a little. Thus, I will be heading down to Osaka for the duration of the holiday and likely will not have an opportunity to update this site due to a combination of the following factors: inebriation, exhaustion (sexual or otherwise), lethargy and the fact that I probably won’t have regular access to a computer.

Therefore, I’ve decided to try to set things up so that a new random photo will be posted each day for the duration of my time away, starting Friday night at midnight (Japan time). Hopefully it will work as planned. Of course, one could just go take a peek in the galleries and look ahead at the photos that are going to be posted, but I certainly hope that people will refrain from doing so because that’s just no fun at all. No one likes a spoilsport.

While in Osaka, I’ll be spending my time with some family friends who live in the region, the youngest of whom is this precious angel:

The last time I paid the family a visit was Golden Week 2002, so I’m definitely looking forward to catching up. I’m hoping that my Japanese has improved sufficiently since then that communication will run far more smoothly than previous visits. One can only rely on body language so long.

Well, it’s late and I just got back from the kangeikai for the new intern so I really should take a shower to remove the stench of cigarettes and booze from my body and then head to bed. I’ll be back again with the usual tripe next week. Until then, I hope you’ll enjoy the mediocre photos!

I’ve been a bit short on time the past few days and I’m not feeling particularly loquacious at this late hour, so I think I’m going to forgo the usual poppycock tonight and just post a photo.

Here is the headquarters of Asahi Breweries, located across the Sumida River from Asakusa:

The taller building on the left is the Asahi Beer Azumabashi Building, and was designed to resemble a glass of beer complete with a nice head of foam. (Don’t see it? Me neither.) The low black building beside the glass of beer is the Super Dry Hall, built to commemorate Asahi’s best-selling product, the semi-palatable Super Dry Beer. Of course, more so than the actual hall itself, the first thing that most people see when they first encounter this sight is the unique, WTF-inspiring structure resting atop it.

Designed by French architect Philippe Starck, the Flame d’Or (Golden Flame), as it is officially known, was created to represent the fighting spirit of Asahi employees, whose introduction of the Super Dry brew in 1987 was a smashing success when the product quickly became the company’s top seller (as it remains to this day).

Clearly Mr. Starck had consumed a few too many of Asahi’s fine products when he set to work to design the structure, as the enormous golden squiggle is said by many to more closely resemble a gilded piece of excrement than a burning flame. In fact, many Tokyoites affectionately refer to the object as the Ogon no Unko, or The Golden Turd. However, regardless of whatever the sculpture can be said to more closely resemble, it certainly holds a special place in the Tokyo metropolitan area, where it sits beside the banks of the Sumida River like a small bit of feces being subjected to the gentle current of a bidet.

And, with that appallingly atrocious simile, I’m off to bed for some much-needed sleep. Good night, folks!

The musical Cats returned to Tokyo last year for the first time since its initial run ended eight years ago. Despite all of the hoopla, I truthfully could not have cared less, as there are few things I dislike more than watching people sing and dance about in a gaily fashion (a colonoscopy being one example).

Seeing as my neighborhood doesn’t have much to offer besides a bustling seedy red-light district (which I assure you I have never patronized), one can likely understand the surprise that I experienced when walking home one night from a different direction and encountering this:

Yes, that is the Cats Theater, home to Tokyo’s production of Cats and located only about a hundred paces from my apartment building. I can only presume that this particular location was chosen due to inexpensive land prices, because there is absolutely nothing else in the vicinity worth visiting, especially for the type of crowd that I would imagine is wont to attend musicals. Nonetheless, it has proven to be a popular attraction and at fixed intervals throughout the day, the street in front of my building floods with a mass exodus of women in their 30s leaving the theater.

The show has already been in production for nearly six months, but I never bothered to snap a photo of the theater until this past weekend. I’d like to say that the presence of an acclaimed Broadway musical has introduced some much-needed class or culture into my neighborhood, but sadly that doesn’t seem to be the case. In fact, the only noticeable difference is the ubiquitous presence of stupid Cats posters on every fucking flat surface within a five-mile radius. For some reason, the expression on the face of the ginger woman on the left really gets on my tits.

The other night I was watching TV for the first time in ages and happened to catch a pair of car ads that gave me a bit of a chuckle. Apparently, in February of this year, Nissan Motor Co., Japan’s third-largest automaker, launched a new ad campaign to promote the excellence and design of their model line and encourage people to visit their neighborhood showrooms to experience for themselves the fine quality and the feel of the materials used in each Nissan vehicle.

Staying true to the common practice by Japanese car companies of using English slogans in advertisements, Nissan created the following tagline for the new campaign:

(Wait for it. . .)

“Touch your NISSAN”

That’s right, seemingly innocuous yet potentially teetering on the edge of risqué (depending on how dirty one’s mind is), Nissan has provided the world with another Engrish gem. While it’s possible that no one at Nissan recognized the giggle-potential of their tagline, it certainly caused me to do a double-take, and I somewhat doubt that I was the only one.

Touch your NISSAN is actually strongly reminiscent of the Nintendo DS Touch! campaign that has been ongoing since October of last year. (Nintendo has recently taken the pun one step further with their new “My First Touch!” promotion featuring video clips of people’s first experiences playing the DS.) I, for one, would love to see the explosion of a trend featuring the use of double entendres in ad copy. Perhaps other automotive companies can follow suit with similar suggestive slogans of their own. Wouldn’t be great to flip through a magazine and see ads featuring lines like these?:

Feel your Mazda
Caress your Mercedes Benz
Squeeze your Suzuki
Pet your Volkswagen
Fondle your Honda
Stroke your Toyota
Rub your Mitsubishi
Palpate your Oldsmobile
Spank your Jaguar

Okay, I admit that those are incredibly lame, but I think the world definitely needs more of this. But, then again, I am the guy who was admonished by the teacher in my grade 12 Economics class for creating an ad for a fictional top-of-the-line luxury pen featuring a scantily-clad model above the tagline “I love a man with a big pen,” so perhaps it’s best that I not be listened to.

Continuing my office’s grand tradition of going out drinking in the middle of the week, last night my officemates and I hit the town for an evening of drunken revelry. Originally scheduled as a hanami party, the noticeable lack of sakura turned the event into a second kangeikai for the new guy in our office. This time, however, all staff were present, including the top managers and the mighty shacho himself.

Over a bland meal at a Chinese restaurant off of Aoyama Dori, we quickly and merrily descended into the pits of drunkenness by means of numerous pitchers of beer and more shoukoushu (Chinese rice wine) than I want to even think about. Naturally, things became a tad rambunctious as the evening progressed. Two of my coworkers who had both spent a few years in the U.S. as university students soon began making use of all of the colorful obscenities that they picked up during their time there, much to the chagrin of the older staff members who were proficient enough in English to understand what was being said. Here’s an example of one of their heavily-accented exchanges:

Drunk Guy 1: “Why the fuck aren’t you drinking, bitch?”
Drunk Guy 2: “Man, what the fuck you talking about?”
Drunk Guy 1: “You know what I’m fucking talking about, bitch. You keep filling everyone else’s glasses, but you aren’t drinking shit!”
Drunk Guy 2: “Don’t fucking talk to me that shit, motherfucker! I’m drinking more than you are!”
[Continues ad nauseam]

After the meal, the majority of the revelers departed for home, leaving just six of the most wanton of our group to head to the nijikai (second party). There’s a particular Chinese hostess club in Akasaka that my boss is apparently quite fond of, so lo and behold, that’s where he said we would be going. The place was decent enough — it had the archetypical dim lighting, velvet couches and middle-aged salarymen busting out old enka tunes — but the slightly haggard appearance of the women in their sleazy outfits combined with the fact that the only thing to drink was cursed mizuwari (whisky diluted in water), the experience was far from enjoyable.

Thus, in order to pass the time while my boss was living it up chatting with his favorite hostess and the two drunk guys were busy carrying out a new series of energetic exchanges based around the words “bitch,” “shit,” and “motherfucker,” another coworker and I set to work flipping through the karaoke songbook and picking random songs to viciously butcher to the displeasure to our fellow patrons in the bar. Finally, after a number of pitiful pop tunes and a utterly horrible rendition of Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On?,” my boss declared that it was time to go. We made a quick stop at a nearby ramen shop for a hearty dose of hangover prevention before hopping into cabs and heading home, where I sleepily arrived shortly after 2:00 a.m.

As one might expect, it was pretty quiet in the office today, as many quietly nursed hangovers and we all fought to stay awake following last night’s adventure. The total tab for evening came out to be about US$680 for dinner (for 16 people) and another whopping $1000 (yes, one thousand) for the waste of time at the hostess club, of which my share was calculated to be $10 and $70 respectively. Thankfully, they chose to break down everyone’s share in terms of rank (one of the few benefits of living in a rigid hierarchal society), and thus the managers had to foot the majority of the tab. Had that not been the case, I just may have had to resort to blackmail, taking advantage of the crappy keitai pics that I drunkenly snapped of my boss getting friendly with one of the hostesses. I guess now I’ll get to save that for another occasion.

Oh, sweet irony. How you make me chuckle with glee and cry with misery at the same time.

Here was the scene yesterday morning:

It was about 8:30 a.m., and I was on the Yamanote line heading to work. As the train neared Shibuya station, the usual announcement played, stating that the doors would be opening on the right side and that there is a gap between the door of the train and the platform, so proper caution should be taken when exiting the train. At that moment, the following half-thought popped into my otherwise haven’t-had-my-coffee-yet brain-dead mind:

“Why do they always announce that there’s a gap between the door and the platform? Surely, everyone on this train has ridden on trains countless times before and is well aware of the presence of the gap. Is it really necessary to announce it at every single stop?”

As the train came to a stop, I made my way through the crowd towards the door. Suddenly, at the precise moment that I placed my left foot on the metal edge of the doorway (which was wet with rain) in preparation to extend my right towards the platform, I received a sharp shove from behind by an impatient fellow commuter. My foot promptly slipped off the edge of the doorway, and sure enough, down into the gap my left leg dropped. My body fell forward and a loud thwack! resounded as the palms of my hands hit the ground to stop my fall, sending my umbrella into the legs of the man in front of me.

I quickly stood back up without missing a beat and noticed through the corner of my eyes that every head in the immediate area was turned in my direction. At that point, I did the only thing a person can do in such a situation: hobbled away as quickly as possible without looking anyone in the eye.

Upon reflection, I realized that perhaps those “mind the gap” announcements aren’t such a bad idea after all. Now, if they only they had a “NO PUSHING, YOU MISERABLE CUNTS” announcement to go along with it, my commute might be slightly less unpleasant.

Ask any Japanese person what first comes to their mind when they think of the season of spring, and they’ll answer “hanami!” Ask any Japanese person what first comes to their mind when they think of hanami, and they’ll answer “getting sloshed and passing out in the bushes!”

Yes, the hanami (cherry blossom viewing) season arrived in Tokyo this past week, and everyone and their mother was out enjoying the rare temperate weather and having picnics beneath the beautiful pinks and whites of the cherry blossoms in bloom. Many Japanese regard hanami as the quintessence of Japanese culture, the intricacies of which are too complex for the simple foreign mind to comprehend. To the Japanese, the beauty of the sakura is found not only in the delicate colors and the serenity of the gentle falling of the petals, but also that the blossoms epitomize the ephemeral nature of existence and the impermanence of life. Thus, at this time of year, people throughout the country get together in parks and other outdoor areas to celebrate the fleeting exquisiteness of nature by getting shitfaced drunk and littering the parks with mountains of garbage.

As the weather was exceptionally nice this past weekend, Judy and I decided to go check out the sakura in the Yasukuni/Chidorigafuchi area, as recommended by one of my coworkers. Apparently about one-fifth of Tokyo also had the same idea, as when ascended from the subway exit we were flabbergasted by the sheer number of people scrambling about for an unobscured view of the trees. We first took a walk through Yasukuni Jinja, a shrine infamous for the 14 convicted WWII Class-A war criminals housed within and the visits made by Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi that continue to infuriate Japan’s neighbors in China and Korea. Yasukuni was crowded as well (no surprise), but we did manage to walk around a bit and enjoy some of the fare from the stalls that line the walkway to the shrine.

Afterwards, I suggested to Judy that we go walk along the Chidorigafuchi moat to look at the cherry blossoms close-up, but she informed me that if I wanted to do so, I would be spending the rest of the afternoon by myself, as there was no way she was going to try wading through that crowd. So instead, we walked in the opposite direction from the crowds and spent the afternoon wandering aimlessly around the city, which is, in my opinion, the best way to find the hidden gems that Tokyo has to offer.

Sadly, Sunday’s strong winds combined with today’s rain have all but washed the sakura away, bringing this year’s hanami season to a premature close.

I guess that’s life.

Ever since the advent of the computer age, the unyielding speed of technological advancement has been nothing short of astounding. Naturally, it was only a matter of time before this progress extended to the world of smut (about five minutes, to be exact), where prospective applications stand to provide endless benefit to the world’s awkward and perverted. Geeky losers who would never have a chance of achieving physical contact with actual members of the fairer sex are hard at work on the development of computer-generated women, with the goal of one day realizing their ultimate dream of the creation of a virtual sexual experience where a willing human partner becomes redundant.

With a society that inexplicably breeds an inordinate number of socially inept men, Japan continues to lead the world in the development of advanced virtual sexual technology in an attempt to bring to life ideas conceivable only in the wildest imaginations. MetaDoll.com is a prime example of just how far this technology has come within the past few years alone. The site features images of nubile CG beauties in a variety of outfits and poses, as well as a number of animations and interactive games. Access to most of the content requires a membership, however there are a few select features accessible without one, including this great Shockwave game jovially titled “Play with My Boobs!” [hint: keep clicking for additional options].

As the innovation of this progressive technology continues, one can only imagine the potential applications when it will be inevitably combined with Japan’s advanced wanking technology. The possibilities are endless!

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Psst ↓ ↓ ↓

username: vip08
password: A01-4415-0822

Google is your friend.

Last night, some of my officemates and I went out for an informal kangeikai (welcome party) for a guy who was transferred to work in our office in Tokyo. As our decision to go out was a bit last-minute, none of our usual haunts had room for our group, so we ended up going to a chain izakaya near Shibuya station called Kaasan. Kaasan means “Mother” in Japanese, and the chain markets itself as providing homely fare prepared with a motherly touch. Accordingly, the kitchen and wait staff are composed entirely of matronly middle-aged women who dote on customers with a maternal demeanor whilst supplying them with large quantities of alcohol and reminding them to finish their vegetables.

Since it was a Monday night, we all decided to limit our intake of alcoholic beverages, but achieved varying degrees of success. It’s actually a tad difficult to keep track of how much nihonshu you’re drinking when someone refills your cup after every sip. Nonetheless, we all made it to the station afterwards without anyone puking or passing out (which is quite an accomplishment in itself), and parted ways.

Upon returning to my apartment to find Judy sound asleep, I realized that I had to return a DVD to the video rental shop before midnight, and so I headed back out and managed to get the DVD into the hands of the cashier with about three minutes to spare. As I walked past the station on my way back to my apartment, I happened to pass by a guy who I’ve seen many times playing the saxophone and trumpet (albeit not at the same time) beneath the elevated train tracks. Feeling somewhat chatty after my numerous beers and countless glasses of sake, I greeted the guy asked him, “Do you play here often?” (which, in retrospect, does indeed sound like a cheesy pickup line, much to my dismay).

We chatted briefly about our respective backgrounds and time in Japan, and I learned that he was originally from New York and had spent the past 15 years in Tokyo. Unfortunately, within minutes the conversation quickly took a turn towards one-sidedness and the guy began to rant and rave about everything from the film industry to the American government to the lamentable prevalence of ignorance among the youth of today. He seemed like a rather intelligent guy, but he was definitely on a different level than most “normal” folk. I’m hesitant to just pass him off as some whackjob, but when people advocate the overthrow of the government and say paranoid things like “Don’t you see? They don’t want you to know what’s going on!”, it certainly makes one wonder about their mental stability. I barely managed to get a word in edgewise the entire time, but since I’m not the type to rudely interrupt others when they are speaking, I ended up standing there for over an hour listening to his tirade.

Since then, after having thought a bit more about some of the things that he was saying, and considering the depth of his knowledge and analysis of each issue he mentioned, I’ve come to realize just how intellectually inactive I’ve become in the last few years. I definitely felt more socially aware when I was in university (although I forwent the traditional scraggly facial hair, “Free Mumia” pin and other clich´s), but in the years since, while my knowledge and understanding of social issues and world events have increased considerably, I’ve found that my priorities have shifted a bit and I no longer focus as much energy on them.

Could this be due to disillusionment? To laziness? To having become complacent from living in a society regrettably known for its ignorance and shallowness? Perhaps it’s just from growing older and now being in a position where I’m relatively comfortable enough to enjoy the small pleasures in life, rather than dwell upon the inequalities and injustices in the world. Or maybe I’m just a bad person.

I suppose my biggest question is: Why do my coworkers insist on getting soused in the middle of the week? My head hurts.

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My apologies for the particularly inane ramblings as of late. I promise I’ll be back to writing about boobies and eccentricities in Japanese society and whatever else shortly. In the meantime, why not take a peek at this video of J-Pop super-group and fodder for Japan’s legion of pedophiles, Morning Musume, squeal and squirm as they watch a clip from the Japanese film Ringu.

Apparently there are few pleasures in life comparable to that attained from scaring young girls.

Today is the first day of the Japanese fiscal year. All throughout the country, fresh-faced shinnyuushain (new hires) attended their first day of their first full-time jobs with a mixture of nervousness and excitement. Uniformly dressed in ill-fitting new black suits, they roamed the streets in packs on their way to and from the company that many of them will serve for the rest of their working lives. No doubt, a momentous occasion for those involved, but for someone like me who’s on the outside, it’s like watching fresh meat heading to the slaughter. The next year of their lives will be filled with suffering and hardship as they learn what they must do to fit in and toe the company line. And, thus, the loss of their youth, the crushing of their spirits and the death of their souls will duly commence, followed by roughly 38 years of ardent devotion to the national cult of salarymanism until they finally retire at the age of 60, at which point they realize that they’ve wasted their entire lives in the office and have no idea to do with the remainder of their time until the arrival of death.

I wish them all the best.

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My apologies for not posting in the past few days. The end of the fiscal year is always an extremely busy time. Hopefully I’ll be able to find more time once things get settled within the next week or so. In the meantime, here are a few more photos from my day in Asakusa in March. Yes, utter crap, I know, but whattayagonnado?