Purple potato latte is my new favorite drink

This is a milk drink made with strained steamed carrots, squash and purple potato. It's sweet and really does have a mild potato flavor.
Look at the amazing color of the dark purple potato. Don't you think you'd remember if you'd ever run across one before? Doesn't it seem like something restaurants would be excited to serve? That's what I thought, anyway. Turns out, they're grown only in Okinawa and it's illegal to export them raw. So they turn up in chips and now drinks, but not much else.

By the way, by "turns out" I mean "someone told me." If you know otherwise, let's hear it.

Free lard chunks

In the meat section, for greasing up your skillet. Do we have that?

Interesting that cubes of fat are free, but plastic bags at this Coop are 5 yen each. Not contradictory or anything, just interesting. I guess people have more motivation to take a pile of extra bags than to take more than they need of this stuff.

Future city Shiodome

From the top down: skyscraper, train, pedestrian bridge, highway, plaza, long escalators to semi-open underground shopping arcade. Red and white lights reflected from glass elevators slide up and down the building. This bubble-built complex is the version of Tokyo people imagine when they're thinking slick and vertical.

Hitched in Japan (Not me, relax, Mom)

Pete and Morgan came to Japan for 14 days with a modest but clear agenda: to see some cherry blossoms, find some great coffee, and get married again. They took in some chilly sakura revelry at Yoyogi Park. They had coffee everywhere - I can't wait til Pete puts his caffeine fiend's map of Tokyo online. And they got married at Minato-ku Ward office. Their goal is to pick up 12 marriage certificates before they have a friends-and-family wedding affair.

They did a little reading up in advance. They got a certificate from the US Embassy in Tokyo that said they were fit to be wed, and they filled out a pile of papers at the ward office not much more or less complicated than what I needed to get my cellphone. Someone there translated what they wrote on the forms into Japanese, including "first-born son" and "second daughter" and the phonetic spellings of their parents' names.

All that remained was to get signatures from two witnesses. Feeling celebratory, they went to a cafe across the street from the government building. They tried to convince a waitress to sign. She might have been game, but she checked with a manager who came over, grunted "Happy wedding" in English, and motioned for them to put the unsigned papers away. They cabbed over to my neighborhood. Over spicy black tantan men, careful not to get any broth on the forms, I signed one half of the witness form. We walked back to my office in the rain, where they traded a foil pack of blueberry gummies for another signature from one of my coworkers. Taxi back to the ward office. I joined them and smoothed over a few queries from the kindly, but possibly contagious, civil servant helping them from behind his flu mask.
(Pete gamely tried to answer a question by explaining the societal concept of adding "Jr." to a name, but it turned out the guy was just asking whether it should be transliterated as "joonier" or "jiyoonier.") The clerk, Mr. Toyoda, was one of those cool old guys I associate more with Miyazaki than Tokyo. When I asked him if they could get a copy of the certificate to keep, he said it had to be for a specific purpose, like for submitting to an embassy or a court. I leveled with him - they just want a copy to keep. "Gotcha,"  he said. "We'll call it... embassy."

We sat and waited for the official document longer than the original paperwork. We were alone in the rows of seats except for a nosy homeless guy. Finally, they paid an extra three bucks and got an A4 certificate, a pretty cool souvenir from their first trip to Japan.

Winter weather, summer hats

On the morning show Mezamashi TV, the model insisted that the only way to wear spring's hot boater hat, or "kankan-bou," is to tilt it a bit, just so. She held the pose a few seconds longer than was comfortable to watch.

Back in the studio, as they do, the regular announcers each showed off one of the hats. With an awkward adjustment and an unconvinced, unsmiling laugh, the non-model modeling the straw hat said, "She said it looks more fun if we tip it like this." She didn't look like she was having much fun. 

I had fun writing about boater hats for Pulse, though. Except I've been plagued with the old ShopRite can-can jingle the entire time. (Does anyone at all know what I'm talking about?)

Coffee/social grace taste

I took the Starbucks Via taste test challenge today. I sipped from the two paper shot cups and knew which was the instant coffee. I named the right one with confidence. Which means, of course, that I was totally wrong.

The nod from the woman in the green apron was something between disappointed and annoyed. We both turned to the woman of a certain age behind me, who was tickled to try the coffee she'd seen on TV that morning. She was a Japanese steel magnolia (steel tsubaki?), powdered, coiffed, brooched and charming. "Let me try," she said. She sipped, and went blank for a moment, like everyone on TV does when tasting anything.

"Why, I don't taste any difference at all. They're just exactly the same!" Ah. That, of course (of course!) was the right answer. "It pleases me so much that you feel that way!" the aproned one beamed. Some lame need to not appear ungrateful or blunt made me try again. "Yeah, I mean, they're both really good, right?" I said.

We each got a coupon (buy three Vias, get one free), even if mine was handed over reluctantly. I put it in my wallet.

If I try Via again, next time I'll try adding a little sugar.

Dangerous product placement

In the basement of Ginza's Hanamasa, the wholesale grocery store, they have a syrup section. The honey on the right, in an industrial squeeze bottle, is just the start. There's lemon honey, sundae toppings, corn syrup, maple syrup and kuromitsu, a dark molasses, all delicious treats.
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On the left is another squeeze bottle of amber gel. That one goes on charcoal to help it burn. Less delicious. Choose with caution.

Caramel dose

Each flavor of these caramels is more delicious than the last. The first one I noticed was black tea, then plain, then dark chocolate and now matcha. The only one that was underwhelming was plain.
They come in odd little pressed packets, sealed like ice pops or maple seed pods. It takes focus to unpeel them without making a sticky mess. The bag suggests chilling them. This would surely make it easier to scrape
the slick of goo out from between the sandwiching wrappers. I intend to try this, but the bag is always empty by the time I get to it.

C. C. Lemon. Yeah!

What's interesting about this family of aliens from planet lemon is that they're standing in front of the Tokyo Sky Tree. That's the latticed column in the middle of the background. When it's done, it will be the tallest structure in Japan, twice as big as the next tallest. But right now, it's only (exactly) half built. Directly above the top of the frame of this picture, there are just cranes and bare beams.
Also, there's the whole family of aliens from planet lemon thing.

Twitter life

I know that writing this makes me one of those starry-eyed late-adopter people. (What is it they say about new converts?) If you're all "I don't see the point of Twitter and I don't care to," that's totally fine. Move along. You will find this post very annoying. Guaranteed.

Most of this weekend was a direct result of Twitter.* There was a big cherry blossom party on Saturday for a group of people who all met on Twitter. It was hosted by a couple, Kerry and Mimy, who are both active users. Before we headed there, I met up with my friend Kim. I met her first on Twitter and then for the first time in real life when I spotted her sitting behind me at an event and recognized her from her avatar and from a Twitpic she had posted.

At the party, warmed by the heat of two non-stop charcoal grills, I was talking to Satoka. I knew from her posts that she spends time in Shibuya and asked if she had any suggestions for where to take some visiting friends that night. She said there was a modern Japanese bar and restaurant with microbrews that would be perfect, except that it had no sign and would be hard to find. All the better! She called the owner of the place, Cacoi, and asked if he'd be open that night. He said yes, and she asked him to keep an eye out for a group of foreigners. She told me to mention her using her Twitter handle - that's how they knew each other.

During a mass stroll through the tony neighborhood's sakura-lined river, I talked to my friend Joseph, a Brit who's involved with TEDxTokyo. I told him about my friend-I-haven't-met-yet Andrew, another Brit in Singapore who does online presentation training videos using TED Talks as a base. Joseph was one of the few people there that Jim already knew. Jim stays away from the Twitter pipe, but can't avoid getting some second-hand smoke. I pointed to Mark when we got there. "That's the guy who got stuck in traffic on the three-day weekend," I said. Jim went right over and struck up a conversation. "Sandra showed me the pictures you put up that day," Jim said to Mark. "Man, I've been there."

We said our goodbyes to the Twitter party, including Niki's whole family, up from Osaka for the event, and Theresa, who had come from Shizuoka. On the train, I checked in with Emma, my friend-I've-never-met in LA who recommended I read Pattern Recognition. I am loving the book. (I pester author William Gibson, occasionally, too, on Twitter.)

The visiting friends were waiting at Hachiko's bronze paws, just as we'd arranged on Twitter the night before. I know this will make my mother nervous, but the head of the group was a man from Romania named, as far as I knew up until a few days ago, Bluegod. (His avatar is a cartoon of a blue dog. This confuses my little brain every time.) Marius and his friends were completely lovely, as I expected from his posts. Six of us had drinks (craft beers for them, black tea ume shu for me) and seasonal takenoko and mountain vegetable tempura. They hurried to catch the last train, leaving behind a present of a book that looks great.

On Sunday, some old-fashioned offline touristing with real-life non-Twitter friends Pete and Morgan. Non-Twitter on pain of penalty; Pete has been given ultimatums about starting an account.  I parked them in a cafe (a gem, discovered simply because it's on the way home) to check out a small art exhibition. In my new constant trendquest, I asked the guy next to me if I could take a picture of his glasses. He said sure and asked how I knew about the show. Twitter.  Him too. We exchanged handles, which means I should be able to get a hold of him easily if I need follow-up info about his specs.

When I started doing reporting for Kyodo News in 1999, it was about a fifty-fifty deal whether companies would have the information we needed online or not. When I left the Tokyo Shimbun in 2008, our English language reporting was almost all done online. I imagine finding some of the feature story subjects I hunted down would be easier or the people found would be a wider pool with the added power Twitter's loose connections.


*Not Friday. Friday I went to see Matthew Sweet and Susannah Hoffs play at Billboard Live at Tokyo Midtwon. It was great. Jim got tickets through work, and we went with a friend who is adamantly not into the world of Twits. I didn't tweet about it. Oh! Except I did find Matthew Sweet on Twitter afterwards. He pimps his handmade ceramics (!) there. I sent him a message. He hasn't replied yet.


Image credit:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/carrotcreative/ / CC BY 2.0

Akihabara escalator: going up, and over, and up

This is the escalator to the Chuo line at Akihabara station.  It goes up-flat-up. (You won't be surprised to know there's one that goes down-flat-down, too.)

The flat part in the middle is disorienting. It feels like the starting point for the rise up could be anywhere, even if you can see that your feet are firmly in the middle of the step.

(There are better videos in the "related videos" that come after mine ends.)