Hey, look over there!

Japandra is going to return to being USAndra for a few weeks.

In the meantime, you should look at Quirky Japan. It's a lot like this site. Er, except that he has really amazing photos, insightful commentary and useful information.

But come back some time, okay?

Don't drink and ride

They got puking, fighting, and falling down on the tracks. They left out passing out on the shoulder of the person next to you.

The doctor will eat you now

We did that thing where you stick your feet into a pond full of fishies ravenous for dead human skin. Now, of course, this sounds like a great - actually, no, it sounds insane, like it might make you shreik and squirm and have disturbed flash backs for a while.
Even though the nibbling feels like a painless field of mild electroshocks, a quick peek reminds you that it is in fact the tickly defeat of jillions of years of evolution happening between your toes. I wasn't sure what they were actually doing, though. They have little vacuum mouths and suck around like they're cleaning an aquarium. But they didn't congregate at callouses.
In this pic, taken by another skeptical foreigner who had smuggled a cellphone into his yukata, the swarm had already mostly moved on to fresher feet.
The critters are called "Dr. Fish." I had seen them on "look what the crazy Asians are up to" AP features last year. There are a million YouTube videos of it. Check them out, if you want your nightmares for free.

We paid 1500 yen for 15 minutes at Ooedo Onsen Monogatari in Odaiba, Tokyo. General admission to the baths, including yukata, bath amenities and old-timey Japanese carnival games, is about 3000. Lots of restaurants and additional massage treatment options for additional fees, all scanned onto a wristband barcode. You can also spend the night in a recliner for that price, if you don't mind a lounge full of snorers.

Discomfort sells

This English school called Gaba has a series of ads that each have one sullen, disinterested westerner and one morose Japanese person. A strange dymamic for a company whose selling point is friendly, one-on-one conversation.

One theory is that after you take their classes, you won't feel uncomfortable if you find yourself facing down a dour librarian or an irratable cop.

I don't know what they're getting at, but I don't think that's it.

The cowboy ad's thought bubble mentions "a quiet guy like me."

Could the western person represent the Japanese person's inner foreigner?

This is only a test

Almost 100,000 foreigners swarmed out of small train stations and herded toward college campuses all over Japan Sunday morning for the JLPT, a standardized Japanese test given twice a year. I joined in, for old times' sake. I passed it back in the Kyushu days and decided to give it another go. To see how the old brain is holding up. To make myself buckle down and study a little.

The people settling into their assigned seats in the benches throughout the lecture hall where I took it looked more or less representative of the ethnic breakdown of the non-Japanese in the city: some Russian women, Indian men, assorted North Americans, Brits, and Aussies, and lots and lots of Koreans and Chinese. It used to be necessary to pass it to enroll in a Japanese university as an exchange student. I think that's not true any more, but there were many college-age kids, girls dressed up in fake leather jackets and tights and guys slouched over in black and white camouflage and striped hoodies. A businessy French couple chatted before it started, and a grandfatherly white guy polished his wire rimmed glasses. Some people crammed from kanji workbooks and some slept. A few looked hungover. Most looked nervous.

The Korean girl next to me was a fidgeter. She rolled her three sharpened pencils on the desk. She held up the answer sheet and growled at it when the proctor handed it to her. She chomped on the powder blue strap of her watch during the test. After she burned through the kanji section, she hummed a little as she drew and erased cartoons on the front of the question booklet until time was called. When the first section was over, she climbed under the desk.

Her test ID said she was born in May of 2000, but I don't believe she was a day over six. Her mom came in and collected her after each section. They both looked kind of resigned. It was no place for a kid, especially the 70-minute reading comprehension section, which was about things like supply and demand, job satisfaction questionnaires, and dating in Roppongi. I felt a little bit bad for her when I glanced over halfway through and saw her swinging her legs and blowing quiet raspberries at the pages. Just a little bit, though. She did dust me on the other sections.

Extra cheese, and just drop it down the chimney

Pizza-La is offering a special treat for its customers - not to mention for its delivery people. Between December 13 and 25, upon request, your pizza can be delivered by "Santa Claus." (This is the first time I've noticed quotation marks used like that in Japanese.) But make your pizza delivery reservations now - they are expecting so many orders on Christmas eve that they won't be able to accommodate people who wait til then to order their Christmas pie.

A better Christmas treat would be a pizza that didn't cost 40 bucks.

Ho, ho, ho.

Well drawn

Japan is banning smoking from the outside in. "Walking-smoking" is prohibited in crowded areas by signs like this, though I don't think there's any kind of enforcement. People still, of course, do walk and smoke. But they also jockey for position around the municipal ashtrays set up in designated outdoor smoking area. The effect is sort of the inverse of bums standing around a burning trashcan.

We went to a really nice cafe in Daikanyama with an airy patio and a comfortably crowded dining room. Smoking was permitted only inside. As a rule of thumb, the smaller and less ventilated a place is, the more likely it is to be crammed with chain smokers.

An earlier draft suggested "in the gutter."

(Please do it at home.)

Why are the receptionists always frosty?

The dozens of stylists were friendly, though. I talked to/was handled by five.

When I made the reservation, the receptionist said to call again if I couldn't find the place. I couldn't. When I called from nearby for directions, I almost just canceled the reservation out of embarrassment. She sounded so fed up, I felt like an idiot for not being able to glide right to the (nifty wide, center-hinged) door. (The place is well hidden - you actually have to go into an unmarked building entrance and through a courtyard to find it.) But while I was hanging my head in the waiting room, she answered the phone and gave the same directions three more times to locals, so I felt less bad.
It is a nifty three-story warren of lacquer-trimmed rooms with a fashionable jumble of antlers, owls, antique wallpaper, and artfully placed musty luggage. A faded Mona Lisa sits propped on the floor against the wall in a chipped gilt frame. She and I traded bemused looks while I got my hair washed and ears swabbed once and then, later, again.
There are so many stylists bustling around - carrying stacks of magazines, leading customers from one room to the next, passing messages from the front desk to each other, and wheeling carts full of shiny sharps and strange bottles - that it feels like an arty ER.
My main stylist was a chatty, pretty Japanese lady with blond hair who seemed like she'd been carrying around a list of things she would love to ask a foreigner if she ever got the chance. Like, "I know someone from Greece and she only washes her hair every two weeks. How often do foreigners usually wash their hair? Japanese people usually wash their hair every day, even though it's actually bad for it." And, "Sometimes I use web sites to translate Japanese to English, and I don't speak much English, but it looks like it comes out pretty strange. Does it? It does? I knew it!"
She cooed again over the size of my skull (small) and the consistency of my hair (thin strands, but plentiful) and walked me all the way to the front door.

I can't make heads or tails of the website, but it's pretty.
Bloc de Zenith, Shibuya, near the ward office. 03-5784-3228

And my spirit

(This vehicle is done to weaken an air conditioner.)

Double limited

This tea is sold only in fall, and only in train stations.

Should we try flattery?

The gyoza and beer you had are stinking from your stomach. Use Breath Care.

My work here is done

Three months and two hours into an advanced reading course, during a lesson on using the verb "have" with ailments, an adult student wrote on the board

She talked me a measle.

Now,as then, I don't even know what to say.

Zero yen gym

I love that the Tokyo Olympics 2012 committee has plastered the subway with a poster of the evergreen "add exercise to your daily routine" listicle.

Thy leaves are fiber optic

Tokyo Midtown, Roppongi

Graffiti makes wall sad, angry

Japanese English 404

"It is crowded very much now, so you put time for a while, and please utilize it once again."

Resume/macrame

These kids in uniform cheap suits and optimistic shoes were not the crowd I expected to see pouring toward Tokyo Design Festa. I'd like to think the conference center's planners chuckled when they put the Career Forum on the same day. They probably didn't, though.

The next one is May 16th(Sat) & 17th(Sun), 2009 11:00 - 19:00 at Tokyo Big Sight

O, gingko tree!

The gingko is the official tree of Tokyo. This is a tall one in Harajuku. (Christmas merchandising began on November 5.)

Extreme face painting

Tokyo design festa

Those first three characters are o ba ma

Obama's speech was on about 2 pm. Newspapers announcing the win were on sale at the train station by 5.

Now I can eat lunch

The office gathered around my computer to watch the speeches.

Everyone was duly excited, but now it's back to work - no champagne, no cupcakes, no Obama cookies.

UPDATE: I went down the street to get a (no-crust, white bread, egg salad and butter) sandwich and a celebratory bag of KitKats, and it is quiet outside.

Very quiet. And bright.

Early evening madness

If you were a theater manager in up-all-night Tokyo, and you were cool enough to think it would be fun to show the original classic Halloween on a Halloween that happened to fall on a Friday, what would you think would be a good schedule?

A) On a 24-hour loop starting mid-day Friday

B) Starting at 8 pm the week before Halloween and through the weekend

C) One midnight viewing on Friday only - people who want to see it will make it an event

D) On Friday at 11:50am, 2:10, 4:30, and, for a late-night finale, 6:50pm.



If you answered D, send your resume to the Shinjuku Toa, stat. You'll fit right in.

It's the great turkey, Charlie Brown!

A Japanese acquaintance asked if I celebrated Halloween, and if that was with friends or family. He looked concerned when I said it was usually a friend holiday, so I asked if and how he celebrated.

"With family, of course."

And how?
"We gather together and eat a delicious dinner with many dishes."
Like...?
"Potatos, beans, anything, but most important is a turkey. Or a chicken.Any bird, as long as it is cooked--" he circled his arms and struggled for the word.
"Whole?"
"Yes!"
Hm. And then...?

"That's all. Is it as same as your country?"

Now, where was I?

A (Japanese) woman at my office told me that she wouldn't be able to come along on an assignment today because she had an appointment in Hartford. I thought, huh, I didn't know we had any clients in Connecticut. Makes sense, though, just a quick train ride away. She said she'd be back at the end of the day. I thought it was nice that she got to get out to the suburbs for the morning.

I snapped out of it and did a little internet browsing. I read something about the political ice cream at Baskin' Robbins and felt bummed that the closest BR was so far away - all the way down at 14th Street.

This is while I was awake, mind you. (I don't know where my co-worker was actually going.)

So, how do we show that the new gum has more juicy flavor?

We could use Japanese drag queens?

Hm, does that have enough "juicy?"

What if we have them riding on the pack of gum like it's a log flume ride...

I'm listening...

And they're all in evening gowns!

Ah, I dunno, something's still missing. We've got the gum, we've got fruity, but...

You're right, you're right... wait, okay, I've got it! Say we put the Japanese drag divas in early 70's black face?

Throw in a Japanese girl on the sidelines, and I say you've got a winner!

Japanese has a word for "become one body with"

We took the train to Shimoda for the weekend.

If you are searching the internet for things to do on eastern side of the Izu Peninsula, I have a few ideas. You should rent a car if you can. There's basically one winding main road that runs up the east side and a few buses that crawl along it once or twice an hour. So it's easy to drive without getting lost, and hard to get around without a car.

This picture is the women's outdoor onsen at Akazawa DHC* hotspring resort. The similar men's bath is one floor up. There are other baths and saunas inside, including tea-cup-ride-size individual terra cotta bath tubs infused with aloe vera and DHC. There are beautiful private baths for up to 6 people, charged by the hour. You can get hotel rooms there with private outdoor baths and use the tennis courts, swimming pool, and bowling alley. The 1600-yen (almost 16 bucks) day pass gets you the baths, piles of towels, an unparalleled variety of toiletries, a tatami lounge room with coin-operated massage chairs facing the ocean, and a crowded gift shop with generous samples of all their cakes, shrimp crackers, and tea.

The ad that led us there promised that their infinity pool baths (or you?) "become one body with the sea." That was indeed the effect if you sunk down to chin level in the water.

Tranquility.

If you sat up a little higher you could see cars winding along the road we had just come up. The effect of that was hurried recall of that drive and whether you had noticed any naked people up on the balcony above and if not, was it because it wasn't visible from the road or because you just hadn't known to look, and come to think of it, there are all sorts of buildings you can see from here and if you can see them.... ahh, chin deep is lovely.

*(DHC is a magical cosmetics ingredient that seems to be the sponsor of this place - it is in not only the name of every single facility and all the free body and hair care products, but in the bottled water and the currant sauce for the ice cream.)

UPDATE: I am totally confused. DHC is a catalog cosmetics brand, not a chemical. That makes the DHC swimming pool less dubious, and the DHC bowling alley stranger.

For my sins

I rode on ten different trains for work yesterday, five of them at rush hour. And up and down four elevators that had lines to get on just to make it to the 20th floor. I was not on speaking terms with Japan for a few hours.

The only ones who can help

These are not nine boxes of wine stacked outside my next-door neighbor's front door; they are nine boxes of L. Ron Hubbard lectures on CD in Japanese.

Teach your parrots well

There was a lost parrot a while back that got itself found because it could say the name of its pet shop.

The flier taped up on light posts around the Kayabacho neighborhood in Tokyo says that this lost parakeet only knew its name and 'good morning' when it flew off the balcony. (The balcony?)

I'm wondering if each of the pulled phone number tabs really represents someone who caught sight of a dazed bird chirping "Ohayo! Ohayo!" and wanted to give the owners a call.

Something to inspire people on their way to work

The most depressing lobby art I have ever seen - a sad, naked man in a wide, marble space.

"Another day at the office. Sigh. Oh well, at least I have clothes on."

Anyone can char a piece of toast

...but it takes a special skill to actually set it on fire.

I can't take all the credit. We are lucky to have not only three gas burners installed in our kitchen (many kitchens come with zero and people set up a semi-portable ring or two) but a little built-in oven underneath, too. It's made for broiling a fish. And not a large fish. A one-person fish. Maybe two such fish, side-by-side. The oven doesn't have a dial with pictures of toast, just a knob to control a ceiling of open flame that sits quite close to the grill. The real estate agent warned us that it was only for cooking fish, and that we had better be careful to fill the pan under the grill with water before trying to cook the fish, because if we didn't, it would burn and the kitchen would be ruined. (This looks like a dicey idea, by the way, because the grill unit is attached to the door and I can't imagine that sliding a shallow pan full of hot fish water in and out of an oven with a jerky mechanism would go smoothly.) This scared us away from the whole fish-in-the-oven idea, and we've been sticking to using it for making toast.

In a city where lack of good bread is probably near the top of any Euro/American gripe list, Jim has found delicious whole wheat sourdough near his office and keeps us steadily supplied. It makes perfect toast, all the tastier, perhaps, for the art and science required, from setting the heat to turning the bread over at a good time to taking it out at the right moment without the benefit of being able to see into the oven. We've had a few pieces get a little dark now and then when one of us pops bread the oven and then wanders into the living room, gets distracted, then sprints back into the kitchen when the burnt smell starts wafting.

But the special skill comes in being able to stand over the oven, stir frying, without giving the bread another thought until opening the oven to see if it might be time to gingerly reach in and turn the tanned slices over and realizing only then that they are not only fully blackened but engulfed in flames.

When the fire died down, Jim scraped the charcoal off the top of one piece. The bottom was still soft and cool to the touch - pain brulé. He put it back in the oven, black side down, to finish toasting. I tossed the other piece in the sink.

If you have any clever ideas about "remembering what setting is a good temperature for toasting bread" or "using a kitchen timer," you do not appreciate the zen challenge of starting anew each time. You probably don't set your bread on fire, either.

That's bananas

The big craze sweeping the nation and emptying the produce shelves this week is the "morning banana" diet.

You have a glass of room temperature water in the morning and two bananas.

The rest of the day, you eat whatever you like.

Ta da!

A Dole spokeswoman said this morning that banana imports are up 25-27%. (She didn't say if that was before or after the so-called "banana boom." They've had a well-advertised foil-envelope-goo product on the market for at least a few months called "morning banana," and I wonder if they started this whole thing on purpose.) [This suicide fruits picture is not Dole - it's a copycat that just appeared maybe this week.]

Girls interviewed on the street for a morning news/variety show said they were all doing it, and their mothers, too.

I've found that bananas here are tougher and less sweet than at home and cost three or four times more (a buck or more per individually bagged piece), so I haven't been eating them. I miss grabbing a cup of coffee and a banana on the way to the subway for a dollar. I was a banana diet pioneer!

Except that a panelist on the news just mentioned having coffee with her morning bananas, and the rest of the panel jumped up to remind her that you are supposed to eat them with water. Your magical fad diet will never work if you do it wrong!

Walking 60 miles per hour

There are no poles in the aisle of my second morning train and the doors are unlocked, so a column of people moves single file from the back toward the front. Why not front to back?

Friends don't let friends

I fear that someday I will be the news peg for a "small but increasing number" story about people run over in intersections because they were writing text messages instead of watching where they were going. 

Maybe this subway ad will help. That and a few more toe-grazes on the sidewalk by swerving grannies on bicycles.

What's cuter than emphysema?

Japan Tobacco (web site tagline: "Welcome to Delight World") says that while 40.2% of Japanese men smoke, 12.7% of Japanese women do. 

Women aged 20-29, the youngest age group reported, had the lowest smoking rate of all the age groups at 11.4. The smokingest women by far were the 60+ group. And that can only last so long.  Get marketing in here, stat!

Which brings us to Fram.  The skinny raspberry menthol cigarette with a flowery pink box. 

They really do look delicious and fun. Like a combination of iPods, mentos and lip gloss.

Infuriating.

(Was that a haiku?)

Any color you want

As long as it's clear vinyl with a white plastic handle.

Top commenter Trixie raised the excellent point that see-through umbrellas should cut down on run-ins. And they do make it easier to see where you are going. 

However, I am frequently the only person squinting quizzically up at the sky with a dry umbrella rolled tight while people under nearly-dry umbrellas bump and scrape each other left and right squinting quizzically at me. (Once, a colleague walking next to me in a light mist asked why I didn't put up my umbrella. I said it was because it wasn't raining.  She gave me a confused translation-error nod.) 

Clear umbrellas make it easier to see other people, but 99.9% umbrella usage at the first hint of precipitation means there are a lot more umbrellas on the street on any given cloudy day, so, poke-in-the-eye-wise, it's a wash.

Yer not selling it

An alert reader asked if this meant "blend" or "brand." 

Take your pick - either way would be equally untrue.

News flash

Tokyo trains are really crowded sometimes. (And only then do they park in the tunnels for 15 minute stretches.)


UPDATE: I got a "Proof of train delay" slip with a notch punched out at the 40 minute mark. I was going to take a picture of it, but my boss rolled it up into a tight ball and threw it out.

Einstein was a Japanese man

In which we discover the true meaning of E=mc2... turns out it stands for the Japanese words for, "Great! It's really simple!"

The price of pee is eternal vigilance

Starbuck's bathroom at the forefront of the war against terror.

Tommy Lee "Rainbow" Jones

Asking, I think, if your job and your canned coffee are treating you right.

This guy is getting to be a real problem

Quit sticking your face in people's bags already.

The Silence of the Cicadas

Some signs that summer is over creep - bulky sweaters in designer showroom windows, hot canned coffee at the small grocery store, fat steamed pork buns by the Lawson's register.
Others fling themselves buzzing into your screen doors. The cicadas - semi - drone a high-decibel sonic backdrop all summer. They're loud like a buzzing neon light. Like a whole roadside of neon zapping with pulsating current.
They're all supposed to live only a week or so, and their squished carcases have been getting ground into the sidewalks for weeks. But it was only in the last few days that they started skittering onto our eighth floor balcony, so big and heavy and clattery that they seem more like spring-loaded tin wind-up toys than insects. They thud when they hit the glass and rattle as they lie on the floor, buzzing in short, desperate bursts instead of in their usual long, rhythmic whirs.
We just left them out there the other night, one on each balcony. In the morning, both were gone.

Some perspective

This is how you know the bus is coming.

Help, help! I'm being repressed!

Cell phone posting has stopped working. And it just took seven minutes for this page to load up. Now you will never see Tommy Lee Jones' stony mug advertising/scaring people away from Boss coffee or the mysterious reactivating bug bite on my ankle that is surely something exotic and horrifying, though some people think it looks like it's healing.

UPDATE: well, looky that. He's been at it for a while. In related news, there are only so many different jokes you can make about Tommy Lee Jones being the Boss.

We have crab bread!

Judging from the sell-by date and the shelf space next to the packaged donuts, guessing that no actual crabs were harmed in the making of this product.

Japan gets the gold for pseudoscience

This is the breakdown of Japan's gold medal winners - by blood type.

Even if it is with a bit of skepticism, blood-type-as- personality-indicator comes up among the Japanese staff at lunch time often enough and intensely enough that it seems none of them discount it completely, though my friend Miki saw this Olympic analysis and sighed, "I wish they'd drop this idea already."

As of Thursday, B had four, O and A had two each, and AB had zero. Suckers!

Of course, they can get transfusions from anyone, while I would bleed to death waiting for another O negative.

Pop quiz: What is this woman selling?

And you may find yourself

Alone in a swank conference room on the 27th floor.

Just run toward the sky then keep going

Paragliding in Nagano.

I baked you this delicious cake

We had all you can eat and drink at JPop cafe last night, for 90 underwhelming minutes. The buffet was half-hearted, but they really did up birthdays. The place was in Babel,they say.

Who needs a milkman?

The banner at this liquor store says free delivery. The insulated truck and scooters say they mean it.

Rebranding

Old-school bike messenger as Eco-delivery.

I think they deposit them into a Nigerian bank account

Remember that kid who would get his life-saving dialysis only if everyone sent their soda can pull tabs to their cousin's friend's office manager? It seems the campaign was so successful in America that he made a full recovery and is now traveling the world spreading alchemical medical procedures.

In our office, there is a print-out on the bulletin board announcing the good news that our PET bottle tops can now become smiling cartoon vaccines for sad cartoon teddy bears. It shows a complicated chart with a suspiciously cyclical part in the middle explaining how the screw tops become are converted at a rate of 800 to 1 into "vaccine" (which, incidentally and irrelevantly, is pronounced "waksheen" in Japanese), and then pleads that you "do now what you can do now. Save a life."

The three pages have been posted in English and Japanese and worked over with green highlighter, so it is obviously true.

Someone at the office has valiantly carved a milk carton into a receptacle, thereby performing two acts of planet-saving heroism in one selfless stroke.

Coincidentally, this was posted a few weeks after rules were changed to require PET bottles to
be recycled with the plastic labels and lids removed and - oh, but this is another topic - put into the burnable garbage.

Now they are just getting a little weird

Please do it at the beach.

A start

But will this be enough to stop the fingers-in-ears epidemic that is tearing at the social fabric?