Found this Japanese doll set for sale on the Japanese shopping site Rakuten.
The price quoted is 100,000,000.00 JPY which converts to roughly $970,718.970 USD. Is this for real????
You can check it out for yourself here: 闇市（特定客様用ã®ç‰¹è¨ãƒšãƒ¼ã‚¸ã§ã™ï¼‰.
The first 2 characters mean black market…
This video of Japanese commuters on the Chuo Line which runs into Tokyo’s busiest station Shinjuku. Not sure which station this is but it looks like a feeder into Shinjuku which was used by an average of 3.52 million people per day in 2006. Watching it makes me feel really glad I live in central Tokyo, not out in the sprawling bed towns.
How to Load People on Trains in Japan – For more funny videos, click here
I have only ridden on trains that packed a couple of times, and yes, while the video is a bit old, people are still employed in the mornings to push people onto the trains. They make a little over $10 an hour for the pleasure.
Imagine if all these people decided to drive to work – wouldn’t that be even crazier. Not that there would be enough places for them to park. Japan’s public transport system is really great for the environment, especially if you don’t have to use it.
Pickpocketing isn’t a problem that I have heard of, although groping is, and a number of lines now have women only cars at the front of the train to give Japanese women a bit of a break from the marauding hands of Japanese salarymen.
Interestingly there have been recent calls for mens only cars – this to stop men being accused of sexually harassing female passengers – here is an article from the Mainichi newspaper about this: Train companies close doors on men’s only carriages, giving free pass to groping scams. There have been quite a few cases of people being questionably arrested for groping. Some people will do anything for money!
And another news story I saw today that looked interesting: President of IT firm arrested for stripping on bullet train.
I don’t think stripping would be an option on the train shown in the video!
Snapped this photo with my mobile phone on the way back from the office yesterday morning.
If you head down the hill from Meguro Station, you will come to a river bank with some wonderful cherry blossoms in bloom. They should be in bloom for another week or so, and further along other trees will come into bloom soon.
It is the season for cherry blossom drinking parties, with many Japanese people heading off to their local park to wine and dine – or mostly just wine under the pretty pink petals.
We are heading to Yokohama on the weekend to partake. Looking forward to it!
Chooch had her exam for Level 4 of the Chinese Proficiency Test yesterday. She has been studying pretty hard recently for it so we thought we might go out for dinner last night. After a bit of a search around on the internet for good vegetarian restaurants we ended up choosing Shamaim – an Israeli / Middle Eastern restaurant located about half an hour from central Tokyo in Nerima ward.
In New Zealand we don’t have much in the way of Israeli restaurants (at least not that I am aware of), but we do have a lot of food from that area, particularly Lebanese restaurants – and these have long been a favourite of mine. It wasn’t until we moved to the Kansai area in 2001 and discovered a great little Israeli felafel place in Nara (which I have heard has since moved to Kyoto) and I was very happy to discover that they served wonderful food much like I was used to in New Zealand. I suppose it should have been obvious that Israeli food would be very similar to Lebanese food, but my image was more of New York deli style grub.
So we rode the Oedo line from Azabujuban station out to ShinEgota station which took a bit under half an hour. After getting out of the station we had a nice stroll through the streets of Nerima ward. That area is very Haruki Murakami – peaceful semi-urban Tokyo and it wouldn’t seem so strange to stumble upon a character from The Wind-up Bird Chronicle.
After a bit of a walk we found the restaurant. The area it is in has a pachinko parlour, a book store, and even what looked suspiciously like a bia hoi (sp?). From the outside Shamaim didn’t look like much, still we were hungry, hungry as polar bears as we went up the stairs. Once inside we were pleasantly surprised – the decour was nice and homely and would have been fine in any half decent cafe in New Zealand.
We ordered the all you can eat 2100 yen vegetarian special and dug in. It was damn good. Nice veggie soup to kick things off and then a great selection of dishes to dip our pita bread in. The all you can eat special lasts 2 hours – but we didn’t. After an hour or so, and a couple of extra orders we were as full as could be and very sleepy! Too much food 
A mighty fine repast.
Shamaim is highly recommended. If you click here, you can get a map to the restaurant as well as a coupon you can print out to get free Shamaim special dessert “Marabi”, or free Arabian spicy coffee, or free mint tea – the choice is yours.
One thing that stood out was the music. A lot of restaurants like this try to play traditional local / ethnic music. Shamaim didnt – some great beats to keep the dining kicking along. Gotta appreciate that!
Ah Pink Tentacle. One of Japan’s more interesting blogs. Hot pink on black like a racy 80′s Cyndi Lauper video hacked up by a Harajuku fashion freak. All good. Just having a read of that blog, and saw a couple of posts about Akita. There was once a crying Virgin Mary statue in Akita City. Carved from a Judas tree. Is that ironic or just a coincidence? It stopped crying in 1981. Metallica was formed in 1981. Is there a connection? Just another conspiracy theory… And they say Jesus is buried in Aomori.
And also Kirichimpo: Phallic promotional mascot. I remember kiritanpo was a regional delicacy from Akita, I only tried it once because it normally has chicken stock in it. But I never saw anything like Kirichimpo when I was there.
Nice to see Akita news getting out there.
If I had a thousand yen for every free paper out there, I think I could almost make the taxi fare to Narita airport. These giveaway magazines showcasing restaurants and massage parlours (of the kind ones mother might go to, not the kind you find down Manchester Street or in Shin-Okubo) can be found all over Tokyo in places like railway stations and supermarkets. We got another one in our letterbox yesterday – this one was called Gyutto (Japanese only) and covered our local Azabu / Tamachi area.
While I am not really that interested in getting a sunbed tan, or yet another Asian-fusion-noodle-barbecued-meat-and-sushi restaurant with stylish decour and soft mood lighting, I was interested to read an article about differences in love between guys and gals in Japan. They asked 50 men and women a range of questions about what they looked for in the opposite sex, what sort of language they liked and didn’t like as well as their favourite foods.
They had a listing for the places they dont want to go on a date:
For Japanese Women, the worst places were:
1. Akihabara
2. Shopping
3. Horse Racing
4. Pachinko (Horizontal pinball like gambling)
5. Manga Cafes
with chain pubs, haunted places and forests also listed.
The places Japanese guys most don’t want to go on dates to were:
1. Tokyo Disneyland
2. Shopping
3. Shibuya
4. The womans parents’ house
5. Sanrio Puroland (Kitty Chan theme park)
as well as Matsuya Department Store in Ginza and other places, dessert buffets and mountain climbing.
So there you go – it is perfectly safe to take your date to a strip club. Or even better – train spotting!
Can you imagine a Kangaroo Notebook? The errant product of a Japanese stationary supplier, endlessly folding in on its marsupial pouchiness? Bounding across a written landscape all the way to hell?
Somewhere between the darkness of Kafka and and the magical lightness of Italo Calvino floats Kobo Abe’s Kangaroo Notebook. A novel about an unnamed salary man who wakes one morning to find radish sprouts repulsively growing on his legs and who has miraculous adventures whilst travelling on a psychically controllable hospital bed.
His companions on his adventures are likewise surreal. A hot as hell nurse bent on collecting a record amount of blood in order to (jokingly) win the Dracula’s Daughter medal, an American Karate expert (fluent in Japanese of course) by the name of Hammer Killer, and even a pair of horny as can be squid.
Kobo Abe passed away in 1993, and Kangaroo Notebook was his final novel. The theme of death hovers over the novel, but never darkly. There is a joy here in the horror of the living undead. Calvino wrote about the necessity of lightness in writing, meaning that the story should flow lightly – the translation at times here is heavy and clumsy, but the underlying story shines through. There aren’t many translators of Japanese who come close to Murakami’s translator translators, and it is in this regard that the only weak point of Kangaroo Notebook arises. To translate, one must also be able to write elegantly!
Abe isn’t terribly well known outside of Japan, but within the country he was known as being one of the most creative novelists that came out of Japan in the twentieth century. Adroitly humourous, Kangaroo Notebook is almost impossible to place as a novel – it is difficult to say what happened, or even to say where it happened. But it is a highly enjoyable journey nonetheless!
A friend of mine from Canada, Pierre Nadeau, who lives down in Wakayama and is currently apprenticed to the Japanese sword smith Kiyota Jirokunietsu has been featured in the February issue of the Hir@gana Times. It is a nice three page article with plenty of detail and insight into the life of a Japanese sword-smith’s apprentice.
Hir@gana Times is an English-Japanese bilingual monthly magazine published here in Japan. It costs 390 yen an issue and is available from all good bookstores. One great thing about the magazine is, if you are learning Japanese, the articles are translated into Japanese, and they have furigana (kanji readings), so it is a good way to develop your Japanese language skills.
Subscription information for the Hir@gana Times is available here.
If people anywhere in the world are likely to go overboard when doing things then the Japanese would have to be right there at the top, and deco-tora or deco-trucks are a rockingly great example of this.
Taking the decoration of the vehicles to almost unimaginable heights, the owners of these trucks add all sorts of magical lighting, paneling and decoration to make their trucks works of art. The photo above is from pingmag, who have an interesting article about an exhibition of photographs of these pop culture icons by Japanese photographer Masaru Tatsuki. From their post:
This pretty colourful aspect of Japanese pop culture has been extensively explored by photographer Masaru Tatsuki who spent ten years with the truckers of Japan’s highways. Today PingMag walks over to Masaru’s current exhibition at Harajuku‘s Little More Chika gallery to catch up with him about his new photo book.
You can read the full interview here in English: Masaru Tatsuki’s Decotora Photo Op
And it isn’t just cars and trucks that get decorated – I once saw a deco-chari, a decorated bicycle, done up to look like the rider was in the cab of a big rig! Now that was something special!
Went shopping this afternoon, to the Yamaya supermarket in Aoyama-1chome, and was quite bemused to come across this sign in their wine corner. The flag on the top is the Australian flag, then it says New Zealand under the flag, and written vertically in Japanese is… Australia!
Not sure how they ended up with that sign, but surely New Zealand needs a new flag… and Australia could probably do with a new one as well!
By the by, we couldn’t find any penne pasta, and other shops seem to be out of it as well. Prices for other types of pasta are up as well. Global warning leads to anti-penne pandemic anyone?
