Storifying the Skytree, and other made-up words

The Skytree finally opened yesterday after an eternity of manufactured hubbub. Just in case the protracted hype wasn't annoying enough, they sent around their mascot to do the morning show circuit today. Sorakara-chan ("from the sky") waved her arms and talked in a voice that was a combination of chalk on a blackboard and squeaking styrofoam. She answered pertinent questions from the announcers like, What's the best thing about the Skytree? and What's your favorite food? and Do you have a boyfriend? It gave me flashbacks to being introduced to endless classes of third graders.
A new intern at The Japan Times made this Storify collection about the opening. We think Storify has a lot of potential for quickly creating a multimedia survey of responses to an event. Frankly, none of the ones we've put up so far have gotten a ton of views. One thing that's cool about Storify is that the finished product can be embedded in other sites. I'm trying that here just to see what it looks like.

Total eclipse of the SMAP

You can catch an annular eclipse every few hundred years or so. But the chance to watch the moon turn the sun into a ring of fire while SMAP sings along to celebrate? Just one moment in time, baby. Maybe it was the early hour or maybe it was the fact that this boy band is pushing middle age, but watching them shuffle through their song and half-hearted hip thrusts was painful. They wore matching blue vests (and fedoras? It was early for me, too. [UPDATE: See the newly added photo below for why you should never trust witness testimony.]) and stood on a round stage with a big white ring suspended over it.

In human history, there must have been ancient people who greeted astronomical events with some form of music and dance to appease the frightening gods. I can only imagine the performance today would have the opposite effect.

"Lift your face up a little"... but only with an approved solar viewing device.

UPDATE! Don't take my word for it. Here's SMAP singing what I'm going to translate as Upside-down Sky.

I crunk corrected

As my (I hope still?) friend @Durf pointed out, "Ice cream ≠ Popjoy." Several others did, too, but none with quite the same beautifully crunky economy of expression. I admit, it crossed my mind that maybe we were getting our Crunkies crossed. I crunked to the crunkiest convenience store and crunked a Mint Crunky icemilk bar. Honestly, after the crunky Popjoy experience, my expectations were slightly crunked. I opened it up and crunked it as soon as I got outside. Hmmm, not bad! The puffed malt crispies give the chocolate shell a great texture. There are no crunky little "mint capsules" ruining everything. My crunky American palate would prefer a mintier mint taste (and a hell of a lot less plant oil), but I get it. It's tasty. To anyone I crunked off, I'm sorry.

Mint Crunky is kind of... crunky

It's that time of year, when the Twitter feeds of gaijin in Japan are abuzz with Mint Crunky sightings.
Somehow I missed the Crunky experience last year. Part of the fun is that they take a little luck to find, and I guess I'd never run across them. Yesterday I found them staring up at me from the shelf at Lawson. People go out of their way for these, and here they were, just sitting, so I felt a kind of obligation to try them. If you are a devotee, I'm going to ask you to stop reading right now. There's enough gaijin-on-gaijin rancor out there, and I don't want to start anything. But I was disappointed.
The chocolate-covered pellets are like a diluted York Peppermint Patty and malt ball mash-up. It's neither very minty nor very crunchy. It has little "mint capsules" that snap in your teeth like something that isn't supposed to be there, an effect like specks of gristle in a hamburger. It's still a sweet little nugget wrapped in chocolate, it's not like it's painful to eat. It just made me wish for candy that has more conviction.

Other writing

I wrote a story for CNN International on the buzz in Tokyo about the US presidential election. Nevermind that there isn't much. I felt like there would be more to say about it when the actual election gets closer. I learned a lot about Japanese elections while I was writing it. Most of it didn't belong in the story, but I felt like I had to understand how the Japanese see their own elections before I could understand how they see ours. (Maybe that wasn't totally necessary? It felt like it was.) I had thought I'd live out my days without knowing anything about how it all worked, so it was fun to dive into. When you've got some time, check out how Japan divvies up votes when the handwriting (!) isn't clear. They could never have the equivalent of a hanging chad problem. The editor suggested I work in karaoke somehow to give it more of a Japanese flavor. This insulted my journalistic integrity, so I put in something about pop hydra AKB48 instead. Oh, well.

The only reasonable size

I'm doing fewer posts at Japan Pulse now. One recent one was about Japanese versions of American fast foods. Make no mistake, you can get as fat as you want to in Japan. I also put up something about the remarkable unpublished "teenage wasteland" photos that LIFE magazine has released from its archives from a shoot in Japan in 1964. A lot of the pictures are of Japanese kids losing their minds to The Tokyo Beatles. Their music sounds like it wants to be a direct copy of the actual Beatles -- a copy in the same way that looking in the mirror and drawing with your left hand would give you a copy of a painting. But the band looks wilder. Backstage photos show them with shirts off and magic marker writing on their bodies. Check out the music on the post.

I don't know why posting here is so much less frequent. Probably because the time goes to Twitter, sliced up into tiny chunks like fine sushi (there's some Japan flavor!!). [Commenter: I went to a sushi shop in Kyoto once and the pieces of sushi were very large. You shouldn't say that fine sushi is small.] Anyway, the truth is that writing, anything, feels harder and harder. I don't know why. Maybe the relevant brain cells have curled up and died. I'm hoping they're just sleeping.

Who dropped this beautiful eyelash?

An ingenious little set-up for testing out fake lashes.

In the sticky heat of last summer, I thought fake lashes would be a good alternative to mascara that seemed to smear, no matter what claims it made, when confronted with Tokyo's brutal humidity. It was not a success. I didn't really give it a fair shot, though - I bought plastic ones on a discount rack from a kiosk in Harajuku. They came with their own little tube of glue. It was only in the moment of panic after I'd sealed my eye shut that I considered the wisdom of putting dirt-cheap, unbranded chemicals into my eye. It stung, and I wondered if I'd still be able to see, if and when I was able to pry my lids apart. Second maybe only to using eyebrow scissors on a jerky train, is there a dumber way to blind yourself? When the tears stopped, my vision was intact, but the lashes were, alas, not awesome. They felt like a strip of plastic wedged along my eyelid, poking in at the corners. I tried to get used to them while I cleaned the apartment that day, but I peeled them off before I went out for the evening. I'm sure getting nicer ones would help. It was pretty traumatizing, though. I'll probably stick to mascara for a while. I haven't tried this Heroine Make brand, but I like their ads.    





Who dropped this beautiful eyelash?

'Twas I! I did it on purpose!