Now, who would do such a thing?

Please do it in the athletic club

Public opinion seems to be against me here, but they shouldn't make them look so fun if they don't want you to play olympics on the hangstraps. They're perfect little rings!

All the Tokyo subway manner posters so far (official site).

Standoff

10:58 am at the Hankyu department store. Shoppers look in and staff look at the floor, waiting until it's time.

Lost and found

A set of dropped and run-over keys. Who went to the trouble of finding a way to hang them in an intersection?

What is this disembodied thumb selling?

I'll tell you a little secret. Usually when I ask this, I already know the answer.

Here, I know there is a dermatology clinic involved, but beyond that, not sure what's going on here.

By the way, How to Japonese has a great post about finger and toe names in Japanese that points out that the names don't distinguish between hands and feet.

If I ever go looking any further than my own back yard

One of the things I've been missing here is sandwiches. Especially panini and baguettes. Fresh mozzarella, sundried tomatoes. (Egg salad on squishy white bread, they've got covered.)

So, it's kind of crazy that I finally found the sandwiches I'd given up on - at a tiny shop that is so near my apartment and so delicious I can only laugh. I had thought about going in a bunch of times, but it just didn't look like a sandwich shop. It's always empty and looks a little sterile. (I did actually try anyway a few times on Sunday afternoons, which I kept forgetting is when it's closed.)

They have fresh mozzerella, basil, and tomato sandwiches, brie and apple sandwiches, and even something called a reuben.

And brownies (!) and "Brooklyn cheese cake." Cheesecake is number two on my rather short list of things that Japan, bless, approximates very poorly. Sandwiches are number one. Brownies are few and far between.

That this place has been around the corner all this time kind of boggles my mind.

It's called Better Days. Indeed!

Twelve tiny Tokyo tips

If you want to know, like, what to do in Tokyo, there's a whole big internet out there. Browse my archives, check out the Nihon Sun, the Japan Travel page of About.com, the Tokyo Agenda listings at Metropolis, and Japan-i, for starters.

I figure you already have the big stuff in place - you know where to stay and have a few ideas about the main things you want to see. This is just a few tips to give you a little tiny edge as you're getting from place to place.
Shall we?

1. Get Tokyo City Atlas: A bilingual guide. I never left the house without this book for the first few months I was here. If we're friends, you can borrow one of mine. We have two.

2. Get a Pasmo card. Buy and load cash onto it at a machine at any train station. Even if you don't remember to get your $5 deposit back, it will be worth it in time and hassle saved calculating route prices and fiddling with tickets. And you'll get to see what the future feels like as you tap your wallet against the turnstile to get in and out of the train and subway system.

3. Walk on the left. This isn't a law or a rule or anything, but it took me a while to figure out why people were constantly bumping into me. Turns out, Japanese people are not necessarily clumsier than everyone else on earth, I was just wandering on the wrong side of the street. It seems obvious now, but it took kind of a while to figure out what was going on. Of course, you may be quicker than me.

4. Stand on the left. On escalators in the Tokyo area, stand to the left, walk on the right. (They say it's the opposite around Osaka.)

5. Watch your money. Pickpockets aren't a problem except maybe - maybe - if you're stumbling around Roppongi or Kabukicho late at night; running out of cash could be. The place is lousy with ATM's, but you will be surprised - and not in a good way - by how many of them won't take your non-Japanese ATM card. Or won't be open after a certain hour. Your best bet is often to use a Post Office ATM, but, even though the cash machines are often in a separate lobby that is partitioned from the main building, they usually shut by early evening. Any given convenience store chain's machine might or might not work with your particular card. They're all different, so if you find one that works for you, remember where it was.

6. Get an early start. If you must. Tsukiji market is not my favorite place, but people love it. The main tuna-auction action is over - already finished - before 6 am. It gets bright incredibly early and the trains are empty, so it feels like the city is extra supportive of your virtuous, seize-the-day zeal. Go get 'em. This will also make you feel better later when you...

7. Take a nap. Or a rest. Stop into a mom and pop coffee shop or a Starbucks or do like the salarymen and put your feet up in a massage chair for free at a big electronics store like Bic Camera or Yodobashi. Hang out on the grass at Yoyogi Park or on a bench at Koishikawa Kourakuen. The point is, just chill. You're not going to see everything anyway. You'll enjoy what you get to much more if you're rested. And I know that you could fly home first class if you had a dime for every time you were reminded of that, but it's one of those things that I know I need to hear again once in a while. So. Relax. Japandra's orders.

8. Get a late start. I am becoming more crowd-averse by the day. Bad luck, that, living in, you know, Tokyo. I hate popping out of the house at 8 on a Saturday morning to beat the crowds to wherever and finding out that 7 million other people had the same idea and they are all on my train. Where are they going? Why? Get to the famous museum or shop just as it's opening and enjoy a nice long line of fellow worm-getters. For the birds! Plan right, and hit the tail end of the lunch crowd, get to the museum an hour and a half before it closes, check out rooftop views at night. Get to the beach after the hottest part of the day and get the good spot that the sunburned family is already vacating. Go to a hot spring when people are at dinner and enjoy some quiet. Lots of karaoke places are open all day. Kill a few afternoon hours singing your head off at cheaper prices, then blink out into the evening just as lines are starting to form.

9. Don't miss the last train. They have "last trains," mostly somewhere around midnight. The theater of it can make it fun to ride the last train - the station staff wave and shout into megaphones and riders sprint and stumble for the gates as the warning bells ring - but it's no fun to miss it. Times are posted at the entrances of all the stations - glance at the sign as you're heading out for the evening. After that, you're looking at an expensive ride home, a long walk, or a lot of coffee and lousy pancakes at Royal Host. (This is not the worst thing in the world.) If you are into staying out all night at clubs or karaoke or a manga cafe, the last train is not a problem. You'll find the times the trains start up again on the same station signs.

10. Don't count on websites. I got into the habit in New York of jotting down just names to find out full details on places or items later. This isn't working so well here. A lot of really cool stores have functionless websites that are hard to find. If you like a place, be sure to grab a business card or catalog.

11. Talk to people. Ever had strangers share their cab with you, drop you off at your hotel, and refuse to take money for the fare just because you got yourself stranded at a rural train station after the buses stopped running? You won't believe how friendly and helpful people can be. You might not know a word besides "beer-u" and "arigatou" (you do know "arigatou," right?), but a good attitude and a little patience will probably get you anything you need. That, and maybe a little comical gesturing.

Bonus: Buy some stuff. You'll be glad when you got home. Try RanKing RanQueen for a little bit of everything, Don Quixote for a ton of everything, or, seriously, any convenience store. (See how that website had lots of useful English on the sidebar buttons, but then nary a word of it once you clicked through? Yeah. Key point: RanKing RanQueen is in Shibuya, Shinjuku, and Ikebukuro Stations.) Buy some goofy candy or black q-tips or t-shirts for your friends. Then, go back to that shop, spend a little extra, and get yourself that amazing thing you saw that will last a long time and remind you of your trip. When are you going to be back this way again?

No goldfish were harmed in the making of this drink

The goldfish sour was lined up on the menu with the fruit juice cocktails - the grapefruit sour, the lemon sour, the lychee sour. We thought it would be more fun not to ask what was in it. When Betty ordered, the waiter didn't write it down.

"It's spicy."

Betty said that was okay. He looked worried and finally shrugged and jotted down the order like, okay, your dime. The mystery deepened.

A goldfish sour turns out to be shochu (clear booze) and soda water with two hot dried chillies swimming around a shiso leaf at the top.

Another waiter came around and I asked if they had invented the drink. "They have it other places, but I think not too many. It's kind of unusual. By the way, do you... like it?"

Betty nodded. I asked if he had tried it.

"Me? No." He leaned down a little. "I'm scared of it."

Pores don't make a girl cute!

I can't say I've ever been overly worried about my pores, per se. I liked the looks of this face wash because, one, it has baking soda, which seems to be a totally underappreciated resource here, and two, because I, well, liked the looks of it. (See, I am superficial, but about strange things.)

Keana is not the merringue-headed moppet on the front - it means 'pores.' Which I still seem to have. But this stuff does lather into a remarkable whipped texture and leaves my face weirdly soft. It also stings my eyes like hell. Good bye VISION.

What quake?

For all the times I think the ground is swaying when it isn't, I didn't notice the big quakes tonight. In fact, I even saw a few older ladies pointing up at the vents in the ceiling in the cafe I was walking out of. They kept staring and pointing and I thought they were saying "Blood? Blood!" I looked where they were pointing and there was certainly no blood coming from the air conditioner, so I continued on out. Outside, a little boy and his mother were pointing up at the building. The storefront is bright pink. I thought maybe he was pointing at that. Who knows what will grab a kid's attention?

How did I miss this? Normally, I am quite sensitive to earthquakes, so I find it strange that I didn't notice these two big ones, even with people nearby pointing and staring and, in fact, in retrospect, obviously saying "earthquake," not "blood." (They sound slightly similar, but not that similar.)

One effect of living here is that I have come to accept that there are a certain number of experiences every day that I am just not going to understand. I remember struggling against this in Miyazaki twelve years ago and finally, one day, while sitting in the back seat of a car with my coworker and her ancient granny while her brother drove us hours south to ... what was that? Picnic and be buried in volcanic sand? I stopped. I realized I'd figure out where we were going and why when we got there and that stressing out about it wasn't going to help. I think that was good for me, overall. But there are times, like when everyone is suddenly acting like they're in a horror movie, that it might be better to let the inner control freak come out and have a closer look around.

Smallest car ever

I can't help thinking of the 22 Short Films About Springfield, in which even the very tall need need to drive a vehicle.

Someone on an old message board suggested this one-seater is a gasoline version of a Takeoka mini-car and can be driven with a scooter license. Doesn't look like this one's been driven in a while. (Someone wrote "wash me" in the grime on the front in English.)

.

Well, a tomato is a fruit

Tomato roll cake at Time Out Cafe in Ebisu. With a side of cigarette smoke and Look of Love remix.

The smoke is a bummer, but the music, browsable collection of international travel books, and the free WiFi are a treat. And the cake is delicious.

Eating lunch alone together

This is one of my favorite lunch places. I just realized I had no idea what it's called - I just think of it as "the place with the yellow flags out front near the office.*" And now that I look at the free point card I got there, it turns out to be one of those Japanese words that you still get wrong even when you (think you) can read it. The name is the characters for "small" and "town" -　小町 - and then cafeteria - 食堂. Aw, cute. Small town restaurant. Case closed, right? Nah. It seems "komachi" means "the town beauty" or "belle." Supposedly. So then why is the logo an old-school sushi chef giving a dead fish what for? Ah, anyway. None of this was the point.

The point is that I like this place because the owners are friendly and you can get whatever you like from the refrigerator case right inside the sliding front door. The kid next to me had fresh tuna and octopus sashimi with miso soup, and the guy across from me had three different deep fried mystery lumps doused in brown sauce with a pile of white rice. (I could have put a hand into the middle of each of their trays without straightening my elbows. I didn't, of course. But they are that close. Why are you looking at me like that?) I always grab a plate of fish marinated in miso and ginger and a veggie side or two, then go to the back counter to get some soup and a bowl of "health rice" with 10 types of grains and beans mixed in.

A kerchiefed motherly type whisks away whatever food you have that should be served warm and heats it up while you squeeze in at a communal table, either the long one in the middle or a four-seater next to the wall. She finds you and sets down your food and the bill while you grab chopsticks out of a box and hot tea and water from pitchers spaced along the table. There are small flat-screen TVs propped up on each side of the room tuned to some chatty afternoon variety show. I don't like TVs in bars or restaurants usually, but here it lends a living-room sort of feel and makes all the elbow-to-elbow solo diners seem less solitary.

I've only been at lunch, but it's open year round, 24/7 .

Bonus: Something in the restaurant - the phone? a notification that people are waiting by the register? - plays a MIDI version of Pomp and Circumstance. It does. Why would I make that up?

*Note to the tall: my coworker calls it "the place with the tiny tables that are impossible to sit at."

Komachi shokudo 2-17-14 Shinkawa, Chuo-ku, Tokyo and 5 other Tokyo locations.

Dodge seaweed?

Not sure quite what the beach-appropriate behavior here is. Wearing crocs? Pushing ladies toward oncoming vehicles? Frowning disapprovingly at young people having fun? All of the above, perhaps?

Last August's "Do it at the beach sign" was also a little obscure.

Do not turn your back on the crows

Crows have been in the news lately. A Washington Post article about Tokyo vs. the crows has been syndicated all over the place. It seems to me the lede was buried in favor of some alliteration. That crows are eating trash - even "garbage in Ginza" - is less surprising and interesting than that they are, in the third paragraph, eating the infrastructure of the fastest internet in the world. And the actual infrastructure, too - they've caused blackouts and stopped a bullet train?! Why not have your cake and eat it too: "shutting down shinkansens" or "feeding on fiber optics?"

Then from NPR, we find out that crows are crafty - vengeful and vindictive (wow, that is easy to fall into). The 8-minute audio portion has a story about how good they are at telling people apart and at holding a grudge forever. There's a photo test to see how good you are at telling crows apart. Those look like normal American crows, though. Listening to the story while picturing Japan's jungle crows, with beaks the size of of hearty lobster claws, makes it all the more chilling. (The character for "jungle crow," 嘴太鴉, which I don't think is actually used much, means "thick beak crow.")

Predatory crows seem to be a problem at Tokyo University, too. These signs I snapped there warn that there have been "many recent occurrences" of them sneaking up from behind on hapless students.

Among the list of warnings: As much as possible, do not take your eye off the crows.