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Like most people here, I have an ambivalent love relationship with Japanese ATMs.

I mean, who doesn’t love their ubiquitous salaryman-foodstamp dispensers: after all, they are lovable, sexy and incredibly serviceable.

Until night falls, that is. At which point they suddenly emerge clad in leather, whip you into submission, make you bend over and ram your every orifice, strictly foregoing the use of any lubricant.

Which, come to think of it, does remind me of a few ex’…

Ahem. Anyway.

Japanese ATMs are sometimes very convenient. For example, despite living in an über-residential neighbourhoods where most of the locals are either dead or not too far, and banks an unheard-of commodity, I only have to walk a hundred feet from my door to the closest ATM-equipped combini.

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My new phone conveniently came with a set of dictionaries on an external SD-card. Which has allowed me to give some rest to the incredibly helpful, yet thoroughly worn out, pocket dictionary Karina gave, me the first time I left for Japan, three years ago.

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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:

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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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‘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.

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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)…

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Picture dogsled.jpg
Not been back for a week and they are already announcing snow for tomorrow…

I guess I could launch into my usual bitching about cold temperatures, poor standards of insulation in Japanese architecture and the fact that I can feel the wind blowing from one side of my appartment to the other, through closed windows…

See, that’s what I would have done a month ago.

But today I won’t.

Not only because I’ve just spent two weeks in Montreal, where -15° C is considered a warm day. But also because I have heard of Nunavut.

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Picture montreal_street.jpg
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.

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Picture canada_dogsled.jpg
Top 3 major technical drawbacks of dog-propelled transportation versus motorized vehicles:

  1. Car engines stopping randomly every 20 minutes to take a dump.
  2. Right Tire attempting to slice Left Tire’s throat (helped by both Rear Tires) and subsequently putting it out of use for the day.
  3. Rear Tire repeatedly trying to procreate with Front Tire (no immediate use, as far as replacement for Left Tire is concerned).

In conclusion, and despite the important huggability factor (very low for your average out-of-the-box Aston Martin), I would say that dogsleds are very unlikely to regain a dominant position in the transportation sector.