Fire and ice, in a can

I don't love canned coffee anymore. I still think it looks cool and it's neat that it exists, but I can't say I love drinking it. So I usually don't. But it's hot out. An icy "not too sweet" iced au lait might be just the thing...

Ice, ice Oreo

What does ice flavor taste like? In Oreos, lemon.
There's sort of an asterisk at the bottom (one of these guys: ※) explaining that "a cool-feeling creme is used in this product." As if to quiet the people complaining, "Hey, these Ice Flavor Oreos don't taste like ice!"

The other Tokyo subway manners posters

There are two separately administered subway lines in Tokyo. (I'm on one right now, so I can't look up the details.) As the manners posters on Tokyo Metro get cuter and cuter, the ones on the Toei line are getting punchier. Look at this. Kapow!

How many yen per meter?

Another thing I've failed to get excited about is the Sky Tree. It's a big TV tower. The tallest tower in the world and the second tallest structure, after the Burj Khalifa. And, if I'm reading Wikipedia right, it's also the tallest structure on an island? Couldn't they just stop at "tallest tower in the world"? Anyway, yesterday they announced the price to go to the observation decks: 2000 yen to go to the lower deck at 350 meters and 3000 yen to the upper deck at 450 meters. That's almost 40 bucks, with the yen as strong as it is. On Twitter yesterday, Nikkei Trendy set off a wave of price comparisons for tall buildings around Japan when they calculated a trip up Tokyo Tower at 5.68 yen/meter and Sky Tree at about 6.67. One reader pointed out that the Shin Umeda Sky Building in Osaka was a bargain at just 4 yen/meter, but my pal Durf won the day with some back-of-the-envelope math.

You've seen someone like this

A single bound!

When we came back to Tokyo in the beginning of April, the first foreboding change I noticed was a big fat cat lounging around in the subway station. On the wall. The clever yellow “Do it at home” and “Do it again” posters had apparently been replaced by the lowest form of art: a cute cat photo. At the risk of alienating you: I hate cute cat photos. Was every month going to be a different cat? The new slogan is “We’ve seen people like this,” or, “You’ve seen this type of person.” The message of the fluffy fat cat was that you shouldn't take up too many seats on the train. Would they have soft-focus cats illustrating all the bad subway behavior? Shoving adorably to get on first, endearingly grooming themselves on board, slurping ramen with their widdle paws? The horror. The obvious answer to this concern was, of course, “Hang in there!” Luckily, May brought a sort of funny flying dog, (why are dogs okay and cats annoying? I don’t know. They just are.) and now June’s poster is totally appropriate and more cringey than cute: this wet dog shaking himself off, warning people about not splattering each other with their umbrellas. A timely message, since rainy season officially started here on May 27, a little earlier than usual.
The new manners posters are collected on the Tokyo Metro site.

Here’s a bonus page of umbrella-handling etiquette for those who read Japanese. I never thought about how to open and close and umbrella before - handy. People follow many of these already. Most folks almost always wrap their umbrellas neatly before getting on the train, and most adults are more likely to tap the points on the ground to shake off water than to pinwheeel them around. The worst offense I spot is people holding their umbrellas pointed almost horizontally out behind them, like swords they’re about to draw with a flourish. Not to give anyone any ideas.

Tokyo magic

Joker in a bottle

I wanted to do something fun for Jim’s birthday, but nothing too crazy for a Thursday night; a hangover on a busy, early work day isn’t much of a gift.

A few times he’d snapped cellphone pictures of lit signs outside of “magic bars,” saying “we’ve got to come back and check one of these places out sometime.” Magic bars are a thing in Tokyo. Sometime had come!
The bunch of people who agreed to come out may have had their doubts, but they all showed up at the fifth-floor bar in red-light district Kabukicho. The other establishments in the building looked like they’d make your money disappear with different kinds of tricks.

The cab dropped us off near the place, halfway between the only two places we ever go in the area: a loud, loud rock bar that we’ve never left any earlier than 3 am and a cheap karaoke bar that attracts all of the neighborhood's angriest gaijin. Jim said later he was sure we were going to one of these two and was secretly disappointed that this was the birthday surprise. But no! Up the steps of the shady building and through the door with the manga magician! The bar is called Calvados, but it says “Cuore the Magnificent” on the door. Hey everybody!

We sat at the center of a long, curved bar, and a young magician named Kokoro did close-up magic, like fork bending and card tricks. As promised, he made a birthday cake appear in a flash of fire. He took a group polaroid of us that turned out to be the end of another trick. Most confounding of all, he put a happy birthday card inside that bottle of green tea.
Another magician set up soon after with rope tricks, disappearing coins and mutilated 1000-yen bills. He taught us all how to do a disappearing tissue trick.


There was a short stage show with audience participation. It was all pretty good. Kokoro emptied a paper cup full of water that I was holding over my head. He “hypnotized” a friend into not being able to pick up a light wooden box. (Dan got him back, though, by accidentally swinging the box up to reveal the trick bottom.) The best trick was when he made a real bowling ball and pin fall out of a floppy paper notebook. Actually, the best trick was getting a guy who was in the middle of a long week and who’d had his vacation revoked, again, to grin like a kid on his 40th birthday. Shazam!

Why Japanese people make the peace sign in photos, or, "Say Veeeeee"

The thing about those two titles for this post is that one is misleading and the other is impossible to search. And it's not SEO trouble I'm worried about, it's my own search ability. I've sort of lost tons of my own posts because I can't remember what I called them and the obscure titles had nothing to do with the content. (That is, lost like something you know is in the living room somewhere is lost.)  
Jake asked me to write a post for his site two months ago* explaining why Japanese people have such an overwhelming tendency to make the peace sign when a camera is pointed at them. I was excited to write it so that I could finally find out for myself. I found quite a few posts and articles in both English and Japanese that, like this one, dangled the promise of an answer. Also like this one, they didn't deliver it. I'm going to go ahead and spoil the ending of my Japan Subculture post: I never did find a definitive answer. I did make up a theory, though. So, why do Japanese people make the peace sign in photographs?


*I put off posting here for a few days and then it kind of fell by the wayside.

Camping for city slackers

I have mixed feelings about camping. I like it if the weather's perfect and there's a decent bathroom and running water and we don't have to carry anything too far. And the floor's not lumpy and there are no bugs. Otherwise, it all seems like a little too much trouble and too little sleep. Hm, I guess that's not really "mixed" feelings. My co-writer Felicity at Japan Pulse wrote a post about camping in Japan for amateurs. These campsites put up the tent for you and provide all the goods for a campfire meal. You just roll up with a change of clothes and maybe a toothbrush. The fanciest level of service was "princess camping," which comes with a butler. You know, a camping butler. (Surely this calls for Photoshop.)
I met up with some friends of a friend for a night of camping over Golden Week. It was an old cabin campground on the bank of Lake Saiko, one of the five beautiful lakes around Mt. Fuji.  It's a nice site, compact. Over the years they kept adding cabins in the spaces between cabins until it reached its current slightly crowded state. The public toilets there were cleaner and nicer than in any train station bathroom. The group of people I was with go camping once per season and always put up a banner that says "Sound of Mountain." They keep a group journal and split up the equipment, from folding tables and cast iron pans to a tightrope to sling between trees for fun. They didn't choose the campsite for its mod cons, but I appreciated having them. The gravel parking lot is just steps from the cabins - all the easier to lug the cardboard boxes of food, spices and even a kit they used to smoke cheese and salami over sakura wood chips. The cabins have tatami floors and the front office rents thin futon mats and wool blankets for an extra 100 yen apiece. There was also an overhead fluorescent light. It had an outlet where they plugged in a computer for music and an electric water pot, rigged securely with the tightrope to hang from a ceiling beam, because its cord was too short to reach the floor.
We made a huge pot of curry for dinner with vegetables from a roadside stand -- and a can of tuna fish someone had brought. At least cooler heads prevailed when someone wanted to throw in a ton of celery greens.
We sat around after dinner, shivering, leaning into the fire for warmth and squinting against the smoke from damp pine branches and dried needles. They asked for some American kids' camp songs. I tried to explain the lyrics to There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly. I said, hearing the strangeness of it for the first time, "Anyway, it goes on like this til finally, she swallows a horse." The guy in the group asked, skeptical, "And she was okay?" And it was a shame that we were speaking Japanese and not English, because the translation wasted that perfect set-up for "she died, of course." It's funny, sort of, if it rhymes. If not, it's just bizarre.
The only thing missing was marshmallows. I would have brought some, but I didn't think of it til we were all staring into the embers around 10 pm. I could really use that round-the-clock camping butler.

TEDxTokyo

TEDxTokyo is tomorrow. I'm excited to be there as part of the social media team. I'll be one of the people tweeting from the @TEDxTokyo Twitter account. (I wonder if you can tell which ones are mine?) The presentations will be live streaming from 9 am to 6 pm Japan time from TEDxTokyo.com in both English and Japanese. Tune in! Everyone in rehearsal today looked good. Lots of smart people with ideas about getting Japan back up and at 'em. Also, a juggler and a yo-yo guy. Get some friends together and check it out, why not?

Born on the 梅雨

It's rainy this week. People have been talking about whether this is the beginning of rainy season. It's earlier than it usually starts - typically around the first week of June for the Tokyo area. But, it is raining a lot. In Japanese, rainy season and the rains it brings are called (o)tsuyu or bai-u, both written as 梅雨. It's a faithful question on kanji quizzes for those unusual readings. The basic readings for the evocative characters that make up the word, "plum" and "rain," would be "ume" and "ame." (Do you want to argue about how I'm simplifying the explanation? Do you, punk? I didn't think so.)
What's my point? I just wanted you to chuckle with me by humming this whenever anyone mentions 梅雨. Of course, depending on who you hang out with, this may not be too often.





Incidentally, I posted a link to Hank Williams singing Jambalaya on the Bayou on Twitter. I wasn't really thinking of the lyrics. I knew it went "crawfish pie, something something bayou" and thought it was bay-oo. Listening to it now, it doesn't rhyme with the Japanese at all.
Me-oh-my-oh.