Iodine gargle: do not use

Don't let the hippos fool you.

A Japanese saying reminds us that "good medicine is bitter." Bitter I could handle. "Fruity iodine," there are no words for how bad it tastes. The fruity part doesn't help at all. It's like spraying perfume over a chemical spill. If it weren't for the happily gargling hippos on every step of the instructions, I'd think I'd accidentally ingested something that was meant for cleaning metal or lubricating gears. Not to mention the second horror, when you spit it out in shock and the entire sink looks like a slasher film.  
After that one stomach-turning mouthful, I'm tossing the stuff. Having a sore throat is not that bad.
Why do we even have it? I'll tell you, even though it's embarrassing. I bought it instead of iodide tablets when the nuclear plants were looking wobbly. I knew that a bottle of iodine tincture wasn't even close. But it felt like taking a flimsy umbrella out on a day when a typhoon might hit. You know it's futile, the wrong approach altogether, but you'd feel remiss if you didn't at least try.
The pharmacist said, "It's not the same stuff, but in a pinch, it would be better than nothing to dilute and drink it. But normally, you know,  you shouldn't." What an understatement. I'd have to seriously reconsider how important my thyroid was before I'd drink that.

Commuters, take your marks!

Asics ad-bombed the entire Yamanote train I rode home from work tonight in a pretty excellent way. Everyone took the transformation a little more in stride (ha!) than you might expect.
I always knew Tokyoites would take the gold in commuting.

Why you gotta talk so loud?!

You may be having fun, but please keep your voices down.

This one, I don't think it would go over quite so well in the New York subway. You can just bet that a bunch of feminists would be all like, Why'd you have to use women to illustrate people talking too much on the train?!
Because you know how women are. Noisy!
Really, though, the groups of people I've personally witnessed being noisy on the train are, in order, first, groups of Americans, especially beefy guys, but mixed-sex clusters of skinny 20-somethings are super racket-prone, too, especially on an afternoon train toward, say, the beach; next, Japanese middle or high school kids in sports uniforms, maybe on a post-game high and usually with a pair of den-mother chaperones ignoring their rowdiness; next, groups of three or four swaying Japanese salarymen, collars open, redfaced and repetitive on the way home at night; and last, by a lot, pairs of young women who are all like, you know, and-then-he-was-like, and so on. 
So maybe they didn't choose the actual noisiest, but the least likely to complain about being portrayed as such. Maybe the first draft was a bunch of US military guys tossing gum wrappers and plastic bottles at each other across the aisle, and then someone thought better of it.