Well, hello there! Thanks for stopping by! Surprised to see something new up here after no updates for seven weeks? I know I am!

My apologies for the very long silence. Contrary to speculation, I am in fact still alive (thankfully, the reverse culture shock I’ve experienced thus far has been of the non-fatal variety) and I certainly did have the intention to resume blogging again once I had had a chance to settle in a bit in my new country of residence.

To be honest, though, I haven’t exactly been up to all that much over the past month and a half. However, for the sake of trying to put some new content up on this website, here’s a brief rundown of what’s been going on since I last posted:

I left Japan!
Well, duh. Although we had always planned to return to North America, it was definitely hard for Judy and I to say goodbye to our home for the past five years. Sure, I took the piss and ranted and raved on this website, but I really did enjoying living there and will always cherish the memories I made and the experiences I had. I definitely miss the place and look forward to the next opportunity to go back. Now, ceasing with the retch-inspiring sentimentalism. . .

I went to New York!
Arranged at the very-last minute after a tentatively-planned business trip was canceled, I ended up making a short visit to the Big Apple to attend my aunt & uncle’s 20th wedding anniversary party. I hadn’t been out there since May 2001, so it was great catching up with relatives and seeing a bit of the city as well. I also had the additional pleasure of serving as tour guide and interpreter (half-assedly so in both regards) for a family friend and his niece who also traveled in from Japan for the festivities. Sadly, Judy was not able to come along. Speaking of my beautiful bride of nine months. . .

My wife and I are separated!
Geographically speaking, that is. Following our departure from Japan, Judy returned to Vancouver to spend some time with her family and to get some much-needed time away from me (I kid, I kid. . . I think). Naturally, I miss her terribly, but she has informed me that for various reasons, she will remain up there until I find gainful employment (or until another man steals her heart, whichever happens first). Speaking of my inability to find work. . .

I’m still unemployed!
Gosh, no one wants to hire a shiftless layabout with the social skills of a drunken baboon and the bodily reek of the same — who’da thunk it?? Despite my lack of immediate success, though, my search for employment continues on and I am optimistic that I will find a job some day soon (hopefully before my wife leaves me and my parents kick me out of the house). In the meantime, I have decided to embrace my lack of occupation and have cultivated a healthy growth of stubble in order to complete the ‘unemployed’ look, as nothing says ‘malingerer’ quite like a face several days unshaven. I have, however, been bathing somewhat regularly in a feeble attempt to preserve a modicum of self-respect, although the ever-present stench seems to indicate that my efforts thus far have been somewhat less than sufficient. I do fortunately still have some income coming in, but unfortunately it’s not enough to enable me to get my own place or to entice my wife to come back to me. Now, one might think that being unburdened by the obligations and constraints of regular employment would give me plenty of time to maintain a blog, however. . .

My computer broke!
Well, the hard drive failed, to be specific. And it happened on a Friday night while I was taking a break from job-hunting to watch the movie Ju-on: The Grudge of all things, causing the computer to freeze during one especially creepy-ass scene [the faint-of-heart might not want to click that]. After replacing my soiled underpants, I set about trying to diagnose the problem and whether I would need a specialist (or perhaps even an exorcist) to rectify the situation. Sure enough, I sadly ended up eventually having to rely on the services of a professional, something that hurt my pride as well as my wallet. Fortunately, I’ve got my computer back with a working hard drive and am ready to start blogging again (assuming that I can come up with something to write about).

So that pretty much brings us up to today. Barring any further computer problems or the arrival of an actual job offer (I can only wish), I’ll try to keep up with posting whatever I can manage to pull out of my behind, although I’m still not certain what that might turn out to be (An Analysis of Color Variation in Excremental Material, anyone?). Until the next post, I leave you with some crappy photos™ from my recent travels to New York and San Francisco. Toodeloo!

Sorry once again for allowing real life to get in the way of blogging (for shame!). Actually, I’ve been away (I still am) and haven’t had much time to sit down and vomit on to the keyboard to create something to post. Everything’s been going well, though — last Monday was my last day at work, we’ve nearly packed up/gotten rid of most of our belongings and we’re now trying to enjoy the rest of our time here in Japan. Oh, and it’s freakin’ hot. Thank goodness I no longer have to wear a suit and tie every day!

Well, I’ve got to run. Here’s a typical “Ooh-Japan-is-so-like-spiritual-and-enchanting” photo since it’s the only one I had available at the moment. Will try to post again soon!

My apologies again for the lack of posts. I’ve been pretty busy recently. With only one week left at work and only one month left before we leave Japan, things have been pretty hectic. We’ve even begun the monumental task of going through all of our stuff and deciding what is to be sold/given away/thrown away (most of it) and what is to be shipped back across the ocean to the States (as little of it as possible).

Will try to post again soon, but in the meantime, I offer you yet another crappy photo:

My apologies, once again. I’ve been incredibly busy recently both at work and at home and thus haven’t had the time to scrounge around in my ass to find something worth pulling out and posting on this site. I’ll try to post again soon, but in the meantime, here’s a photo of a very jolly train!

After our somewhat less-than-enjoyable red-eye flight from Tokyo to Honolulu, Judy and I managed to move our connecting flight to Kauai up a few a few hours (with the guy at the check-in counter stating no less than three times, “I’m supposed to charge you to change it, but I’ll wave it for you.”) and finally arrived at the Kauai Marriott Resort in the city of Lihue at around 10:00a.m.

We had requested early check-in since we knew that we would be arriving in the morning, however we were disappointed to learn that there were no rooms available when we got there. Having some time to kill, we headed down to the poolside restaurant for breakfast, but we hardly had an appetite in our state of exhaustion. We also looked quite ridiculous sitting at a poolside cafe in Hawaii wearing long pants and sweaters, with winter coats resting over our seatbacks. Eventually the desire to sleep became too strong, so we ended up spending the next few hours dozing off at various locations around the hotel, including on the beach, in the garden and on a couch behind the big Christmas tree in the lobby (where at one point we awoke to the sound of a little boy asking, “Mommy, why are those people sleeping over there?”). Finally, a room became available and we were at long last able to take a shower, take a nap and begin our vacation.

Looking back, our four days in Kauai are a bit of a blur. The majority of our time was spent finalizing everything for the wedding: meeting with the wedding coordinator, getting our marriage license, preparing decorations and gifts, ironing all of the last-minute details, etc., etc., etc. However, despite all of the running around, we did manage to enjoy ourselves quite a bit. We were able to spend time with the various family and friends who made the trip out to join us, we took a dip in the ocean, played volleyball (albeit horribly), relaxed on the beach. . . and, oh yeah, and we also got married!

More to come soon! For now, here are a few photos!

Sorry, have been a bit busy these past few days. Judy’s mother and sister are visiting Japan at the moment and came up to Tokyo on Saturday, so last weekend was another busy one. Will try to post again soon!

My friend Josh and his girlfriend Wei Wei came out to Tokyo from Taipei this past weekend, and Judy and I did our best to give them The Tokyo Experience. We only had a few days, but we tried to see/do as much as possible during that time, and as a result, despite it now being several days later, I still have yet to fully recover.

I’ll try to put up some photos from the weekend within the next few days, but in the meantime here’s one of a scene we came across while passing through Ginza on Sunday:

The model dressed in geisha garb was on the street for less than two minutes, during which time nearly every single person in the vicinity in possession of a camera came rushing over to snap her photo [that’s Josh & Wei Wei on the right]. As is usually the case in such instances, almost immediately one of the photographers in the front began shouting that it was a private photo shoot and telling everyone else to stop taking pictures. Within moments, the model and main photographers quickly departed and everyone else continued on back in their respective directions, bringing with them a slight smile.

Sadly, I only managed to get one clear pic amidst the bedlam and the composition and lighting suck.

One thing I love about living in Tokyo is that you never know what you might come across during the course of any given day.

Hola, amigos. ¿Qué tal? I know it’s been a long time since I rapped at ya, but I’ve been on holiday. Not away on holiday, mind; just basically sitting around on my fat bony ass, being a lazy bum. Last week was Golden Week and I had the whole of Monday through Friday off from work. Although we ended up staying in Tokyo, Judy and I were actually pretty busy (well, occupied, anyhow) most of the time. Unfortunately, I only managed to accomplish about 50% of the things on my to-do list (the unaccomplished 50% including posting on this site), but I had a good time relaxing, going to the gym and taking care of some long-overdue errands and chores.

Anyway, it’s late and tomorrow’s another day back at work. Today was quite possibly the slowest-passing day I have ever had the misery to trudge through. Tomorrow I’m thinking of soiling myself after lunch just so I can at least have the clean-up and amusement from my coworkers’ reactions to help kill some time.

Due to the complete lack of any worthwhile content in this post (”What’s new?” you say), here’s an equally un-worthwhile photo of some trees or something from Hibiya Park:

¡Adiós!

I love how pretty much everything in Japan comes with helpful illustrations. Everywhere you go, there are pictures of cutesy characters warning you about various dangers in your midst, everything from closing elevator doors to molesters on the prowl.

Recently, I came across this fire prevention billboard for the Takanawa Fire Station:

I have no idea who the orange alien fella on the right is, but the message is clear:

Battered shrimp + Flame = Fried Shrimp or OMG the house done caught fire!! ?

Cigarette + Flame = Smoking or OMG the house done caught fire!! ?

Great stuff.

Tokyo is home to many highly exclusive restaurants. The kinds of places that put in place certain measures to keep the riff-raff out: exorbitant “seating charges,” guest lists, entrance through invitation only, that sort of thing

This place is apparently so exclusive that it’s only open for a single hour each day.

I wonder how they manage to stay in business.

I’ve been working a lot of overtime recently, often being the last person to leave the office at night. As a result, I’ve been pretty brain-dead for the past two weeks or so, walking around in a daze and hardly taking any notice of my surroundings.

So you can imagine the little jolt I received this morning when I came into work and saw this hanging on the wall:

Yep, it’s the flag of the present-day Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force, although it’s perhaps more widely recognized as the flag of the former Imperial Japanese Military and a symbol of Japanese nationalism. So what was it doing hanging up in my office? Well, it seems that today is the anniversary of the establishment of the Japanese Imperial Navy, and my slightly eccentric bucho (who, incidentally, is now my de facto boss) is apparently somewhat of an ardent nationalist and felt the need to celebrate.

I suppose the equivalent in America would be someone decorating his/her office with a Confederate flag, but I doubt that would fly in most workplaces today. Although nearly every visitor to our office gave a startled reaction when walking through the door, most of my coworkers just giggled uncomfortably and played it off as just another one of the bucho’s wacky antics (last autumn he adorned the intercom with several persimmons tied together with twine).

Perhaps the funniest moment of today came when one of the managers from the General Affairs Department upstairs, whom I had never heard speak a word of English, came down to our floor to make some copies, saw the flag, chuckled and then said to me in heavily-accented English, “Remember Pearl Harbor.”

Things have been pretty hectic at work ever since I gave notice last month. My company was having some difficulty finding my replacement, and almost immediately began asking me if there was any way I could extend my stay. I declined several times at first, but after talking things over with Judy and agreeing that we were a) in no real hurry to leave, b) hadn’t found new jobs yet and c) that another few months’ pay wouldn’t hurt, we made the decision to change our plans to stay in Tokyo through July.

So that’s the news. Although I’ve been spending a lot more time in the “real world” than on the internet lately, hopefully I’ll be able to get myself back into posting regularly now that I’ve got a bit more time to spare.

I don’t really have anything else to say at this time, so how about a boring photo?

Seeing as it’s already been over a month and a half since Judy and I returned from Hawaii (and in light of the outright demands kind requests I’ve received of late), I figure that it’s about time I actually mentioned something about the trip here on this site. The truth is that I’m still exceptionally busy these days with work, looking for a job, filling out immigration paperwork and so on, so I haven’t had the time to post anything other than mindless fluff in a desperate bid to keep people coming back to this site in order to provide some sort of pathetic validation to my otherwise fragile ego.

Okay, frivolous run-on sentence out of the way, let’s carry on.

Our trip to Hawaii began with a six-hour overnight flight plagued not only by an exceptionally dire selection on in-flight entertainment, but also EXTREME TURBULENCE FOR NEARLY THE ENTIRE DURATION OF THE FLIGHT. The meal service was stopped, flight attendants were running down the aisles, and the plane shuddered and swayed much like I do on the toilet after an evening overindulging in the dangerous combination of alcohol and sashimi (huh?).

After managing to survive our version of Nightmare at 20,000 Feet (minus the hairy creature on the wing, which surely would have been flung off during this flight), we finally made it to solid ground at the Honolulu airport. Whilst retrieving our baggage in a sleep deprivation-induced haze, I was startled by the sudden sound of a voice behind me that said, “I like your blog.” I turned to identify the source of this strange statement and came face to face with a pretty woman with short hair who appeared to be facing my direction. Now, despite my natural eloquence (ha) and charm (double ha), I only managed to confusedly stammer out a feeble, “Who me?” before the woman disappeared into the crowd.* Needless to say, I was quite surprised to discover that an actual human being reads this website, let alone one of the female variety. Who knew?

“Stewardess, it’s that guy from conbinibento.com!”

Anyhow, despite our (literally) shaky start, the remainder of the trip turned out to be a complete blast. We visited the islands of Kauai, Oahu and Maui (in that order), each of which provided its own unique sights and experiences. Furthermore, the gods were certainly smiling down upon us, as we fortunate to enjoy nothing but sunshine and warm weather for the entire duration of our time on the islands. It was almost enough for me to put aside my inherent aversion to clichés and be tempted to use the word “paradise” to describe them (although I have thus far refrained from doing so).

Well, I think I’m going to stick in a “To be continued” right here with a promise for an update along with some photos in the very near future (cue someone asking where the rest of the Korea photos are…). Stay tuned!

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*The woman in question has since identified herself and is well on her way to recovering from the close-range exposure to the overwhelming stench of my body odor.

The weather was pretty nice this weekend (considering it’s the middle of February) and so Saturday afternoon Judy and I decided to slide out from under the kotatsu and actually venture outside to take a walk around the neighborhood. Our neighborhood is pretty unexciting for the most part, but every once in a while we encounter something interesting, either as a source of wonder, a chuckle or what have you. Yesterday, it was this:

I love it when Japanese governmental organizations go through the trouble of creating English signs, pamphlets or other materials, conceivably for the benefit of foreign residents living here, without bothering to even double-check whether they make any sense. In this case “No Unauthorized Dumping” becomes “Don’t Waste Garbage.” Classic. They even put up a second sign with a phone number for inquiries, which I can only imagine people call up in order to ask about the meaning of the sign.

I’ve been so busy lately, it’s ridiculous. I hate it when actual things that need to get done get in the way of my inherent lazyfatbastardness. I haven’t forgotten about this site, but it’s been hard to find the time to write up anything worth posting. I’m still planning to put up photos from Hawaii, too, but in the meantime, here’s a photo of idon’tknowwhatthehell for no reason what so ever:

On Saturday, Judy and I took a trip up to Omiya in Saitama to have dinner with some friends. We arrived early with a couple of hours to spare, so we decided, despite the freezing wind, to take a little stroll around and revisit some of our old haunts. Naturally, the place we headed first was our old apartment.

I’ve written previously about the many tribulations we experienced while living there, but it was still nice seeing the place again. The shitty “brick pattern” plastic siding concealing the original rotting-wood-and-damp-paper structure beneath, the mailbox where I received approximately five pieces of mail over the course of an entire year, the window through which a burglar came in and robbed me of all of my valuables, and so on. Oh, and my old bicycle, which has since become an extremely dusty trash bin.

Yes, that’s right: I abandoned my bicycle when we moved to Tokyo two years ago. I am a very bad person.

But please allow me to explain. There are basically three ways to get rid of an old bicycle in Japan: 1) arrange for it to be taken away and properly disposed of for a fee, 2) leave it outside of a train station or other busy area to either be stolen or taken away by the city, or 3) abandon it in a nondescript location to either be stolen or eventually become part of the landscape of urban decay. I hadn’t intended to do the latter; in fact, I had originally planned to take it with us when we moved, but there ended up not being enough room for it in the mover’s small truck, and so the two guys from my company who lived nearby and were helping us move (one of whom had actually given me the bicycle, third-hand), told me to just leave it behind. And so, with a lack of time and more favorable immediate options, I did.

And to this day, there it sits; a gradually deteriorating eyesore, its former road-weaving glory long forgotten as it gathers layer upon layer of dust while now acting as nothing more than a convenient receptacle for passers-by to deposit their garbage.

I wonder how long it’ll be before someone decides to have it hauled away. . . .

Saw this last night in the drug store down the street from my apartment:

It might be a little difficult to discern, but here’s the deal: On the top shelf, individual refill packages of Dove body wash are priced at ¥298 each; on the bottom shelf, special two-package sets are available at a price of ¥598 each — ¥2 more than the cost of purchasing two individual packages(!).

Apparently, in Japan, there are instances where buying in bulk is actually more expensive than buying items individually.

Shop in Japan and watch your savings grow!

How about some more shoddy pics from Nikko?

These’ll be the last, I promise.

Judy and I had a very “Japanese” weekend this past weekend. On Saturday, we took the 2.5- hour train ride up to Nikko to see some of the sights and take a bunch of crappy photos of the autumn foliage. Despite the fact that it was rather bone-chillingly cold to the extent that we had to plaster our bodies with heating pads in order to avoid losing limbs to frostbite, we had a pretty nice time up there.

On Sunday, we went to an enka performance in Shinjuku starring enka god Hosokawa Takashi. The first half consisted of a play of some sort, but I’ll be honest: I gave up trying to follow the archaic Japanese after about five minutes and spent the rest of the time fighting to stay awake. The second half was a solo concert by Hosokawa, which, to my complete surprise, I actually found kind of entertaining. That guy can do some wild stuff with his voice, let me tell you!

Judy was given the tickets for free and the person from whom she received them even arranged for us to meet Hosokawa after the show, which actually turned out to be far less awkward than I had expected. We had a brief introduction, posed for a photo and then he wished up happiness in our upcoming marriage and we said goodbye.

It’s been a while since I’ve put any new photos up, so I thought I’d post some of the aforementioned crappy photos from Nikko, even though they’re really nothing special. One of these days I’ve really got to take a photography class or something. Or just give up trying. Anyhow. . . .

I had to work late tonight in order to finish up a translation for one of the directors at my company. In return, he treated me to dinner & booze at a small mom & pop izakaya that he always visits every time he comes to Tokyo. These kinds of places can be found all throughout the city, usually tucked away down side streets and embellished with little more than a small, unassuming sign and tattered noren. After consuming the best yaki-nasu (grilled eggplant) ever I’ve ever tasted plus an entire bottle of nihonshu, I saw the director (who by that point was rather sloshed, as he had consumed a much larger bottle of shochu) off at the station and stumbled on home, where I now sit.

And now, in light of my inebriated state silly mood, here are a pair scans of some purikura that Judy and I recently took. As you can see, actin’ the fool is what we do best.

Don’t you hate it when inconsiderate jerk bloggers don’t update their blogs for, like, days on end?

Yeah, me too. I’m such a prick.

My apologies, once again. After suffering through the past few weeks with barely any time to spare, when I finally found myself in a position to ease things up a bit, I couldn’t resist the urge to just do nothing for a little while. So instead of putting any time into this site, I caught up on some sleep, did some reading, frequented the gym and watched last week’s Evolution Schmevolution special on The Daily Show (a torrent of which — QuickTime/61.0MB — can be found here, courtest of onegoodmove). It was fun being a bum for a few days.

I’m planning to start posting semi-regularly again this week (hmm, sounds familiar) and I’ll do my best to keep it up. For tonight, however, here are two photos from the trip Judy and I took down to Minato Mirai on Sunday afternoon: one of some geezers taking photos of the night view and the other of the inside of the Keihin-Tohoku Line train on our way back to Tokyo. Completely not at all worth posting, I agree, but they’s all I got at the moment.

I don’t feel up to attempting a “real” post this evening, so I’ve decided to blatantly copy the successful format of Patrick’s ‘Today’s Five Things‘ blog. I certainly hope I can do justice to the original. Here goes:

1. Buy me this, and this, and this!
Judy and I recently set up a wedding gift registry via the Wedding Channel website. While at first it seemed like it would be fun to go through various online shops and basically choose anything that struck our fancy, we’ve since come to find the process to be a tad. . . laborious. I guess it has a lot to do with the fact that we’re looking only at small images of products on a computer screen and trying to select items that we will be expected to use for the rest of our lives. I have a hard enough time picking out a pair of shoes that I’ll likely only wear for a couple of years; I can’t handle having to consider whether items that appeal to my tastes now will still be tolerable a few years down the road. It’s like, “Is this the particular dish that I want to have flung at my head during a heated argument with my teenage child regarding his/her performance at school?” or “Is this blanket sufficiently thick to keep me warm when my wife makes me sleep on the couch for two weeks after making what I thought was a completely innocuous remark about the perkiness of our next-door neighbor’s breasts?”

Perhaps registering for gifts would be more enjoyable were we to do it in an actual physical store where we could examine the goods in person. Plus, we’d get to play around with one of those price-scanner gun thingies, which to me seems like quite a lot of fun (in case anyone hadn’t already realized, I’m incredibly easy to amuse). There’s also the issue of being unable to shake a slight feeling of greed as we browse through and try to select items for other people to buy for us. However, I suppose that we’ll have to try to ignore this guilt, seeing as it’s probably better than ending up with three different sets of tacky napkin holders.

2. Hot & sweaty
I haven’t mentioned this before, but the air conditioning in my office has been broken since the beginning of June (!). Thus, I have had to endure the entire frickin’ summer sitting in a hot and stuffy room, alternating between fanning myself with an uchiwa and wiping perspiration from my face, while trying to fit in some actual work in between. In a feeble attempt to ease our sweaty suffering, in July a large fan was brought in to blow cool air from the meeting room next door where the air conditioning is functioning (welcome to Japan! – perhaps the only industrialized nation in the world to shun central cooling/heating); however, every time the meeting room is used for an actual meeting (several times a day), the door is closed and we lose our only source of minimal relief from the heat.

Everyone in the office has been complaining about the problem and hassling the General Affairs Dept. to hurry up and have it fixed, but alas our complaints have fallen upon deaf ears. Apparently the entire cooling system needs to be replaced, which would end up costing around a million yen (about US$10,000), so my company made the decision simply not to fix it. Hence, last month we were requested to gaman until the weather cools down in autumn. Heartless bastards.

3. What’s small, hard and gives me a boner?
Nintendo’s GameBoy Micro was released in Japan yesterday, and after work today I headed to an electronics shop near my office to check it out and play with it a little. My first reaction: “Wow, that really is small!” My second: “. . . and totally not worth the money.” Call me a parsimonious old miser, but as much as I’d love to own a Micro (and rub it tenderly across my naked flesh), for now I’m more than content with my SP. Maybe if I haven’t yet come to my senses in six months or so when the price drops a little, I’ll reconsider it.

4. Ouch
You know that it’s been a bit too long in between visits to the gym when the day after you finally go for a workout, you can’t lift your arms above your head. Putting on deodorant this morning was a bitch.

5. Zzzzz
Well, I’ve finally put up some more photos from past visits to the Tokyo Disney Resort. They’re beyond typically dull, but here they are:

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You know, that was actually pretty fun. Straight and to the point, enables me to cover a variety of topics in a single post, no need to delve too deeply into anything – perhaps I’ll copy Patrick more often (although not too often, I promise!).

The posting of a random photo usually means that I’m either a) very busy, or b) very lazy. Today it’s the former, but if the frequency of Random Photo Posts steadily increases you can bet it’ll be because of the latter.

Anyhow, this is just a photo of a seemingly ordinary sign for a delicatessen near my office. It seemed entirely mundane and inconspicuous to me at first, until one day something occurred to me: in the area where I work, in contrast to every other place I’ve frequented in Japan, there is a noticeable lack of stray cats in the neighborhood. In fact, to this date, I haven’t seen a single one. Hmmm. . . .

Judy and I are still finishing up the wedding invitations, so unfortunately I don’t have time at the moment to write a proper post. The goal is to get the invitations out by Wednesday the 31st, and it looks like we’re hopefully going to finish in time.

Anyhow, here’s a photo of the creepy building that houses the Akasaka Jewelry Design School, which Judy and I stumbled across while walking aimlessly from Shibuya to Akasaka one day last spring. At first I thought it was some kind of cult headquarters, but in fact, the camels have nothing to do with the Korean church next door. Just a completely random choice of building design.

My apologies, I’ve been a bit busy lately addressing wedding invitations. I’ve got a few things in the works, though, so hopefully I can get some stuff up on the site shortly.

In the meantime, in honor of Typhoon Mawar, which is expected to hit Japan some time within the next 48 hours or so, here is a photo of a garbage can filled with umbrellas that have accumulated after being left behind at the restaurant on the ground floor of my company’s office building.

Who knew people were so forgetful?

Well, Judy and I are back in Tokyo after our short excursion to Korea. Overall, it was a very nice trip — we saw some sights, enjoyed some of the local cuisine, learned a bit of the history and culture — and the very minor challenges that we did encounter were so insignificant as to be a source of amusement more than anything else.

Rather than give a play-by-play overview of our trip (since I sincerely doubt that would be of interest to anyone), I thought I’d try to keep my usual verbosity to a minimum and just mention a few points about our time there.

The Package Tour
After looking around at different airfare options to Seoul, we eventually decided to go with a package tour offered by a travel agency that included the airfare plus accommodation due to the low price. The only catch was that while we could select our days of travel, we had no choice with regard to the flight times, nor could we choose the hotel. Thus, our fate rested in the hands of the knavish rapscallions at the travel agency.

A week after making our reservations, we were informed of our flight schedules and the name of our hotel. On the appointed day, we made our way to the airport and departed on an evening flight, arriving in Seoul shortly after 10:30PM, where we and the other members of the tour were met by a member of the local branch of the travel agency.

Now might be a good time to point out that the primary reasons for which most Japanese people visit Korea are as follows:

1. To buy foreign brand-name luxury items that are only slightly less expensive than those sold in Japan;
2. To eat Korean food that is exceptionally more spicy than that found in Japan; and
3. To indulge in wholly unnatural and unhealthy obsessions derived from watching way too many insipid, melodramatic Korean television dramas.

Thus, the 45-minute high-speed bus ride from the airport to our hotel was spent being verbally assaulted by the travel agency rep, who gave a non-stop recitation about where to buy this-and-that and where to eat this-and-that and so on, all the while I was secretly hoping that our vehicle would hit a pothole and send the rep and her stupid microphone through the front windshield.

As we hadn’t signed up for any of the tour-related activities (being taken to buy overpriced brand-name goods, being taken to eat overpriced Korean food, etc.), our relations with the travel agency and fellow passengers ended upon our arrival at our hotel. That is, however, until we were picked up on our day of departure to be transported to the airport. On the way there, the bus made a detour and all passengers were taken into a shopping complex staffed with middle-aged Japanese-speaking Korean women who proceeded to feed us sample after sample of different kinds of kimchi, after which they looked us in the eye and motioned to their wares, essentially saying, “Okay then, which will you be buying?” Now, seeing as most Japanese people have an innate aversion turning down others outright and the resulting loss of face, the only recourse our fellow passengers had to appease the vendors and extricate themselves from the predicament was naturally to purchase something. Strangely enough, while I considered the entire ordeal to be akin to a subtly-performed shakedown, most of our travel companions seemed to revel in the opportunity to have one last chance to shop before reaching the airport (where they would no doubt go on to shop at the numerous duty-free shops as well as on the plane back to Japan itself).

The bottom line: I am never taking a Japanese package tour like that ever again.

The Hotel
As I mentioned previously, we were given no choice in the selection of our hotel and thus all we could do was cross our fingers and hope for the best. As a result, we found ourselves staying at a place called the Poong Jun Hotel, which is depicted in the image at right. Unfortunately, the person responsible for the creation of that image took some rather blatant artistic liberties, as the hotel looking absolutely nothing like that (hint: replacing those pretty trees with shitty, run-down concrete buildings might provide a more accurate representation).

To our surprise, the hotel room itself was actually quite large (at least compared to what we’re used to on our ghetto budget), but it was also quite old as well. The walls and carpet were stained, the bathroom was moldy, the bedding showed considerable wear and the decrepit hair dryer was just laughable. However, what is most worthy of mention about the Poong Jun Hotel is that, despite having striven for the past 35 years to be “the leader in the frontline of Korea’s tourism industry,” they apparently missed the memo about English having become one of the most widely-used languages in international tourism, and thus none, yes none, of their staff could actually speak it. Unfortunately, we didn’t come to realize this until about halfway through our stay, when it became quite obvious that no one was actually understanding anything we were saying. For example, when I kindly inquired whether it would be possible to borrow a functional portable hair dryer to use during our stay in lieu of the antique monstrosity on the bathroom wall, the woman at the front desk responded by telling Judy and I that there were taxis queuing outside. After about five seconds of the two of us staring at each other in confounded silence, it finally dawned on us that the clerk had apparently misunderstood “dryer” to be “driver.” The worst instance, however, was when regular visitor to this site and all-around good guy, Marco, telephoned the hotel in attempt to reach me in order to make plans to meet up for drinks, but was hung up on not once, but twice by the front desk staff because they couldn’t understand him. Finally, they acquiesced to take a message, however they wrote down the wrong phone number, and as a result, my tentative plans to hang out with Marco (or “Mark,” according to the message from the front desk) were not realized.

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Well, I’ve clearly failed in my attempt to avoid my typical circumlocution, so I think it’ll be best for me to split this entry into to parts, as my eyelids are growing increasingly heavy as I write this. I’ll try to get part two of this uninteresting adventure up within the next couple of days, but in the meantime, here are a few preliminary photos from our trip:

I admit that it’s a bit dull, but this is the view from the roof of my apartment building. In the background you can kind of see part of the Sony global headquarters, a surprisingly unexciting campus composed of several drab, uninteresting buildings. I had expected something a bit more high-tech. . . it could definitely use some robots or something.

A couple enjoying the view of the Mermaid Lagoon at DisneySea.

I wonder what they’re thinking about.

With the overabundance of taxis in Tokyo, it seems that the drivers often have a lot of time to kill while waiting for a fare.

Indeed.

An interesting thing to note is that, unlike the US where the vast majority of taxi drivers are “foreigners” (cue stereotypical image of turban-clad East Indian gentlemen sputtering unintelligible English), nearly all taxi drivers in Japan are old Japanese men.

This is an interesting-looking flower that I saw at Tokyo DisneySea.

Anyone know what kind of flower it is?

Salarymen aren’t the only members of the Japanese workforce who exist in a continual state of exhaustion. Those in the working class need to take some time to recuperate every once in a while, too.

A view of the concrete-lined and heavily polluted Meguro River at sunset.

Well, here it is. . . another random photo post.

I had been hoping to put up some actual new content on this site over the weekend, but unfortunately I ran out of time. As a result, I guess it’ll just have to wait until after I get back from Korea. In the meantime, I present you with the first in a series of assorted photographs, all of more or less equally mediocre quality. As with in the past, looking ahead in the galleries is cheating and shall be punished my means of a horrible voodoo curse, the manifestation of which is far too unpleasant to be mentioned here.

Now, as for that photo:

Yep, she’s the same girl as in this shot. The one above was taken nearly four years ago. It’s one of my favorites.

I had incredibly grandiose plans to put up quite a few posts this week, but unfortunately my situation at work has been completely insane recently with big things going down concurrently in both the States and in South Asia. Thankfully, tomorrow is the last work day before the summer holiday, which means that I’ll finally be able catch up on some much-needed R&R.

Seeing as it’s quite late and I can barely make sense of what’s appearing on the screen in front of me as I type this, I’m just going to post one link and one photo and then call it a night.

The link is to a list of common giongo, which are Japanese onomatopoeic words. Giongo are used far more often than their English counterparts; in fact, most people tend take advantage of any and every opportunity to use them instead of actual words, which is mighty frustrating to the beginning Japanese learner, who has no idea what those seemingly silly sounds mean [yikes, where’d that alliteration come from?]. Anyway, here is the list, courtesy of the good doctor known as Dave, conqueror of Tokyo and shooer of cats.

Now, on to the photo. The other day I realized that I had completely forgotten about the Tokyo Disney Resort gallery that I set up last month, so I’m going to try to prepare some additional typically boring photos to stick in there in the near future. For today, though, I offer you a photo of one of the brazing furnaces at my company’s plant in Ibaraki. Were you to stick your hand in there, a-chi-chi-chi!! would probably be the giongo you would use as the flesh was seared from your bones in a matter of seconds.

And with that, I sleep.

This past Saturday, Judy and I headed to Tokyo DisneySea for the second round of her birthday festivities. Although I hadn’t been to the Disney Resort since our previous trip last year, we’ve probably gone at least half a dozen times during our nearly four years here in Japan (a fact that I am somewhat loath to admit). As hard as it may seem to believe, the Tokyo Disney Resort, especially the relatively new DisneySea park, is actually quite a popular dating destination for young Tokyoites, so we felt absolutely no qualms about spending the day mingling amongst grade school children and departing with wads of cash in exchange for overpriced baubles and scarcely palatable food items. Nonetheless, we actually had a pretty good time.

Nothing much to say here. . . .

The life of a Japanese salaryman is rough. You’re expected to dedicate your very existence to your company and toil away all of your waking hours for a mere pittance, with little appreciation or satisfaction gained in return. You’re also endlessly exhausted, and thus never hesitate to try to grab a few winks at any opportunity.

Nope, I’m not on vacation. I’m actually going to be a bit busy in the next few days, so I thought I’d put up a couple of random photos in hopes that the fickle blog-reading public won’t go elsewhere for their insipid rambling fix.

Ah, who am I kidding? No one visits this site anyway.

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Recently, a building down the street from my office was torn down. The steel frame of the new structure that will replace it is already being (noisily) erected, but during the brief interlude when the lot was bare, I snapped this photo of the back of the building immediately behind it. I’m quite curious what’s on the other side of those doors.

How many Japanese people does it take to screw in a lightbulb?

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So there I sat, at my desk. It was late, far later than I had intended to stay at work. The office was silent except for the constant hum of the air conditioner and the occasional shuffling of papers by my equally-exhausted coworkers.

I had just spent several hours straight working on the translation of what I was told was a very important letter. After a long series of rewrites and revisions, every word, every subtle nuance of the original Japanese had been skillfully transcribed into English, leaving nothing ambiguous. I printed out the final version, took the stairs up to my boss’ office and handed it to him with a weary smile. I would soon be going home, where my lovely fiancée would no doubt be waiting.

Five minutes later, the silence of the office was broken by the ringing of the telephone on my desk. I answered with slight hesitation. It was my boss, informing me that he had decided to rethink the letter and therefore he wouldn’t be sending it out tonight after all. “Let’s continue this tomorrow,” he said. “Have a good night.” As I replaced the receiver, I couldn’t help but chuckle at my pitiful plight. “Ah, the life of a translator.”

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Yes, I know, you’ve heard it all before. Nothing’s changed and nothing ever will. If only I were paid by the word or by the hour, rather than the paltry flat fee that I receive for my unwavering obedient servitude.

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I haven’t taken many photos recently. Although I’ve never really had an eye for photography, I’ve always at least made an effort to try to take interesting photos (”interesting” in this case meaning “crap”). However, lately everything I snap seems so dull, so uninspired, so out-of-focus. The truth is, though, that words alone obviously can’t keep this site afloat, so here’s an example of an aforementioned dull, inspiring and out-of-focus photo:

And with that, I sleep.

I took the day off from work today. For some reason, I haven’t quite fully recovered since my trip to Nara last month, and this morning I woke up with a fever and felt like crap so I called in sick. Although it was great being able to sleep for most of the day and to relax during the time that I wasn’t sleeping, I honestly can’t say I feel that much better. Oh well, it was nice not having to go to work, at least.

My apologies for the lack of posts recently. I haven’t been feeling well, work has been quite busy, and I’ve been a bit occupied with other things. Hopefully I can get back into the flow of posting again shortly.

In the meantime, here are three photos of typical Japanese countryside views taken in Nara earlier this month:

One of the great things about living in Tokyo is that you never know what you might find when you wander around the different districts of the city. Something that I’ve always enjoyed doing on days when the weather is nice and I don’t have any plans is donning my jodhpurs and pith helmet and setting out with my trusty elephant gun at the ready to valiantly explore new neighborhoods. A cracking good time, I tell you.

One particularly fun place to visit for an hour or two is Kappabashi Dogu-gai, located in between Ueno and Asakusa, where one can find block after block of restaurant supply stores selling everything from kitchenware to neon signs to plastic food display models. There you can wander in and out of shops overflowing with anything a person would ever need to open up a restaurant (well, aside from actual food, that is), as well as seek out the many depictions of kappa (a kind of folkloric water creature) scattered throughout the area.

Judy and I made a visit to Kappabashi relatively recently (I gave my stalwart mahout the day off), and here a few photos from that afternoon:

Amazingly, although I was extremely tempted, I did manage to make it out of Kappabashi without having purchased any of the plastic food models. They’re actually quite pricey, and frankly, there’s not much one can do with an incredibly realistic replica of a piece of tempura shrimp other than try to trick people into eating it, which would probably get old rather quickly (I have a hard enough time making friends as is, on account of my ungodly body odor and chronic incontinence).

I’ve mentioned previously my fianceé Judy’s unhealthy endearing addiction to Korean dramas, and the subsequent obsession with all things Bae Yong Joon-related that developed as a result. Well, fans of the genre will be pleased to know that she has since been branching out to dramas featuring actors other than Yon-sama (most recently, Stairway to Heaven, starring Kwon Sang Woo and Choi Ji Woo), as well as starting to explore the wider arena of Korean cinema.

Thus, over the weekend, we hit the video store and rented the 2001 romantic comedy My Sassy Girl on the recommendation one of Judy’s friends. I hadn’t even heard of the film prior to renting it, but based on my past experience with Korean dramas, I figured that it would be just another sappy melodrama filled with forbidden love, overbearing parents and lots of tears.

Well, actually, all of those elements did play a part in the storyline, however, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that the film was vastly different from what I had expected. In fact, I found it to be downright entertaining! Sure, there were certainly moments bordering on melodramatic, but the barrage of comedic scenes coupled with the superb acting on the part of both Cha Tae-hyun and Jun Ji-hyun made the quirky film thoroughly enjoyable from beginning to end.

Now, seeing as this film is already four years old, and as I’m not one to blather on about plot lines, dramatic intent or any of that, I’ll just say that I recommend this film to anyone looking for something different from the usual Hollywood schlock. Sure, it might not be everyone’s cup of tea, but for fans of Asian cinema, I believe it’s definitely worth a viewing.

Incidentally, while reading up about the film after watching it, I learned that Dreamworks has already purchased the US remake rights, and the American version will be directed by Bend It Like Beckham director, Gurinder Chadha, and possibly star Rachael Leigh Cook in the titular role. Like most American remakes, I imagine that the end result will likely be a steaming pile of doo-doo (see: The Office), but that’s Hollywood for you (i.e., pander to the lowest common denominator by including as many explosions, tit shots and fart jokes as possible).

I’m tempted commence with a rant about American audiences’ inability to appreciate subtlety, but I reckon that it’s about time I shut the hell up. Therefore, I shall do just that, and leave you, dear readers, with the pitiful photos below taken recently at a kaiten zushi (conveyor belt sushi) joint here in Tokyo. Kaiten zushi shops are one of my favorite places to eat in Japan, as they’re quick and cheap, yet oh-so delicious (assuming it’s a decent place that serves fresh fish).

Actually, I could really go for some sushi right now. . . .

Well, I’m back from Osaka. Actually, due to a last-minute change of plans, I ended up spending the majority of the time in nearby Nara prefecture, but that worked out just as well.

The people I went to visit are basically my family here in Japan. . . my family in the States has had a relationship with them for over forty years, since my mother and the father here in Japan became pen pals when they were in primary school. Letters and gifts have been exchanged, various relatives have visited back and forth, and since coming to Japan, I’ve been fortunate enough to get to know them quite well, and they are all incredibly wonderful people.

The reason for the change in plans, however, was due to a rather unfortunate accident. Late one night last month, the father was walking along the side of the road, returning home from a reunion with some old friends, when he was suddenly struck down by a drunk driver. Luckily, the extent of his injuries weren’t as bad as they could have been, but he did suffer from a shattered kneecap, tibia and fibula, as well as a broken tooth from when he landed on the windshield. I visited him in the hospital several times during my visit and he’s doing quite well. After having to wear a cast covering nearly his entire leg for the past month, he’s now undergoing rehabilitation and is expected to fully recover within a year.

In addition to the hospital visits (which were actually kind of fun, since his entire family seems to find it hilarious that he got hit by a car, and everyone, including him, cracks jokes about it), my holiday was spent hanging out and relaxing, and playing with the adorable granddaughter (who seemed to regard me only as her personal plaything à la Richard Pryor in The Toy). The high points of the trip were probably the day Judy visited from her grandma’s house in Kobe, the afternoon spent digging up bamboo shoots in the forest behind the mother’s family home and the night out at karaoke with two of the daughters.

The low points were the terrible cold that I caught right before the holiday that left me with the runniest nose that I’ve ever experienced for the entire duration of the visit, and my drunken rendition of The Real Slim Shady by Eminem at the repeated urging of the youngest daughter during the aforementioned karaoke night (luckily the obscene amount of alcohol consumed that evening has left most of the memory gone from my mind, however what remains shall haunt me with unescapable shame until the end of my days).

As was expected, since returning to Tokyo, I’ve been absolutely swamped with work. In addition to my usual tasks, I’ve just been assigned to be actively involved with our operations in India in response to some recent developments at our joint venture over there, and this has left me busier than ever (I’m in need of another vacation already).

Thanks for putting up with the random photos while I was away. . . perhaps I’ll just do that again on occasion when I can’t be arsed to write a proper post. For the time being, however, I’ll try to keep up with regular posting as time allows, despite the poor quality that you’ve all no doubt come to expect.

And here is the last of the random crappy photos:

Hopefully I’ll come up with something to write about after I get back from Osaka (although it will no doubt be the customary worthless drivel).

But for now, it’s time to get some sleep before I catch the shinkansen tomorrow. Adieu!

A complete waste of film:

Sometimes you just can’t help dozing off on the train.

It’s embarrassing when you’re snoring loudly with your mouth wide open, though.

I don’t care much for cats. There are far too many of the mangy varmints slinking around Tokyo.

Uh, yeah. . . don’t have much to add to that. I’m sleepy.

A scene from Sogo Park in Koga, Ibaraki during the peach blossom season.

As I’ve mentioned previously, the hanami season in Japan is a time for people to get outside for the first time in months and drink themselves silly. A good time is had by all.

Of course, people — especially those of the aged variety — also enjoy activities that don’t involve soiling themselves in public. Here are some examples:

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.

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.

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?

It’s strange how our dreams — the result of nothing more than brain activity in the unconscious state — can affect us as much as, or possibly even more than, our actual conscious experiences. Recently, I’ve been having lots of dreams in which people I used to know but have lost touch with — old friends, classmates, significant others — make appearances. Although the dreams haven’t been particularly remarkable or perplexing, I usually wake up in a funk and remain that way for the rest of the day.

Lately, there have been two guys in particular who keep showing up in my dreams. One is a guy named Adam, who I knew from about grade 2 through my junior year in high school (grade 11). He was probably one of my closest friends in elementary school, but we started drifting apart once we got to high school. He got involved in drugs and was eventually kicked out of school for getting in too many fights. The last time I saw him, he was drunk and had apparently stolen one of his friend’s parents’ gas cards, and he came by my house and offered me free gas and cigarettes (I declined). I last heard that he had had a few run-ins with the law, but has since cleaned up his act and is now very active in the volunteer community through his church.

The other guy is named Jason and we were friends ever since the day I met him during the first week of kindergarten and later came home and discovered that he lived in the apartment block just across the street from my own. We were tight all the way through elementary school, junior high and even high school, and the childhood experiences we had together are countless. After we graduated from high school, I went off to university and he stayed in California and did some schooling and later started working full time. Even though we weren’t all that great about keeping in touch while I was in university and especially after I moved to Japan, every time I went back to my home town to visit he was always around and up for hanging out.

However, two years ago when I went back to California for a visit, I was mysteriously unable to get a hold of him. None of his phone numbers worked, and I eventually learned through the grapevine that he had moved to the East Bay. I tried to get a hold of him again when I went back at the end of last year, but I failed. No one seems to know where he is now or how to reach him. The last time I saw Jason was in June of 2002, when we hung out at our friend Gilbert’s house for an afternoon. Tossing around a football at a local park, it was like old times: reminiscing about experiences when we were younger, talking about our plans for the future, and just hanging out and having a good time. He was someone I always thought I’d know forever, so it’s strange to think that I might never talk to him again.

Okay. . . before I ramble any further and start quoting lyrics to old Beatles songs or whatever, I’ll STFU already. It’s just that with all of the weird dreams I’ve been having lately, those guys (and a few other people) have been on my mind. I guess I just wonder where they are now and what they’re up to. . . .

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Today I finally had time to put up the first batch of photos from my trip to Asakusa earlier this month. They’re all pretty dull, typical tourist photos and I’m a bit disappointed in myself for taking such drab pictures, but I figured I’d put ‘em up anyway. I have quite a few more, so I’ll probably put some more up when I can make the time (although they’re equally as crappy).

Today’s photos are from Sensoji (also known as the Asakusa Kannon Temple), which is the oldest Buddhist temple in Tokyo, and is also considered by many to be the most impressive. It was especially crowded on the day I went, so it was tough squeezing between the tourists (both domestic and foreign) to get around and explore. Anyway, here they are:

I am so glad this week has finally come to an end. . . it’s been a long one.

This afternoon just after lunch, my boss came to me with a request to translate the lengthy minutes from a meeting he attended earlier this month into English. “Can you finish it within today?” he asked in such a way that make it sound like a demand rather than a question. I figured I was up for the challenge and immediately went to work on it.

Seven hours later, I was nearly finished and looking forward to saying “osaki ni” and getting the hell out of the office, when all of a sudden, the telephone rang. It was boss, instructing all of us to pack up and get ready to go out drinking. My coworkers promptly began shutting down their computers and tidying up their desks. Five minutes later when my boss came strolling in, everyone was putting on their coats while I remained seated at my desk, frantically trying to finish up the translation. My boss came over to check on my progress, and upon seeing that I was nearly done, he said, “Good, please email it to me when you’re finished. I’ll send it off tomorrow.” And with that, he and all of my coworkers headed out to go drinking, leaving me behind, alone and feeling dejected in the empty office. Eventually, I finished up the translation, send it off, locked up the office and headed home.

It was a bit of a depressing way to end the week, but at least tomorrow’s Saturday, and unlike my coworkers, I won’t have to spend the day in the office finishing up work from tonight.

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I haven’t yet had time to go through the photos I took in Asakusa last weekend to see if there’s anything worth putting up, so in the meantime, here’s a photo of a defaced political poster featuring Hideko Murakami and Shintaro Ishihara (the governor of Tokyo) that’s posted on the side of a building near my office. There’s a high school in the area, so it was probably some of the students who did it, but I’m sure if Ishihara were to ever see it, he would likely blame it on the evil foreigners.

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).]

A master photographer will never think twice about taking a daring risk in order to capture the perfect image on film. Whether it be crouching behind the shell of a bombed-out vehicle in the middle of a war zone or perched precariously on the face of a mountain thousands of feet above a rocky ravine, a photographic artist will stop at nothing to obtain that one consummate shot that will make all of the hardship worthwhile.

Now, despite camera skills that can barely be called rudimentary at best and the “artistic eye” of a one-eyed palsied cripple with glaucoma, there are occasionally times when I, myself, am struck with an overwhelming inspiration that propels me into perilous circumstances in seek of a photograph — which more than often turns out to be wholly unimpressive in the end.

Thus was the case this past Saturday when Judy and I passed through Yoyogi Station on our way to pay a visit to her brother in northwestern Tokyo. While waiting for the train, I was seized with inspiration and quickly retrieved my camera from my side bag. Positioning myself on the edge of the platform, I attempted to take one of those pretentious pseudo-artistic photographs whose final result is not praise, but rather nothing more than ridicule for the photographer, all the while with my darling fiancée off to the side muttering, “You’d better not fall onto the tracks.”

Wow, unimaginative and uninspiring — perhaps I ought not quit my day job just yet.

Nothing much going on today except that it’s still cold and wintry, and everyone I know is feeling miserable (stupid Seasonal Affective Disorder).

Anyway, here’s a bathroom sign that gave me a bit of a chuckle when I saw it in a department store a little while back:

If that doesn’t cheer you up, then maybe some Japanese vacuum porn will (or, conversely, make you even more horribly depressed. . .).

Well, it seems mother nature took my gripe earlier this week about the meager snowfall in Tokyo as a challenge.

Thus, today Eastern Japan was blanketed with the heaviest snowfall it has seen in ten years. While it certainly made my morning commute a bit more exciting, the snow has since nearly melted away and it’s now back to just being cold.

Oh well, it was fun while it lasted.

Last night I went to the gym for the first time since I went back to California last December.

That’s right, three months ago. I had been planning to start up again when I got back in January, but I was so busy at work that I couldn’t justify paying the monthly membership fee if I was wasn’t going to be able to leave the office early enough to go during the week. Believe it or not, a “regular” gym membership in Tokyo (meaning no access time restrictions) generally runs about US$100 per month (!). Utterly ridiculous, no doubt, but they don’t call Tokyo the most expensive city in the world for nothing.

However, seeing as I’m going to be getting married later this year, I figured I’d better try to put on a bit more muscle (okay — a lot more) so I can hopefully look slightly less scrawny in the wedding photos. Skinny white boy genes are a cruel, cruel curse.

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Here are a few more photos from my visit to Shinjuku Gyoen last spring. Yes, I know, pictures of sakura are totally clichéd and played out . . . but they looked so nice that day, I couldn’t resist pretending that I actually know how to operate a camera.

I really don’t like cold weather.

Growing up in the San Francisco bay area, it never really got cold. There was “cool” and “chilly,” but never “I’ve lost-feeling-in-my-testicles” cold. Of course, when living outside of Boston during my university years, the weather certainly became “my-scrotum-is-an-empty-sack-because-my-
testicles-have-retreated-into-my-body-cavity-and-are-now-socializing-with-my-kidneys” bitingly cold, but there was frequently snowfall to accompany it, which made the temperature somewhat bearable because everything was white and purdy-like.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t snow sufficiently enough in Tokyo to stick on the ground, let alone allow me to temporarily ignore the fact that all of my appendages are atrophying due to frostbite. It’s actually not even that cold here anymore, but the overall dreariness combined with the lack of suitable insulation anywhere makes me utterly and inescapably miserable. Thus, during the winter season, each day is spent in a semi-catatonic state as my mind and body shut down all extraneous operations in order to conserve energy and cocoon myself from the bleakness of reality. I feel drowsy and distant all day long, and I can’t even remember what the sensation of “hot” feels like anymore.

Thankfully, February will soon come to a close and hopefully spring will make a timely arrival. In the meantime, I’ll just have to put up with the bitter cold and the oppressive melancholy and try to keep my spirit warm with copious amounts of booze.

Over the weekend I was looking at some photos from a warmer time and figured that I might post some for the sake of. . . well, for the sake of what, exactly, I don’t know, but for some reason or another. The photos were taken last spring at Shinjuku Gyoen, the park that Judy and I visited last November. However, in the spring I visited the park alone and, as such, was able to spend way too much time talking ridiculously awful photos of the scenery. Here you go:

Bicycles are a very common form of transportation in Japan. Teenagers use them as a primary means of transportation, housewives ride them to the market and back, and many salarymen ride them in between their homes and local train station as part of their daily commute. Despite their ubiquitous presence, however, most cities and towns in Japan do not have the necessary infrastructure to accommodate heavy bicycle traffic. Hardly any roads have bicycle lanes, and this forces cyclists to ride on the sidewalk, often resulting in collisions with pedestrians. There is also a noticeable lack of bicycle parking facilities, which leads to dense rows of illegally parked bicycles on sidewalks and roadsides that hinders pedestrian and even road traffic.

In response to the widespread problem of illegal bicycle parking, many local governments throughout the country have established anti-bicycle brigades, which carry out frequent raids around town to collect illegally parked and abandoned bicycles and haul them off to large storage facilities where they are held until their owners come to retrieve them.

Last Thursday I happened to witness one of these raids and snapped this photo:

I, myself, actually had my mamachari (granny bike) confiscated twice when I lived in Saitama. Both times I had to make the trip out to the pound and pay ¥1000 to get it back. But hey, the combined fines were cheaper than the ¥2500 that I would have had to pay per month for a spot at the only bicycle parking lot in the area — half-way between my apartment and the station.

Tonight when I passed through Shibuya station on my way home, I looked up and noticed this new advertising gimmick by Levi’s Jeans:

Yes, those are real pairs of jeans hanging from the ceiling. This is kind of campaign is something that would never work in the US; within minutes, all of the pants would be gone and the homeless guys who sleep in the station would all be sporting new 501s.

Like the countless other bastardized generic Western traditions, at one point in time the Japanese adopted the holiday known as Valentine’s Day and made it their own. No longer is it a day for a man to spend ridiculous amounts of hard-earned money on flowers and chocolate for his special lady in hopes of getting some good lovin’ in return in order to express his heartfelt feelings — instead, the Japanese took it upon themselves to combine the made-up day of buying stupid crap in the name of love with the eternal playground favorite “opposite day” and created a day in which women give gifts to men.

Great idea, isn’t it? Women in western countries are spoiled silly — birthdays, anniversaries, Christmas, Valentine’s Day — if you don’t spring for something nice on each occasion, there’s no guarantee your sweetheart won’t walk out the door and never return. Not once is the shoe ever on the other foot, so to speak, and we men receive unreciprocated gifts from the women in our lives. However, here in Japan, the 14th of February is a day especially for women to indulge men. From store-bought chocolate to home-made goodies, women throughout the country take the time to do something sweet for the ones dear to them.

And then there’s giri choco — combining the bitterness of obligation (giri) with the sweetness of fermented, roasted, and ground cacao seeds combined with a sweetening agent, giri choco is what Japanese women give to the men in their lives (friends, coworkers, etc.) out of nothing other than pure, unadulterated social obligation. Sure, it sounds silly and completely unnecessary, but then again, so are most social customs. Whether people like it or dislike it, all that matters is that they buy chocolate and make the chocolate barons even richer.

Of course, in Japan, obligation isn’t truly obligation unless it’s mutual and never-ending. Thus, the confectioners in Japan created a completely new holiday in order to keep up the indebtedness cycle, and White Day was born. Exactly one month after Valentine’s Day, men who were lucky enough to receive gifts on Valentine’s day (giri or otherwise) now have to give gifts in return, at often two or three times the value. In other words, White Day is a terrible, terrible holiday, and I’m lucky that no one likes me enough to give me giri choco in the first place.

Now excuse me while I go cry myself to sleep.

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Yesterday while browsing through the prepared food section of my local department store, I saw this and just had to get it. Behold, Valentine’s Day themed sushi:

Last week, I had to go up to my company’s main plant in Ibaraki for several days of meetings with visitors from an American firm. Although I probably shouldn’t admit this, the meetings were painfully dull and reminded me of just how overwhelmingly NOT cut out I am to be a businessman.

I had heard that a new intern named Jason had arrived last week from the States to work at my company’s head office, and so I organized a small, informal kangeikai (welcome party) after the final meeting in order to meet him and to hang out with some of my old coworkers I hadn’t seen in a while. Well, as typically happens, the four-person dinner quickly tripled in size, and once alcohol was thrown in the mix, madness ensued. However, rest be assured, it was good madness (like mud wrestling). Even better, since no managers were in attendance, not once did any of the several conversations taking place concurrently ever turn to the topic of work.

Unfortunately, being the only person who had to return to Tokyo that night, I had to duck out early and just managed to catch the last train back. But for everyone else, the party continued until late into the night. The next day brought hangovers to all (except me), and Jason, the guest of honor at the festivities the night before, called in sick.

Good times.

Here are a few photos from the welcome party, but please excuse the poor quality — my skills with a camera are even worse after I’ve had a bit to drink:

On Sunday, Judy and I went up to Omiya in Saitama to spend the afternoon with some friends. From November 2002 through January 2003, I lived there in a tiny one-room apartment about 10 minutes from the station (Judy joined me in September after she switched jobs).

Unfortunately, the majority of my time in Omiya was marked by a number of troubles, especially involving my apartment, such as: the fact that it had paper walls and zero insulation, meaning during the winter it was colder inside than outside; the robbery in June 2003, resulting in the loss of not only all of my valuables, but two years’ worth of digital photos as well; the Humidity Incident of August 2003, during which everything in my apartment became covered with mold; the two ladies of the night who moved in next door and woke us up every day at 4:00 in the morning when they returned from their “exploits”; and countless others.

Yet, despite all of this, when we were back there this past weekend, I actually found myself feeling somewhat nostalgic for the time I lived there. Strange, in a way. All in all, I suppose Omiya is a decent place to live for a person who works an hour and a half outside of Tokyo, but as far as I’m concerned, nothing compares to living in the big smoke (sure, neither place has much in the way of charm, but what whuddaya gonna do?).

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Here are a few older photos taken at the Hikawa Shrine, which is about a 20 minutes’ walk from Omiya Station:

Many people are aware of Japan’s love for excessive packaging.

Behold a particularly ridiculous example that Judy picked up at the supermarket the other day:

On Saturday, Judy and I met up with a couple of my officemates to go bowling. It was the first time that I had been bowling in several years, and the first time that Judy had hung out with any of my coworkers ever. Despite the hour-and-a-half wait for an open lane, the rest of the afternoon was a lot of fun and we enjoyed three games of bowling and one slightly poorly-received joke about “superior ball handling skills” (it seems the expression doesn’t translate very well into Japanese).

Afterwards, we went to dinner and, in the Japanese tradition, imbibed a number of alcoholic beverages. As this was the first time for these particular coworkers and I to spend time together outside a work setting, we were able to get to know each other on a more personal level. At one point, the conversation turned to the topic of work (surprise surprise) and I was amused to hear some my officemates’ opinions about our company and some of the other people we work with. It was definitely a relief to learn that I am not alone in some of my gripes about working there. Apparently Japanese offices are miserable places for Japanese people to work, too.

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Here are two photos from the bowling alley, one of my coworkers and the other of the funky Japanese bowling shoes we were wearing:

It’s funny how you can be away from work for a few weeks on holiday, but as soon as you get back it feels like you never left in the first place.

Despite the piles of work that greet me each day, I’ve been making a concerted effort to spend less time at the office. So far I’ve only been marginally successful, but I’m going to keep up the fight. I can’t go back to spending all of my waking hours at work.

Must not. . . become. . . Japanese!

Anyhow, I’m kind of short on time at the moment, so I’m just going to throw up a few photos from my trip back to California. Even though I carried my camera with me nearly everywhere I went, I regrettably took precious few photos.

Here are a few that I actually managed to snap of some friends:

Well, I’m back.

After a hectic couple of days running last-minute errands and saying goodbyes to family and friends, it was time for me to catch my plane back to Japan. Despite the delays, it seemed that the 11-hour flight was going to be relatively smooth as usual. That is, until the plane took off and I got acquainted with the man seated beside me.

His name was Phil and he was a tugboat sailor in the US Navy on his way to Thailand to assist with the tsunami relief effort. He seemed like a nice guy at first, but after downing seven or eight consecutive complementary cocktails he became increasingly belligerent and decided that he wanted to talk to me — very loudly — for the entire duration of the flight. Cue a succession of one-way conversations about highly inappropriate and offensive subject matter, such as the fact that the woman two rows ahead of us wasn’t wearing a bra and “forgot to turn off her headlights,” the joys of “bumpin’ uglies” with curvaceous South American women and utterly insipid (yet extremely detailed) tales of drunken sailor revelry. The glares from the other passengers around the cabin had no effect on him, nor did my feigning sleep every time he got up to go to “take a piss” (as he loudly proclaimed each time). Thanks for reinforcing all of my stereotypes about people in the military, Phil!

Judy and I met up in the Narita airport (as she had arrived back from Vancouver about an hour before I got in) and we made the journey back to our apartment. We had a great time catching up, sharing stories from our respective holidays and making plans for what we want to do in 2005. However, by dusk the following evening we were both coming down with a cold. Damn that recycled cabin air!

So now it’s back to the daily grind. Every day since I got back to Japan has been a cacophony of new year’s greetings, as it is the custom in these parts to exchange an “akemashite omedetou gozaimasu” with everyone you know when seeing them for the first time in the new year. It’s fun with the first five people or so (well, not really), but eventually a mumbled “ak’shtebuhb’busssss” is all one can muster.

As always, my time in California went by way too quickly; I wasn’t able to see everyone I wanted to see, to do everything I wanted to do nor eat everything I wanted to eat. But, nonetheless, I had a wonderful time. I’m not one for sappy reminiscences, so instead here’s a boring photo of my hometown of Cupertino (well, part of it) and the surrounding Santa Clara Valley:

I’m not sure yet when I’ll have a chance to go back, but hopefully this post-vacation glow will stay with me for another few days before it’s sucked out of me by the oppressive drudgery of my day-to-day life.

Merry Chrithmas!!

In the middle of a last-minute Christmas shopping marathon weekend, Judy and I headed over to Matsudo last Sunday to visit the Bandai Museum on the recommendation of one of her friends.

Bandai is the third largest toy company in the world and is responsible for introducing the world’s children such wonderful toys as Gundam, Ultraman, Power Rangers, Tamagotchi and those little pink M.U.S.C.L.E. figures that I was unhealthily obsessed with in the second grade (the absolute best-smelling toys EV4R!) , among others.

Now, with a such a diverse and widely-known character base, I was expecting the Bandai Museum to be nothing short of amazing — in other words, the kind of place that brings smiles to the faces of young children and slimy goo to the underpants of children slightly older.

Thus, you can imagine my surprise when the “museum” turned out to be little more than five floors of gift shops, all selling the exact same selection of toys (mainly cheap Ultraman figures). Signs all over the place indicated that there were a couple of special attractions of some sort, but after our initial disappointment, we couldn’t be arsed to spend the extra ¥300 to see them.

Oh well, at least I got to take a photo of Judy chillin’ with the man himself:

I’m kind of in a rush today because I’ve got to go out and try to find some magic soy milk diet cookies (or something like that), so in lieu of my usual mindless drivel, I’m just going to put up another photo from my visit to Minato Mirai last weekend:

That’s the famous “Cosmo Clock 21″ Ferris wheel, as featured in countless commercials, television dramas and adult films.

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By the way, anyone interested in reading more about the REAL Japan should definitely check out this site: MasaManiA

The writer is a former porn director with a serious chip on his shoulder about all of the bullshit polluting Japanese society. His English is quite good, but the fact that it isn’t perfect just adds to the hilarity. The entire site is definitely worth a browse, but I would recommend starting with the entry brilliantly entitled Jap pussy should be seen more, fuck Jap gov!, which begins with the wonderful line “Have you noticed that any pussy and all dick cannot be seen in Japanese porn?” (not exactly work safe, although the rest of site is).

Enjoy!

There is an extreme overabundance of pointless jobs in Japan. Outmoded and reduntant occupations such as “women who press the buttons in elevators,” “old men who wave cars into parking lots,” and “construction workers well past their prime who stand outside of construction sites and bow to passers-by.” Apparently the Japanese government would rather have a low unemployment rate and high cost of living than a lower cost of living with a higher unemployment rate. It makes sense, I suppose, but it certainly seems rather inefficient [said the guy with a degree in economics].

I saw another fine example of this last weekend while hanging out at Minato Mirai in Yokohama. This man’s job was to hold a sign advertising model rooms open for viewing at a new housing development nearby:

Working very hard, as you can see.

A pair of cinder blocks would do a much better job for free and wouldn’t even need to take bathroom breaks.

Well, it’s official: just like Biggy, I’m going back to Cali.

The arrangements have been made, the plane tickets have been purchased, and miraculously, my company has approved my request to telecommute (or as the Japanese say, “slack off”) from my parents’ home in California for the last two weeks of December. Therefore, come December 11th, I am outta here!

Today, I found myself thinking about all of the things that I look forward to the most about going back to the States. Oddly enough, aside from the obvious ones such as spending time with my family and hanging out with friends, one item very high on the list is food. But the funny thing is, what I find myself craving even more than the scrumptious dishes that are apparently considered too “exotic” to reach these shores — turkey, sandwiches, low-fat milk, etc. — is American junk food. Crap like hot dogs, licorice, Cherry Coke, Sunchips, slurpees, Taco Bell, and so on — “food” items entirely devoid of nutrition, teetering atop the food pyramid whilst mocking me with their deathly delectability.

Operation Gain 10 Pounds is set for launch. T-minus 18 days and counting.

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Here are some photos taken at Shinjuku Gyoen earlier this month. Certainly not very good, but it was dusk and the lighting was very low. Well, that’s my excuse, anyhow, and I’m sticking to it.

After working 12-plus hour days for nearly two weeks straight, last night I reached my limit. I stood up, said “fuck it,” threw my laptop across the room, punched my boss in the face and then proceeded to set my office on fire.

Well, in my head, anyway.

Murderous fantasies aside, I did actually manage to leave the office at 6:30 yesterday without having to resort to bloodshed or violence of any kind. As I passed through Shibuya station on the way home, I saw this:

Yes, that’s right, soon-to-be-released Sony PSPs mounted on the wall for all to gawk at and splooge upon. Apparently, Sony has somehow managed to overcome the delays in the development schedule and the issues with battery life and whatever else to be ready for a release in a little over three weeks from now, just in time for the holiday season.

Suuure they have. I’m sure there’ll be loads of game titles by available then, too.

Oh well, I reckon that the release doesn’t really affect me very much, anyway. Ever since failing to ever beat the original Super Mario Brothers back in elementary school, video games and I have had a somewhat acrimonious relationship. In fact, in the 10-year period between 1993 until 2003, I probably played video games a grand total of about five times. That all changed last year, however, when Judy gave me a GameBoy Advance SP for my birthday. I now give that thing more attention than I give her!

The PSP looks pretty nice, but I don’t see myself dropping 200 bucks for one any time in the near future. Actually, what I’ll probably do is wait until both the PSP and the Nintendo DS have been released and then compare the two. Only then can I decide which will become my new bride.

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If you’re interested, you can see a few photos from the PSP display in Shinjuku — which looks arguably cooler — by clicking here.

There was an article on the Japan Today website last week about the number of teenage abortions performed in 2003:

Government reports 40,475 minors had abortions in 2003

TOKYO — The Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare said Tuesday the number of reported abortions by minors aged 15-20 in 2003 came to 40,475, slightly down from the previous year but still double from 10 years earlier.

According to its survey of clinics, the overall number of abortions last year came to 319,831. For 19-year-olds, the number stood at some 14,600, while for 18-year-olds, it came to about 11,100. There were 7,900 abortions among 17-year-olds. There were 483 abortions for those under 15, according to the survey.

A related Japanese article reported that the figures show that 1 in 50 19-year-olds and 1/64 18-year-olds had abortions last year alone. . . and those are just the reported numbers! Crazy, eh?

While it’s apparent that Japanese teenagers share their Western counterparts’ penchant for doin’ the nasty, sex education is essentially non-existent in this country. Furthermore, decades of propaganda spewed by the government have left most women (and, ridiculously, many doctors) convinced that birth control pills cause everything from infertility to cancer. Combine the lack of information about birth control options with doctors’ financial incentives to perform abortions rather than prescribe the pill, and you can see how abortion is a highly lucrative business in Japan. (From what I’ve heard, the going rate is about 1,000,000 yen a pop — approx. US$950.)

An interesting cultural aspect of abortion in Japan are jizo, stone statues depicting the Buddhist monk Jizo Bosatsu, the protector of travelers and the souls of departed children (who, according to Japanese tradition, receive devine punishment for bringing grief to their parents. . . the little bastards). Mothers who have lost an unborn child usually dedicate a statue of jizo and adorn it with clothing, toys, etc. to encourage the deity to take special care of their child’s spirit.

Back in July, I happened to pass through Zojoji Temple on my way to the Tokyo Tower and was rather shocked to see the rows upon rows of jizo statues housed there. As I wandered through the temple grounds, I witnessed a middle-aged woman and her teenage daughter cleaning and decorating one of the statues — a very moving sight.

Here are some photos:

Over the weekend I went to a travel agency in my neighborhood to inquire about flights back to California for the winter holiday. I told the agent my destination and travel dates and he went back to his desk to search the database, while I flipped through brochures advertising the exotic foods and brand name goods of foreign lands.

A couples of minutes later, the agent came back with a list of three different flight options. The first option looked good, but since I’m not yet 100% sure about my plans and won’t be able to make a reservation for a few days, I asked him whether there were still quite a few seats available on the flight.

“Actually,” he replied, “there are no seats available.”
“Oh. . . uh, okay, how about the second flight?”
“Nope. That one’s sold out, too.”
“Then why did you. . . .”

Yep, only the third (and most expensive) flight had any seats available. This kind of thing happens every single time I go to a travel agency. Of course, 90% of the time I’ve ended up buying tickets directly from the airlines themselves, but occasionally there are deals to be found in the agencies. It’s a shame that discount travel websites like Orbitz, Expedia, etc. haven’t found their way to these shores yet. If I were to buy a ticket from any of the American sites, I wouldn’t be able to use them. Apparently Japanese law prohibits buying tickets for flights originating in Japan from sources outside of Japan. Well, actually, it’s not against the law to buy tickets from overseas; they just won’t be accepted when you show up at the airport and try to use them.

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This photo is from back in August (which makes the context even more bizarre, perhaps) of a promotional event for the town of Kutchan, Hokkaido, complete with a giant snowman and alpenhorns.

After a long week at work, it’s finally Friday evening and all I want to do is go home and sleep. Hooray for working life.

Here’s a photo of the infamous Godzilla statue in Ginza:

Apparently people have gone through great lengths to find it, but I happened to just stumble upon it by accident a few months ago while wandering around the area (the statue is tucked away near the Toho Twin Tower Building, not far from JR Yurakucho station).

The statue itself is only about a meter or so tall, but it’s impressive nonetheless. Definitely something I would love to decorate my living room with, had I the necessary heavy lifting equipment and a band of stealthy larcenists at my call.

Sometimes it’s downright incredible how outlandish people’s misconceptions about Japan are.

Case in point: this article, which was sent to me last week by a friend. Entitled Living and Dying in Tokyo, the author, Adam Sparks, begins with:

My mother-in-law passed away last week, and I attended the funeral in Tokyo. The five-day wake was a mind-blower in so many ways. It made me think of just how different Japan is than the United States and how, in so many ways, it is so far superior, both culturally and technologically. We have much to learn.

He then goes on to list the most clichéd stereotypes and far-fetched assertions about Japan that I have ever read. The result is pure comic gold; a mediocre work of middle school-level fiction that reads like a James Clavell novel. It’s blindingly obvious just how little understanding the author has of Japan and how clueless he truly is. Seriously, if I were to break down the article and provide evidence to refute the blatant falsehoods in each and every sentence, it would take me all week. (The irrelevant sentence about Dubya thrown in at the end was quite a doozy, too.)

The funniest (yet saddest) thing is that many people will probably read the article and believe every word of it. Incidentally, at this moment, those people are probably at home, dressed in yukata, polishing their Sailor Moon figurines and watching their collector’s edition of Akira, while dreaming of the day when they will arrive on Japan’s shores.

It really is surprising how drastically different Japan’s international reputation is from reality. Movies like Lost in Translation and The Last Samurai paint a picture of an advanced, utopian society in which all of the men possess an honorable samurai spirit and all of the women are hot, subservient babes. I suppose I myself am also guilty of having a somewhat idealistic view of this country before I arrived. However, seeing as I’ve never been much a video game fan nor have I ever watched an anime film in my life (a fact that gives me much pride), my preconceptions came mainly from Japanese toys from the 80s and The Toxic Avenger Part II.

Japan as an entity is very good at showing off only the best of its culture and society to temporary visitors, who are carefully shepherded around by handlers and guides to prevent the guests from seeing the “real” Japan. It’s easy for people to float around in a little tourist bubble for a few days and then go home with a head full of exotic memories. Meanwhile, those of us who decide to try to take root here (at least for a little while) find that Japan is not quite the welcoming land of gadgetry and geishas that it’s made out to be.

Anyhow, I don’t want to knock this country too much. Sure, like any place, it has its downsides, but if I didn’t like it I would have left a long time ago. I just feel that misleading articles like the one above tend to cause more harm than good, as a lot of impressionable people who do make it over here and try to acclimatize eventually end up bitter and jaded. For anyone curious about learning about the realities of the so-called Land of the Rising Sun, I recommend stopping by this site as well as reading a book or two on the subject.

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Here are some uninteresting photos from Shinagawa Intercity that I took a couple of months ago while wandering around killing time:

Well, the typhoon on Saturday didn’t turn out to be all that bad. By the time I left my office, it had nearly passed and there was barely a drizzle of rain, so despite Judy calling me an idiot for staying at work, I guess it was good that I did.

I had a hard time falling asleep last night for some reason and so my mental capacity today is even less than usual. Thus, in lieu of my usual inane ramblings, I’ll leave you with a photo of an acrobatic monkey:

Shortly after I took this photo, the monkey lost its balance and fell into an onlooker’s baby stroller. The baby freaked out and started wailing while the audience chuckled (”Aww, so cute”), but thankfully the kid was okay. The monkey got quite a scolding though.

Sometimes the only readily discernable difference between two people is the color of their socks.

I just found out that I’ve apparently become a verb.

Not in a very interesting way, unfortunately (such as, “I wanna jeff you all night long, baby“), but in a way that I suppose is uniquely Japanese.

You see, the language here can be difficult to pronounce at times (even for native speakers) and so it’s very common for words and phrases to be abbreviated, especially loan words from other languages as they tend not to follow the same sound system. For example, “sexual harrassment” is transliterated as sekushuaru harasumento, which I’m sure you can agree is quite a mouthful. Therefore people use “sekuhara” to describe the national workplace pastime.

Anyway, as the only native English speaker in my company, all English documents are proofread and revised by me before being sent out. I received an email by CC today written by the company translator about one assignment in which she wrote that the “jefuchekku” (”jeffcheck”) had been completed and she was submitting the final draft. I asked her about it, and apparently everyone in her office uses that term for my English checks (i.e., “Has this been jeffchecked?”).

Silly, I know, but I thought it was funny.

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Only one photo today — cute little Hello Kitty bouquets that I saw in Ginza on Saturday:

This week has seriously been The Week That Would Not End!

Last night I got home from work ridiculously late (as usual), and after eating dinner, I sat down in front of the TV to veg out a little before going to bed. Not surprisingly, there was another one of those bikini-clad-women-engaging-in physical-challenges shows on, but this one had a unique title that nearly made me forget for just a moment about my miserable existence. The name of the show?

Pooh!

Absolutely fecking brilliant, if you ask me. I wasn’t able to decipher why exactly the program was named after excrement (or the lovable bear who’s stuffed with fluff), but apparently last night’s program was the very last episode, so unfortunately it is likely that I will never know. It’s a shame I didn’t discover this wondrous show earlier, especially since according to the website, the theme on Monday nights is “girls.” How can you go wrong with that?

I guess I should watch late night television more often, eh? Who knows what I’m missing.

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Anyway, here are some photos of the Tokyo Tower — Tokyo’s “famous” (in Japan only) reproduction of Eiffel Tower.

I can’t believe how busy I’ve been at work the past couple of weeks. . . I feel like I’m slowly metamorphosing into exactly the kind of stereotypical salaryman whose pathetic existence I pity. Pretty soon I’m going to have to start chewing Lotte’s ‘No Time’ gum because I won’t be able to take three minutes to brush my teeth in the morning.

There’s actually a word in Japanese that means “death from overwork”: karoshi. Companies here are known to literally work their employees into the grave. In fact, in recent years there have been several lawsuits from families demanding compensation for the deaths of husbands and fathers sacrificed for the sake of the bottom line. Thankfully, I’m nowhere near that point (yet). Actually, if I were to reach such a level, I reckon I’d be more likely to flip out and kill someone else rather than succumb myself. I’m just that sort of “take action” kind of guy.

Anyway, back to work. . . .

I’ll leave you with the last of the photos from Kamakura. Enjoy!

Within the rigid hierarchy of a Japanese company, the shacho (president) is the big man on top. When he says “Jump!”, you don’t just ask “How high?”, but also “For how long?”, “What should I think about when I’m up there?” and “May I please kindly fellate you afterwards?” Needless to say, whatever shacho wants, shacho gets. We underlings exist for the sole purpose of pandering to his every whim whilst taking it up the rear with a smile.

For example, yesterday evening, my coworkers and I were all busily engrossed in our work, when the president came downstairs from his office and announced that he wanted to go out drinking. The bedlam that ensued was highly entertaining — I’ve never seen people scramble so quickly to simultaneously shut down their computers, pack up their belongings and put on their coats, all the while responding enthusiastically to every word that came out of the president’s mouth.

The nomikai (drinking party) itself was pretty uneventful, but it marked the third time that I have gone out drinking in the past 7 days. Not a record by any means, but heavy drinking mid-week tends to throw one’s routine off-kilter. The president tolerated our lowly presence until he was satisfied with the outcome of the evening and then promptly departed, leaving behind ¥30,000 (about $275) to cover the bill. Upon shacho’s departure, a coworker of mine who had spent a few years in the States when he was younger immediately spat out, “All right, let’s get the fuck outta here!”

I still can’t figure out why it’s so hilarious when non-English speakers use foul language, but there’s no denying that it is.

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Here are some completely unrelated photos from Kamakura:

Last Friday, some of my coworkers from my former office in Ibaraki had a nomikai (drinking party) and so I took the two-hour journey up there to join them. Imagine my surprise when I arrived and saw that nearly all of the people there were high-ranking managers (i.e., OLD MEN). However, nothing blurs class lines better than alcohol, and sure enough, as soon as the initial kampai! had sounded, we were all headed down the primrose path to drunkenness together. Insults were hurled, drinks were spilled, sensitive topics were tactlessly breached and a good time was had by all.

Sadly, being the only person who had to head back to Tokyo that night and not wanting to be stranded halfway like the last time, I was forced to depart early and miss the obligatory visit to the hostess bar. What a shame. I was, however, pleasantly reminded that a two-hour train ride goes by far more quickly when one is inebriated. I’ll have to remember that.

In order to pass the time, I took some photos of my fellow late-night commuters. They’re nothing compared to anything on Mike Clark’s site, of course, but here’s a sampling:

Proving once again that I have the maturity level of an 8-year-old . . .

hee hee

Within the past few years, “global” has become a major buzzword in Japan and popular opinion seems to be that any Japanese firm that doesn’t declare itself to be a “global company” is behind the times and destined for failure. The company I work for, despite already having over 30 production facilities around the world, has recently joined in the globalization frenzy and has been doing all it can to “think globally,” as the cliche goes.

In typical Japanese form-over-substance fashion, the first step my company took was to add the word “Global” in front of every department name. Hence, the Marketing Department became the Global Marketing Department; the General Affairs Department, the Global General Affairs Department; and so on. This was considered a major step and was lauded within all echelons of the company. Apparently no one realized the utter pointlessness of it all.

The company’s latest endeavor in this globalization pissing contest has been the creation of a “bijinesu manaa” (”business manner”) database containing guidelines for proper business etiquette for interactions with non-Japanese companies. A few weeks ago, I was approached about helping to create a detailed guide to Western dining etiquette. You see, as the only non-Japanese person in my company, I am thought be an expert on all things foreign, and thus, despite being an ill-manner clod, I was consulted on every aspect of Western table manners.

After the guidelines were created, a few of the people in my office were assembled in the conference room to pose for photos demonstrating proper and improper table manners. The guide was posted on my company’s intranet site today and the photos are so laughably bad that I just had to share them. Here are some examples for your viewing pleasure:

[Note: In Japan, X (batsu) means incorrect and O (maru) means correct (like a checkmark in the West).]

This past Saturday night I was relaxing at home after a day spent out and about, when I heard a commotion outside. I went to the window and saw two punks on the street below shouting at a young guy on a scooter who was waiting at the stoplight on the corner. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but they seemed to be upset about something. Suddenly one of punks shoved the guy off of his scooter and then punched him in the eye when he tried to get back on.

It seemed apparent that the guy on the scooter wasn’t going to fight back and was probably going to get his ass beat, so in the most intimidating angry-Japanese-man voice that I could muster, I shouted down, “Oi, nani yatten da yo!” (roughly, “hey, what the hell is going on?!”). The punks must have heard me, because they backed off and the young guy quickly got back on his scooter and rode off.

At that point Judy rushed into the room to see why exactly I was shouting out the window in my most intimidating angry-Japanese-man voice. As I began to tell her what I had witnessed, I pointed down to where the action had taken place and was surprised to see the two punks now standing in the middle of the road blocking traffic. A Mercedes was stopped in front of them, and the punks’ arms were up in the air in the universal “what’s-up-bitch?” pose. Suddenly, one of the punks went to the driver’s side and yanked open the door, apparently to go after the driver. Once again mustering my angry-Japanese-man voice, I shouted down, “OOOIII!!!“. That seemed to do the trick, because the two punks backed away from the Mercedes and (peculiarly) mounted a single bicycle and pedalled away.

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After our ordeal with the typhoon in Okinawa, Judy and I took advantage of the sunshine the following weekend and headed to the beach in Zushi, Kanagawa to soak up some rays while we had the chance. Some candid photos from that day are below. (Regrettably, the many women in bikinis were forced to go unphotographed due to the fact that Judy would have drowned me in the sea had she seen my camera pointed in their direction.)

Earlier this month my company announced that the name of my office is going to change from the Tokyo Office to the Tokyo Head Office. This being Japan, of course, the insertion of the additional word is a major affair, and thus everything from the wall plaque to the stationery to the business cards has to be updated and replaced.

A three-member team was created to prepare the new business cards: myself, a male colleague and a female administrative assistant. My company’s business cards are incredibly dull and completely unremarkable, so during the first group meeting my colleague and I discussed ways in which we could make the cards more visually appealing, or kakkoii (cool), as he put it. The assistant, however, was unable to accept the notion that such radical change could be suggested by anyone other than the management and merely hemmed and hawed equivocally until the meeting was over.

After several follow-up meetings, we came up with a slightly more sleek, modern design and submitted it to our boss just before the summer holiday. The new cards arrived yesterday, and with great excitement and anticipation (well, not really), I opened the box and removed a crisp, new card. . . .

And wouldn’t you know it, the top managers had vetoed the new design for being “too different” and no changes had been made except for the addition of the extra word.

Oh well. Here are some more photos from Okinawa:

So we’re back from Okinawa. The trip was a lot of fun, but by an unfortunate and rather astonishing twist of fate, the meteorologists actually managed to predict the weather accurately, and it rained. Well, perhaps “rain” isn’t the right word . . . during our visit, the Okinawan archipelago was subject to a fierce anal reaming courtesy of Typhoon Megi (or Typhoon #15 as it was called by the imaginative Japanese). Seriously, it must have been some sort of karmic payback for all of the times that I pissed on the seat as a kid or something.

However, as a sign that the universe may not entirely have it in for me, for some reason or another our room was upgraded to a top-floor suite with a great view of the ocean, and, on the morning of our last day there, the sun even made a surprise appearance for about an hour and half (although immediately thereafter we were caught in a sudden downpour and ended up having to change our clothes in the bathroom of the lobby because we had already checked out).

Nonetheless, despite the horrible weather, we had a great time. Now it’s back to workin’ for the man, tryin’ to make a dollar outta 15 cents and all that jazz. Here are a few photos:

The other night I was up late, flipping through the channels on TV when I saw that the 2004 K-1 World Grand Prix was on. Seeing as none of the other ten channels were showing anything even remotely interesting (late night Japanese TV sucks, too), I sat back and made myself comfortable.

Since I’m not really a big K-1 fan, I couldn’t help but find it funny how clichéd and caricature-like the fighters were. Among the contenders were the rotund former sumo wrestler, the Neanderthal-esque Eastern European, the stout Somoan, the muscled black heavyweight and even the lanky white pretty boy. Suddenly I was eight years old again, playing Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!!.

Anyhow, after watching the competition, I came to the realization that on some primal level, very little ranks as high on the entertainment scale as watching two super-men beat the living shit out of each other.

On the topic of sculpted hardbodies, today’s photos are of the famous Kamakura Daibutsu (Great Buddha). Weighing in at close to 90 tons, this big bronze bad boy was originally constructed in 1252 and has withstood the tests of time (including a giant tsunami in 1495) to become the primary attraction in the historical city.

I’ve just put up the last of the photos from my trip to Taiwan. Took me long enough, eh? Now I can finally start putting up more photos I’ve taken in Japan.

Next week is the Obon holiday so I’ll be off from work. So far it looks like I’ll be staying around Tokyo, but the following week Judy and I will be going down to Okinawa for a few days. I’m definitely looking forward to kicking back on the beach. Maybe I’ll even be able to turn myself a shade or two less pale, too.

These last photos are just a hodgepodge of random things, but here you go:

On our third day in Taiwan, we stopped by Hsimenting, a hip shopping/hang out area packed with droves of young people. I was pretty surprised to see the considerable influence of Japanese pop culture on Taiwanese youth — it almost seemed as if we were walking through Harajuku (minus the goths and the rockabillies) or Shibuya (minus the kogal and the drug dealers).

Later in the day we took the train up to Danshui, but because it was overcast we weren’t able to witness the sunset for which the area is well-known. It was still a nice time though: we walked along the wharf, visited a night market and stuffed ourselves silly with scrumptious Taiwanese specialities (unintentional alliteration, I swear).

I’m not a very big fan of posed photos (especially when I am the one doing the posing), but these ones actually didn’t turn out all that bad (except for the stupid grin on my face). Anyway, here you go:

As you may have noticed, I have a bit of a problem in that I tend not to take very many photos of people. My grandma used to say that if a picture didn’t have a person in it, it was a waste of film; but seeing as Judy doesn’t like to pose for photos and I don’t need to see my ugly mug more than I already do, it’s just easier to take photos of scenery and architecture and the like.

However, most people tend to find those sort of photos a tad dull. Therefore, today’s photos all contain people, some of whom are even LOOKING AT THE CAMERA!

After visiting the National Palace Museum (as mentioned yesterday), Judy and I returned to the city and Josh and Wei Wei took us out to dinner to meet some of their friends. They definitely were a nice bunch of people, but that wasn’t surprising since Josh is an amiable guy and makes great friends wherever he goes (the affable bastard). After dinner, we went a club called Roxy 99, where we proceeded to get quite inebriated, in which state the photos below were taken.

On our second day in Taiwan, Judy and I ventured out to the National Palace Museum, which is considered to be the world’s largest repository of Chinese artifacts. The collection, some 700,000 pieces spanning about 5,000 years, was once housed in Beijing’s Forbidden City before a series of political upheavals eventually led to its arrival in Taiwan. Apparently when the Nationalists fled to Taiwan they brought China’s greatest historical treasures with them. Lucky for us, eh?

Today’s photos are from the Chih-Shan Garden, a reproduction of an 11th century Sung dynasty garden, which is located on the museum grounds.

It’s Friday evening and I am beat. I’ve been sitting here for ten minutes trying to write something, but my brain has decided to turn in early for the night and so I can’t even manage to construct a coherent sentence. So please forgive me if this entry makes less sense than my usual nonsense.

Judy and I went to Taiwan at the end of April of this year to visit my good friend Josh and do a bit of sightseeing. The trip was a blast — we visited some interesting places, met some cool people and sampled tons of delicious Taiwanese food. I even learned how to say “toilet” in Mandarin.

Anyway, I’ve been wanting to put some photos up from the trip for months, but I’ve found it difficult to find the time to do so (OK, OK, I’m a lazy bastard, I know). Therefore, I’ve decided that instead of trying to put them all up at once, I’ll just put a few up whenever I get a chance.

Today’s photos are from the Chiang Kai-Shek Memorial, which was the first place we visited on the trip. Impressive, ain’t it?

Fish don’t fry in the kitchen, Beans don’t burn on the grill
Catchy tune, ain’t it? Anyway, it’s old news by now, but in January of this year Judy and I moved to Tokyo. This marks my third residence here in Japan, and her fourth (running from the law is tireless work). Previously, I lived just outside of Tokyo in Saitama prefecture, otherwise known as the “armpit of Japan”, and before that, in the inbred wasteland that is Ibaraki prefecture.

Needless to say, compared to my previous two cities of residence, Tokyo is — to borrow a phrase from the Brit I met at the pub the other night — the dog’s bollocks. No longer am I exposed to unsophisticated cousin-marrying plebs sporting tweezed eyebrows, bleached orange mullets and oversized cartoon character-emblazoned track suits with matching Hello Kitty slippers. No longer are the only forms of entertainment in town a run-down arcade and the local convenience store parking lot. No longer am I stared at simply because of the amount of melanin in my body (or lack thereof). Yes folks, in Tokyo I am free to carry on my existence in relative anonymity, surrounded by relatively “normal” people (although that is still debatable). And even though the cost of living in Tokyo is expensive as fuuuck, the city has a lot to offer.

The new place may not be a de-luxe apartment in the sky, but it’s far nicer than my previous dwellings (read: utter shitholes) and I’m far happier here. Yes, we finally got a piece of the pie.

Anyway, I finally took some photos of the place, as promised months ago, and they are now up. Won’t you be my neighbor?

Sometimes when you’re in a foreign country, you’ll see something that you wouldn’t ever expect to see “back home” and it makes you laugh. It could be something funny, something strange, or even something mildly disturbing, but no matter the reason, it amuses you and the memory stays with you.

Since moving to Japan, I’ve certainly had my fair share of such experiences, but rarely have I had a camera nearby to capture them. However, on those rare occasions when I do happen to have a camera handy, I always try to politely snap a photo or two (that is, if I can manage to stop flagrantly gawking and pointing for a moment).

Thus, I now present to you the new Random Japan gallery. (I considered calling it the ‘Weird-Ass Shit’ gallery, but that didn’t seem very catchy.) I’m starting it off with the three photos below and will update it from time to time (i.e., when I can be bothered to do so), possibly with some sort of theme for each update. Today’s theme, I guess, is “people”. More specifically, people being weird. Weird-ass people. Doing weird-ass shit.

In April, one of the managers at my company, Soumi-san, invited the company intern, Zach, and I to join him for a day trip to Shizuoka prefecture in central Japan. Shizuoka is known for its excellent views of Mt. Fuji, pleasant weather, sakura ebi (”cherry” shrimp), green tea and strawberries — and we sampled all of it.

Well, actually, make that almost all of it — despite the fact that the weather was absolutely beautiful, some haze prevented us from actually being able to see Mt. Fuji (it was on holiday that day according to Mr. Soumi). However, we were assured that the view is normally quite breathtaking. Despite that itty bitty disappointment, the rest of the day was a lot of fun.

I’ve put some photos from the trip up in the gallery, so please feel free to take a look.

Over the weekend I worked on trying to set up a gallery for the site. Apparently, I’m starting to get the hang of CSS and PHP (haha, yeah right) because getting the gallery layout to my liking was far less frustrating than originally getting the site set up. I used the Singapore PHP gallery web application, which I suppose is pretty low-tech since it doesn’t have all the bells and whistles a MySQL database would enable (huh?), but it’ll do for the time being.

Unfortunately, I didn’t have enough time to prepare any new photos to stick in the gallery, so instead I uploaded some old photos from my August 2002 trip to Hokkaido in northern Japan. Sadly, the originals were all lost when my laptop was stolen last year (must . . . suppress . . . rage), so the images in the gallery are smaller copies. You can access the gallery by clicking on the “photos” link in the menu on the left or go directly to the Hokkaido photos directly by clicking here. The photos are crap, I know, but I’ll try to put some new ones up soon.