Even close friends won't tell you if you have sweat stains

It got chilly again this weekend. Which is kind of great considering how unbearably humid it will be soon. It's already stifling in this train car. This makes the Wacoal ads for sweat-guarding clothes seem like a good idea. Notice how this ad uses diagrams, fear tactics, reassurance and a pretty western lady in Japanese clothes to make the pitch. Not to mention a clever pun for the name of the shirt itself, sugoi.

I rounded up a few of these breezy duds on Pulse. I didn't mention it there, but my resident aviation expert says that Toray, the textile company behind some of the performance fabrics, also makes the carbon fiber wings of Boeing's 787. I think that could make for an interesting ad campaign.

Meet at the lion

The lion in front of the iconic Ginza branch of Mitsukoshi department store is a common meeting point for people catching up in Ginza after work. It's a small space, but there are always a few people standing there checking their watches or killing time on their cell phones.

The bronze statue itself is behind a construction wall for restoration now. This photo could prevent I-don't-see-a-lion missed connections.

Premium Midsize Office

This place is going up near my office, at breakneck speed, of course. Not just regular midsize offices, mind you. Premium. Acme Widgets can open its generic Tokyo offices at last.

Shibazakura, field of phlox

The other night around 10:30 Miki sent a text message asking if we wanted to take a 6 am train to see a field of flowers near Mt. Fuji. I basically never want to take a 6 am train, especially with such short notice. But the fact that she was willing to made me wonder what was so great about this flower carpet thing. I checked out the website, which said that the flowers were at peak blossom as of right this second, and looked again at her message, which said that it was going to be super fantastic and she'd been waiting forever to see it.

A long train ride on a sunny day also seemed like it would be a good balance to the day before, a day that had somehow passed without getting any closer to the outdoors than the balcony. So, a compromise: we'd take a train at a more civilized hour and meet her at the Fuji Highlands.

We ran around Shinjuku station the next morning insisting to everyone in a uniform that there was meant to be a special holidays-only express train to Kawaguchiko at 10:20 and demanding to know what platform it left from. They all said there was no such train, but I wasn't fooled; Miki had said this train ran only a few times a year for this festival and don't be surprised if some of the staff didn't know about it.  And I'd seen it on the website. However, even the special "temporary" track didn't have the train displayed. We finally got on a similar - but not quite as express - express train and wondered where that mysterious Harry Potter train could be.

It was a gorgeous ride on the Chuo line, with wild wisteria hanging in the trees and bright flowers and greens in gardens. At Otsuki, we changed for the Fujisankyukou train, an adorable relic painted with silly Fuji faces, for a slower ride through Yamanashi's farmland. A man next to us sipped sake out of the screwcap of a commemorative blue glass Fujisankyu bottle, sketching the mountain, as it went in and out of view, on the side of the sake bottle's box with a ballpoint pen.

From Kawaguchiko, it was a bus ride to the Shibazakura festival. Miki had gotten stuck in terrible traffic a few hours earlier. By the time we got there, a lot of it was heading toward us. (I'm telling you, going early is rarely rewarded around here.) And so at last, after a 3-hour journey, this field of sunny pink and white flowers swept out before us at the foot of a crisp Mt. Fuji. They smelled sweet. A sign at the gate rated the flowers 50% open, despite what the website had said. There were a lot of people, a lot of them old, but the openness of the space kept it from feeling really crowded. A huge, gnarled chunk of tree turned into a polished taiko drum sent up an echoing background. Japanese fairground food, including meat-wrapped rice balls from Miyazaki, made nice snacks.

People were setting up huge tripods to wait for the sunset, but the last bus left too early for us to watch Fuji turn pink.

 The Shibazakura Festival runs through May 31. The Fuji Highlands "free ticket" from within Tokyo on JR for 4500 yen covers some of the local transportation around there, but we still needed an extra 400 yen for the bus and park entrance, and an extra 300 to take the express train (rather than the included local) from Otsuki to Kawaguchi-ko. The official name of the ticket is the 河口湖・山中湖セレクトフリーきっぷ or "Kawaguchiko Yamanakako select free kippu."

There are several express buses from Tokyo to the site. The most direct goes from Shinjuku to the festival grounds at 8:40 and 11:40, and it looks like it would be 4300 round trip, though that may not include festival entrance. And you're on a bus for two and a half hours plus god knows how long when you hit traffic.

And that mysterious holiday express train from Shinjuku to Kawaguchiko that didn't exist? It was all my mistake. That train arrives at 10:20. It leaves Shinjuku at 8:14. Because the timetable runs from bottom to top. This is totally clear once you know it. Lesson learned - keep an eye on the arrows, even - especially - if they seem to be pointing in an odd direction. Any Chuo train headed for Kofu should get you to Otsuki.

The Hard, The Quality and The Creamy

(Not pictured: the Italian)
A newish line of canned coffee from Itoen.
I hate to say it, but I've mostly lost my taste for vending machine coffee. It is reassuring to know it's there as a last-ditch option. I think there was a time when I really liked it. When I do drink it now, even though at least the last dozen cans have been in Tokyo, it still tastes like cycling to school in Miyazaki, or sneaking downstairs and outside to the machine around the corner from the board of education office where I was shackled to a desk all summer.
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At first. And then, too often, an ammonia taste jumps out and I try to make a mental note of which variety of which brand it is so I don't get it again. But there are too many. I can never remember.

I just tried The Creamy, and it was nice and mild. Sweeter than I like coffee to be, but a tasty drink. Maybe the "the" will make it memorable.

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?)