The Blog From Another Dimension: Focus on Japan 2007 Archives

Yes

Walking to the station the other day, a brief question-and-answer Sachi and I shared reminded me of an interesting linguistic difference between English and Japanese. Wanting to know which route we should take, I asked, "Do we go straight ahead, or turn left?" Sachi answered, "Yes." I laughed, but I understood: we turn left.

I have encountered this before in Japan: when asking a binary "A or B" question, the answer "Yes" means the latter is correct. To an English speaker, however, that sounds like a joke answer--as if both were the correct reply. However, I have yet to probe this deeply; for example, I have never heard "No" to mean the former of the two choices as being correct. Nor am I sure of how strong a linguistic certainty this is; I don't seem to get much agreement from Japanese speakers that this is the way Japanese people answer such a query, though I have witnessed it many, many times.

In contrast, there is a much more established difference between the two languages, concerning the answering of negative yes/no questions. Positive questions (such as "Do you have a problem?") are answered the same way in English and Japanese; however, negative questions (e.g., "You don't have a problem?") are answered differently.

In English, we answer "yes" or "no" based upon the positive or negative status of the answer; for example, if you do have a problem, you answer "Yes," because the answer is that you do (positive) have a problem. If you don't (negative), then you answer "No." The positive or negative sense of the answer always matches the "Yes" or "No" reply.

In Japanese, however, the answer depends on the truth of the question; in other words, if the assumption of the question is true, then the answer is "Yes," even if the question is negative. Ergo, the question, "You don't have a problem?" is answered "Yes, I don't"--"Yes" because the question was true. If the question is not true, the answer is "no," as if to say, "no, you're wrong," even if the answer is stated in the positive--as in, "no, I do have a problem." Kind of like the old song, "Yes, we have no bananas today."

The same structure is used in Chinese, and, I suspect, most far-eastern languages. I remember a story told in a movie a few decades back ("Chan Is Missing"), where a Chinese man is stopped by a traffic cop in San Francisco. The cop holds that the Chinese guy ran a stop sign; the Chinese man insists that he did not. Eventually, the cop asks, "You didn't stop at the sign, did you?" And the Chinese man answers, "No!" Of course, he meant, "No, I did stop!" but the American cop took that to be an admission that he didn't stop, and so wrote him the ticket with greater confidence.

I always try to teach this difference to my students. When I ask them if they have any questions, they usually answer "no." So I add, "Ah, so you have no questions? Then they answer "Yes." So I come back at them with, "So you do have a question!" To which they answer, "No!".... and that can go on for as many as three or four cycles until they catch on. By the end of a semester, nobody gets caught by that little trick, and they are all aware of the difference. It's a funny little instructional gag that everybody enjoys. But it effectively demonstrates the trouble you can get into by making assumptions based upon your own language's patterns when speaking a different language. In this case, I tell my students that it is safer to give a full answer rather than just a simple "yes" or "no"; to answer "Yes, I have no questions" is more clear than the simple "Yes" if you don't correct for the language pattern difference.

Another slightly different example of language assumptions is with the Japanese phrase "muzukashii." That word, literally, means "difficult," but used in certain circumstances, means "no way in hell can we do that." It is more polite to covey the idea subtly; instead of refusing a customer's request, a shopkeeper will instead say it is "difficult" to do it. Japanese people instantly recognize this contextual clue and stop asking for the thing. Westerners, however, think that it is simply a matter of effort, and so keep asking how the task can be accomplished, and are confused and frustrated when the Japanese person keeps talking about how difficult it will be. "Yes, yes, I know it'll be difficult--you've told me three times already! But can you do it??"

While this seems entertaining in itself as a quirk of translation, I should at some point do a post about how such mistakes so commonly occur between people speaking the same language, but assume a particular word means something very different. Like "atheist" and "agnostic," for example--but in situations a lot less clear-cut than even that.

Four Years

I almost missed the milestone: today is my fourth anniversary of non-stop blogging. 1,461 days (365 x 4 plus a leap year day) since August 2, 2003. That was a photo post on my college's graduation day (we're holding it on the 4th this year, keeping it on a Saturday). I noted the first anniversary, the second, the third, and then today is the fourth. Makes me wonder what's be happening when I reach year five.

Today, I kept busy with a meeting at work (we're getting moving on switching our internal email system to GMail, specifically Google Apps for Education), grading tests, and doing shopping outside. Tonight, there seems to be an O-bon Dance festival at Sunshine City--I can hear the music from here (150 KB mp3 audio), and you can see a bit of the setup between the buildings from our balcony.

That's the Prince Hotel on the left, the NTT Building on the right, the Sunshine 60 Tower behind the NTT Building, and Shinjuku skyscrapers above in the middle. The O-bon festival is below and center. Closer up, it looks like this:

A very standard O-bon setup--you can see similar photos I took a few years back in Inagi. There's always a square platform in the middle, lanterns and lights strung out from that central area, people dancing around it, a wider circle of spectators beyond that.

Later, Sachi came home and we went to what is now our usual yakitori place--not the mom & pop place, but the bigger restaurant around the corner. The one where there's an old guy who comes in every night and monopolizes the waitress' time with idle chat. Before we left, a group of seven or eight older men came in wearing garb that told us they were with the O-bon festival themselves. It seemed like they had gotten an early start on the drinking, and were ready to get soused. So after a few made bombastic and half-drunk attempts to speak English to me, we finished and left, with a friendly "goodbye!" to the O-bon guys.

Cheese-O-Rama

Just got a flier in the mailbox for a pizza place (the one starting with "D"). Just wanted to make an observation.

First they had "extra cheese" on pizzas. Then they escalated to injecting cheese into the edge of the crust. Then they enlarged the crust so they could shove even more cheese into it, essentially creating a cheese-filled danish at the end of each piece. Now, it seems that they are getting even closer to dropping the pretense of there being pizza involved as opposed to finding new "delivery systems" for melted cheese. Hence, the "Quatro Cheese Melt":

I mean, seriously. Why not just hand people a bucket of melted cheese and be done with it? Who's being fooled into thinking that this is a food dish rather than just the equivalent to putting a bowl of cheese into the microwave and then eating it by scooping it out with your hand? Anyone?

But they do pay attention to the non-cheese portion:

Interesting flavors. They include "meat," "ethnic" (which I assume is some form of salsa), "spicy," and "white sauce." I presume that the "white sauce" is a clever way of saying "even more cheese."

But hey. Fake Japanese Elvis Guy gives it the thumbs-up, so what can I say? Better hurry and order now, though--you'll only be able to gorge on these things for another five weeks.

New on the Menu

Something new I noticed: Diet Coke has suddenly appeared on all the menus of fast food places in Japan. For a long time, I wanted to get a diet drink at these places, but none of them had it, except for Subway (Diet Pepsi). Now, I eat at hardly any fast food joints except for Subway, but I have noticed they all seem to sport diet colas now. Last week, when shopping with Sachi in Sunshine City, I needed a fast drink, and noticed it for the first time. Since then, I noticed it at KFC as well. Interesting...

New Costco

In preparation for our housewarming party tomorrow, I went to Costco early this afternoon. One of the down points about moving away from Inagi was leaving behind easy access to a Costco; the Tama-Sakai store was less than a 20-minute scooter ride away. And since Costco keeps prices low in part by setting up in way-out-of-the-way locales, that means that Ikebukuro is quite a distance away from any one of them. A cost of living centrally.

Now, just last week, a new Costco opened up in Kawasaki. Like other Costcos, it's in a hard-to-get-to location, but it is the closest one to central Tokyo yet. It's just across the southern border of Tokyo in Kawasaki City. The address is 3-1-4 Ikegami-Shinmachi, Kawasaki City, Kanagawa. You can Google-Map it here. It's about a 1-km. walk (perhaps 20 min.) from the closest station, Sangyo Doro Station--and that station is not on a line directly to or from Tokyo. It's on the Keikyu Daishi Line. The best way to get there from Tokyo is to go to Shinagawa Station and transfer to the Keikyu Main Line; go to Keikyu Kawasaki, and transfer to the Daishi Line.

Now, as the crow flies, the new Costco is just 23 km. from where I am now; the old Tama-Sakai store is 35 km. However, to get to the new Kawasaki store, I have to go through the heart of Tokyo, and that's never easy. It took me an hour to get there, and an hour to get back, taking different routes each way. By train, it would be almost an hour on the trains alone; add 12 minutes from home to the station, and 20-25 min. from the station to Costco, and we're talking an easy 90 minutes here.
To get to the old Costco from here would actually be more or less equivalent in terms of travel time. Maybe a bit longer by scooter, but almost identical travel times by train. This despite the Tama Sakai Costco being a lot farther out. Count on Costco to find even more and more inconvenient places to locate...

Now, if you own a car and you don't mind paying tolls, then you're in luck; the new Costco is right along an expressway; if I were to take that route, it would likely be a very short trip, certainly less than half an hour door-to-door.

However, if Costco is too far away, and you're just looking for foodstuffs, you might want to try Niku no Hanamasa. Before now, I liked the shop, but was not too impressed. The reason: I only saw the Shinjuku-Kabukicho store, which does not have all that much great stuff. I simply assumed that they were all like that. But when I checked out the Ikebukuro store this week, I found out that this was not the case.

The Ikebukuro store beats the Kabukicho store all to hell. There is tons more in terms of selection, loads and loads of beef, but also generic but good foods of all types. They have very good wine for very cheap. Good dried fruits. Low-fat yogurt ice cream, which is pretty good. Some imported foods. And so forth and so on.

One surprising thing: their beef is cheaper than Costco's. I got some Filet steaks from both places; the quality was about the same, but Costco charges ¥600 per 100g for American filets, while Hanamasa charges ¥400 per 100g for Aussie filets. The difference in taste is inconsequential enough to make Hanamasa far more desirable on that count.

Of course, Hanamasa doesn't have all the great stuff you'll find at Costco, even as far as food is concerned. But if you're jonesing for some cheap food, especially meat, Niku no Hanamasa could be a good source for you. Find a store near you.

Return of the King

In the wake of Krispy Kreme's insane success, Burger King has returned to Japan, and their second shop set up business in the basement of Sunshine City last month. A very good location--they are the first shop people see coming in through the underground passage starting at Tokyu Hands. Their success does not seem to come close to rivaling Krispy Kreme's, but they had pretty long lines; the McDonald's down the way had nobody in line, despite a steady supply of customers.

The location might explain some of it, but likely it's the "new thing" effect that Krispy Kreme totally made off with that has helped out Burger King. The chain was previously here in Japan for several years, but lost out to McDonald's in a price war.

In the meantime, McDonald's, feeling the heat from places like Starbucks, has decided to start their own brand of McCafe at the end of August, offering low-cost alternatives to Starbucks. What, a McFrappuchino for ¥250?

Rubbish Redux

One of the things that I don't miss from my old apartment, which I also mentioned before: the trash service. It would be right out the window, and with only a skimpy net to protect it, crows and cats and other creatures would make a mess out of it at the first opportunity, as you can see from this photo from my last week in Inagi:

As a result, we couldn't toss our trash until late the night before, or early the same morning the garbage people came. It was a huge inconvenience--if you forgot, you'd have to keep the stinky bags in your apartment until the next trash day, or put them out days early and risk being visited by the garbage nazis for not being a good garbage neighbor.

Here in my new building, the same worries do not apply. There's a trash complex down in the basement second floor, on my way to my scooter cage, where I can drop off any kind of trash, at any time I like. No birds or other critters can get in there, and you can leave stuff at any time of day or night. Sweet.

The standard burnable/unburnable bags get their own special room, with what may or may not be a compactor unit preparing stuff for easy haul-away. You go into a little room and there are these two biggish metal doors with large handles on them.

You open a door, put the bag in, and close it again. Some big noises follow, and your trash is somehow taken care of.

We've already had one hiccup in the building; the burnable trash door was out of service a few days ago, causing everyone to pile trash up at the room's entrance. The next day, a notice was up telling people not to put in bags bigger than a certain size; apparently someone had gotten too ambitious and had jammed up the system.

For everything else, you use the special trash room next door to the plain garbage room.

Here, you've got your PET bottles with space underneath for cardboard...

More space for glass bottles, cans, and newspapers & books underneath...

And then in the corner, places for old clothes, milk cartons, and styrofoam trays.

There is also a place for unburnable garbage too big to fit in the regular trash room door, as well as for sodai-gomi--but so far no one is bothering with sodai-gomi stickers. People seem to be throwing out whatever stuff they thought they could fit but couldn't. A nice, big sofa was there the other day, and disappeared fast. A washer-dryer unit is still down there, probably too big or otherwise problematic for these units. Someone threw out a satellite TV dish, apparently unaware that they are prohibited in this building.

What's also interesting is that the special trash room is locked--requiring you to wave your key in front of the ping-pong-ball receptor, just like with the front door or bicycle room.

What's more interesting is that you also have to use the key in order to get back out of the room--I guess people could access the place by coming in where the trash collectors enter.

They don't have trash chutes here like you see in some U.S. movies for tall apartment buildings, but for Japan, it's a very nice system.

Recycle Robbery

Before leaving Inagi, I had to get rid of all my excess stuff. And I had a ton of stuff:

2 wood cabinets
1 metal cabinet
1 computer desk
1 computer monitor
1 plain desk
1 scanner
2 printers
3 phone sets
3 carpets
3 video decks
2 stools
1 ceiling lamp
3 gas heaters
2 gas stoves
1 suitcase
1 bed frame
1 hamster cage

I also had a fridge, air conditioner, a TV set, and a computer monitor. These items wouldn't be picked up by the city--you need to use special recycle shops for those. I arranged to sell or give away most those by other means, however. But before they were spoken for, I had one of the city-recommended recycle shops come over and do an estimate. While they were at my place, I figured that I would have them check out everything else as well, and give me an estimate on how much they'd charge for each item. The answer was pretty shocking.

Even before that, I had gotten very bad vibes from Japanese recycle shops. When I lived in Nakano Ward many years back, I used a local recycle store to shop at, outfitting my apartment. I quickly found that they charged very high prices for used goods--so close to new prices that I eventually decided not to buy used stuff anymore. What I didn't know was how badly they ripped people off on the other side of the deal.

After I decided to move out of Inagi, I went to a few different secondhand shops (they're always called "recycle shops" in Japanese) armed with a printout of photos I'd taken of the things I was trying to unload. I soon learned that these people wouldn't take anything that wasn't in near-pristine shape--for example, no electronic goods more than five years old, regardless of operating condition. I guess I can see why they would do that--but then they said the same about furniture. My plain wood desk is a very nice one, unmarred and unscarred--plain but very nice. The store owner didn't care if it was in pristine shape--if it was older than five years, he wanted me to pay him for taking it.

Only two items that I have interested these guys: a gas stove (with burners, the kind you cook on) and a gas fan heater. The gas fan heater is brand-new, just got it last year, and it's a ¥20,000 model. One recycle shop guy magnanimously offered me a few thousand yen for it. That was the most generous offer I got. And he was they guy who looked most like a yakuza, punch-perm haircut and everything.

Remember the recycle guys I mentioned above who came in and did an estimate? They offered to take the gas stove and gas fan heater... for nothing. Everything else, I would have to pay to get hauled off. And their prices were outrageous. The total came to more than $700. And this was even after I would haul everything down to street level myself--all they had to do was drive up and take it away. They even tried to get me to pay them a fair sum for taking things like my old telephones--before I discovered that you can throw them out in the unburnable trash, for free. They had to know that, and so were really trying to rip me off.

Now, the city will come and haul big stuff off as well, except for refrigerators, laundry machines, air conditioners, and TVs. This is called "Sodai Gomi," or "oversized garbage." You go to your local market (supermarket or convenience store) and you buy "tickets" for a variety of goods. You buy tickets by how much they cost, and which ticket to buy depends upon a chart you can get at city hall. For example, the wood cabinets that the recycle guys wanted ¥8000 to haul off, the Sodai Gomi people would take away for ¥500.

When I tabulated the stuff the recycle guys said they would take which could also get taken away by Sodai Gomi, the difference was huge: the city would demand ¥12,500 ($100) for the same stuff the recycle guys wanted ¥62,000 ($500) for. Effectively, the recycle shop could just take it away and then have Sodai Gomi take it from them, and they make a cool $400 for an hour's work--not to mention the extra hundred-plus bucks they'd make from selling my gas stove and heater to some sucker at near-list prices.

How can they get away with this? I really don't know. I don't know why anyone would use them instead of Sodai Gomi, but apparently some people do. Even without that, a lot of the stuff they demand I pay them to haul off would, I am certain, find its way into their shop anyway, and they'd probably ask top dollar (top yen?) for that as well. When I put stuff out for the sodai-gomi people to haul off, a lot of it disappeared the next morning, likely scouted and routed by the recycle shop guys, stealthily coming in with their ubiquitous loudspeakers turned off, stealing what they couldn't get you to pay them to take.

What a scam. I decided that I would use them only for what I absolutely had to--an old computer monitor (they wanted 3000 yen for that, but no one else would take it). My gas stove I sold with my air conditioner--made 9000 yen where I would have had to pay as much to get it taken away. Everything else went to Sodai Gomi, save for a few other things sold via ads.

I still have that like-new gas fan heater; I'd be damned if I'll gift those crooks with that nice little machine. I'll wait until winter and then sell it via an ad. I should be able to get a reasonable price for it.

Lost Summer Light

My father asked recently about when it gets dark here in Tokyo, and it got me to thinking. I noticed that while in Madrid, in April, it was light out until very late--well past 8:00 pm. My father noted that it stays light out in the San Francisco Bay Area until almost 9:00 in the evening--though of course he noted this at summer solstice.

In Japan, however, sunset is around 7:00 pm now. Seeing as how Tokyo and San Francisco share almost the same latitude, how is this? The same goes for Madrid.

As it happens, both Madrid and San Francisco are on the western edges of their time zones, while Tokyo is on the eastern edge of its zone; this accounts for a good deal of the difference. In addition, America and Europe enjoy Daylight Savings Time, while Japan has opted out of that plan--one of only three developed nations (including India and China) that don't change their clocks.

As a result, it starts getting light before 4:00 in the morning, which means that birds start their early-morning chirping at about 3:30, which is how late night owls like me sometimes stay up until.

Seeing as how most of Japan is on the east end of GMT+9, it would seem natural to have DST. DST was implemented by U.S. occupation forces after WWII, but the Japanese government dismissed it immediately upon regaining independence. According to various sources, DST has not been implemented for several reasons: farmers hated it, educators feared it would keep students away from homework in the early evening, and one claim even said it was preferred in the gloomy postwar days, so everyone could get drunk and sleep instead of being depressed in the daylight.

However, it seems that we may be getting a break: this month, there is news that the government is now seriously reconsidering DST for Japan in the face of global warming, and, one would presume, rising energy costs. Hokkaido experimented with DST after a fashion--a non-mandatory shift of working hours. As slipshod as that might sound, it apparently worked, and has fueled interest in DST here. Look here to see a "man on the street" perspective.

Personally, I'd vote for Japan to join GMT+10 and have DST on top of that--then Tokyo could enjoy mid-evening June daylight like Spain gets, and the sun would rise at a civilized 6:00 am during the summer. Even early risers in Tokyo miss an hour or two of daylight, and most people miss two or three hours. I miss four or five, but then I'm weird.

Tokyo Back Streets

As I have explained before, street layouts in Japan are somewhat complex, following a different system than is used in the United States. And despite the fact that relatively few people in Japan have cars, the streets tend to be full of them at any given time. Sure, it may not be as bad as you hear New York is at times, and as I ride a scooter, a lot of the frustrating traffic jams are for me more an exercise of finding a way past the stopped cars through the gaps and crevices.

As a result, driving down the main drags can be, well, a drag, if you'll forgive the piss-poor pun. Streets are not quite so tidy as they are in the U.S. They angle, they turn, they merge, they don't usually run parallel. So it's not easy to find a backstreet route in the first place. But it can be even harder because of a phenomenon I like to call "the neighborhoods of no through passage." I discovered these early on, when I tried to take shortcuts. I would drive down what looked like a promising street to cut through a mass of houses and other buildings to get to an objective that was blocked by traffic on the main roads. (Sometimes there are no gaps to ride through.) A few minutes later, I found myself dumped back out on the road I started from, having found that You Can't Get There From Here.

In the U.S., when a neighborhood wants to cut down on traffic cutting through, they usually install speed bumps along the main roads and 4-way stop signs at every intersection. This slows people down enough to discourage those who are trying to find an alternate route. In Japan, however, they have found an alternate method: creatively designated one-way streets. Take a look at the scan below, of an area in central Tokyo:

Note all those blue arrows. They designate one-way streets. Now, starting from the big red street along the bottom, try to take any of the streets heading upwards to the top of the map, without going against any of the arrows, and without going to the yellow street on the left. Go ahead, try it. Similarly, try finding a route from the yellow street at the left all the way to the right side.

Now imagine trying it without the benefit of a map.

Pretty clever, huh? They do an excellent job of blocking you out. Oh, a route can be found, but it's extraordinarily tricky, especially without a map to guide you. (And even then it's still hard!) The residents probably come to know the area well enough to be able to get where they want to go easily enough, but strangers quickly become ensnared and no matter how hard they try, they can't get to where they want to go. As a result, drivers tend to avoid taking the back streets.

And no, the streets aren't one-way because they're narrow. In Japan, streets that would be so narrow as to be back-alleys in the U.S. often serve as two-way streets in Japan, as I pointed out in this post. The one-way system has got to be for keeping shortcut-seekers out.

Now, the thing is, there usually is a workable backstreet route--but it's hard to find. It takes trial and error, and some time studying maps. Or, an easier method: follow the taxis.

Taxis do this kind of thing for a living. They know all the back streets. Which is why all the photos I took of backstreets here (all are of streets between Shinjuku and Ikebukuro, which will be my route to and from work) have taxis in them. So if you want to go from point A to point B, just follow the cabs, and you'll get there. The back streets that allow for a path from one place to the other are full of cabs, as well as the other practiced drivers who have found the routes. The back streets may be narrow and tiny, but they're well-used.

Some of the back streets are actually quite pleasant; they wind past parks and are sometimes tree-lined. You wonder why more people don't know about them. But then you look at the map of the area and you can see why. They're so far buried in convoluted mazes of streets, it sometimes seems a wonder that people can find them at all.

One thing I do know: without a map, you can get lost in Tokyo really easily.

The Price of Pride

Sometimes it's a good thing to have insurance.

A few weeks ago, I was coming back home on my scooter. My apartment building is part of a complex, and each column of apartments has its own bike/motorbike parking area, with a little pathway leading into it from the parking lot. The parking lot has little roads connecting a few different lots.

As I came in on the parking lot road, a takkyubin (delivery) vehicle was parked there, and as they often do, they left their empty cart blocking the entrance to the bike parking area. I asked the delivery guy, who fortunately was there, inside the truck, to move the cart, while I waited. I was almost in the middle of the road, the back of my bike pointing out.

When they guy came to move the cart, he was careless; he got between myself and the cart, his back to me--and then started backing up right into me. Not wanting to get hit and fallen on by this guy, I used my feet to back up a little bit out of his way (scooters don't have a "reverse"), while uttering some kind of sound to let him know he was going to back into me. That's when I heard the pop and scrape.

While I was waiting for the cart to get moved out of the way, a guy and his wife were driving out of the lot. There was barely enough space between the back of my bike and the other side of the road for this guy to get through, only a few inches clearance. Worse, since he was going downhill, he coasted, which meant there was no engine noise to warn me he was there. He did not make any signal that he was about to pass within inches, despite the fact that he could clearly see that I could not see him. He saw everything that was going on and had ultimate control of the situation. I did not have to back up much for my tail luggage rack to hit the side of his car as he passed.

Well, you know people and their cars. In Japan, it can be even worse than America, in fact; people have an almost obsessive-compulsive desire to keep their cars spotless. There are exceptions, of course, but one thing even car-loving Americans tend to be surprised by when they first visit Japan, is that so many of the cars look squeaky-clean and new.

So this guy hears the scrape, stops his car, and jumps out, pissed off as hell. Even in Japan, where people tend to avoid fights and conflicts, if someone feels that you've scraped his car, he'll be ready to jump down your throat. A few years back, I passed a van in a close situation. I know exactly what happened: my muffler scraped the curb, but I know for a fact that I did not touch the van. The owner of the van, having heard a scrape, felt differently. I knew nothing of this until several blocks later, when a man jumped out of his van, leaving it in mid-traffic, strode up to my bike as I waited at a red light, and made a grab for my keys. He later came back and parked nearby when I told him I'd wait. He was pissed as hell, saying I'd scratched his van. I asked him to show me where, and in an ironic twist, this was one of the few people in Japan whose car was full of scratches. He turned to his van and started to point, but soon saw it would be hopeless to identify which one was supposedly the one I had caused. In our pursuant discussion, he said that the scratch was not as important to him as the fact that I did not apologize (though I think that the fact that his van was already in bad shape helped to turn that balance). I explained that I did not scratch his car, I was positive I had not--but he said it made no difference. So just to end the situation, I apologized. They guy nodded in a lordly manner, and left.

That is one way to defuse the situation: apologize profusely. In Japan, that does not necessarily mean a legal admission of fault or guilt, it is often just to grease the wheels. It was the same with the guy I was now dealing with in my building's parking lot. Had I turned over, shown my belly, and allowed him to growl over me, his dominance assured, things would have gone differently. Unfortunately, my American tendency not to instantly apologize but to stand my ground, this was still strong enough--in addition to the fact that it was not such a clear-cut accident. I have no problem admitting that I should not have backed up without looking. However, there were mitigating circumstances. First, I did not move under motor power--I simply backed up with my feet, and did so to avoid collision, under a split-second choice. Second, it's not as if I switched gears and backed up while having time to be careful and look both ways--it was a sudden, reflexive avoidance reaction, like ducking back if someone puts their hand too close to your face. And third, his car was to my back and silent--and I still hold that if you decide to pass within inches of people with their backs turned to you, you must accept at least some of the blame yourself.

This guy was having none of that. Even more pissed that I did not immediately humbly apologize for being fully at fault, he became even further enraged when I explained that I was not yet sure that I was 100% to blame. His wife was no help to defusing things, she backed him up and was similarly angry.

Well, we called the police to take a report on the accident, and called the insurance companies. In this kind of a case, despite the mitigating circumstances, I was technically at fault--mostly because my bike was moving backwards, no matter how little or for what reason, and hit his car on the side door, leaving an almost invisible blemish. He had the blemish, and all I had was my story.

You may think I understate when I say the words "almost invisible blemish." However, I use those words because when the police asked the guy to point out the scratch--they could not find it themselves--the guy came to point it out...but couldn't find it. Not for several seconds, at least. As it happened, I had already found the scratch a few moments before he tried to, and saw that he started by pointing almost at it... but then his finger wandered away from the scratch, and he had to look really hard in order to finally locate it. That was the extent of the damage. It was so light that at one point, I wanted to try to rub it with my finger to see if it would come off, like a soft paint transfer--but before I could touch it, the guy yelled at me threateningly, telling me not to touch it. The way he was looking at me, I swear he would have gotten physical had I gone ahead and actually touched his car. (Who knows, maybe he was afraid I'd wipe the smudge off and he'd have nothing to stand by; it's not as if I wasn't going to pay for it anyway if I made it worse, he already had my insurance info by that time.)

It still rankles me a few weeks later to remember it. I could not prove that he passed within inches, nor could I prove that I only moved back a few inches, even if it would matter (which it probably wouldn't). The delivery guy had his back turned and so saw nothing. I accept responsibility for not looking before backing up, no matter why I did it, but this guy refused to acknowledge that he might even be in the smallest way also responsible for his silently passing within inches of me when I had my back turned. Instead, he acted like I had just delivered the worst possible insult to his manhood by leaving a near-invisible scar on his automobile and did not immediately prostrate myself and beg forgiveness.

Fortunately, I have insurance for this; I paid about ¥40,000 for two years' worth of insurance to cover damage to other vehicles and property. When I spoke to the insurance office (someone there speaks English well), they at first suggested that I wait until the damage estimate came in to decide whether or not insurance would pay, as my next insurance payment would go up by $100 if I did. The insurance agent seemed to think that the repair could be done for under that amount, and if so, it would be better just to pay out.

A few days later, I called them back. They told me how much Mr. "My Car Is More Precious Than Life Itself" had the vehicle repaired for.

¥181,461. In U.S. dollars, that $1,493.

For a nearly invisible smudge on his left rear door.

Am I nuts, or could you not replace the entire freaking car door for less than that? It wasn't a Mercedes or any type of luxury car, just a standard domestic sedan. And in Japan, this kind of repair is usually less than it is in the U.S., at least as far as I have seen and heard before now; parts may be a bit more expensive, but labor is usually much cheaper here.

So naturally, the insurance will catch it, and if I want further extended coverage, I'll cough up the extra hundred. If people can get away with highway robbery like that and the insurance company agrees to pay, it means that I'd better have the extra coverage just in case something like this happens again.

To be perfectly honest, if it were me, I would not even have cared about such a blemish. Cars get scratches. Deal with it. Live with the shame. Better to have a few scars than constantly be wound up about what might happen to your beautiful faux manhood. My brother and I used to share a car in college; it looked like crap, and we didn't much care. It's a thing, and the thing worked just fine. In that car my brother and I had, we got rear-ended several times; each time, the insurance companies pointed out that the car wasn't worth enough to make a full repair of the severely dented back end, so they just paid off the total cost of the car--something like $700. My brother and I just had a basic un-denting done, and didn't think about it again. We certainly didn't get mad or angry or excited about it, nor did we go ballistic when the other driver essentially said, "whoops!" and "here's my insurance info," even though we knew the insurance wouldn't pay to set things back to the way they were before. And heck, my scooter has been scratched on several occasions--some by myself, other times by others--and I barely notice or care. Who really gives a damn? I mean, I love my Mac PowerBook like some people love their cars, but if someone scratched it, I'd say, aw, too bad, and go on with life. I wouldn't fly into a rage and demand his insurance pay $1000 to replace the casing. If it still worked, that's what matters.

Now, safety, that's something else. A few years back, on my old scooter, I was driving across a bridge, in the middle of the single lane of traffic going my direction. Some ass in a car wanted to speed past me. He did not even bother to honk at me, flash his brights, or otherwise indicate he wanted to pass. Instead, he just flew past in a confined roadway while I was still in the middle of the street. I was already going about 10 kph faster than the speed limit, about 60 kph, and this guy was easily doing 70 or more--and as he passed me, his car side-swiped my scooter, throwing me off balance and nearly making me crash. I could hear his car scrape against my bike for what seemed like one or two seconds as he passed me. That must have left quite the scrape on his car... but of course, he did not stop. He sped off.

I was soon able to catch up to him, and honked at him to pull over. I know, it was stupid to, probably, but I was pissed. Not because he might have scratched my precious bike. Rather, because the bastard had come this close to frakking killing me. He dodged down side streets, tried to shake me as I pursued him, honking my horn all the way, hoping to attract a police officer. I busied myself memorizing his license plate (Tama 300, な 81-83, and I don't give a damn who knows), before he finally got away by going up a ramp to an expressway, which my level of scooter was not allowed to enter. Maybe I should have still followed him and caught him at the toll gate... but then again, the prick had a nationalist hi-no-maru sign in his rear window, so maybe I was better off leaving him go as I did.

Instead, I went to the nearest police station, gave them the license plate number and a description of the car, and filed a report. The police assured me that my name would not be released to the guy; they could not file charges, after all, having no eyewitnesses, but they told me they would visit the guy's house and give him a talking-to. Despite my lack of faith in Japanese police, I have little reason to believe they did not. Maybe I wound up causing the guy some grief after all--maybe it was a stupid kid driving daddy's car, and the police visit did him no good. I like to think so, anyway. I also was confident it would not come back to me as the guy did not have my license plate number, nor any idea of who I was or where I lived.

My point? If somebody nearly kills you, getting pissed may be stupid, but at least it's understandable. If someone barely smudges your car, I can even understand you not accepting what responsibility you had and trying to lay it all on the other guy--you're protecting your own interests and being defensive, and that's human nature. Maybe I'm doing that here more than I deserve to--I don't think so, but it's possible. And understandable.

But don't expect me to accept your rage as an equally understandable reaction.

Finding an Apartment in Tokyo

The apartment I've got right now is pretty sweet. It's a big place for cheap. It even has a nice view. And I've stayed here longer than I have stayed in any one apartment in Japan. I just completed my seventh year here, which outdoes the two and a half I spent in a place in Koganei, which was the previous record-holder. In fact, since I moved out of my folks' house at age 21, this is the longest I've stayed in one place.

Nevertheless, time moves on. I'm getting fairly deep into a relationship, but our living places aren't compatible. Hers is close in to Tokyo, but is way too small. Mine is big enough for two, but is too far out. Only the fact that I have a scooter has made it livable; otherwise the daily bus ride to the train station, plus twenty minutes combined waiting for the bus and train to come, make it an hour-plus trek to my job, with transfers and walks along the way. For Sachi, it would be even more of a trip.

So now we're looking for a place that's both large (my condition) and close to central Tokyo (her condition). Of course, we'd both like both qualities. The hard part is finding them. Fortunately for us, we'll have two rather healthy incomes to put together; for less than we now pay combined in rent, we'll be able to get the kind of place that we want. So we've started the process, both of us understanding that it could be a long way to go. Maybe it's harder finding a good place in New York City, but it ain't easy in Tokyo, either.

I also figured that this would be a good opportunity to get into explaining how one finds an apartment in Tokyo. I went into that before in this blog about two and a half years ago (part 1, part 2), but that was told more as a story, with facts about apartment hunting peppered in. Let's see if we can't go about it in a slightly more organized fashion this time. And hopefully, I'll be able to do it fairly well--after all, I've been through this process seven times in Japan so far (eight if you count finding my brother's place). It's been a while since I last did it (seven years, as I mentioned), but having gotten started again, it's all coming back.

Location: You know what they say about location, and it's no different here in Japan. Rule of thumb: the closer you are to central Tokyo (as measured by the Yamanote loop line circling the center of town), the more expensive it'll be--but also, it gets more expensive the closer you are to the local station you choose.

You start by seeing where it is that you work, and probably discover that it's too expensive to live close to there. So then you start figuring what the train lines are like from work to various places. Some train lines are more coveted than others; they may have nice, major stations along the line (the Chuo Line, for instance); they may have nice express trains (express stops rate higher rents). Some lines, like the Nambu line, have no express trains and few interesting stops. So you choose a line which looks good for you, and has good connections to work and to other places you'd like to go.

Then you choose the station itself. As I said, express stops are choice--it means a shorter commute into work. Factor that in along with proximity to central Tokyo and other desired locales. Sometimes you can actually find a place which is not yet "discovered," and has many good qualities without having prices that are too high.

Sachi and I believe we've found that station for us: Musashi Kosugi, in Kawasaki City, just across the Tama River from Tokyo's Ota Ward. Kosugi is an express station, with no fewer than three major lines running through it (Tokyu Toyoko, Tokyu Meguro, and JR Nambu), and through trains to three different subway lines (Hibiya, Mita, and Namboku) through extensions--and a fourth, the Fuku-toshin Line, connecting in 2012 (a line that would take me straight to work). Of the six lines now operating out of Kosugi, three have their terminus there (Meguro, Mita, and Namboku); it is an express stop for all lines that have such stops. There is direct access to Shibuya, Ebisu, and Meguro stations on the Yamanote Line, averaging abut 14 minutes from Kosugi to any one of those stations. From there, you can transfer yourself to anywhere, and many of the through trains go to other major stations.

Despite the choice station location, Kosugi is relatively low-priced. Just a few stations inward, Den'en-chofu is hugely more expensive, as an upscale neighborhood. Although being even more distant and less well-connected by train lines, Futago-Tamagawa and Mizonoguchi, across from each other a little ways up the Tama River, also ask higher prices. Kosugi seems strangely overlooked.

One other element of location is distance from the train station--a key point if you are going to walk to the station every day. That's where my place lacks--it's a 20-plus-minute walk, or a 5-minute bus ride followed by a 5-minute walk, with hilly areas for the walking. Having to depend on a bus is also a pain, because they often come at inconvenient times. The bus from my place to the station comes once every twenty minutes--and arrives at the station just two minutes after the once-every-twenty-minutes express train has left. So having a place within 10-15 minutes' walking distance of the train station is a big plus.

Size: this is the other big deal with apartments. There are two ways to measure the size of a place: the number of rooms and the floor space. In Japan, total floor space is measured in square meters. My current place is big, 84 square meters; Sachi's is about half that size. Individual rooms, on the other hand, are measured in tatami mats, each one approximately three feet by six feet. Standard is a 6-mat room, nine by twelve feet, as illustrated at right.

The second way to measure is by the number of rooms. In Japan, the letters to remember are L, D, and K. "L" for living room, "D" for dining room, and "K" for kitchen. If two or all of those are combined into a single multi-purpose room, you'll get an LK, DK, or LDK, for example. If a number is added to the beginning of that, it means that there are that many extra rooms (usually bedrooms) in addition to the central area. (In Japan, bathrooms are not specified; it is assumed that there will almost always be one toilet room and one bath/shower room.)

Sachi and I are looking for a 3LDK--what in the U.S. would be called a three-bedroom apartment. We're hoping for a room at least 70 square meters in size. I visited Kosugi recently, and finding such a place within our price range seems eminently possible.

Type: In Japan, there are three basic types of places for rent: apartments, "mansions," and houses. The real distinction to be made is between the apartments and "mansions." Apartments are relatively cheap and of poorer construction; they are always rented. "Mansions," on the other hand, are not sprawling estates as are their namesakes, but rather more-sturdily-built apartments. Think condominium. Walls are thicker (often concrete), and soundproofing is better. I live in such a "mansion," and the folks who lived next door to me had a newborn baby when they moved in. Either that's the quietest kid in history, or the soundproofing in the walls is excellent (though it is always weakest in the ceiling, from the unit above). Mansions are sometimes rented, but often are bought. At the $2000/mo. level, I have also seen a surprising number of rental houses offered. Sometimes these are attached/semi-attached, but usually not. They are often a square layout with two floors; sometimes they are an elongated rectangle, three floors, with a garage at the ground level.

Cost: Here's the real kicker. In Japan, moving-in costs can be prohibitive. There can be up to four separate costs for moving into a place in Japan, only two of which are common in the U.S.:

• First month's rent: standard.
• Deposit: in the U.S., it's usually one month's rent; in Japan, it ranges from one to three months' rent, though it is usually two months'.
• "Gift" Money (also called "key" money): from zero to two months' rent, this is essentially a bribe, or a surcharge demanded by the owner. Worse, if there is any "gift" money demanded initially, another month's rent in further "gift" money is demanded every two years when the contract is renewed.
• Agent's Commission: one month's rent. Granted, they work to get you a place, but they don't work that hard! Sachi and I will likely fork over the equivalent of US $2000 for an agent who will likely spend only a few hour's work getting us a place. True, they may only score a sale every ten or more attempts, but still, they have an amazingly sweet setup for themselves. Unsurprisingly, any agent will eagerly take down you phone number and address and try to get you to rent a place through them.

The common deposit/gift scheme is 2/2, meaning two months' rent as a "gift" and two more as a deposit. Which means that moving in will often mean plunking down six months' worth of rent before you can call it your own, only one month's rent of which will actually be applied to the rent itself. Sachi and I will pay about $6000 in fees and will have about $4000 locked up in the deposit when we move in, beyond the $2000 for the first month's rent. That's $12,000 to get into an apartment. That's not a down payment on owning the place. In short, it's a real scam they put you through.

What's more, I just discovered an extra element that I had never encountered before: end-of-contract conditions. Most of the places Sachi and I have seen so far have conditions that prohibit us from keeping the place for longer than two, four, or five years. Probably a loophole to get the owner out from under rent control, it means that the owner can choose to completely re-negotiate after that amount of time passes. In Kosugi, I am guessing that four-year end-of-contract clauses will be common--that's when the Fuku-toshin Line connects to Kosugi, meaning a direct line through to Ikebukuro and other new, popular stations. Also, there seems to be a lot of new apartment/mansion development in Kosugi--it won't remain under-discovered for long. We may start by renting, but buying in the near future may not be a bad idea.

One more important point about cost: the kanri-hi, or maintenance fee. This is added onto the monthly rent (though it is not included in the key money, deposit, or agency commission). It can sometimes be in excess of $100/mo.

Ambience/Shopping: this can also be key. Sachi has a great location for shopping; just across the street is a big, long covered shopping street (it is named "Pearl Road," which, oddly, most such streets seem to be named). Two stations closer in from Kosugi is a station called Tamagawa; it has virtually no shopping. Kosugi is a happy medium: lots of shops and restaurants, but not a huge number, and the main street is nicely shaded with trees. We'll have to do more exploring, of course, to get a feel for the area. Key point: how many supermarkets within walking distance, and what are their hours?

These are the major points. Other important points for a place include:

• Age: when was the place built? More than ten years is pushing it. A place can be "reformed" (renovated), but newly constructed is most sought-after.
• Exposure: where do the main room windows face? Southern exposure is best for sunlight, but you also have to consider where major roads are. Will there be a ton of traffic noise? Is there a train line nearby? Sachi and I were almost shown a place which appeared on an ad's map as in a nice spot; it turned out that it was actually on the corner of two major thoroughfares and an elevated expressway.
• Closet space: naturally. Though it always fills up no matter how much you get.
• Elevation: what floor is it on? First floor is considered bad in Japan, especially for women. It's about security as well as the view. Every apartment's description includes the total number of floors in addition to the floor the unit in question is on.

Then there are a larger number of lesser features:

• Balcony space: usually very small, but some places can have a nice amount of floor space outdoors.
• Elevator: important if you live above the 3rd or 4th floor.
• "Autolock": a security feature, where you have to buzz in people for them to enter the building. As is true everywhere, it is questionable, as with most places it's easy to just wait for a tenant to come in or out and catch the door when it's open. associated feature: Video intercom (may be in color).
• Cable TV/BS: the "BS" stands for "broadcast satellite," usually the NHK variety. Though with any place, you'll want to see if the other satellites are blocked out by buildings or terrain.
• Internet: newer places may have shared fiber-optic high-speed Internet connections built-in to the building; you could get access without extra charge, and many new rooms have the Ethernet ports built into wall sockets along with TV reception, power, and gas.
• Air conditioning: Japan's summers can be brutal. Frankly, I don't know what I'm going to do--I bought two air conditioners for my present place, and having them uninstalled-reinstalled may cost more than just getting new ones...
• Flooring vs. Tatami mats: some people prefer tatami (thatched) mats, but wood flooring is pretty popular nowadays. Often, apartments have mostly flooring with one or more rooms done in tatami. Wood flooring may have "TES Yukadambo" (TES 床暖房), which means the floors are heated from underneath. This often applies only to the Living-Dining area. "TES" stands for "Tokyo-Gas Eco-System," and can be applied to a variety of new-fangled central-heating systems.
• Other stuff: Are pets allowed? Could be good or bad, depending on whether you want pets, or whether there is good soundproofing. Your place might or might not come equipped with a gas-burning stove in the kitchen. (Japanese places very rarely have full-blown stoves, or dishwashers or trash compacters, for that matter.) The kitchen may or may not have a counter opening to the Living-Dining area. Kitchen layout and cupboard space must be looked at. Various water-heating systems may be employed. There may be a special area where parcels can be delivered without requiring you to be home. Is the toilet separate from the bathing area, and do you even care?

Once you have found a place that meets your requirements well enough, a little more investigation is called for. The real estate agent may show you the place at the optimum time of day, when the warts are the least apparent. You should visit the place at other times and camp out a bit. You may discover that trucks load right next door at 6:00 in the morning with a piercing backing-up beeping. Unexpected sounds or smells could make themselves manifest. And the noisy neighbor is always a frightening specter, hard to detect beforehand.

So, all of this is stuff that you have to keep running in your head as you look for a place. I've already taken up way too much space just for getting the basics down. So, I will cover the actual looking-for-a-place part of the hunting process for a subsequent post, coming soon.

No Parking

This whole parking thing has gotten out of hand. They have really gone hog-wild. It's not just in Shinjuku or in the high-traffic areas; I can't even park my scooter on a normal street anymore without getting ticketed. Before, using a scooter was great; parking anywhere was not a problem. And I'm not talking about cluttering up a street, but parking in a place which still leaves a broad two meters or more of sidewalk open for traffic.

Case in point: I came to visit Sachi and parked in front of her apartment building. There is a space next to a pedestrian overpass, where there is a traffic "shadow," an area where no one would walk or ride their bike even if it were clear (see photo below). A less offensive parking space is hard to imagine. But the ticketers came along and started writing out their citations... not because it was a nuisance, not because anyone complained, not because anything was being blocked... but simply because they could, because there's a profit in it. If the bike were parked next to the building where it was blocking foot traffic, they'd have no complaint--I know, because I just asked them, and they told me to park it in a traffic spot because it was not a public traffic spot. So I did that, and now it's parked next to some little stools on a pathway next to this building, where it could easily bget in the way of someone who wanted to rest there... but I won't get a ticket for that.

Note the sidewalk, how there is more than two meters open, and how the bikes are parked in the traffic shadow behind the fencing. The tickets won't clear up the space, either--it'll just fill up with ordinary bicycles. So what's the point?

And neither is this going to clear up the sidewalk, even in places where the sidewalk is narrow: they are only ticketing motorized bikes. Scooters and motorcycles. Not bicycles, even though they take up virtually the same amount of space, and are far more numerous. Apparently, you can't hand out a citation for a bicycle that generates profit. So they get a free pass. At worst, a notice is left on the bike, and if it stays affixed for several weeks, then it gets carted away. My scooter got a notice and was almost ticketed within just a few hours.

It's not just me, either. I moved my bike with minutes to spare, but this guy didn't. He just took the ticket off his bike's handlebar, the one behind him to our right, and is now he's futilely complaining to the ticketers about how he was just visiting a nearby building for a few hours, so what's the deal? Note the bicycles here don't even get a notice to warn them to move.

If you park a scooter even for one day, it gets ticketed, which means a steep fine and points get taken off your license. Which stays on your record for a full year, or longer if you get other violations before that year is up.

Nor is it a simple matter of finding the right spot. The building superintendent steadfastly refused to allow me to park in any of the many open spots around the building where no one goes. Buildings in Japan have zero accommodations for visitor parking. They have completely closed off all parking places for scooters, except for the pay-parking lots--and that can run $10 a day or more, for parking in a space barely larger than a bicycle takes.

In short, Tokyo has changed from a scooter-friendly place to a scooter-hostile zone. It would be slightly better if there were a reason for it other than sheer profit for the ticketing agencies. I'm just lucky that there's a sliver of a space next to my workplace where I can park. Otherwise I'd have to park far away and pay for the privilege.

Throwback

This is an interesting sign you sometimes see on Japanese roads, especially at the entrances of underpasses and overpasses:

The bikes, okay... but the rickshaws? An interesting inclusion there. Now, I will admit that I have seen handcarts of that nature in Japan, but very rarely... and I think only a fool would try to take one onto an overpass. True, there are fools out there, but how many with rickshaws, and even if they do have one, if they're that foolish, won't they ignore the warning signs anyway?

Parking in Shinjuku

It used to be that you could park just about anywhere in Shinjuku on a scooter. Just go up to the sidewalk and park it alongside bicycles, no problem. And it didn't really cause any more problems than bicycles alone. It was one of the best things about riding a scooter--the convenience and efficiency should you want to shop here, check out that over there.

Just a little more than a year ago, I posted on the fact that tickets for parking violations would soon shift from police administration to private contractors, and predicted that it would lead to wanton ticketing--not to clear the streets or to benefit the public in any way, but rather purely as a way to make money.

Well, I was right. The new parking police have gone way too far. I noticed this when I found that I could not even park my scooter in front of my own workplace, where the sidewalk is very broad (about 4 meters) and there has always been plenty of space, no problem parking there. No mess, no inconvenience to anyone. It's not a busy area, not a business district, and there's no reason why people can't park.

Then my students started getting ticketed for parking their motorcycles in front of the school. I was lucky to avoid that before I caught on that there was ticketing now in force; one of my students got two tickets (which equals four points off his license and $200~$300 in fines).

I also noticed that if I tried to park in Nishi-Shinjuku, roving bands (four people per group) of the new parking police were going up and down the street, issuing tickets with abandon. And just tonight, on a Monday night after 7:00 pm in a far corner of Kabukicho where my co-workers had come to meet, I wanted to park--and found a gang of ticketers right where I figured I'd saddle up for a few hours. Swell. Worse: no legal parking places for bikes within easy walking distance. Lots of places for cars to park, but not bikes.

What's worse than that is that the ticketers seem to be focusing on ticketing motorized bikes (scooters and motorcycles); I haven't seen them molesting cars yet, though there are plenty parked illegally virtually everywhere.

I knew it was a bad idea when I heard of it, and it's even worse than I thought in execution. I'm just going to have to give up shopping in Shinjuku if I have my scooter.

Shinkansen and Restroom Nostalgia

Today, Sachi and I returned from a short stay in Nagano to meet her family. As we did twice before when traveling to that region, we took the bullet train--a nice ride, but pretty expensive. We each paid about $50 for a one-hour ride each way.

I remember the Japanese Bullet Train, or Shinkansen, back in 1983 when I first traveled in Japan. Then, I had a Japan National Railways (JNR) Railpass, which gave me unlimited access to all JNR trains for a single price. So I used the Shinkansen up and down the country, from Hiroshima to Morioka (as far as it went north back then).

I remember that "no smoking" back in those days meant that the forward half of one car was designated as "smoking," with the back half designated as "no-smoking," which of course meant that the "no-smoking" part was just as filled with smoke as the other half. Apparently, JNR at the time felt that entropy would not spread the smoke around, and did not see enough demand for non-smoking seats that it could designate a whole car as such.

I remember a little Shinkansen adventure when I returned from my short trip to Hokkaido (cut short by my homestay city's request that I return to their town early, only to find that there was no specific reason and I wasted three days instead). I remember that for some reason (probably that I couldn't stash it anywhere else), I carried with me all of my suitcases and all of the junk I had acquired in the three weeks of previous travel; it equalled one large suitcase, a backpack-suitcase (which I still have), and two large shopping bags full of stuff. To say the least, I was bogged down so badly that moving around was a chore.

I remember that when I arrived in Morioka going south and transfered from the regular train to the Shinkansen, I would have to go down four floors--and I only had a precious few minutes to make the transfer. At that time, either there were no elevators (not to mention escalators), or I did not know where they were and had no time to learn. So as we pulled in to Morioka Station, I was at the door, ready to bolt out. But when the doors opened, something unexpected happened: two dozen old ladies barreled through from behind me, literally shoving me aside and not letting me out the door until they had gotten through first. As they disappeared in the distance, I finally got out, and now made even more late, struggled mightily to make it to the Shinkansen tracks.

Somehow, I got to the bullet train platform just as the doors were about to close, but I had to jump onto the first car, closest to the stairs--and found that my seat was at the other end of the train. Already drenched in sweat and exhausted from the race down to the Shinkansen platform, I then struggled to drag my two suitcases and two full shopping bags down the narrow aisle for the length of the train.

About halfway through, I entered a car and had an encounter: there were the two dozen old ladies, all relaxed and stretched out, and when they saw me, they broke out laughing. Apparently, they too knew the transfer to be a tough one--which is why they shoved me aside, without thinking that (a) they would delay me more than I would have them, and (b) I was burdened down with huge amounts of luggage and they were not. I smiled politely as I passed them, thinking less-than-kind thoughts.

I also remember the lavatories, mostly because I lost a pair of glasses in there. In the 1980's, they used a kind of septic-tank approach, where the toilet just had a circular rubber-leafed membrane between you and the tank of noxious material. I remember going to the bathroom there, then leaning over to flush--and in leaning over, my extra pair of glasses, worth more than $100 as I recall, slipped out of my breast pocket and square into the hole to the septic tank. I left the lavatory as soon as I could, and without thinking about it beforehand, I asked the conductor if the glasses could be recovered. He said no, with a look that I then--upon thinking about it--understood as saying quite rightly that I wouldn't want to recover the glasses from where they were. Even with rigorous cleaning, would you want to put that onto your face?

Anyway, what brought the toilet part of this reminiscing back to me was an observation I made today, about something that has not changed on the Shinkansen for all of these years--something that makes no sense to me. Every few cars, there is a set of lavatories on the Shinkansen. One is for women, and is naturally a seat toilet. One is for men and women, and is also a seat toilet. Both are in rooms with a solid door that closes. Natural enough.

What I don't get is the men's lavatory: only a urinal, which is fine--but the door has a window in it. See the photo below: the left shows the men's-and-women's combo door, the right side shows the men's-only door.

Here's my question: why the hell put a window on the men's room door? There's no use for it. The other rooms have an indicator showing whether the room is occupied, tied into the door lock. The same could be done with the men's urinal as well. It would not cost more--in fact, the men's urinal door with the window must cost more, because it costs more to add a window than to have a plain door. And while many Japanese men probably don't mind the lack of privacy, certainly some do. So why have the window at all in the first place? It makes no sense to me, though apparently it made sense to someone.

This brings back another memory from that first trip, on the ferry from Aomori to Hakodate, bridging the islands of Honshu and Hokkaido. The bathrooms were located along the outside corridors leading from fore to aft. There were stalls for men and women to do their setting business, but all the men's urinals were simply lined up out in the open on the other side, where people of both sexes walked past. Not being quite that modern (or old-fashioned, I suppose), I used the stalls.

But in Japan, there is something of a history of men's rooms being more open to the public. Even today, when I used a store's restroom, the men's room door was propped open, while the women's room door was closed. Often it will be that way, with the men's room's urinals sometimes being in plain view of passers-by.

This is in contrast to a feature of Japanese restrooms that I like: the stalls, including the ones in the men's rooms, are completely sealed from outside view. No gap at the bottom, and more to the point, no gap between the door and the stall wall. When you close the door, there is no way for people to see in unless they climb the wall and peek over. In the U.S., when you're sitting on a john in a busy public bathroom, you often have to deal with people who want in to a stall, and who apparently don't believe that a locked and closed door means occupancy--they will often stare right in at you as you sit there, to make sure the stall is indeed occupied. I never liked that, and I can't imagine that anyone would. That can't happen in Japan--it's a fully private little room. Nice.

But one other thing that bothers me sometimes: the cleaning ladies. You can bet that cleaning men are never found in ladies' rooms. But in Japan, mostly in hotels but also in large buildings like department stores, cleaning ladies are almost always present in the men's rooms, or so it seems at least. Not that the ladies would necessarily ogle like men might in a ladies' room, but nevertheless, to bathroom-shy individuals like myself, it is not really a helpful thing. It's one of those times that you wish they were a bit less gender-discriminatory in hiring the cleaning staff.

The Barrage Begins

I love a lot of things about Japan. I love the peaceful aspects of the country, the general hands-off character to its religious side, the less confrontational interpersonal habits, and the many differences between its culture and my own which provide fascination as well as entertainment. I love some very specific aspects about Japan, including how there are a lot more people in stores who can help you and how far they'll go sometimes to help you; how Japanese public restroom stalls are fully closed-off and private; I love Mt. Fuji, and I love the shopping streets with their varied little stores. I love the fact that English is supported so well here (and how it is sometimes mangled). I love to just go out and walk or drive in a random direction and discover new stuff.

But there are things you hate, too, just like any other country. And at or near the top of my list is those goddamned loudspeaker trucks. I know I've blogged on this before, but a little more depth this time. (And sorry for saturating the page with images, between this post and the recipe.)

In Japanese elections, politicians have a lot of restrictions which seem good on their surface--such as no television advertising, no plastering their posters everywhere and anywhere, and so on. Not that this really stops corruption. And one other thing it does is limit what the candidates can do to gain recognition: ride around in loudspeaker trucks all day blaring at huge volumes. What makes it worse: I'm paying for the damned things. That's right--candidates get anywhere from ¥250,000 to ¥450,000 (roughly $2000 to $4000) of taxpayer money to pay for the trucks that wake those same taxpayers (including me) up way earlier than we'd like to--and then to keep blaring away, all day long, without a break.

This whole setup just baffles me. I can understand Japanese people not complaining when this happens--that's simply part of the cultural landscape (although Sachi tells me that people sometimes do complain, like the two older ladies in the office she temps at). But how do these bastard politicians get away with cruising through crowded neighborhoods at 9:00 am on a Sunday morning (like they did last Sunday), blaring away on their loudspeaker trucks at top volume, and not have the locals get so pissed off that they'd at least withhold their votes? Seriously, do they actually gain votes by waking people up like that?

And yet not only is it happening, it is happening in spades. Almost everyone on the ballot is out there. Over the last two days, I've been going to the window as often as I can get around to it to snap photos of whoever is being an ass at that moment. In this election, there are two candidates for mayor, and 24 for city council. See the roster below (the main board can be enlarged by clicking on it):

So far, I have caught 16 different candidates rolling up and down the street. In small form (though each pic is in fact 450 x 310 pixels):

In that armada are both mayoral candidates and 14 of the 24 council candidates. As for the other ten, I would bet good money that either I missed them, or they just haven't gotten around to this neighborhood yet. Almost always, the trucks carry the candidates themselves, and there's a lot of city to cover. Even so, with 26 candidates running around, they must be very efficient, as there appears to be more than enough time for there to be at least one truck in the area every few minutes--and every so often, two or even three trucks in the same vicinity, as these images of trucks passing each other show:

Nevertheless, they also somehow find time to make their way into each and every parking lot for every apartment building, and cruise through at a snail's pace whilst blaring away as loud as ever:

Note that the green truck at the bottom right of the above four photos is the exact same truck used four years ago when I first blogged on this annoyance. A lot of the vehicles are perennials, though some of the candidates who always seem to appear have upgraded their vehicles and their loudspeakers.

Oh, by the way, note that I have not taken the trouble to blank out any of the politician's license plates (though I have taken care to do so for other vehicles). If someone finds a way to use those numbers to harass the politicians in some way, I ain't losing any sleep over it. In fact, it is a bit of a fantasy of mine to hire a loudspeaker truck for one week, and immediately following the elections, when the candidate is trying to rest and wind down, to go in front of their house, and for one week, from 8am to 8pm, blare out at maximum volume, "GOOD MORNING!! I AM AN ANGRY RESIDENT!! I JUSTED WANTED TO SHOW YOU HOW FREAKING ANNOYING THIS IS!! GAMBATTE KUDASAI!! ARIGATO GOZAIMASU!!" Over and over and over and over again, for a whole week. See how long it takes them to call the police and complain. Not that the police would do anything if a citizen called, but I betcha they'd move their asses if a city councilperson did. That's Democracy for ya.

And it's not even limited to politicians: I even spotted an issue truck, apparently not attached to any party or candidate, just screaming on about what issues they wanted talked about. [Late edit: a closer inspection of the mayoral candidate's truck shows that on the inside of his truck-top facade, only visible from a height, were similar banners to what is seen on the issue truck. Fair game? Or are they breaking some rules here? -- later edit: the issue van is back again the next day, with a different facade; I listened more closely, and found that they are campaigning for both "Okada" candidates, presumably father and son.]

And it's even worse sometimes, when the politicians decide that they like your abode so much, they just can't resist parking, getting out of the truck, and making a 15-minute long speech, just for you.

This following photo was interesting--it was Fujii, who parked in a local square and made a speech to a crowd. The thing is, it could not have looked more fake. The audience was lined up along the walkway all nice and neat, nobody left for the duration of the speech, and they all clapped on cue--while actual residents just walked by, completely ignoring the little play. Obviously the supporters were bused in in order to make it look like the candidate could draw a crowd.

Obviously, this system isn't working. Maybe they should change the laws so as to just let people advertise on TV--but only X minutes per election cycle per candidate, at set rates. Subsidize the damn thing with my taxpayer money if you have to. But just get these damned yammerheads to shut the hell up. At least within the walls of my own residence.

image from Mainichi Shimbun

Surprisingly, the politicians actually seem aware that they are annoying the hell out of people: there are at least ten candidates in the region who have joined a coalition of candidates who refuse to use loudspeaker trucks. They still use mics and boom boxes, but otherwise are relatively inoffensive, pedaling around on bicycles to talk to citizens. Much better! I hope to god that all ten candidates run away with victories and it sets off a new trend. Not that I actually expect that to happen. But you can dream, can't you?

Thank all that is good and holy for one thing: campaign law also says that the candidates can not go around in the loudspeaker trucks before the official election campaign period (usually about 10-14 days) begins. But that one or two weeks can be hell. Forget about sleeping in. I myself have one more full week of this crap to endure before it ends.

Other resources:

• A very good English-language blog with in-depth analysis of Japanese politics, with podcasts.
• An article on loudspeaker trucks in Japanese elections
• Foreign residents' reactions (nothing surprising here)
• Another gaijin's rant
• An article on Internet-based campaigning in Japan
• A Japan Times article (their links break quickly) on new changes to the election laws, allowing "manifestos."

Next-day Update: Three more of the politicians so far have added to their names of the obnoxious, making 19 different local politicians out of the 26 running who have no respect for their constituent's peace of mind. The seven six five four non-offenders so far are Sawaki, Tarao, Harada, Kusuhara, Igawa, Harashima, and one of the Watanabes. [Update: I am removing the people from the list who later show up in their trucks.]

The worst offenders: the Okadas, mayoral challenger Takao and his (apparently) son Manabu, both members of the Japan Communist Party. Their vans are the loudest and most persistent in this area, coming around more than any other candidates, stopping to make speeches and driving through parking lots. They also apparently own the "issue" truck that has made multiple appearances as well.

Creepy McSushi

A little while ago, I noticed that a new conveyor-belt sushi joint (kaiten-sushi in Japanese) had opened up along my route home, and so I decided to check it out. Usually, I go to a place called "Ganso Sushi," which is a fair place. I'll order a plate of maguro, and if it's good, I'll eat there that night (quality varies dramatically from day to day).

This new chain, called "Sushiro," makes a big deal of their ¥105-yen plates (roughly a buck a plate, with each plate having two pieces of sushi), which is fairly cheap. This chain has started sprouting up everywhere, with the same building style as many "family restaurants" (Denny's-style) in Japan--a second-story restaurant with a ground-floor parking lot.

Anyway, I stopped by one evening and went in--and very quickly freaked out. I can't say exactly why, but something about the place just creeped me out somehow. Unlike most kaiten-sushi joints, this one had no central bay with the sushi chefs. The chefs were hidden behind a wall. There were, instead, three or four rows of booths clustered around conveyor belts that led back behind the wall leading to the kitchen. To order any special kind of sushi, you would talk to the chefs via an intercom, and in a minute or two, the order would come rolling out. How you could be sure that your order would not be snatched up by diners before you on the conveyor belt I don't know, maybe they have a system for that, an order tag or something.

The thing is, the whole place gave me the willies. It just felt wrong. After figuring out how it worked, I simply felt that I had to get out of there and never come back. It's one of those unconscious things that you can't explain. Don't ask me to be rational about it.

Obviously, I am not in the majority on this: the place was crowded, with people waiting in line to be seated. Every one of these places I've seen has people streaming into it, likely because of the low prices.

Still, you won't catch me in one of those things.

Demagoguery in Tokyo

Shintaro Ishihara just got re-elected for a third four-year term in Tokyo:

Tokyo Governor Shintaro Ishihara, an outspoken nationalist who is fond of riling Japan's neighbours, has secured a third term leading the world's largest metropolis.

Mr Ishihara, who has used racial slurs for Chinese and Korean residents and has described women past child-bearing age as "hags," had an unassailable lead over his rivals for a four-year term, Japanese media said.

He was first elected chiefly from name recognition, having been the famed author of the nationalist screed The Japan that Can Say "No", and seems to have gained popularity with his rather overt demagoguery.

Ishihara is not at all loved by the foreign community here, as he has a history of stereotyping and scapegoating on racial grounds, distorting statistics to make it look like foreigners are a criminal menace, and inciting fear among the local population as a means of creating support for his administration. This is in part why you get comments like this:

"I voted for Ishihara as I think Tokyo needs a leader who is convincing and has strong leadership," said Manabu Koiso, a 24-year-old fish market worker.

In a very real way, it is the same kind of effect that Bush gets when he makes people afraid of terrorism, with the understood linkage to Islam and people of Middle Eastern origin, or that Republicans in general get when they play the race card on immigration (see Bill O'Reilly's latest meltdown where he tried to connect his immigration scare with a recent drunk-driving tragedy).

For those of you not familiar with Tokyo's charming governor, here's a sample of his tasteful commentary:

Roppongi is now virtually a foreign neighborhood. Africans — I don't mean African-Americans — who don't speak English are there doing who knows what. This is leading to new forms of crime such as car theft. We should be letting in people who are intelligent.

He has also referred to Koreans, Taiwanese, and Chinese as "sangokunin," a derogatory term from Japan's colonial days. In his speech, to Japan's military forces, he said that these foreigners "are committing heinous crimes over and over" and suggested that such foreigners should be rounded up in case of a natural disaster, otherwise they would "cause civil disorder." This was evocative of the panic following the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, when rumors spread that Koreans were poisoning wells, burning buildings, looting, and even planting bombs; as a result, as many as 2,500 Koreans were killed by Japanese mobs of vigilantes. For Tokyo's governor to be stirring up the exact same fears even before another quake strikes is reprehensible beyond belief.

But at least he's a strong leader.

Insane

My sister-in-law has been following the madness over at the first Japanese branch of Krispy Kreme. They opened in mid-December last year and immediately there were 200 people in line to get donuts.

Ok, so there's a hot new shop, and a lot of people want to try it out, so as a special thing, people wait in long, long lines. Nothing weird about that.

But the lines didn't stop. Yes, they got shorter, but a few weeks passed, and still the lines were mammoth. Then a month passed. Two months. Three months. And still, my brother and his wife told me that the long lines persist. So I decided to check it out for myself the other day, and indeed, the lines are still there:

There's an amusement-park-style maze-line right in front of the store with what must have been at least a hundred people in it, but it was not big enough; the tail end of the line continued around the corner, with a security guard feeding the store-front line with the people from the auxiliary line whenever enough space opened up.

Amazing. Truly amazing. (And yes, those people near the end of the line have a baby in a carriage.) And it's not like people in line don't know what they're getting into; there's a sign clearly notifying customers:

The sign says, "Current Wait Time: 1:00," with a notice below about the tail end of the line starting around the corner.

Now, Krispy Kremes may be good, but they're not that good. It's utterly bizarre. My brother and his wife have asked their students for an explanation, but they're puzzled as well. Maybe I should try approaching the people in line ("Hi, I'm a reporter from 'The Blog from Another Dimension'....") and asking them why they've decided to wait for a whole hour just to get donuts. Thousands of Tokyoites, every day, for months on end.

Is it a fad? Mass hysteria? A new cult religion? A huge Homer Simpson fan club?

A Good Idea

The Japanese train system has always been very good. Anyone who lives here knows that Japan's copious number of trains run on time (without quite so much fascism), so much so that you can practically set your watch by them. Even more, they stop on a dime, so you know exactly where the doors will be when the trains come.

There have been other changes as well, from the welcome (less smoking--for example, JR East's bullet trains went completely no-smoking just today) to the annoying (as an "anti-terrorism" measure, trash cans--what few there were--were removed from the platforms on many lines). But one change that seems to be taking shape is better information for riders. This from the Yamanote Line, Tokyo's main loop line:

Above these passengers' heads, you can see a pair of LCD screens. The one on the left is for ads (and the occasional English mini-lesson from Berlitz), but the one on the right displays train information, and it does a good job. Here are some sample screens:

In addition to what stop you're coming to, all stations are displayed along with how long it'll take for you to get there. That's a nice feature.

This one tells you what lines you can transfer to from the upcoming stop...

But here's a nicer feature: a display of information about where the stairs, escalators, and elevators are located relative to the cars of the train, along with the transfer info. Note the number of your car is displayed at upper right. It even mentions which exits are best for certain transfers.

There's also a more detailed display of what's coming up...

And info on the status of other lines, should there be trouble.

What should be next is free WiFi on all lines (like they have on the Tsukuba Line now, though I don't think it's free), especially with a connection to the train line's central data center so you can see the status of any and all train lines and get info on how to best get from point A to point B. This feature would bee especially useful as more and more handheld devices are getting WiFi. And if they can afford to install something like 16 LCD screens per car like they did here, why is free WiFi so out of the question?

Your Social Window

A cool Japanese expression that I learned recently is "Shakai no Mado." Literally, it means "Social Window." In English: "your fly is open."

This brings up all kinds of questions, such as what kind of social interaction are we talking about?

Morphing Corporate Baseball Teams

In the United States, sports stadiums have started changing names due to corporate sponsorship--note Candlestick Park in San Francisco, which has gone through the names 3Com Park and now Monster Park. But the names of the teams change only when a franchise moves to a new city.

In Japan, however, franchises are not awarded by location; you don't really hear about a city getting a baseball team, rather a corporation getting one. Baseball teams take on whatever name the owners desire, which means that you've got names of the teams themselves morphing from one to another. I just saw a story about the Softbank Hawks, and thought, wha? They used to be the Fukuoka Daiei Hawks (Daiei is a supermarket chain), though when I first came to Japan, they were the Nankai Hawks (Nankai is a railway firm).

Other teams have similar name histories. The Swallows were originally the Kokutetsu Swallows (another railroad firm, this one the now-defunct JNR, the national railway corporation), then they were briefly the Sankei (newspaper) Atoms, then they became the Yakult (beverage) Swallows. The Yokohama Baystars started out as the Taiyo (?) Whales, became the Taiyo-Shochiku (alcoholic beverage) Robins, then the Taiyo Whales again, and then the Yokohama Taiyo Whales.

Then there is the Hankyu (railway) Braves, which became the Orix (financial group) BlueWave, which merged in a businesslike manner with the Kintetsu Buffaloes (formerly the Kintetsu Buffalo before the herd increased I guess, and before that, the Kintetsu Pearls, owned by the hilariously-named Kinki Nippon Railway) and became the Orix Kintetsu Buffaloes, later to be renamed the Orix Buffaloes.

One team name I particularly enjoy is the Nippon Ham (meat-packing company) Fighters, now the Hokkaido Nippon Ham Fighters. Often the name of the team is misinterpreted as the "Ham Fighters," which I think is much better than just "Fighters," myself.

One note: for a sport which claims to have acquired its own unique Japanese identity, the names are all English--including even the more-Asian-flavored names, the Carp and the Dragons. The Giants are sometimes called the "Kyojin" (Japanese for "Giants"), but that's a nickname, not an official one. I have to wonder if that's a rule or something, because you gotta figure that "Samurai" would be the perfect name for a Japanese team. However, Japanese people would find such names odd. What might appeal to English speakers would sound strange or even comical to Japanese--take the name "Ninjas," for example. A Japanese person would laugh at any baseball team with that name.

In the meantime, you gotta have a scorecard to keep track of the name changes.

Truck Parking Lot

In Japan, roads can be pretty narrow, and it's not uncommon to find a street which is so narrow that you can hardly believe it's even a one-way street, and then you realize it's used for two-way traffic. Wide roads exist, but they are few and far between. A three- or four-lane road is fairly hard to find in Japan, with highways (expressways) being no exception to that rule. Commonly, two lanes is a wide thoroughfare in Japan, and most of the major traffic arteries in Tokyo are two lanes almost all the way.

So naturally, truckers make parking lots out of them. I see this pretty much every day on the way to work. I take Route 20, or Koushu Kaido, one of the major east-west routes going through western Tokyo Prefecture. And on the stretches where there are not many businesses, trucks are commonly parked along the side of the road, their drivers taking a nap or break or something. Here's one I spotted yesterday. In the photo, with time frozen, it's kind of hard to see that the purple truck on the left is not moving (I should have taken a longer exposure to blur moving traffic), but you can see its parking lights are on. Also note the no-parking sign at top left.

And no, there are no construction sites nearby to explain why they've stopped at that location--no unloading is going on, nothing. They're just parked there. While this happens mostly on the major roads, I've seen it on most two-lane streets that I regularly drive on.

This of course forces all traffic for about a hundred meters or more behind the truck to merge into a single lane, and I have often seen three or four trucks parked like this along a few hundred meter's stretch of road, essentially making a major boulevard into a one-lane street for a considerable length--enough to cause traffic jams.

And, as is usual for this kind of thing in Japan, nobody seems to mind or care or complain. Certainly the police never do anything about it.

Fukutoshin Line

This is The Line Formerly Known As Line 13, as it were. The new subway line opening between Ikebukuro and Shibuya is now officially the 副都心線, or Fukutoshin Line--literally, the "secondary redevelopment effects on a city center as a result of suburban development" ... er, "line," as defined by EDICT. Though that translation may be a tad stodgy. The three characters are "secondary" (or "vice-"), "metropolitan," and "heart." I guess "Secondary City Central Line" might be a better way to put it.

However, the line will not be opening as soon as I had thought. Many sources placed the opening in 2007, but the same article that reveals the name claims the line will open in June 2008.

The line is of particular interest to me because it includes a station less than a block from my work, and would do away with a 10-minute walk now required in my commute. I was hoping it would open in June this year--a nice birthday present for me--but instead I'll have to wait another year.

Japanese Anti-Piracy Movie Trailers Become Even More Ridiculous

Until late last year, this was the trailer playing in just about every Japanese movie theater to discourage piracy. (For irony, see the pirate-video-cam version of the trailer on YouTube.) This trailer has been around for a few years, and tells the audience: "Our enjoyment (of movies) is being stolen. Important things will be destroyed. I won't watch, I won't buy (pirated movies)." The following text appears during the trailer: I want to protect movies, I want to protect our enjoyment (of movies). ... Don't watch or buy illegal downloads and pirated DVDs. The campaign is called "Save Our Movies." As if, of course, they are greatly imperiled by movie pirates.

There are several things wrong with the ad. First of all, it is shown pretty much exclusively to people who just plunked down $15 a head to see a movie in the theater, so it's hard to say what the effect will be of either boring non-downloading patrons with such an ad, or insulting them with the accusation that they do so. Secondly, the ad is pretty strange. Artistic, perhaps, but my own reaction to it was to roll my eyes at the over-dramatization. Maybe some are impressionable enough to be affected by this message, but I have the feeling that most people scoff at it.

But they've gotten even worse in their latest trailer which I've seen several times now. Instead of the girl crying pirate-black tears, they now have a set of bizarre cartoon frames. I wish I could show them to you, but I cannot find them anywhere on the web. One frame, for example, shows a movie pirate in the back of a theater with a camera up on a tripod, wearing an evil grin, while other patrons stand and shout in anger. One male patron is caught in a ridiculous mid-shout while his girlfriend is crying miserably (while also shouting). Cut to another frame showing the pirate at home insidiously working his home computer with the movie, his hands caught in a villainous rigor.

Now, of course, you would expect this to be ironic, perhaps even self-effacing, intended as comic relief to make light of a situation while still sending the message. The thing is, that's not the tone of the trailer at all. It comes across as serious, even somber--not like they're trying to make fun of it at all. It could be tongue-in-cheek, I suppose, but nobody is laughing at it at the screenings I've seen. And it is all too similar to similar cartoons shown on Japanese subways to discourage impolite behavior, like talking on your cell phone or spreading your legs out while seated--cartoons with a caricatured offender with bystanders showing ridiculously exaggerated expressions of annoyance or distress.

Maybe I'm just not getting it. Maybe it's low-key, nobody-laughs comedy like Bunraku. But I have the feeling that it's not.

No Tokyo Snow

Ever since they started taking records in 1876, there has always been snow in Tokyo by February 10--the latest recorded snowfall being February 10, 1960.

Not this year. It's February 11, no snowfall in Tokyo so far, and today's low was 7 degrees Celsius (45º Fahrenheit), with a high of 14º C (57º F). The forecast for the next week at least shows little change, and no chance of snow foreseen. We might go without snow at all this season, and I've heard that the skiing industry up north ain't having too much of a fun time.

Over the past several years, the first snow has come in December or January. On December 9, 2002, it came just as I was leaving for the U.S., and trains were shut down in much of Tokyo--including the Narita Express--almost preventing me from getting to Narita for my departure.

So, what's the cause? Everyone is thinking global climate change, and it might just be so. But the better test for that would be in snow not falling in Tokyo for several years. Still, it's strange not getting at least one snowfall.

Stupid News from Japan

You can't get anything past the Japanese boys in blue:

A man stole a police car from outside a post office in Maebashi on Monday because he was too tired to walk home....

The policemen who drove the patrol car left it idling in the parking lot. I know Japan is a relatively safe country, but this is still pretty stupid. The man apparently did not even drive the patrol car all the way home. Instead, he stopped 5 km later and told a woman that he was a police officer and needed her car.

Nothing you can tell me will shake my conviction that beer was involved in this somewhere.

From the This-Is-What-You-Get-for-Electing-Right-Wingers Department:

On Jan. 27 Japan's Health Minister Hakuo Yanagisawa gave a speech on the country's shrinking population in which he referred to Japanese women of childbearing age as "baby-making machines." He went onto explain that arresting population decline was difficult "because the number of baby-making machines and devices is fixed [in the population]; all we can do is ask them to do their best per head." The 71-year-old Yanagisawa did add, however, "that it may not be so appropriate to call them machines."

Ya think?

And from the irony department:

A former assistant professor of Meiji University's School of Information and Communication plagiarized 96 percent of a report on copyright submitted to the Institute of Intellectual Property, sources said Monday.

Plagiarizing a report on copyrights. Well, you gotta give the guy an A+ for sheer brass balls.

MegaMacs MegaScam?

A few weeks ago I blogged on the MegaFattening MegaMac at Mickey D's here in Japan. Since then, as reader Jeff pointed out, reports have come out that the MegaMac is so popular that it sells out too quickly--and McDonald's stores have had to limit sales of the burger at each store to ration the item.

Customers who go away disappointed are given a rain-check coupon to get the MegaMac at another time for a discount--190 yen instead of the regular 350 yen. One such coupon is pictured below; Sachi got one when she tried to order a MegaMac and was told that they were sold out. (Though I have no idea why she would want one--hell, the burger is almost bigger than she is.)

McD's outlets have limited sales of the special item to "dozens or hundreds" per store per day.

Frankly speaking, I smell a marketing scam. First of all, how could they "run out"? The MegaMac is essentially a Big Mac with two extra patties. Is McDonald's running out of Big Macs and patties? Nope. So what's the problem? Do they actual have the materials but their accounting system can't allow parts for one burger to be used for a different burger? Sounds ludicrous, but I suppose it's possible.

However, I think that it is more likely that McDonald's saw an opportunity for a PR device. After all, just introducing a new product will not get them publicity. Even selling a huge number of them might not get printed up. But running out of a specialty product because it's so popular and then having to g