Hey, look over there!

Japandra is going to return to being USAndra for a few weeks.

In the meantime, you should look at Quirky Japan. It's a lot like this site. Er, except that he has really amazing photos, insightful commentary and useful information.

But come back some time, okay?

Don't drink and ride

They got puking, fighting, and falling down on the tracks. They left out passing out on the shoulder of the person next to you.

The doctor will eat you now

We did that thing where you stick your feet into a pond full of fishies ravenous for dead human skin. Now, of course, this sounds like a great - actually, no, it sounds insane, like it might make you shreik and squirm and have disturbed flash backs for a while.
Even though the nibbling feels like a painless field of mild electroshocks, a quick peek reminds you that it is in fact the tickly defeat of jillions of years of evolution happening between your toes. I wasn't sure what they were actually doing, though. They have little vacuum mouths and suck around like they're cleaning an aquarium. But they didn't congregate at callouses.
In this pic, taken by another skeptical foreigner who had smuggled a cellphone into his yukata, the swarm had already mostly moved on to fresher feet.
The critters are called "Dr. Fish." I had seen them on "look what the crazy Asians are up to" AP features last year. There are a million YouTube videos of it. Check them out, if you want your nightmares for free.

We paid 1500 yen for 15 minutes at Ooedo Onsen Monogatari in Odaiba, Tokyo. General admission to the baths, including yukata, bath amenities and old-timey Japanese carnival games, is about 3000. Lots of restaurants and additional massage treatment options for additional fees, all scanned onto a wristband barcode. You can also spend the night in a recliner for that price, if you don't mind a lounge full of snorers.

Discomfort sells

This English school called Gaba has a series of ads that each have one sullen, disinterested westerner and one morose Japanese person. A strange dymamic for a company whose selling point is friendly, one-on-one conversation.

One theory is that after you take their classes, you won't feel uncomfortable if you find yourself facing down a dour librarian or an irratable cop.

I don't know what they're getting at, but I don't think that's it.

The cowboy ad's thought bubble mentions "a quiet guy like me."

Could the western person represent the Japanese person's inner foreigner?

This is only a test

Almost 100,000 foreigners swarmed out of small train stations and herded toward college campuses all over Japan Sunday morning for the JLPT, a standardized Japanese test given twice a year. I joined in, for old times' sake. I passed it back in the Kyushu days and decided to give it another go. To see how the old brain is holding up. To make myself buckle down and study a little.

The people settling into their assigned seats in the benches throughout the lecture hall where I took it looked more or less representative of the ethnic breakdown of the non-Japanese in the city: some Russian women, Indian men, assorted North Americans, Brits, and Aussies, and lots and lots of Koreans and Chinese. It used to be necessary to pass it to enroll in a Japanese university as an exchange student. I think that's not true any more, but there were many college-age kids, girls dressed up in fake leather jackets and tights and guys slouched over in black and white camouflage and striped hoodies. A businessy French couple chatted before it started, and a grandfatherly white guy polished his wire rimmed glasses. Some people crammed from kanji workbooks and some slept. A few looked hungover. Most looked nervous.

The Korean girl next to me was a fidgeter. She rolled her three sharpened pencils on the desk. She held up the answer sheet and growled at it when the proctor handed it to her. She chomped on the powder blue strap of her watch during the test. After she burned through the kanji section, she hummed a little as she drew and erased cartoons on the front of the question booklet until time was called. When the first section was over, she climbed under the desk.

Her test ID said she was born in May of 2000, but I don't believe she was a day over six. Her mom came in and collected her after each section. They both looked kind of resigned. It was no place for a kid, especially the 70-minute reading comprehension section, which was about things like supply and demand, job satisfaction questionnaires, and dating in Roppongi. I felt a little bit bad for her when I glanced over halfway through and saw her swinging her legs and blowing quiet raspberries at the pages. Just a little bit, though. She did dust me on the other sections.

Extra cheese, and just drop it down the chimney

Pizza-La is offering a special treat for its customers - not to mention for its delivery people. Between December 13 and 25, upon request, your pizza can be delivered by "Santa Claus." (This is the first time I've noticed quotation marks used like that in Japanese.) But make your pizza delivery reservations now - they are expecting so many orders on Christmas eve that they won't be able to accommodate people who wait til then to order their Christmas pie.

A better Christmas treat would be a pizza that didn't cost 40 bucks.

Ho, ho, ho.

Well drawn

Japan is banning smoking from the outside in. "Walking-smoking" is prohibited in crowded areas by signs like this, though I don't think there's any kind of enforcement. People still, of course, do walk and smoke. But they also jockey for position around the municipal ashtrays set up in designated outdoor smoking area. The effect is sort of the inverse of bums standing around a burning trashcan.

We went to a really nice cafe in Daikanyama with an airy patio and a comfortably crowded dining room. Smoking was permitted only inside. As a rule of thumb, the smaller and less ventilated a place is, the more likely it is to be crammed with chain smokers.

An earlier draft suggested "in the gutter."

(Please do it at home.)

Why are the receptionists always frosty?

The dozens of stylists were friendly, though. I talked to/was handled by five.

When I made the reservation, the receptionist said to call again if I couldn't find the place. I couldn't. When I called from nearby for directions, I almost just canceled the reservation out of embarrassment. She sounded so fed up, I felt like an idiot for not being able to glide right to the (nifty wide, center-hinged) door. (The place is well hidden - you actually have to go into an unmarked building entrance and through a courtyard to find it.) But while I was hanging my head in the waiting room, she answered the phone and gave the same directions three more times to locals, so I felt less bad.
It is a nifty three-story warren of lacquer-trimmed rooms with a fashionable jumble of antlers, owls, antique wallpaper, and artfully placed musty luggage. A faded Mona Lisa sits propped on the floor against the wall in a chipped gilt frame. She and I traded bemused looks while I got my hair washed and ears swabbed once and then, later, again.
There are so many stylists bustling around - carrying stacks of magazines, leading customers from one room to the next, passing messages from the front desk to each other, and wheeling carts full of shiny sharps and strange bottles - that it feels like an arty ER.
My main stylist was a chatty, pretty Japanese lady with blond hair who seemed like she'd been carrying around a list of things she would love to ask a foreigner if she ever got the chance. Like, "I know someone from Greece and she only washes her hair every two weeks. How often do foreigners usually wash their hair? Japanese people usually wash their hair every day, even though it's actually bad for it." And, "Sometimes I use web sites to translate Japanese to English, and I don't speak much English, but it looks like it comes out pretty strange. Does it? It does? I knew it!"
She cooed again over the size of my skull (small) and the consistency of my hair (thin strands, but plentiful) and walked me all the way to the front door.

I can't make heads or tails of the website, but it's pretty.
Bloc de Zenith, Shibuya, near the ward office. 03-5784-3228