Aside from a brief emergency trip to an eye-specialist last Summer (literally a mom-and-pop operation, whose office was approximately half the size of my current bedroom), I have never, during my stays in Japan, been afflicted with illnesses serious enough to mandate a trip to the hospital. At least nothing that couldn’t be treated with a self-administered treatment based on quinine-rich tonic water (aptly sterilized and base-neutralized with proper dosage of gin and lime).

This morning, though, I had to check in at my neighbourhood clinic and undergo a whole series of health exams. Not that I was feeling in any particularly bad shape (nasty lingering chest cough and faint hangover from previous night’s gin&shochu outing aside), but the Japanese Ministry of Education and Research insists on making sure that I don’t have tuberculosis, cancer or bubonic plague before even considering shelling out some Yen toward my World Domination Plot research, otherwise known as PhD.

In the grand tradition of furthering cross-cultural enlightenment that has made this blog famous in the greater Shin-Nakano Sanchome area, I figured I would share some random observations about the experience:

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I am not sure there is any delicate way to put it, so I’m just gonna lay it out there. Might save some people a few bucks, who knows.

These allegedly “bigger” Japanese brands: a crass marketing ploy, it turns out.

I guess it is now time to start hunting for boxes of prophylactics bearing pictures of elephants or dinosaurs…

• Tired of wearing a tie at the office?
• Want to dress more comfortably, yet remain appropriately formal for a work environment?
• Love traditional Japanese clothing?

Say no more!

We have what you need:

Behold, the necktie fundoshi!

Wear one at the office and get envious looks from all your coworkers (possibly a few sexual harassment lawsuits too).

This one dedicated to Jeff:

I was enjoying a peaceful late lunch and tea break at the small eatery next-door with E., somewhere between lovemaking session #5 and arguing session #253, when a noisy discussion, one table over, draw our attention:

Three obatarians were seated, twice as many teapots in front of them, loudly and excitingly commenting over what looked like exercise sheets scattered on the table. From the style of the exercises and the tone of their comments, it seemed like at least one of them was learning how to write kanjis: a peculiar explanation, seeing how they all sounded positively natives, with little chance of belonging to the 1% illiterate people in Japan.

But then, listening more carefully to their attempt at pronouncing strange guttural tchaw’s and yow’s and taking a closer look at their papers, we realized they weren’t working their Japanese kanjis: these little old women were indeed feverishly teaching each other Korean. At that point, I could clearly see the ghost of Bae Yong Joon hovering above the table and reflecting into their glistening pupils.

I suppose until that moment, I had woefully underestimated the spread of Yong-sama-mania among the greying Japanese masses, but E. confirmed that even her aging slightly xenophobic grandma had all but started to learn Korean, secondary to that mop-head single-handedly bringing Korea to the forefront of sappy insipid drama production for the Asian market.

And I naively thought that peace and understanding between countries would have to be slowly built over mutual respect and appreciation for millennia-old cultures.

You are stuck in Japan, it’s oppressively hot and you don’t have a yen to your name. You decide to do the obvious and rob a cab.

Sure why not: the rich bastards must be carrying like a million yen on them at all times. Sounds like an easy one, right? Right?

Well, no.

You see, the incidence rate of mad bank robbing ending in wild taxicab chase and hostage situations through the streets of Tokyo is so high (Bogota of the East, that we call it) that officials have had to come up with a solution. Unbeknownst to you, from the moment you hopped on the cab with your gun, the taxi driver has been pressing a secret button on his dashboard that turns on an emergency distress signal light on top of the car, thus warning any law enforcement agent in the vicinity that something fishy is afloat.

In your face, evil taxicab robbers!

Well, that is, unless you actually take the time to poke your head out the window, spot the blinking red light, shoot the driver and escape.

But taxis are not the only ones that have received special care regarding the endemic hijacking problem in Japan: all public buses are also equipped with such a special emergency light that can be turned on in case a crazy lunatic would suddenly decide to re-enact the best moments of Su-ppee-do, the movie. I feel so much safer already.

Why do I have the feeling some lawmakers in Japan watch too much TV?

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As every bored gaijin knows, you’ll learn tons of interesting things with a quick read of the Men for Women ad section in Metropolis (yea, I know, I know… Look, we were stranded at First Kitchen after spending 20 minutes attempting to stop a cab at 3am in the Tokyo blizzard: you try and find better options for easy entertainment…). You might not actually “learn” anything even remotely useful, insofar as the collective IQ of all contributors probably doesn’t even reach the temperature of my armpit on a cold winter day. But at least you’ll laugh your ass off.

We advise our sensitive readers to skip the rest of this entry altogether, as it contains displays of blunt moronism and enough cliché molestation to make a live sport commentator blush like a little girl.

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You know these little gel pads that you heat up in the microwave and then apply to your body to relieve topical pains.

Well, when they say not to heat them for more than 50 seconds, they are not kidding.

I was gonna post a deep and insightful post about life, death and the pursuit of happiness.

Then, I realized that the brand new Suntory winter-edition homebrew was on sale at Lawsons…

Few people know that the natural color of the Japanese tatami is, in fact, green.

It is only with wear and sunlight that it becomes its trademark straw-yellow color.

All right, everybody knows that. Especially around here, where Eriko gave me her usual demeaning laugh when, upon my discovery that every patch of tatami that had remained covered by furniture so far, was much greener than the rest, I suggested mould.

Crazy stuff, I know…

Oh, and the free-falling posting rate? What can I say, critical sense is a bitch.

Seriously: once you start actually wondering twice whether what you are about to type is worth the time, or if you shouldn’t instead run to the local combini to see if they got any new seasonal flavored beer… that’s the end of it all.

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Yet another classic illustration of why even my mildest efforts to blend in, or at least not stick out like a sore thumb waiting to be hammered in (something’s not quite working with that metaphor, but I’m not sure what) are irremediably doomed.

So, I’m in the train with a friend discussing our common love for the music of Fela Kuti and other seminal Afro-beat acts of the 70’s.

At one point, the discussion is hovering over the respective merits of Fela and his son, Femi, who has quite successfully taken where his father left and does a great job nowadays of blending classic afro-jazz with newer house beats and modern electro experimentations.

And that’s when I suddenly become aware that our car has not only fallen dead silent (Japanese hardly ever talk on the train anyway) but also that more than a few people are eyeing us sideways with strange looks on their face. The disruption in the wa is so major that even a dirty gaijin like me can feel something is fucked up.

We have been talking in Japanese, probably loud enough to be heard around the car. And, judging by the look on certain faces, we might as well have been talking about raping baby seals with hello kitty vibrators…

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• Revenge of the obachans

  It is pretty much Dawn of the Dead’s aftermath out there (after the zombies have won). I guess only 70 year old grandmas and sleep-dephased gaijins go shop on a tuesday afternoon.

• Sid, if you only knew what they did to you…

  There is no such thing as a music track unfit for supermarket PA in Japan. Of course, it needs undergoing a heavy process of musical mutilation first.
  I am puzzled at the mere thought of that guy out there with a cheap Casio synthesizer who spends his days re-recording any song he can put his hands on, ensuring it is first emptied of anything that could even remotely be called “musical essence”. Apparently that guy thinks that Mozart’s K. 219, Staying Alive and Anarchy in the UK all have the same potential for easy-listening adaptation.
  I might one day beg the supermarket manager to let me make a copy of their CD… unless there is some radio station that broadcast that. Need to find out.

• Do We really need to have the fresh octopi tentacles on display, next to yoghurts and beer?

  Not that they don’t look appetizing or anything.

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We all know about the contagious power of yawns…

One only needs to start yawning in the middle of a crowd to get everybody else yawning in return. This can actually be quite fun if you suddenly decide to fuck with people’s head and discreetly yawn at people during some large meeting (I know, it sounds really stupid - it is - but try it one day, you’ll be amazed how quickly you’ll get the whole room yawning).

In Japan, though, there’s a much more interesting variation on that theme: Cell Phone fidgeting.

Anybody who’s lived in Tokyo will have no doubt told you about the principal characteristic of the average Japanese commuter: an uncanny ability to instantaneously fall asleep as soon as they hit a train seat, doubled with an instinctive knowledge of when to wake up, the very second their train hits their stop home.

Most of the time, though, they are not really sleeping: merely building that legendary Japanese force shield of indifference around them. Western people tend to do the same, but they need a book or a cd-player to help them fake complete absorption in their own world… Japanese do not… they just seat, half-close their eyes and doing so, ostensibly tell everyone they do not care what happens in the car until their destination. Guy next to them wanking on his tentacle porn manga, leecherous salaryman gawking at them from across the car, passenger falling asleep and drooling on their shoulder: nothing will wake up the Japanese commuter.

Except for one thing…

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Anybody knows if there’s any specific Japanese law prohibiting the destruction of crows en masse by way of firearms? I was thinking along the line of .44, AK-47 or rocket launcher… but I am willing to submit to local customs and use nunchakus or katana if that’s a requirement.

Actually I think if they keep squawking away like that, I’m gonna go bare hand on these fuckers.

The single thing I hate most about Japan is the omnipresence of these carrion-eating pests. Blame Edgar Allan Poe, blame centuries of unfounded prejudices: I just don’t like crows.
Not content to look like they could probably eat their british mates for breakfast, the Japanese versions are also renowned for thriving absolutely everywhere: countryside and cities alike.

It is not without legitimate fear that the average Hitchcock spectator will cross one of those deserted city parks at sundown, surrounded by hundred of ominous black shadows only waiting for the first sign of weakness to plunge and gouge out eyes with their razor-sharp beak and claws. God, do I miss the shit-dropping, cackling, unhygienic, peace-loving European pigeon. Good old inoffensive flying rats of our Western cities…
Just try to picture yourself in the middle of Piazza San Marco in Venice, except instead of the usual thousands of annoying little pigeons, the whole square is covered by a huge flock of mean-looking crows (incidentally, is it even my fault if you are not supposed to say a “flock of crows”, but a “murder of crows”? isn’t that proof enough that these things are just a public menace that ought to be exterminated?). Now how do you think that would affect Italian tourism?

Well, Tokyo is just like that, wherever you could decently expect to see a small cutie-birdie or some funny seagull, there is one of those large vicious black bird.

Anyway, I usually consider it sufficient to display a cold disdain toward these feathered bastards and I make a point of ignoring their presence when going around, save for a subtle but severe look of reprobation in their general direction, to make it clear that I disapprove the ways of their species.

But this morning, the war is declared.

IF they think their numeric superiority entitles them to exercise their pitifully discordant vocal organs at 4:30 in the morning, right the second I finally managed to laboriously put myself to sleep, they are in for a surprise. They just wait til I find that old baseball bat I got somewhere in my closet, we’ll see if they can shriek as proudly with their neck at a right angle with their body.

Man, I hate crows…

Why?

Why did I have to buy what I originally thought was plain ole mixed green salad, but turned out to be, upon closer inspection (at home and therefore five long sweaty minutes away from the combini), seaweed salad (with no less than three shades/species/types of seaweed, mind you).

Why, why, why?

And don’t give me that crap about cultural openness, nutritional values and all that stuff: I will gladly eat about anything (although a cold gun pressed against my temple might help) on most occasions. And that includes, caramelized wasp larvae, lapon reindeer sandwich or even that disgusting insult to generations of Italian cooks that is nori-corn-mayonnaise pizza… But right now, everything around me (including me) is hot and sweaty and all I wanted was to put my tooth on a nice crisp leaf of fresh iceberg lettuce (the mere name sends my taste buds in gustative overdrive, right this moment), not some kind of damp chewy pseudo-vegetable that looks like it’s been left behind by the tide.

If God had intended for us to eat raw seaweed at dinner, he would have made it sprout in my backyard while lettuce would be growing at the bottom of the oceans.

So, anyway, I guess with a bit of olive oil…

If you read any japan-related newspaper or blog, you have read that wire by now:

TOKYO, Japan (Reuters) — A Japanese teenager was forced by his teacher to write an apology in blood after dozing in the classroom, the school’s principal said on Monday.

Source: Reuter through CNN

Somebody interestingly translated a different article about this story as published by the Asahi Shimbun.
I know this is old material, but I could not miss this occasion to point out that the teacher did not get much grief and nobody involved even considered any kind of retaliatory action, beside some small verbal admonestation by the principal and, I guess, an invitation to use more traditional methods of discipline the next time around. While this lack of lawsuit probably shocked beyond words American soccer moms, it is hardly anything surprising in Japan.

As Galvin, JET teacher from hell, only half-jokingly pointed out: if you were to “accidentally” dislocate the arm of a student or gouge out a few eyes while experimenting with some novel educative methods with your class, not only would you be entirely safe from any blame whatsoever, but the parents would probably come and present you with their apologies for having raised such a clumsy troublemaker.
Japanese kids are no angels, mind you. They are, maybe as much if not more than they Western counterparts, unbearable spoiled brats. But unlike in the US, were parents expect teachers to live the same kid-ruled hell they go through themselves, Japanese parents consider school to be outside of their realm of lax leniency (and the kids better get used to it, because it doesn’t get any better for them until University, provided they get in, that is).

That being said, I’m glad my teachers never got this bright educational idea, as I would probably be long dead from anemia (instead of that, I left school with a flawless knowledge of irregular German verbs that has not abandoned me to this day, not in small part due to having copied them thousands of times for various punitive reasons).