Everybody has, I’m sure, heard of how painful it is to rent an apartment in Tokyo.
If you or anybody you know has ever looked for a place to live in Tokyo, then you know all about the race prejudice, the vertiginous deposits, ludicrous requirements, real estate agent mandatory commission and above all the two or three months gift money to the landlord, for the privilege of moving into their slum.
If you needed any more proof, here is one:
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.
‘been a very long time since I have posted anything about Tokyo’s most notorious pit hole… Time to fix this oversight!
Legend has it that, back in 1929, one of the few guys to make money off the market crash – Joseph Kennedy Sr., I believe it was, but the name hardly matters since this story is probably made-up anyway – was wise enough to take all his marbles off the playground before it sunk, when he overheard shoeshine boys in the street exchanging stock tips.
If 15-year old shoeshine boys start investing in the stock market, was his thinking, it’s high time to get the hell out and start selling short. He was right, and his clairvoyance pretty much built the Kennedy’s fortune and indirectly resulted in Jackie getting a very heavy dry-cleaning bill, thirty years later in Dallas.
Of course, while Economics 101 textbooks love to give you this fairy tale as an illustration of the danger of uninformed speculation, the truth more plausibly resides somewhere in Joseph Sr.’s arm-length records of insider trading and stock pulling. Hell, he might even have been one of the guys giving that last tip to a stock market teetering on the edge for months.
Then what is the moral of this story, I hear you ask. And more importantly, what the hell does it have to do with Roppongi?
Well, a modern day version could be thus: When you start bumping into pimply junior-high-schoolers while ordering drinks, it’s really time to get the hell out.
The good thing about being up and coding at 5 in the morning, is that you don’t have to wake up in sweat to run for the nearest table, when some underground traffic jam comes up.
Brief, but definitely one of the strongest shake I have ever felt in Tokyo.
This kinda makes up for last month’s tectonic joyride where I was passed out in my bed.
Oh, and one small piece of advice: never leave an open box of sugar on the edge of a shelf in a country prone to earthquakes. Actually, cross that, never have any piece of furniture rising over 3 feet.
Update: According to the news report, it went up to a 5 (Japanese scale) in the Ibaraki area. Not quite sure how that measures up in Richter scale, but that’s quite big (level 7 being total annihilation)…
The Japanese language has no future.
Literally.
It has got a present tense, a past tense, many inflections for each, but absolutely nothing to accentuate a verb in a way that shows it is taking place in the future.
This is not as inconvenient as one might think at first: present tense is used instead, and, when the lack of context calls for it, precisions such as “tomorrow”, “later”, “after” clear up ambiguities.
Sometimes, though, it gives strange results.
in Japanese, “I will miss you” becomes “I miss you”.
In fact, because the closest equivalent in Japanese is 寂しい (samishii: lonely, desolate), instead of saying “I will miss you” or even “I will be lonely”, you say “I am lonely”…
In other news, arguing all day long while walking aimlessly in a city taken over by muddy snow and icy wind chills is about as fun as it sounds.
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 think the only reason I can stand the freezing winter in Tokyo (ok, freezing is a relative matter, but let’s just say it’s much colder than Tanzania right now) is the fact that it is sunny all along: that does make a big difference.
Great light for pictures.
The one on the right was taken right behind my house… I’ll let you guess what it is.
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.
When I am taking visitors out and they start on the whole tired “Tokyo is like Blade Runner, without the flying cars” thing, I usually just nod and take them to Shinjuku Nishiguchi… Making our way toward Sakuraya and its floors upon floors of useless electronic gadgetry, before taking a sharp turn into the insanely narrow backward recesses of 思い出横町 (Omoide Yokochou: Memory Lane).
Impossible not to experience at least some level of self-sufficient ‘bet-they-don’t-mention-this-in-lonely-planet’ pride when you walk through that über-authentic remnant of post-war Tokyo, trying to catch your breath amidst the carcinogenic fumes of kushiyaki barbecues and slaloming between drunk salarymen and people sitting at the street-side stalls in an alley that is barely big enough to walk with your arms outstretched.