Blizzardboy | A Kiwi in Japan

Happy April Fools for yesterday! Yesterdays post Japanese Prime Minister Fukuda Announces Retirement was of course a joke. Although whether him becoming a bikini pin-up idol would be more beneficial for the Japanese economy than his current performance is a question very much open…

Got my boss yesterday too – telling him I had found another job and asking him if he could find a replacement by that afternoon. Ah the look on his face:)

Chooch posted on mixi.jp that we were moving to Greenland! and quite a few people fell for that. She wrote that because of difficulties maintaining a car in that climate I would have to cross-country ski to work. And she was worried about the lack of vegetarian food there.

All in all a good laugh.

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There is an interesting post at The Consumerist about an American couple who were stranded in Tokyo after they were unable to get any cash, or use, their Bank of America debit card.

Before leaving for his honeymoon, Derek called Bank of America to make sure he could rely on his debit card while he was in Japan. Bank of America assured him that he would have no problem accessing money. Yet on the third day of his honeymoon, neither he nor his wife could draw cash from their cards, stranding them with only $15 in cash.

He writes:

….

On the third day of the trip, we went to Akihabara to make some video game purchases. I found the only Wii system we saw the entire time we were on the trip and tried to buy it. My card was declined, which was incredibly embarrassing and difficult to deal with because of the language barrier. My wife tried her card and it went through, thankfully. The next shop we came to had something she wanted to purchase, at which point her card was declined. She paid with the cash she had left over, leaving both of us with about the equivalent of $15 total in cash.

You can read the rest of the story Bank Of America Stranded Me In Japan Without Cash On My Honeymoon here.

Quite a sad story especially seeing as it was their honeymoon (I wonder how many people come to Japan on their honeymoons?). Japan’s banking system is still quite behind the times (and I know that wasn’t the problem here – it was suspicious activity outside the normal usage of their debit card) and even supposing their cards did work there are still a lot of places in Japan that don’t take credit or debit cards. And if you get outside of the main centers it is even harder to find places that take these cards.

This is a photo of the hours of a Japan Post ATM right bang smack in the middle of Tokyo

In the country side, ATM’s often close at 5pm – weekdays! and are also closed over public holidays, and convenience stores don’t always have ATM’s – so you will need to carry enough cash to carry you over 3 days. It is pretty safe to carry that amount around, as long as you stay out of dodgy bars in red light districts you shouldn’t have any problems.

I remember one time when I was living in Akita and there was a festival in our little town. The festival was held down the main street with lots of little stalls and people fishing for gold fish and doing all those things that people do at festivals. It was quite a large crowd, larger than I would have expected given the population of the town I lived in. Anyway, I was a little short of cash, so I went to my bank, who had a branch on the main street and lo! the ATM was closed – closed because of the festival. The reason I was given was that there were too many people for them to be able to guarantee perfect service – so rather than disappoint someone, the closed down the ATM.

Point of story – if you are travelling to Japan (or anywhere for that matter!) bring enough cash to carry you over for a couple of days. Divide your money up so that if some gets stolen you still have some. And smile:) sometimes there ain’t nothing you can do about banks.

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Fountains pens are one of those little luxuries which I particularly enjoy. Feeling the smooth flow of ink across the page is a very pleasurable experience, that despite advances in writing technology over the past 100 years, has still not been replaced. I still remember being terribly proud when my teacher at primary school judged my penmanship good enough to graduate from the humble pencil to a fountain pen. I wonder if children in New Zealand still enjoy this? Or do they go straight from pencil to myspace?

Last weekend we were going book shopping in Yaesu, near Tokyo Station when we stumbled upon the Pilot Pen Museum. There are so many little museums scattered around Tokyo that it can be fun to see what finds when out for a wander. The Pilot Pen Station is a Museum and Cafe with a neat display of writing implements – both produced by Pilot as well as outlining the development of writing instruments through out the ages.

There is a cafe on the first floor, non-smoking through-out. It looked pretty standard for a Japanese cafe and we didn’t try what they had on offer. The museum itself is on the second floor – up a staircase which quite ingeniously traces the history of the Pilot Corporation up each of the steps. One of the highlights of the museum was their collection of maki-e fountain pens. I had seen these before in department stores around Tokyo but didn’t know too much about them. They are made using a special lacquer coating process and then have very beautiful individual designs drawn on them. Very Japanese and beautiful to look at.

The museum is open Monday to Friday from 9:30am to 5pm and Saturdays 11am to 5pm, closed Sunday and National Holidays. Admission is free and they also accept Pilot brand fountain pens and the more exclusive Namiki brand pens for repairs. The museum is easy to get to – one minute from the Ginza Line Kyobashi Station (if coming from Shibuya), 3 minutes from the Takaracho Station on the Asakusa Line (if coming from Ueno / Asakusa) and 8 minutes walk from the Yaesu Exit of JR Tokyo station.

Having visited the Pilot Pen Station museum I had a bit of a poke around on the internet to see what I could find. Pilot themselves don’t have much of an English website. But I found an interesting interview over at the perennial purveyors of pulsating missives – pingmag – with The God of Fountain Pens. As well as that, I found an informative page about the pen museum at Tokyo Fountain Pen Scene (complete with map). The person responsible for that site also sells fountain pens on ebay – here is his page. He seems to have a good selection of pens for sale. (I have no relation with what he is selling btw).

Finally Pentrace East has quite an indepth guide to fountain pen culture in Tokyo. I didn’t realise there was so much to do related to fountain pens in Tokyo – that page has recommendations for a couple of days of pen related sightseeing in the capital alone!

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This weekend was a three day weekend with today off to celebrate Japan’s Foundation Day. As most of you are no doubt aware, Japan was founded by Kitty Chan when she miraculously appeared out of Doreamon’s magic pocket, put a one sen piece into a pachinko machine and hit the jackpot with the various isles that make up Japan sprinkling out of the machine to a magnificent cacophony of the machines bells and whistles. Or something like that, foundation mythology is rarely steeped in reality.

Yesterday we headed out to Fukushima to see some friends. It took us about 4 hours to get there by train (on the subway to Kitasenju and then onto the Tobu Railway Company’s network). It was really nice to get out of Tokyo to enjoy some clean air! It was also quite surprising just how much colder it gets outside of the capital.

Today was beautifully clear, and we had a glorious drive through the hilly landscape of Fukushima. Seeing the trees interspersed over the snow covered slopes always reminds me of the sumi-e (ink brush paintings). We went to an onsen as well, before heading back to our friends’ place for some chijimi (Korean okonomiyaki?).

It is nice to get out of Tokyo and into the “snow country” if just briefly. And nice to be back refreshed for the new week.

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Having moved back to Tokyo after a gap of two years, it is an interesting experience to revisit familiar places and to experience new locations. Tokyo provides an interesting mix of the new and the old and here I have written about Tokyo’s electronic town – Akihabara.

Is Japan a manufacturing based economy or a fully-blown (as in blue bottle) consumer society?

One area of Tokyo where the line between the two is sketched thinly is Akihabara (more commonly known as Akiba). Traditionally in Asian cities sellers of similar products grouped together so if you wanted a particular product you would go to that street. You can still find this in places like Hanoi where if you want a blackboard you jump on your Minsk and cruise off to the blackboard street! Compared to the contemporary way of shopping where everything one could want (and a lot of stuff one doesn’t) is all lumped together in a shopping mall, this system means one can compare between sellers and score some great bargains.

Japan is the same and Akihabara was (and still is) the home of electronic components, wires, switches, IC chips, lights and everything a budding Edison could dream of. Under the station you will find rows of little shops selling all sorts of electric goodies – here a shop specialising in lights, a stall with every kind of capacitor under the sun, there a shop selling microphones, surveillance equipment and tiny cameras perfect for spying on staff or worse.

So traditionally this is where the engineers and researchers who powered Japan’s electronic boom came to buy specialised parts, and if there is one thing that such people are also famous for, it is the twisted otaku side of Japanese sub-culture. Hence, shops and restaurants sprang up to cater to there desires for cute anime products and cos-play (costume play) gear. Which lead to cos-play cafes which have since become a global export from Japan – with such cafes springing up in a number of different countries around the globe.

As Akihabara became famous amongst travelers, there was something of a backlash amongst the local powers-that-be, who tried to clean up the areas’ tarnished image. So while the cos-play cafes still curtsy their way into the hearts of many an otaku, today they exist alongside more upmarket and mainstream establishments catering to more mainstream Japanese consumers.

Today the world’s leading “electric town” would have to be Shenzen, across the border from Hong Kong in Mainland China. This city has eclipsed Akihabara and indeed most large cities in China offer wider selections of electronic goods and components than Akihabara does – an indication perhaps of the wider shift in economic power towards Asia’s economic powerhouse.

This mix of electronics, twisted sexual fantasies and the urbane make Akihabara a fascinating place to visit, revealing as it does an intriguing mix of Japan’s past, present and future.

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One of the big changes in New Zealand over the last twenty or thirty years has been the increasing diversity in restaurants and eating and drinking choices in general. I remember interviewing Mike Moore (this guy, not this Mike Moore) when I was living in Wellington and hearing how when he first moved to Wellington as a young politician, Wellington had a grand total of two restaurants that served wine.

Today in New Zealand there is a huge variety of food as well as wine and alcohol available, and indeed some of the worlds greatest wines are produced in the land of the long white cloud. Immigration has played a large part in this, as have the significant number of refugees that New Zealand opens its’ doors to. So from the standard Italian and Indian fare to Malaysian and Somali restaurants, through to my favourite – Lebanese – New Zealand offers some great gastronomic experiences. I heard a news report recently that Maori cooking is undergoing a resurgence – a delight I am yet to explore.

Lebanese food has always been a favourite – and I must admit to being a died in the wool, one-eyed humus and felafel fan. So when I read about the existance of an Iranian restaurant in the Tsukuba / Tsuchiura area I was over the moon. And then some.

They have felafel on the menu, and it is really, really delicious. When it is available. We have been there 4 times now and Ali’s Kebab’s has a batting average of .250. Having been there with a couple of meat eaters (yes, they do still exist) the carnivore options are varied and apparently delicious. We always seem to end up having pizza when we go there. Old school Japanese pizza. And if you have been in Japan for a while then you will know what I mean by that. I know the main target market for the restaurant are Japanese people, more specifically Ibaraki citizens, and that is why the chili sauce is about as hot as my jokes, and why MTV seems to be incessantly blaring from the very nice flat screen TV they have installed on one wall.

That aside Ali’s Kebab is a nice place to visit, with great, friendly service and I would highly recommend it, especially if you are, or have Muslim friends to entertain as the restaurant serves حلال (halal) food (yes, they do serve alcohol, but this place is about as one gets in Japan).

If you want directions here is a map (in Japanese unfortunately) which is one page on Ali’s Kebabs website.

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With Nova on the verge of going under, I thought it might be interesting to look at what some foreigners outside of the worlds of English Teaching and High Finance were doing in Japan. Since the time of Laficado Hearn foreigner have been bringing their own special blend of magic to these islands, offering new and delightful ways of enjoying oneself.

Here are 5 business ventures run by foreigners in Japan:

The Anchor Pub – Hachijo-jima – Izu Islands Tokyo!

Although most people have an image of Tokyo that includes a mightily fast paced rat race and pollution and concrete office buildings and apartments spreading off into infinity, Tokyo is much more than that. Head outside of the hills and there is the mountainous paradise of Okutama, as well as some gorgeously untouched islands in the Pacific.

The Anchor Pub is located on Hachijo-jima, which is an overnight ferry ride from Tokyo (or 45 minutes by plane or helicopter if you are feeling especially bubbly). Run by an Australian, The Anchor Pub looks to be a great place to rest after experiencing the natural bounty Hashijo-jima has to offer. As well as a national park on the island, there are some amazing breaks on offer for surfers as well as a tunnel system left over from the Second World War.

As well as their website: http://www.hachijo.net/, they also run: http://www.hachijo.info/ an information site giving lots of really useful information regarding getting to Hachijo-jima, and accommodation on the island (including a free camping ground) as well as plenty of things to keep you occupied during your stay.

Sarashina Tansu

If one had to choose the area of Japan most likely to be home to an European cabinet maker then the mountainous ski adventure playground of Nagano would be a pretty safe bet. Bringing a solid body of experience as a cabinet maker in Europe to the restoration of Japanese antiques may seem an unlikely combination but for Austrian born Wiedner Udo Erich the combination looks to be a success.

He has a website at http://www.tansuhome.biz/ and a video of when he was featured on Japanese Television is on the http://www.tansuhome.biz/tansu.html page. The website is only in Japanese, which is fine as my German doesn’t extend much beyond “Achtung lieblung, mein nachtfraulien!”

The Greenhouse

Located in Chichibu – a very rural part of Saitama, The Greenhouse is an amazing place to visit. Chichibu during the Edo period was almost a country to itself and a major center for the performing arts during this period in Japanese history. Today, the Greenhouse combines the best of that world with an environmentally friendly and spiritually rewarding place to stay and unwind.

Located in a very large traditional Japanese country house, the Greenhouse has facilities for recording music and also provides a wonderful space for musical performances and get togethers. We stayed there a couple of years ago while a large group of Sitar players were workshopping. With over 40 sitar players there it was quite an amazing experience.

The Greenhouse is run by Chris who has been in Japan for such a long time he is almost a national treasure. He is very knowledgeable on topics such as the environment, capitalism and corporate greed which makes for some very interesting discussions.

The Greenhouse’s web address is: thegreenhouse.info and you can find a guide on how to get to the Greenhouse at: http://floatingworldweb.com/plex/index.html#-360.

Soulsmithing – Japanese Sword apprentice in Wakayama

One of the most beautiful things to come out of Japan is definitely the Japanese sword in its many guises – tanto, katana etcetera. Soulsmithing is the website of a Quebec national living in the central Japanese prefecture of Wakayama learning the delicate craft of sword making. More of a life style choice than a business as such, getting deeply involved in the arts and crafts of Japan can be both a way to support yourself, and a way to learn and grow as a person.

Becoming a recognized sword smith takes many years of hard work at the forge as an apprentice, but he is well on his way to achieving his dream. Hailing from Quebec, maple syrup is also a big passion of his. His website is in French, Japanese as well as English.

Canyons Japan – Canyoning, Whitewater rafting and more adventures

Located close to Tokyo and making for an excellent weekend away from Ishihara’s smog encrusted den Canyons Japan offer some rocking outdoor adventures in the Minakami area of Gunma. They have some mindblowing canyoning, canoe and kayak and caving courses. Their white water rafting is best experienced after a typhoon as the white water rafting can be a bit tame at other times.

If memory serves me correctly the bloke running the show is a Kiwi named Mike who has must be close to having the longest dreads in Japan. Him and the lads do a great job of keeping you safe while you go wild in some of Japan’s beautiful mountain scenery. They also have outposts in Nagano and in Shikoku.

As well as blowing your mind during the day they organise regular full moon parties as well as other events, and offer accommodation for full fun no hassles escapes from everyday working lives!

Check out their website at: http://www.canyons.jp/ for more information.

Five different places, five different adventures. There are certainly plenty of opportunities for enterprising and driven foreigners in Japan; as well as plenty of opportunities to experience and travel to some of the more remote areas of this fine country. There are many more foreigners in Japan doing and running amazing things – cafes in Aomori, ski lodges in Niseko Hokkaido, bakeries in Ishikawa.

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It is often said that there is no such thing as a free lunch but, we have been lucky enough to discover an endless and renewable source of free beer. Well, at least 3 free beers. But that is plenty for this camper!

Asahi Breweries is one of the major brewers of beer in Japan, and they have breweries scattered throughout these islands. We visited the brewery in Moriya in the south of Ibaraki Prefecture, on the border with Chiba Prefecture a couple of Sundays ago. Being a Sunday the brewery was not operating, but there were a large number of people taking part in the tour.

Interestingly there was a support group for mentally handicapped families (is that the correct term? I have been away from New Zealand for a long time and have lost track of what the current politically correct phraseology is) with about 30 members taking part. Initially we were a little concerned that they were going to take part in the beer tasting, but as it turned out, only the parents were to take a tipple as a well earned respite from their arduous looking responsibilities. I had a chat with one of the parents and she explained that their children had all attended the same school in Tokyo, and that they went out most weekends on various activities with their kids. Their children ranged from 13 to a couple in their 40’s so I think they certainly deserved some of the frothy golden goodness.

The tour lasted about half an hour, with a video being shown first off in the factory’s auditorium, followed by a guided walk through the complex and finishing up 60 meters in the air at a beer garden in the sky with amazing views of the surrounding countryside. I sampled some great Asahi Super Dry, as well as some Lowenbrau which they were showcasing – not really my cup of tea. I was tempted to ask for Speights, but having only had a couple managed to keep such patriotic instincts under check. And besides it was a long way down if they were to throw us out.

The factory has a nice collection of paintings scattered around its confines.

You can visit the factory year round – except for around new years and on some holidays set by Asahi. You do need to book – which you can do by calling 0297-45-7335 or by fax (does anyone still use fax?) on 0297-45-7761. I am assuming they can handle enquiries in English.

There is parking, and all the orange juice your poor hapless driver can drink on site, but the best option for getting there is a combination of rail and company bus. From Tokyo take the Tsukuba Express to Moriya Station (about 40 minutes), from the central exit of the station there are free buses to the factory leaving twice hourly from 9:10 am through to 14:40 (every hour at 10 mins and 40 mins). They also have buses from the east exit of JR Moriya. There is information available in Japanese.

E-Ibaraki Report has a short report on a visit here: Asahi Beer Brewery and tour

Being free and all, a trip to the Asahi Brewery in Ibaraki is highly recommended. Just remember not to drink and drive!

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Tsukuba is blessed with a wide range of things to do and one such point of interest are the Botanical Gardens run by the National Science Museum on Higashi Odori.

Opened in 1983, the Botanical Gardens provide an ideal destination for an afternoon out with the family. A large range of diverse flora are on display in this facility spread over a 14 hectare area. We visited there a couple of weeks ago, but spring is really the best time to visit with some stunningly beautiful flowers to see. Autumn though is not without its own niceties. The following picture shows Chrysanthemum nipponicum which blooms during October.

There are both indoor and outdoor gardens, ranging from tropical planets through to desert cactii, montane grassland as well as marshland plants.

The gardens are opposite Tsukuba University and a link to a map on google maps is here: Tsukuba Botanical Gardens. It is possible to visit from Tokyo – take the Tsukuba Express from Akihabara to the final stop (about 45 minutes) then take the Kanto Tetsudo Bus from Tsukaba Center to Tsukuba Techno-Park Oho (about 5 minutes) and get off at the bus stop of the Tsukuba Botanical Garden.

There is an english website here with more information about the plants and activities of the botanical gardens.

Entrance is 300 yen for adults and university students and free for rugrats and other students. The gardens are closed Mondays except for public holidays (much the same as the Tsukuba Public Library).

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Found these great representations comparing China and Germany through design up at China Digital Times. The designer Liu Yang, is a Chinese born German designer who uses the simplicity of good graphic design to communicate the cultural and social differences between the two countries.

This first one shows the differing attitudes to lining up to buy tickets. If you have been to China you will know that those scrummaging skills developed on the rugby field are highly valuable:

The second image is more interesting, being a depiction of the self:

The blue sections of the images refer of course to German culture, with those in red denoting the Chinese equivalent. Interestingly, Japan would be German in the image of the people lining up, and Chinese in the image depicting the self.
It is difficult of course, to pare down cultures as diverse as German or Chinese into simple images, but these I think are very effective.

We went to Germany for one night a few years ago and I remember being quite surprised as to how relaxed everyone was. When we went through immigration there were two immigration officers having what must have been to them quite a fascinating discussion. They didn’t even look at us as they stamped our passports!

On our way back out it was much the same, except we saw them round up a person of middle eastern descent. Ah, the joys of being white. I guess some stereotypes are true after all.

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