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I wanted to post this before September completely passed over us. A buddy and I found it dangling in the entrance to a little bar. We could only presume that it was some indication of the type of food served therein. Unfortunately, it was the middle of the afternoon so the place wasn't open, otherwise we would have gone in and requested an order of Fanged Abomination in Chianti Sauce. Mad props to anyone who can identify it. We have no clue.

Get em off downtown

So, I was walking through my city's red light district. It was a shortcut. Really. I was just going from, um... the hospital where I volunteer to play Scrabble with the elderly to, uh...church. I was just taking an innocent shortcut. DON'T JUDGE ME! Anyway, I love the signage down in the seedier parts of town. In addition to a club named "Vajiina" (I wonder what that means?), I found the below sign politely refusing service to foreigners. Apparently the proprietors do not want any filthy disease-carrying Americans (i.e. me) to avail themselves of their "form". And by form, I believe they mean den of prostitution.

Make my spunk the P-spunk

God DAMN...just when I thought I'd run out of Japanese products with weird-ass names. Not just the name, but even the color of this Spunky Heads chewing gum is gross. After mastication, it goes from an already unappetizing gray to a tarry black. Not even very minty fresh either.

XXXTREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEM SNACKING

Since it has been a while since we reviewed any snack food abominations, today we will look at three EXTREME FOODS from the shelves of Japan's grocery stores.

First up is COFFEE MANIA!!!! These little one-cup coffee pouches are actually a cool (albeit environmentally unsound) idea. You just remove the the filter with built-in cardboard holder from its pouch, strap it to the top of your coffee cup, and pour hot water over it for a fresh cup of joe. Since the filter contains real, ground coffee, the end product is way better than instant. Perfect for those times when you want just one cup, and not a whole pot. I think what makes this particular product "maniacal" is that it contains roughly twice the amount of coffee grounds as the regular model, allowing you to make one very strong or two very weak cups of coffee.


Our next snack travesty is the ORIGINAL BIONIC LIFEGUARD CHOCO SNACK. Lifeguard is a popular (or at least common) energy drink in Japan. The drink offers consumers a massive caffeine dose, undefinable fruity/acidic flavor, and a neon green color that makes it look like something you'd find in a spray bottle with a poison-control hotline sticker on it. Now, imagine all these qualities transferred to a solid corn puff coated in white chocolate and sprinkled with Pop Rocks. Brain-meltingly bad.


Last but not least is Fruity Paradise flavored Natchan. Anyone who has spent any time in Japan knows Natchan. The innocently smiling bottles contain a relatively drinkable mixture of high fructose corn syrup and a tiny amount of real juice. Usually, Natchan sticks to conservatively descriptive names like "Orange" and "Grape", but it looks like someone at their marketing department got a bit carried away this season.

Fraud is fun!

First, I gotta say, I love the Internet. Last night and this morning I got a couple of very strange messages on my cell. They seemed to be from a man in his 40s or 50s, talking very quickly. I really couldn't make out what he was saying... something about 回収 ("collection") and 早い段階 ("at an early stage"). Fortunately my phone showed me his number, so I figured it wouldn't hurt to Google it. If the guy was from a legit business and was calling from a business number, I reasoned, I should get a hit and be able to figure out what it was about.

I certainly got a hit... to this cached page from a disgruntled blogger warning people that someone with the same number had been trying to get him to pay a fictitious bill.

Unfortunately, this is not at all uncommon in Japan. Cases of phone fraud, in which fraudsters call unsuspecting people and demand that they wire money to a savings account are rampant. Fortunately, you'd have to be pretty thick to fall for most of their ploys, which include:

• Pretending to be the victim's son/daughter and in need of money.


• Demanding payment in connection with their cellular phone/Internet usage.


• My favorite, claiming to be the police and telling the victim that their son/husband was caught groping a woman on a train, but that charges will be dropped if the victim wires them cash.

Anyway, I blocked the fraudulent phone number, so I probably won't be hearing from that guy again. And to my Japan buddies, if you get a suspicious call from XXX-XXXX-6671, I suggest you ignore it and block the caller too. Or answer and harangue him in your native language.

Fun with spaces

Man, when I go out drinking with my guy buddies, there is nothing I like better than sitting around with them holding my COCK tail. And following a tough day at work it's nice to just sit back in my favorite chair and unwind by putting my lips on a tall, smooth COCK tail. I could slurp up COCK tails all day, I tell ya. I just feel more relaxed with a nice, firm COCK tail in my hand... Ok. I think this joke has run its course.

The drug-induced world of Japanese children's television

Being a parent in Japan is great due to the sheer number of bizarre children's shows you get to watch with your kid. Really, I do not know how Japanese society stays so orderly when most of the population is weened on shows that were designed to scar them for life. Forget that pseudo-weird hipster Spongebob, this shit is on a whole other level. Here are a few of our favorites, courtesy of YouTube.

I got started on this line of thinking when my Welsh buddy inquired about the Kure Kure Takora DVD box set. Kure Kure Takora is a kid's show from the 70's featuring a greedy red octopus. In this infamous episode (censored by NHK according to Wikipedia!), the titular main character pretends to be insane in order to extract gifts from the other characters. When his ruse is unmasked, his victims beat him until he actually is a tad crazy.


Someone actually subtitled this, so you can follow the action! The "Algorithm Koushin" or sometimes "Algorithm Taisou" series has been on NHK's popular children's show Pythagoras Switch for years. I don't know how to describe it. It's a kind of comical line dance I guess. In each episode, the hosts get a group of poor schmucks to perform it with them. Usually they get office guys, probably there at the behest of their companies, but this one features Ninjas!


Now we enter the even stranger world of kiddie cartoons. In Japan, they get away with a lot more than you could in the US. Take Zenmai Zamurai, a series of shorts about a dead samurai resurrected as a human/clockwork hybrid who can sooth people by shooting possibly barbiturate-laced rice cakes into their mouths. This episode, in which Zenmai and his ninja pal Mamemaru go in search of buried treasure, features my favorite scene ever from a kid's cartoon --the main characters being chased down a tunnel by a giant ass.


Oden-kun is a cartoon with characters designed by popular author/illustrator Masaya Nakagawa (aka Lily Franky). All the characters live in a stew pot and are ingredients in a boiled dish called oden. As such, occasionally a giant pair of chop-sticks descends from the sky to take them away to be eaten. Oden-kun, the main character is a mochi kinchaku, which is an edible sack made of bean curd filled with mochi (pounded glutinous rice). He can scoop the sticky mochi out of his own head and use it for a variety of purposes. Although it is shown as part of what is ostensibly a kids show, Oden-kun often deals with the problems of adults in modern society. This episode, for example, deals with the tender love that blossoms between a block of tofu and a boiled octopus tentacle.


This series, titled Pants Pankurou, just freaks me out. I guess it is meant to encourage children during their toilet training phase, but the idea of a fully sentient, talkative toilet gives me the jim-jams. In this episode, after singing about the wonders of taking a nice morning dump, Pankurou discusses the ultimate fate of his excrement with the toilet. He decides that it probably goes to the "Unchi no Kuni" (nation of poop) where it will become the king of poop.

Yoko's car?

This was parked in the lobby of one the buildings where I work. It seems to be part of some sort of roving VW promotional campaign. I am not sure how they got the car through those doors. Maybe it disassembles like a giant lego kit, or perhaps the movers just tilted it on its side and slid it through.

Blond ambition

For a long time I have lead a double life. After quitting a job with a software company, I've worked variously covering game news for a magazine, passing out promotional packets of kleenex for NTT, and working in my university's computer lab. Since graduating, I've made ends meet by translating at home and (I am not proud of this) working at an eikaiwa --English conversation-- school a few days a week. Just to be clear, the eikaiwa scene is not about education here. It is a service industry, with a structure and pay scale similar to that of Japan's network of blow-job delivery places. Like the blow-job dispatchers, the main requirements are that you look ok, have good personal hygiene, and pay your own health insurance. Also while the pay isn't too bad, it is not really a job that breeds self-respect.

Anyway, one of the perks of the eikaiwa job is the weird fucking questions you get asked. I have been variously asked,in all seriousness, whether or not all Americans carry guns, whether or not America has seasonal weather variation, whether or not America has actual trees, and whether or not America has any insects. Of course I answered no to all questions, because, as is well-known, America is located on the surface of Mars. But this evening I had probably the best question ever. I was meeting some new students for the first time. After I mentioned I was from America and talked about my hometown in Washington state for a few minutes, one student asked me, "You're not American, right?"
"Err, yes. I am American," I said.
"Uso!" (you're lying!) she blurted out. "So, your parents came from somewhere else, right?"
"Uh, no. My family has lived in America for at least 200 years." I said.
After several more questions along this line, she finally admitted she was shocked because I didn't have blond hair and blue eyes. Somehow, she had made it to her 38th birthday believing that every single fucking American has blond hair and blue eyes. It took another 5-10 minutes to convince her that quite a few Americans in fact do not have blond hair and blue eyes. It took far less time to convince her that Americans have cloven hooves and peel their skin from their body at night to facilitate the ingestion of dryer lint.

I honestly do not know whether to laugh or jump in front of a train.

Escalation

The Japanese have a reputation for being quiet and polite to absurd extremes. This, like all stereotypes, never applies all, or even most, of the time, but I saw something yesterday that reinforced it pretty strongly for me. Twice a week, I teach English in a nearby town, to which I commute by Shinkansen (aka bullet train). I had just gone through the ticket gate when I saw this guy lying on his back at the bottom of the escalator that leads to the train platform. It looked he was having a fit at first because he was kicking and flailing around like crazy.

I ran over and asked him if he was ok. He stuck his hand out and grunted "Hipatte kudasai!" ("Pull!"). I tried to help him up, but he wouldn't budge. Then there was a tearing sound, and it finally filters through my thick skull that he had somehow gotten his suit jacket caught in the escalator.

An elderly guy who had noticed by now and I helped him out of his jacket so he could stand up. A station attendant also appeared and shut off the escalator as we were getting him out of his jacket. What was really impressive to me was that when I first saw him he was trying his damnedest to get up without calling for help or otherwise inconveniencing his fellow commuters. In his place, I would have been screaming my freaking head off.

Anyway, by the time the poor dude was on his feet, I realized I only had about a minute before my train left, so I took off. I am pretty sure the guy also sprinted off to make his next connection too.

Un-American Bicycles

Damn...it has been a good long while since a blog post. I just have not been finding a lot of cool/funny stuff to photo lately. Probably need to get out more. But spring is on us like a drunk oyaji at an izakaya, and with temperatures finally soaring into the double digits (centigrade) I have been able to venture out on my bicycle more. To my great confusion, the below sign has been posted on every single telephone pole along a street in my neighborhood.

My bicycle is left? I don't really get it since my bicycle has never expressed any particular political affiliation. Oh well. Maybe they know something I don't about bicycles and secret meetings at docks.

In other news, electronic music gods Mercer Friendly, incorporated the monja pic from my previous post into an illustration for one of their tunes. They tell me: "I wanted you to know that we appropriated your monjayaki picture for the six demon 1 render -- the monjayaki is texture mapped on the globules under the hair." I feel so honored I don't know what to say! Check out the globules, and the great tune here...OR DIE!!!!!

Breakfast of champions

No, this is not a patch of pavement outside a Roppongi bar on a Saturday morning. It is a Japanese dish called monjayaki. I am introducing it as part of my effort to disabuse Westerners of their stereotype of Japan as a culinary utopia where every dish is low calorie and aesthetically perfect. Some of Japan's foods rival those of the UK both health and appearance-wise. Monjayaki is one such dish. It is basically a lot of chopped cabbage and other filler swimming in a slurry of watery batter. It is fried on a griddle, but never quite solidifies. One scrapes it up with tiny metal spatulas and eats it (or caulks windows with it -works either way). Its flavor is hard to describe. Kind of like sludgy, half-cooked, savory pancake batter with chunks. For those of you with no access to a monja restaurant, you could easily recreate it at home with, well, sludgy, half-cooked, savory, chunky pancake batter.

A Hard Sell

Hmm...I guess the last part of this used electronics shop's name makes sense. I mean, everything has to have an opposite, right? But what produces a "super" one of these?

The Mystery of Santa's Balls Solved!

I finally managed to rip myself out of my laudanum-induced stupor long enough to actually recall my blogspot password. After my jones for cough syrup subsided I ventured out to our covered shopping arcade only to find the Christmas decor had already gone up, like the ugly green and red cock of American cultural colonialism. This year too, Santa's pale balls, upon which I first remarked a couple of years ago, are making an appearance. This year, I finally learned what that is all about.

To explain it, I first have to explain that our city's mascot is a dead, noodle-shop owner named Sendai Shiro (1860-1902). He is quite literally venerated as a god of commerce and prosperity by the locals. The one surviving photo of Shiro has been reproduced endlessly and adorns shop walls all over the city. In the photo, Shiro is sitting, arms crossed, bare knees poking out from under his robes. He looks remarkably like Buddha, so I can sort of see why people worship him.

I am informed by reliable sources that the Santa which appears in our arcade each year is a poorly executed "Sendai Shiro Santa". It is meant to look like Shiro dressed as Santa with arms crossed in his signature pose. What I mistook for a rather generous genital endowment are in fact meant to be Santa/Shiro's knees. Below is the famous photo of Shiro. I find it wonderful that this random collision of local folk belief and Christianity has produced a big red balloon of Santa with his wedding tackle dangling in the breeze.

The other white meat

I guess I will never have a shortage of blog fodder as long as Japanese products continue to be fucking weird. Thank God no other Japan bloggers have ever thought of pointing this out. None. EVER.

Anyway, the other day I saw this in a drugstore:

Surely not, I thought. Surely no one would ever go there in a thousand years, I thought. I had underestimated the cosmetics industry. They have not only gone there, they have purchased land there, and erected an outlet mall with an attached waterslide park there. As the name implies, the product contains placenta (of what creature I know not), which is believed to be good for the skin and "improving your constitution". In fact, a quick googling revealed a horrorcopia of placental skin care and health products. You can get creams, pills and apparently even injections containing "placental extract" to make your skin nice and soft and your constitution more improved. A steal at roughly $90 a box.

C'est bon!

Aside from sweet views of sweaty man-ass, the other big attraction of the Obon season is the hakamairi (grave visitations). Each summer, most Japanese return to their hometowns to visit the family tomb and leave offerings of incense, flowers, booze, smokes, and sweets. My family is no exception to this rule, so last week we trundled off to the sticks for a day of reconnecting with the family spirits and, in my case, wishing for hard drugs. It's not that I dislike my in-laws, it's just that their home is located here:
Or from different angle:
You will not find a Starbucks within 12 miles of this town. Nor will your cellular phone's reception ever creep beyond one half a bar. Now, I am definitely not averse to getting away from the information sphere once in awhile and basking in a few hours of ignorance of what the rest of the world is doing. The real problem can be summed up in three words: unintelligible local dialect. If my spouse is not by my side constantly to translate from local Japanese to standard Japanese, I have no clue what my in-laws are saying to me. Often my spouse doesn't understand either. Honestly, I think they confer beforehand and switch up the dialect for each of our visits to keep us from ever figuring it out. It's worse than those parts in Trainspotting where the Scottish accents get so out of control they added subtitles in deference to non-Scottish audiences.

So, I took a longer-than-necessary stroll after fulfilling my grave-visiting duties. Ostensibly to enjoy the fresh air, of which we in sooth get plenty being from a fairly rural city ourselves. It was actually rather enjoyable. I found some pretty flowers which I had no hope of identifying:

and a scene that I believe is a good, spontaneous example of the Japanese idea of "mono no aware," or an object that evokes a kind of aesthetic empathy:
So I guess the moral of this pointless post is, if you ever find yourself married to a Japanese native and getting dragged off three times a year (obon + vernal and autumnal equinoxes) to their remote rural hometown where the local dialect is completely impenetrable to visit the family tomb, I strongly recommend you take a book.

Obon? Bon!!!

My wife, daughter, and some other members of our enormous family + me visited a summer festival this week. It was held on the premises of a retirement home where one of our many cousins works. Such festivals are held all over Japan during the Obon period at temples, shrines, schools, community centers, or anywhere else with enough space to set up. Although there may be regional variations, I think the basic layout is pretty much the same no matter where you go. There will be a raised stage or platform in the middle where an announcer sits with a mic, playing canned music. Sometimes there will be actual musicians, or some combination of taped/live. Local residents "dance" around the stage. I use scare quotes here because it's not so much a dance as a procession. There are apparently traditional steps and arm movements, but nobody actually knows them. They just sort of imitate the person in front of them (who is imitating the person in front of them and so on), so it's kind of a self-organizing thing. Off to one side vendors set up tents selling yakisoba (sauce-drenched fried noodles), kakigori (shaved ice with syrup), yakitori (skewered, grilled chicken) and beer. There are also usually some games for the kids, such as popgun shooting galleries and "kingyo sukui," in which kids try to fish live goldfish out of an inflatable wading pool with a flimsy tissue net. Oddly that "sukui" bit means "rescue" or "save" and also shows up in the word "sukuinushi" meaning savior, i.e. Jesus. So whenever I see kids playing this game, it gives me a mental image of Christ bending down from heaven with a huge paper net, trying to fish out human souls before they soak through the tissue and fall back into Hell. Whoa...gotta lay off those morning glory seeds.

Everything was going pretty normally. We were all standing around outside the ring of dancers drinking beer (except for the kids and drivers), wolfing down noodles and chatting. The dancers were trotting around the stage with varying degrees of enthusiasm. A lot of them looked like they had been dragged from their beds at the retirement home, some literally being wheeled around by the staff. I honestly can't say if that was a kindness or a cruelty. Some of the old dears, like one very elderly wheelchair-bound woman who was compulsively chewing on her yukata collar, didn't actually appear to understand what was going on. I kind of wondered for whose benefit this was being done -for the retirees enjoyment, or to give a photo-op to their next of kin? However, this depressing thought was driven from my head by a sight that made me spray beer out of both nostrils. A pair of pale cheeks had ascended the stage and commenced jiggling up and down. They had a taiko drummer, wearing only a loincloth, headband and grin, get up and reel off a couple of numbers on the big drum. After all, this is the land of public, fully-nude, occasionally mixed bathing, but it was still kind of a jolt. Even after 10+ years of living here, I'm still sometimes reminded I'm not in Kansas. Kansass maybe, but not Kansas.

A tasty nosehair sandwich

As those who know me can attest, when I'm not cleansing my nasal passages or inhaling boulder-sized rocks of crack, I can generally be found clutching a greasy mouse playing through the first level of Doom...over and over...obsessively. That was until I discovered "Hanage 2." The game is sold through Japan's sprawling network of 100 yen shops, meaning it cost roughly 80 cents US. Don't be fooled by the price though. This game is a brilliant indictment of modern, consumerist society.

Premise Your guy swims relentlessly forward through the air, attacked by a variety of monsters that fly at him in sine-wave formations. Where do they come from? Perhaps from the depths of his cold, empty soul.

Gameplay This game uses only the space bar. When you press it, your guy swims toward the right side of the screen. Stop pressing it, and he drifts back toward the left. The mind-numbing simplicity, reducing the player to a cog carrying out simple, repetitive motions, is a perfect metaphor for our post-post culture in which humans are mere extensions of the machine/phallus that rules the universe.

Power ups The player can collect a number of power-ups, but these just uselessly change the character graphic's clothing with no discernable effect on the gameplay, or even more cruely, render him naked except for his briefs. Again, this aspect is highly informed by our modern culture, in which we, magpie-like, snatch up every glittering trinket dangled before us, accumulating mountains of designer clothing, automobiles and consumer electronics that are as useless and destined for the landfill as our own broken bodies.

Graphics Crudely rendered and garishly colored, they are obviously a reference to the grotesque carnival of human sexuality.

Sound The heroic music and humorous sound effects, contrast starkly with the game's darker themes, creating a keen psychological tension.

Concluding remarks Casting aside clumsy narrative and exposition, this game drives home the horror of modern existence as few others do. Even the title, "Hanage," meaning nosehair, is a reference to all we consider unsightly, undesirable and filthy within ourselves. It will hold up a cold flawless mirror, and you will shrink in terror from what you see.

Money Shot

Canned coffee is as all-Japanese as sushi and creepy fan art of preteen homocidal maniacs. It has been offering a quick pick-me-up to millions of salarypeople every day since 1969. It also uses some of the more, um, creative naming conventions. OK, my mind is probably more pervy than most, but even so... I just don't feel comfortable imbibing beverages with names like "Morning Shot" and "After Shot." Am I the only one who thinks these sound more like names you'd find in the curtained off part of your video store than in Starbucks? For reference, both of these are products in Asahi's lineup of Wonda coffees, for which Tiger Woods used to do ads.

Spend some quality time with your socks

You know, it's easy to get caught up in life's little worries. Taxes. Work. Family obligations. Where you put the murder weapon because if they find it your defense is shot to hell and you'll be spending the rest of your life perfecting counter gang-rape techniques. But I think I'm going to take the advice of this shop sign, and just enjoy my socks. I like my socks.