And now it's stuck in your head, too

The theme song for the last two years or so on morning news show Toku Dane ("[news] Exclusive") has been We Built This City. The three presenters stand in front of the desk with their hands clasped primly in front of them while the camera zooms in from above and around, 80s synthesizers whooshing as the music rises and then falls down to background level and plays through to the end as they begin the program - rather loudly for background music, too. Can you imagine starting your day with We Built This City on Rock and Roll every day? You don't build up a tolerance. It doesn't leave you. Marconi just plays the mamba, over and over.

But now, the show's got something mysterious. Something I just can't touch. And now it seems, it seems they've changed the song. Invisible Touch. I thought it was bad to have Grace Slick hassling you all day -- Don't you reMEMber? Blender didn't name it the worst song ever for nothing.



But Invisible Touch, it takes control and soon it tears you apart. It's true. Someone on Wikipedia calls it "a meditation on intangibility." I suspect that person was not forced to listen to it before work on a weekday. The other song, looking back, at least had sort of an aspirational, upbeat drive. There's just something whiny and forced about Invisible Touch, at least the fortieth time it repeats inside your brain.



I reached for the remote to turn the show on at eight this morning, and then thought better of it.

Swine Flu 101

Japanese news shows are great at making little explanatory graphics. Now, we could impose any number of willful misinterpretations on this diagram (and I hope you will), but it does get to the point.

Japan is pretty far from any recorded outbreak so far. But not really. Nowhere is. They do have fever-cams at the airport, though, that show the temperatures of people coming through arrivals.

They did a photo montage from Mexico (with ominous sound effects) and interviewed a Japanese boxer living there who said it was a little scary and he didn't want to go outside. Then they scrummed Japanese arrivals from Mexico at the airport. A tanned youngish man in a ballcap blinked in the camera lights and said he had no idea what they were talking about.

A NY correspondent said that a local pharmacy had already sold out of face masks. Panic! (I didn't know we even carried them, but, moving on.)

And then, they gave a list of things people should prepare at home - 50 face masks per person, canned food for a month, liters of clean water, a hand-crank flashlight and radio, etc. Which sounds out of proportion and crazy. But not completely.

Incidentally, I imagine all the photos of people in face masks are eerie elsewhere, but from here, it looks like a normal day on the subway. Except that the masks are blue and creepy instead of white and creepy.

Leave Tsuyoshi alone

After ten long seconds of silence at his guilt-admitting press conference, Kusanagi finally answered the question, "On what kinds of occasions do you feel like drinking?"
On the morning show replay, a stopwatch runs up as he looks down. Two hundred journalists hold their breaths. Music you would expect to hear played over a grainy, slo-mo image of an empty swing plinks away. And the tarnished aging boy band singer haltingly admits: "I've always liked alcohol."

Back to the studio, where an unlikely defender in the often-outraged conservative host stands up for him. "Only someone who doesn't drink could ask a question like that." A crusty panelist is unmoved. "I would have liked a better answer."

And then, a beautiful moment. Piko, a 64-year-old man wearing many pretty bracelets mists up and says Kusanagi must have felt under attack.

Let's back up a moment. It would be hard to overstate how much attention this has been getting. A couple visiting from Australia said they'd been flipping through the channels on their hotel TV and had seen the same urgent broadcast of the same downcast, clean-cut looking guy on every station. "Who did he kill? Was it a school shooting?" they wondered.

No. As an executive I know gravely reported to me, "He drank much, much sake and he stripped himself." This was in a park at 3 am in (party hell-hole) Roppongi with a few buddies. The cops came because he was whooping it up and the neighbors complained. He is said to have shouted at the police "So what if I'm naked, where's the harm?"

Where isn't it? The financial impact has been reported to be over 10 million dollars, as he's been yanked from everything from his toque-wearing turn on a weeknight cooking show to his narration of a fun children's educational TV segment. His commercials for Toyota and P&G have been pulled, and the Japanese government is "seeking and replacing" the posters on which he informed the public about the switch from analogue to digital broadcasting.

The disappointment is palpable. My executive friend sighed, "I don't know why he stripped himself." The nation looks on in collective sadness and shock, looking for reasons, wondering the same thing.

There may not be a Chris Crocker here to smear his eyeliner over it, but I'm glad that Piko had the courage, in his own subtle way, to say, "Just leave him alone."

What is this cracked egg selling?

Hello, idea.
by Columbus (1451-1506)

Hint: it involves explorer Christopher Columbus. Obviously.

Breakfast of Earthling Champions

"On Earth
there is a meal
that has evolved."
There is a caption contest on this poster - they ask you to fill in a different word for "evolved" to describe their "10-second meal" gel.

Happy Pulitzer Day

They might not need a public service announcement about this if newspapers weren't five feet wide. I always get sections sliding out and getting crunkled up when I try to open the paper. I think newspapers in America no longer being wider than my armspan is the single good outcome of our shrinking newspaper industry.
In other good news, the IHT runs the NYT crossword, though something like six weeks late. I can fold the paper into halves and then thirds to get exactly a crossword-size exposure.

Do over

Last summer, when we went to see the Yakult Swallows play the Hiroshima Carp at nearby Jingu Stadium, I messed up. I had bought tickets from the Lawson ticket machine without knowing who sits where and ended up in the middle of the Carp's cheering side. That was fine, I don't have any strong Japanese baseball allegiances. Fish, birds, whatever. Maybe you know something about how Japanese baseball fans coordinate and organize. They make honeybees look sloppy. Before the seventh inning last year, everyone around us started blowing up long balloons. Some guys behind us handed us some. I blew mine up and waved it in the air like everyone else. Suddenly, at some secret, unanimous signal, like a flock of flamingos rising into the air, everyone released their balloons and they zoomed up into the sky to land in branches and in the back fence. (Happy Earth Day!) Except mine. Because, of course, I had tied the end in a knot. I looked at Jim and Ayda, who were both empty-handed and laughing. I asked them, clutching my lone balloon, how they had known not to tie them. "Dunno. Just figured. You tied it?! Why'd you tie it?!"
I turned around to face the guys who had given us the balloons. They spluttered their beer. "What did you do? You can't tie it! Why'd you tie it?!"
I undid the knot and my balloon fizzled up and away.
This year, by chance, we saw the same teams play. We watched from a comfortable distance as the Carp-ers released their stupid balloons. Instead, we were surrounded by people waving clear plastic green umbrellas with plastic birds perched on top.
Luckily, nobody offered us any.

Pig princess

This man was walking his pet baby pig along the Tama River Sunday. Her name was Hime-chan - princess. Her leash, which the guy had looped around his neck while she trotted free behind him, had little piglets on it. The guy seemed pretty shy, but asked right away if we wanted to hold her. Have you ever held a baby pig? The hair was sparse and wiry and the critter was hot to the touch.

Gut, Recession Buster

"100 yen gyoza declaration. This shop supports everyone. Blow away the recession."

This is a popular Chinese food chain called Wan Tsu Chi, or, Chronicle of Ten Thousand Pigs*. Their hot sesame noodle soup is very good. Their ramen noodles are nice and firm. In the summer, they make my favorite cold noodles.
And they are giving the recession what for with cheap platters of gyoza.

You can find locations here. Listings are in Japanese, but the map should come up in Japanese and English.

*If anyone has anything better for 万豚記, don't be shy.

Night at the Jinja

I stayed at the hotel attached to Mitsumine Shrine in Chichibu this weekend for some quiet and some nature.


They give you a yukata, and a futon that you lay out yourself. My room was across the hall from their big communal hotspring bath.

There is a thermos of hot water and a teapot and box of green tea in the room. And a cookie. I went for the no-meal option, so the stay cost only 40 bucks. The meal is a fancy, fussy spread in a separate private tatami room, which is no fun alone. I planned to grab something from the cafeteria in the lobby. I didn't know it closed before 5. I made do with souvenir food from the gift shop - walnuts, spicy fried gobo sticks, and huge sweet black beans. And a vending machine yogurt.

This room would be a squeeze for three people, but couldn't be more perfect for one.

At 6 am there was a gong from the temple hall outside, followed, if I am not mistaken, by an electronic version of Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring broadcast over the hallway loudspeakers (special for Easter?). This was replaced by a recording of tinkling water and chirping birds as background sound effects for a hypnotically repetitive suggestion that everyone enjoy some delicious coffee at the coffee shop.

The nearby mountain is called Kumotori, or "cloud grabber." Like the Smokies, it does what it says on the tin. The sky was bright white by six, but the actual sun didn't poke through the cloud cover til it was pretty well over the mountain. I got up to take a look from an ornate scenic overlook platform near the shrine, and there was a photographer already there, a middle aged Japanese man, who'd slept in his car nearby to set up his tripod to wait for the sunrise. He wanted me to know he was using American Kodak film.

Moment of zen

A waterfall in Chichibu, near Owa. The longest and furthest I've been outside here without seeing another person. (3 hours, 5 km.)

Watch your fingers. Or else!

Most of these signs have smiling cartoon raccoons or crabs or just hands. I wonder if there have been bloody finger incidents on the Keikyu line that demanded a more graphic warning.

Give up

C'mere. I'll give ya some a' this guy.

Something about this ad recruiting part time train station employees doesn't seem that welcoming.

Taepodong Breaking news

NHK just broke into a show about a very old family of farmers to report that North Korea will launch a missile "any moment."

For some reason, the visual was a static picture so blurred that it could have been a national border from a satellite or a macro of a piece of moldy toast. The voice-over that made the ominous announcement was digitally warped as they do with crime witnesses. Hm. Why?

Read over someone's shoulder at home

Look at the usual troublemaker on the right, trying to read over the poor guy's shoulder from two seats away.

Only the press release is an April Fool's joke

Most of the JR train platforms in metro Tokyo are non-smoking as of yesterday. No more clusters of smokers huddled around industrial platform ashtray installations. Nice. Would you like a few facts about this, maybe from Japan Rail? This looks like the relevant press release: "Set Areas in the Metropolitan Area to be Made Entirely No-Smoking." Let's just click on it, as suggested at the top of the press release page, and see what it says. Ha! Gotcha! Only six of the last five dozen are actually links. The rest are just unlinked headlines, often vague ("set areas?"). Several with double exclamation points.

Useful Japanese phrase #712

泥のように倒れそうだね。

Doro no yoh ni ta-o-re-soh da ne.

You are about to collapse like mud.

(Drink Aquarius.)

Seeing blue

Glasses for the "blue diet" were my silly near-purchase of the week. Hers was much better.

To lose weight, you just wear the glasses when you eat. They make food look less appealing or alter your brain chemistry or both. Nineteen bucks.

Some thing about some missiles

Yes, I feel lame that the Protein Water commercial was on during a feature about the North Korean missile launch and I'm talking about the skinny machos. I will give you a little update.

They do make news easy to understand on the morning feature shows. The reporter put up a map of the world and stuck on cardboard flags to narrate the reaction to the last time North Korea launched a missile right over Japan into the Pacific. The flag over Japan said "anger" and had a little manga anger symbol. Then America got an anger flag (over NY), and then South Korea got one, too. But wait! When NK explained that it was just for a satellite, the top layer peeled off the US flag revealing "relief," with litle "phew!" sweat drops. Ditto South Korea. Japan, still angry. (I personally was "annoyed" as I had to work late every night for ages, but that is neither here nor there.)

A reporter on the street in midtown Manhattan stopped two middle-aged white people, asking them without context what Taepodong means. One asked if it was a game, and another mixed it up with tempura over rice. (That's "ten-don." Close!) Back to the studio to ram home the point that people in other countries just don't know or care about the situation.

David Spector, the token foreigner on the panel, stepped up and said that the situation is indeed being reported overseas, but that they are using terms like "North Korean missile" more than "Taepodong" so simmer down. Thank you, David.

Incidentally, stopping people on the street in midtown Manhattan and asking them without context what Taepodong means is probably exactly what I am doing right now in the parallel universe where I stayed in New York with the Japanese media.

For you, skinny macho guy

A commercial for new Suntory Protein Water, a cloudy white drink that's packaged in a barbell-shaped bottle. A dance-off between the "skinny machos" and the "beefy machos." The final text says this drink is "for you, the skinny macho."