20th December
Posted in General, Japan at 12:14 pm by Visez
Welcome to the first issue of the Japanese FAQ. Here I will attempt to answer the questions about Japan that people most frequently ask me. Which is exactly what a FAQ is. I’m sure you guessed that. But, come on, I need some kind of introductory text. Be nice.
In this first issue, I will talk about something that is kind of wrapped up in mystery. The Japanese fetish for used knickers. Is it true? Can you really get them from vending machines? Does everyone do it?
For the ones less familiar with the concept, if you are a manga reader, or an anime fan you might have been puzzled at the sight of some characters that seem to be obsessed with panties. Stuff like this:
‘Why do they do it’, you might ask yourself, ‘it’s not even funny!’. Well, in Japan, you have to understand that for lots of reasons that I’m not going to discuss now, the nerd population tends to have slightly peculiar sexual tastes. This is mirrored by the popularity of dating videogames and porn manga with the most absurd scenes, from tentacles to incest to rape to stuff I don’t even know the name of. Because of the so-called Lolicon, frequently the subjects tend to be very young girls, and a direct consequence is the obsession with schoolgirls and, obviously, their panties. I will try to discuss this phenomenon in another post.
So, together with my senpai we went looking for one. But before such a dangerous mission, I needed a suitable disguise:
Fantastic, nobody is going to recognise me now. I kind of like this Owen Wilson-ish look. Anyway, we were all set, and we started going. I’m not going to say exactly where it was, but we went to Shibuya. Shibuya is exactly how you imagine Tokyo: loud, dazzling and packed with people. And it’s nothing compared to Shinjuku.
There we are. If the indications are correct, it should be on the second floor of a building in a back alley. We start climbing the stairs, there’s a door slightly ajar in a very anonymous corridor. We open it.
Inside, a small neon-lit small room, cctv cameras everywhere, and a guy at the counter that without even looking at us keeps on reading his… erm… magazine. The walls and the aisles where crowded with uniforms, schoolgirls uniforms, all kind of stuff. The most expensive ones had pictures included of the girl that owned that uniform. In the second picture, you can see socks pinned to the wall and next to them, racks over racks of amateurial videotapes of girls all recorded in that very store. Crazy stuff. Expensive as well.
And then, there they were:
This image kindly provided by my senpai since my attempts were all blurred. This is exactly what you think it is. A huge stash of used panties and bras.
So, yes, these shops do exist. It would be untrue and unfair to say that EVERYONE here does it, but exactly like we have perversions and fetishes back in good ol’ Europe, here there are some weird things that really do the trick for some people….
Keep on emailing me your questions!
Update: These shops apparently are called Burusera shops (ブルセラ ショップ). Just click on the link for more information about it.
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20th December
Posted in General at 11:28 am by Visez
Sometimes you have a bad day. It’s perfectly normal, you might think. It happens to everyone. Even to Daniel Powter. However, it never ceases to fascinate me how bad things always happen in batches, one mishap after another in frustratingly long sequences. Which is quite handy, I think: it’s Nature’s (or God’s, or Fate’s, or Chaos’) way to warn us of things to come. At least you won’t be caught off-guard.
Why warning us AND making the bad stuff happen instead of just granting us a lifetime of happiness? Maybe accidents and strokes of luck are generated by two different sentient forces. Maybe we make our own fortune and bad luck is completely random, so that detecting its patterns is our only defense. Or maybe we are just in karma debit. And we have to pay. But this is getting too metaphysical.
Anyway, I made all this up in order to justify almost two weeks of prolonged silence. To all of you who sent emails without receiving an answer, I’m sorry, I will start replying now. It all started when the Japanese police displayed their dismay over my famously annoying parking spots by attaching lots of friendly tickets such as this one to the handle of my bike:
I think it’s pretty self-explanatory. Now, what would a well-behaved, conscientious citizen do? Ignore them altogether of course! It turned out that it wasn’t such a great idea. You see, in Japan bikes are everywhere, and they all look the same. So you can easily imagine that this could be very confusing for a person like me with very limited memory for details like where the hell did I park my bike? or where do I live? or, waking up the morning after, what is your name again?. That is why I was quite happy when I found that my bike had a bright yellow umbrella horizontally stuck in the middle of the front basket: I could spot my bike from thirty metres away in a crowded parking spot.
Unfortunately, so could the police. And I have the vague suspicion that they wanted to teach a lesson to the moron who kept on parking in no parking areas with a big bright yellow umbrella flagging his bike. And so they did… my bike disappeared without a note. But is it really my fault if no parking areas are in such convenient places? I mean, seriously, why don’t they put them where nobody parks? Honestly, some people…
No worries, I could still go and take it back. Unfortunately the bike depot was VERY far away, so there was only one way to go and get my bike back. To go there by bike. It makes perfect sense. Jesus. I actually tried to get there. By bike. I mean, another bike. And I got lost. So I lost half a day and I had to spend another week without bike, since obviously the only day I could go to the depot to get my bike back was Saturday.
In the meantime, I was experiencing life as a pedestrian. Life in slow motion, I might say… it was so frustrating, it takes so long to get anywhere. And then I was actually going to work as if I was riding a bike, often finding myself walking in the middle of the road and wondering why people were looking at me weirdly.
And then one night, after a very hard day at work, I felt the sudden craving for a big bucket of KFC. You know what I mean. It’s one of those itches that cannot be satisfied without the real thing. A yearning for fat, greasy chicken. Yes, that nice juicy chicken in crispy breadcrumbs… and in Japan it’s served with Coke, not with Pepsi. Perfection in a bucket. Anyway, it was late, I was tired, and it was freezing cold outside, so I asked a friend of mine to lend me his bike to go to the city centre.
As I was cycling along, eagerly anticipating the tasty meal, I get stopped by a group of four policemen. Policemen in Japan really are Jedis, as you can see from the lightsabers in the picture below. At night, they light them up and you can see the evil red flashing beams from several dozens of metres away. Well, I would have seen them if everything on Earth in that moment wasn’t looking like a fried chicken to me.
Anyway, I get stopped and these guys ask me to turn the bike’s light on. It takes a while, since it’s not my bike and I’m not particularly gifted for mechanical things, and I struggle long enough for them to realise that what I’m riding is not my bike. So they ask me whose it is. My stupidly naive answer: “A friend’s”. I could almost read their minds: gaijin behaving suspiciously + night + borrowed bike = dirty foreigner stealing our honourable bicycles.
So they held me a good twenty minutes in the freezing cold while calling the central to check whether the bike was stolen. As a pleasant way to kill some time, they started asking me questions answered in rudimentary Japanese like:
“Where are you going?”
“To the city centre”
“What for?”
“To eat chicken”
“Is Maruko your name?”
-_giggles from the female officer, since it’s a girl’s name_
“Yes”
“Such an Italian name”
-_If only these guys did not have a lightsaber….
Ok, they got my details and they let me go. I started speeding like a madman towards KFC, nothing, NOTHING could stop me now. So I thought. Because of the time lost with the evil policemen, KFC was closed, and I had to resort to an instant ramen. The satisfaction I got from it was directly proportional to its cost: about 50p. So sad.
As expected, things got downhill from there: at work I got assigned the most boring task one can possibly imagine and I got ill. Obviously I didn’t take any days off since they are a very precious (and scarce) commodity here in Japan, and this plus not being able to rest during weekends because of ethanol-based parties (more about that in another post) only prolonged my suffering. As a consequence, things started stacking up, and I found myself with laundry to do, room to clean, work and study to catch up with and, of course, blog posts to write.
When trying to catch up with a lot of things there is always the problem of fitting a small tablecloth onto a large table: you pull one corner, and the opposite one gets exposed. Trying to so many things at once just increased my stress level without actually helping me in getting anything done. And haste causes bad accidents:
Yes, that is my carpet. And yes, I hate ironing. Now I hate it even more. So, this is what I usually do when I’m in this kind of situation: first of all, I get over and done with the things that have to be sorted out before I can take on everything else. Such as cleaning up my room and doing my laundry. Order brings order and inner peace. Then I make a statement: I create a perfect evening where I do some small things that I really like. It’s like a romantic date. Without any annoying girlfriend. This perfect evening will be the starting point, the cornerstone for the comeback.
So, what did I do? I set the air-con to 30 degrees, I got my DVD rental card, I rented “Four weddings and a funeral” (which I never managed to watch beyond the first half) and I prepared fried eggs with bacon. What more can a man want 
?
PS: I have a new bike now. It’s orange. And pigeons keep on crapping on it. Geez…
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12th December
Posted in General at 4:06 am by Visez
Sorry guys, I’m having a bit of a busy period at work at the moment, check again on Thursday for the next post…
Apologies
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4th December
Posted in General, Japan, Atsugi Guide at 8:32 am by Visez
Whew… Sorry to spoil the ongoing celebrations guys, but I haven’t kicked the bucket just yet. I wrote that post since on saturday night I went to eat fugu with a friend.
Fugu, the bloated looking chap in the picture -pescepalla per intenderci-, is a Japanese delicacy. As you probably know from personal experience already (sigh!), all good things in life either kill you or make you fat, and since fish is as fat-free as it gets, there is nothing left to do for our fishy friend apart from killing you. And in a particularly cruel way as well: blowfish contain a toxin that will slowly “disconnect” your muscles, leaving your lungs and heart for the gran finale.
Oh, I almost forgot the funny part: you are completely conscious throughout the whole process. Ever wondered what it feels like to drown? Eat fugu liver and you won’t be disappointed!
So as you can imagine fugu chefs are serious professionals that undergo years of training and anger management therapy (you really don’t want to piss them off, do you?). Despite their skills, sometimes they have a bad day and a handful of people dies every year in Japan for fugu poisoning. (It has to be said that most of the deaths are caused by people that REALLY REALLY want to die and eat the fugu without taking the toxic parts off, and apparently the liver is so tasty looking that is impossible to resist from having a bite… there are legends of rather unorthodox practices like eating as much as it gets you completely paralysed until the poison wears off but with your internal organs still working, but I guess trial and error is not a very good method for knowing your limit.)
Disclaimer:Kids, don’t do this at home! Ask your daddy to do it first for you…
Anyway, so we went to the restaurant, don’t really know the name, WAAAY too many kanjis written in the funny cursive stylish way but for the people in Hon-Atsugi, it’s on top of Mylord 1, near the station. Here’s a picture of the entrance, the ふぐ sign means (surprise surprise!) fugu.
We go there tempted by a special offer and we are welcomed by a chef that speaks with a voice that is a mixture between a Kabuki theatre actor and Vegeta from Dragonball Z. We get a table right next to the window, the view is breathtaking, more for the surprise of seeing something like this in a small city like Hon-Atsugi rather than for the quality of the view itself.
Dazzling, isn’t it? Yes, the photo is blurred, I’m crap at taking pictures, but it’s all very christmassy outside and the lights are far brighter than it appears in the picture. Quite annoying in fact when you have the power of a lighthouse concentrated in a beam that is perfectly centered on your right-eye pupil.
Ok, so we get the menu, and a brief chat with the waitress makes me realise that because of my poor Japanese what I thought a “special offer” was in fact completely the opposite: I thought that one dish was enough for two people, but what it actually said is that at least two of the same dish had to be ordered. So we thought we would have spent half, but we ended up paying double… ehm… sorry… at least it was just another person and not a party of ten people, otherwise I would have had quite a bunch of people pissed off…
Anyway… the meal was excellent and the service was very good: we got (each) a steamed eggy thing (kinda like tofu) with crab meat, a portion of eight pieces of sushi -really really good-, a soup with mussels and seaweed:
So it’s now time to get to the fish that has taken so many lives in exchange for brief carnal pleasure…
I bravely introduce the deadly morsel in my mouth and wait for the exquisite flavour to hit me. And I wait. And wait. And wait some more. I look at my friend: “Tastes like chicken” “Yeah, it does”.
Chunky, cold chicken, with a very vague sweetish aftertaste and lemony scent. You really have to use the sauce to feel anything. If you ask me, you should put it in a bed of soft white bread and cover it with a blanket of mayonnaise. Now that would be better . But it had to be done, another tick on my checklist.
Cool thing is, there is a tiny amount of poison left in every serving, so that at the end of the meal your lips will feel slightly numb or tingly. Slightly less cool was the price of the meal: ￥3500 (a mesu schina) each, which for Japanese -outside Tokyo- standards is on the expensive side, at least given the quantity. But if you think about it in pounds, it’s 17 quid which makes it pretty acceptable .
Ok, I’m off now, another episode of Full Metal Panic and I can go to sleep… nighty!
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2nd December
Posted in General at 3:03 am by Visez
If you don’t see another post in the next 24 hours it means that I’m dead.
See ya!
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1st December
Posted in General, Cinema at 6:54 am by Visez
There are some people that seem to be always right, no matter what the circumstances are. Even if sometimes it takes you one and a half years to realise it. So, after our talk, I followed your advice and I went to see Elizabethtown. Unsurprisingly, you were right again. Even after so long, even for something you knew nothing about, you came up so nonchalantly with the perfect answer. Apparently time doesn’t matter much for certain people and certain bonds. You know who you are.
Elizabethtown is a movie that could be easily mistaken for yet another Hollywood rom-com: sweet cute guy kinda lost in life, fortunate coincidence and he meets a pretty girl, they end up together and he’s happy again. This would be a very easy (and very unjust) dismissal of the movie. While the description above might fit countless other romantic comedies - Serendipity comes to mind - Elizabethtown is much more than that. In fact, I could almost say that the plot, the story itself, is completely irrelevant to the movie: Elizabethtown is not about the story at all, it is about the people in it: two people that fate brings together, two strangers that recognise each other, two souls that share the same private language. Only these two characters matter, everything else is just part of the canvas… Watching them during their dialogues is like seeing a play in a foreign language: their chemistry is so tangible that sometimes you think Orlando Bloom and Kirsten Dunst are not acting, but having their private jokes on screen. (And there is nothing better than writing something than you know only one other person will be able to fully understand, right? 
)
In an ocean of Hollywood cheese, it is nice to see that throughout the whole story, their chemistry is always rational. The “L” word is not mentioned once. They know their own nature and they know each other, and they realise they can’t (and shouldn’t) be together before the time is right. If they are meant to be, fate will bring them together again. This is not overly dramatised: Kirsten Dunst’s character says “I want you to get into the deep beautiful melancholy of everything that’s happened”. No rivers of tears, just an apparently contradictory mix of rationality and hope. Tragicalness confers beauty, and it is rare (especially among movies) to see something that is beautiful not BECAUSE it’s tragic. Some things can be beautiful and sad without these two qualities being related by causality, and should be treasured for this.
Apart from all this, it is a nice movie, with very good acting by everyone (apart from a Southern accent not always up to scratch by Kirsten Dunst), great portrayal of emotions, and a beautiful soundtrack. But then again, after Almost Famous, could we expect anything else from director Cameron Crowe?
If you like romantic comedies, and would like to see something more… real and introspective than usual, but certainly not less intense, you should go and watch this movie. Especially if all this sounds familiar to you…
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