I made a movie

This has nothing to do with Japan, but I made a little Xtranormal movie. I'm pretty sure it's just on the cusp of going viral. Click now and you can say you saw it back before it was famous.



Okay, okay, maybe not. But this is only the beginning, I tell you.

Touchscreen gloves!

It was cold in Hokkaido a year ago when we went for the Sapporo Snow Festival. Jim tried to operate his iPhone without taking his gloves off by swiping the touchscreen across the tip of his nose. It didn't work too well. Since then, I've read about crafty hacks like sewing conductive thread into the fingertips of regular gloves, and possibly apocryphal hacks like using convenience store sausages in place of fingers. I've always preferred gloves with no fingertips at all (I cut them off if necessary, which is about as crafty as I get). Before Christmas this year, I was excited to find a big selection of touchscreen gloves at Tokyu Hands. Here's a little post I did on Pulse about some of the touchscreen gloves that are out now.

One kind didn't make it into the story, because I couldn't remember what they were called. I got them for Jim for Christmas. They have arrows on the fingers pointing to the conductive bits. Kind of a low-rent Tron effect. A few weeks later, one of the gloves still works great. The other one... like Jim said, they work a lot better when you don't lose them. Ah, well. Maybe they'll come out with a line of snazzy mitten clips next.

99 bottles of sake on the wall

 

I'm probably the millionth blogger to post this picture and this title, but so be it. It is what it is: 130 varieties of sake in little dispensers, on the wall. This is Ponshukan, a sake shop tucked deep in the back corner of a market in Echigo Yuzawa train station in Niigata. It's not especially well signposted; I never would have known it was there if a friend hadn't told us it was a must-see. For 500 yen, you get five tokens and a little ceramic ochoko or two to drink from. Each token gets you one choko-full of any of the sakes. Four that we tried were smooth and delicious; one tasted kind of fishy. If we'd had a little more time at the train station, I would have tried the sake onsen next door, too. You're not supposed to drink before you bathe, but I guess it's okay to bathe in what you drink. Drink or soak in sake: either one's a nice way to relax before a 90-minute shinkansen ride back to Tokyo.

Help/frighten the locals

Here is your bag. Now I will eat you.

Update. Funny, I saw this poster and immediately thought of a small black and white picture we have of a distant Italian ancestor of mine. Everyone on Twitter thought of Matsuko Deluxe, a Japanese drag performer (who I only really learned about when I was writing about Japanese Twitter bots, and found out hers was one of the most popular.) It's not just the resident aliens who saw the resemblance - my friend Takaaki pointed me to this Japanese story on Rocket News 24 that says everyone thinks it's Matsuko Deluxe. I guess only Bunpei knows for sure. Stay tuned...
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