Indeed

 

The toilet paper stacked at our office. A friend in need, indeed.

Pick a letter

Oh, I don't know. Just use any one.

RIP, Awaya Building

Cities change fast, but here it's really head spinning. I took a picture of this building one morning. I knew it would be torn down soon. In the afternoon it was caged in scaffolding, and by the next morning it was wrapped up behind sound-proofing drapes and a white construction wall. Now there are just trucks full of cables and chunks moving out like harvested organs all day and it's impossible to tell if anything is even still standing.

Sweet bitter

I wouldn't say you should take the Tama Express 45 mins west of the city just for a cup of hot chocolate. But, if you do find yourself near the Tamasakai train station in the land of CostCo and Cainz (a home improvement warehouse that makes Home Depot look cozy), escape from the hordes and their doublewide shopping carts at Honey's Chocolate. "Honey" is a Japanese pun on the owner's birthday. Chocolate, with the 'e' pronounced, is her specialty. It's served dark and bitter with sugar on the side. This is not easy to find anywhere, and is especially unexpected out there between the shoe warehouse and the all-purpose seminar rental rooms.
Honey's Chocolate
3-22-16 Koyamagaoka, Machida, Tokyo
Tel. 042-774-4456

How bout some quotation marks?

You have a 'good' eye for fashion.

Good idea. Just put them anywhere.

That's what happens when you drive on the wrong side

I believe they said there are 900 traffic accidents a year caused by people driving the wrong way on highways. Does that seem like a lot?

Behind door number 1

I was walking around in Ebisu last night and was tickled anew with what's around corners and behind plain doors. Marie and I were looking for a restaurant she had been to. When we got to the rough adobe building with split beams jutting out and straw cowlicks, the windows were dark and the wooden door was dusty. It was a boxy building out of place on a residential street - or any street - in Tokyo. Marie was disappointed - she said inside was a two-story teepee. We walked back towards the station, and passed a lightbox sign in front of a compact six-story building for a rock gym. We walked down the narrow stairs to the basement, and there, in a space about the size that my old NY landlady had crammed three sewing machines and a few piles of fabric, was a rock-climbing gym.
Further down the street was this amazing antiques store, packed and piled high with tin signs, grand cash registers, and threadbare stuffed rabbits and dogs. Everything rattled precariously as we squeezed between the secretaries and teetering stacks of drawers and spice racks and wondered what havoc the slightest earthquake would cause.
Finally we got to a different place for dinner, Tooth Tooth. The lighting was subtle, but the lights were anything but - steel swing arm desk lamps 8 feet tall. The place had everything you'd want in a chic Tokyo restaurant; it was tucked away, French, elegant and moody, and had a private banquet room with ornate brocade thrones and clear Louis Ghost chairs all overseen by a life-size storm trooper (1000 yen per person cover charge in that room, unlimited time). The food was good - we shared a baby lettuce ceasar salad and tender, wine-glazed beef cheek, and spicy fries - and definitely improved by the surroundings. The dessert was intense. An earl grey scented block of dark chocolate fondant drizzled and coddled with raspberry sauce and pistachio icecream and garnished with a sliced strawberry and a free-form butter cookie.
The menu was a challenge. Each item was scrawled small in French and then huge, like magic marker autographs, in Japanese. The waitress said it was hard for everyone to read.
The place is part of chain that started in Kobe and has dozens of restaurants with different names between Tokyo and Osaka. I wonder who's lurking around the banquet tables in the other ones?Tin's Collection: Kaneko Bldg. 101, Ebisu, 3-21-6 Higashi, Shibuya-ku, Tokyo, Tel: 03-3499-2291
Tooth Tooth: Tredicasa B1F, 1F, 3-17-12 Higashi, Shibuya-ku, Tokyo, Tel: 03.6419.2040

Sign me up

Shh. I have a little secret for riding the trains. A "hack," if you will.

When one train comes and its screws are popping out and the steamy windows are cracking and the people burst out like popcorn out of a Jiffy Pop, and then they stop coming out and there is still a solid wall of people jammed right up to the open door, I do something crazy. I step out of the way of the herd that hurls and mashes itself into the train like a physics experiment in supersaturation and I wait, alone, on the platform.

When the next train comes, usually about 45 seconds later, it is, more often than not, all oxygen and open space. Sometimes eerily so. Ahh.

Don't tell anyone.

Or a hat or a pterodactyl

"Please enjoy this as a doughnut or at teatime."

Just stick that "or" anywhere.

No, thank you

Where else would toilet paper cores be stamped with "thank you?"

The future in a box

It took two tries, but we got in to the Japan Media Arts Festival at the National Arts Center before it ended. Many supercool interactive exhibits, but surprisingly not a lot that felt brand new. This was the only one that I didn't feel like I'd seen some version of before. The box on the screen is just a solid paper-covered block a little smaller than a Rubix cube that the kid is holding a few inches in front of a camera. It has an abstract black and white mosaic with just a few tiles on each face.
On the screen, each face of the cube appears as a 3D room with a well-rendered man inside. He moves around when the cube is moved, going back and forth and up and down steps depending on how the cube tips. When he's maneuvered out the door he pops out in another room.It takes a moment to be translated to video when the cube moves suddenly, and the image stutters back and forth between the paper surface and the simple little 3D world inside, like Take on Me.
The kids were hogging it for 20 minutes and I kept waiting for their mother, who was watching, or the staff guy, who kept coming over and frowning at their backs, to say alright kiddies, move it along. But no. So, I waited my turn, and it was worth it.

I do have questions. What are the applications for this? How does it work? And where does the little man go when the camera is off?

The show is a collection of the winners and notable entries of an annual juried contest including hours and hours of amazing animation and video. Mark your calendar for next year. And don't wait til the last weekend. We could have gone in on the second to last day instead of the last. Even got in the long line since it was moving pretty fast. We got a peek into the jam-packed gallery as the line wound past and I'm afraid my suggestion that we should perhaps spend our time elsewhere was made in a rather unladylike way.

Older and wiser

Or better at cramming for multiple choice tests, anyway. I got 10 points more than last time I took the JLPT in 1999.
This does not matter at all, except as evidence that dementia has not set in yet.

Do you believe in the Valentine's Day bunny?

Happy... Valentine's Day.

This chocolate confusion was on the sweets floor on the entrance level of the Daimaru at Tokyo station. The lines of ladies! The longest line was for baumkuchen, but no purveyor of cakes or candies was un-swarmed.

What's not to love?

Yes, Valentine's Day in Japan is grotesquely commercialized beyond Hallmark's wildest dreams. Yes, they've got it all backwards with women giving chocolate to the men they love and know. Yes, it's wrong to force people (there's a reason it's called "obligation chocolate") to go on a spending bender when the world is in recession.

But that is no reason for you to miss out on the one-week-only chocolate wonderlands that spring up in all the department stores, like the Chocolate Promenade at Daimaru, or Joie de Chocolat at Tokyo Midtown. Dozens of swanky international chocolatieres set up rows of glass cases with tasteful displays of chocolates from five bucks and up - way up. Some of the chocolates are whimsical, like flying pigs and teddy bears. Lots of the packaging is intricate and beautiful, with just a few glistening black cubes or manicured red hearts nestled in each custom box. (Don't they know this stuff is for dudes?)
The competition is fierce and the samples are plentiful. Some of these places have extended hours on Friday night. So if you're in Tokyo, you've got about 48 hours left to snag all the dainty little bites of free chocolate you can get your hands on. Free gourmet chocolate? The holiday can't be all bad.

But I have a pacemaker!

Phones should be off inside the invisible box around train and bus priority seats. This is to keep the phones from scrambling pacemakers. Can this really happen? Does that mean the priority seats are the only place in the city where people with pacemakers are safe?

Japanniversary

Today is a national holiday started in 1872 that marks the establishment of Japan in 660 BC by the possibly mythical emperor Jimmu.

More to the point, it marks one year since non-emperor Jimmu* and I arrived. There are nice men driving black and gray trucks with pretty red and white flags all over the city blaring imperialist music and shouting guttural slogans... surely welcoming us?

I'll head out and see if I can get a vid...



*This is in fact how "Jim" is pronounced in Japanese.

Don't even ask about the late card system

Pop quiz: How many detailed seating charts does it take to sort out a class of three adults?

A) Um, seating chart?

B) One at the entrance to give a sense of organization

C) One at the entrance, one at the teacher's desk, and one at each seat, each oriented to be right-side up for its own viewer.

Pencils down. The correct answer is C - but that's only partial credit. For full marks, you should have written in "and one man to come check that everyone has found his seat."

Extra short

I did not know the Starbucks Doubleshot was so adorably Japan-sized until I saw that the American version - which cost less - was a tallboy.
(It would give you more perspective to know that my hands are also Japan-size.)

Eat your heart out, Wolf Blitzer

UPDATE: Two 3-D CGI demons - one red, one blue - just chased each other and frolicked around the set of the staid 11 pm political news. One panelist stopped in the middle of talking about today's heated Diet debate to say "...?!" and the other said, "Well, it is Setsubun!" And then they carried on.

Devil out, luck in!

Today is Setsubun, originally celebrated as the beginning of spring. It's kind of like Groundhog Day, except that instead of a groundhog, there's a demon, often represented by the man of the house in a paper mask. And instead of seeing if he sees his shadow, you throw roasted soy beans at him and then eat your age in beans. Beans and snacks are tossed to crowds at temples. Also, you can face in the direction that is determined to be lucky for that year and eat a special long maki sushi roll. (7-Eleven had an arrow pointing the right direction next to the sushi rolls.) Or a roll cake. Or an ice cream roll.

It's not exactly like Groundhog Day. But I'm sure both days scar for life a small percentage of children who participate too young and too closely.

I'm not sure whose video this is. I hope that person doesn't mind.

Ignore your own cripple

What makes this poster funny/sad is that we were actually on a train that was full but not crowded one evening when a youngish guy crutched on with a cast that looked comically like the notice that's posted over every "courtesy seat" (just like the one over anime boy's head). Jim was sitting and I was standing and I saw the injured guy first and nodded toward him. Jim, of course, sprang up and motioned toward his seat, which the man hobbled right over to. It seemed strange that no one else stirred. I've stood up a few times for 105-year-old ladies who've tottered onto the train. Each time, I was surprised to be the only one who seemed to be concerned. That's something New Yorkers are good at - I've seen people hop up and get into insisting matches over who wants to stand up more for the pregnant lady. I think the reluctance here must come from fear of embarassing the person that you might otherwise offer a seat to. I can't think of any other reason that otherwise decent people would pretend not to see a frail grandmother or an injured guy. Unless they're busy sharing chocolates.