12th December
Sorry…
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
4th December
Fugu
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!
2nd December
Last dinner
If you don’t see another post in the next 24 hours it means that I’m dead. See ya!
1st December
Elizabethtown
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…
30th November
Megatokyo
If you have never read a manga, maybe because you wouldn’t know where to start -from the back, I’d suggest- or because you just don’t want to pay stupidly high prices for an imported manga, you might want to try with Megatokyo.
Megatokyo is a free online dojinshi (independently produced manga) with high quality drawings, with about three new pages added every week. It’s a nice story (at least the first 500 or so pages - and there are about 800 online now-, afterwards it gets a little too slow and too much of a love-story IMO) about two american -or canadian?- geeks stuck in Tokyo in a series of adventures about all that is Japanese: idols, dating simulators, arcades, manga, giant robots and ninjas, of course. It’s a gentle introduction to manga and life in Japan.
Enjoy!
30th November
RFID Videogames
Sorry guys, I cannot hold back anymore… after posts about food, culture and society, I have to write something geeky. Japan is the only place in the world where geekiness is -to a certain extent- encouraged, a sanctuary for nerds, loners and misfits, a haven where even the whole of the Imperial College Computing department would be regarded as ubercool. Hyper-technological gadgets are everywhere: affordable, utterly useless and covered with alluring flashing lights. It’s like being 10 and seeing Doom for the first time all over again.
However, the average Japanese otaku (おたく) is much more than your average slashdot/videogames/star trek Western geek, and the geekiness phenomenon itself here is way more complex and fascinating than one would expect from a bunch of guys playing videogames and drooling over anime dolls. But this is not the place… the otaku phenomenon will be treated in another post, now I’ll cut the crap and get to the cool videogames …
Hon-Atsugi (like probably everywhere else here in Japan) is packed with arcades. Last week I decided to venture into one after a particularly satisfying bowl of crab tendon: pink neon-burning, cigarette-smoke laden and very, VERY noisy. Inside you can find all kinds of people: from the businessmen looking for one last adrenaline rush before going back to their wives, to the idle teenagers, to the addicted gamblers, to the fearsome Japanese kids able to finish any possible game with only one credit and constant source of shame and frustration for people like me…
At first glance you probably wouldn’t notice anything particularly different from the games you can find here and the ones in the Trocadero, same House of the Dead, same drums game, same racing simulators. Then you will probably notice an arcade machine with something unusual: it doesn’t seem to have any joystick/joypad/massive gun attached… instead, you play by moving RFID cards.
For the lazy ones that do not want to read the Wikipedia article, what’s a (passive) RFID card? To put it simply for the Londoners, an Oyster card. It’s a card with a chip inside, doesn’t need power (I know what you are thinking, you pedantic little freak… I’m trying to keep it simple here), and can communicate with another device at short range. No need for magnetic stripes or barcode. Just radio communication. That’s it in half a nutshell.
So think about this: a strategy game where you lay your RFID cards representing your troops on the battlefield, and each movement of a card on the board will correspond to the army moving accordingly in real time on the screen. Think Risk/Warhammer meets Minority Report’s interface. Here is a picture:
Sounds cool? It gets better. Obviously, you start the game with cards that represent crappy units, but as you win more games the machine will keep on spitting out more and more cards to assist you in the hunt for the ultra-rare ultimate troops. But wait, wait, it gets even better: apart from playing against the computer, useful for practice and army composition choice, all the arcades are networked so you can decide to play against people in the same arcade place or even against someone of ranking comparable to yours across the whole of Japan!! In fact, your progress is constantly tracked with a save card that contains your profile, and you know your national ranking at all times. So good… you can see here a video of one guy in action. Unfortunately towards the end he is about to lose so he just starts to shuffle the cards randomly. Oh, by the way, the name of the game is Sangokushi Taisen (三国志 大戦).
As you might have thought, I already bought my starter pack… I finished the tutorials and I’m ready for battle… Behold!!!:
As a side note, here in Japan there is something similar to the Oyster card, although it works just on one of the lines that go around Tokyo. Here’s a picture of the Suica card:
Cool thing is, you can also use it instead of a BIOS password in order to access your laptop…
28th November
PS
A little comment on the Wikipedia article about Brass-eye that I linked in my Cos-play post below. Wikipedia claims:
Around 2000 complaints […] were received regarding the show, and several politicians hastily spoke out against Morris, although David Blunkett […] later admitted that he had not seen the programme
Let’s play “spot the obvious”… (Brits only)
28th November
Cos-Play
Hi!
Foreword： Chances are you found this post googling for some pictures of pretty Japanese girls in tight French maid outfits you can drool over. If this is the case, sorry mate, no pretty girls here, but I hope you’ll find the post interesting nonetheless.
Back to us… Last Sunday I went on a small trip to Tokyo, and I ended up in Harajuku. Rings a bell? It’s the part of the town where you want to be if you want to feel like the thousands of cool Tokyo teenagers that shop here: lots of small shops, less expensive than Shinjuku or Ginza, more rebel, more alternative, more hip. (Jesus, sometimes I sound like the Lonely Planet guide…) It also proudly hosts the Meiji temple (yes, the same Meiji Emperor guy of the Meiji Restoration), but more about that in another post.
The reason why you probably heard of Harajuku is because of this lovely natural blonde here:
(Or rather, her four Japanese freaky lifeless minions).
Those four girls you see are in fact Gwen Stefani’s Harajuku girls, so called because they represent the kind of crowd you can expect to meet here. But in order to talk about that, I have to introduce the concept of Cos-Play (コスプレイ). Cosplay (Costume play) is the practice of dressing up either like anime/manga characters or just in a generally ridiculous (but fashionably so) way. And it doesn’t have anything to do with Halloween or Mardi gras. So if when walking down the street you happen to notice just how short Sailor Moon’s skirt is or you find yourself wondering why you remembered maids as fat and German while here they are slim, young and probably, judging from what they are wearing, very cold, it means that you are witnessing people doing cosplay. You can mostly find them in big manga stores or during conventions, and of course here in Harajuku every weekend before dusk. So, here’s a sample of what I saw on Sunday:
Now… cosplay is mainly for girls… guys will be there pretending to be rockers and playing the guitar. However, sometimes something goes terribly wrong and they end up like this:
The guy was quite immense, and after seeing him I really didn’t need him to speak to me with a really high-pitched voice (stile cugini di campagna) that scared the crap out of me and made me want to cry for mercy… Impossible not to think of the giant in little girl’s attire from the paedophile episode of BrassEye. But in the pitiless world of fashion, not everyone can be cool:
You might be asking yourself, why do they do it? I’m not a social anthropologist, but maybe if you too lived in one of the many faceless buildings in some unnamed Tokyo suburb going to school from Monday til Sunday in this orderly, well-mannered, overformal Japan maybe you would feel as well an urgent need to break free before going slightly mad…
26th November
Eels
One thing Japan is full of, no matter where you are, is places where to eat. Just Hon-Atsugi (the central part of Atsugi) is packed with cheap (compared to London) places where you can stuff your chubby face and be happy about it. So I decided to try as many places as I possibly can, and since I have always dreamt about being a restaurant reviewer, I’ll write -briefly and without too much bullshit- my impressions about the place. I hope that other people that will visit Atsugi will find it of some help.
I know that out there there is one person in particular that a couple of weeks ago had a craving for eels… with that in mind, I found an eels restaurant and tried it out.
Location: Mylord 1 (exit of Hon-Atsugi station), top floor
Name: too many kanjis… ends in kawa (川)… I think someone told me it was kitagawa, but I could be horribly wrong. But you can’t go wrong, it’s the only restaurant on the top floor of Mylord that serves eels (うなぎ).
Description: Wooden interiors and yellow lights in a poor attempt to give a homely feel of coziness, but it was all too new, too clean… where is the love? I’m not feeling the love here!!! It was like someone trying to give his house a personal touch by buying a set bedroom from Ikea. Anyway, it wasn’t ugly and it was clean. Pass. Quite nice the tatami-floored private rooms with sliding doors…. but for some reason we didn’t get to sit in there, even though one room was (and stayed) completely free. The place was quite empty, but then again, it was quite early. Here are some pictures of the place:
Gosh! I’m not selling it very well, am I? Well, to be honest, it was all very unremarkable until the food was brought by a very courteous waitress. The eels were E X Q U I S I T E, perfectly tender, warm, very juicy, and the eel-to-rice ratio was just right. Fantastic. And it filled me up as well, which is no easy feat. Seriously, the stuff was really good, and it’s something you should really try at least once. Oh, and they have point cards as well. An eel tendon will set you off for ￥１５００ whereas an eel meal with a very good fishy soup (and the eel’s heart inside… fantastic), a slightly bigger portion than in the tendon’s, various pickled veg and a complimentary end-of-dinner tea is about ￥１８００. Going up with portion size and food served will increase the price up to 2500 yen, but I haven’t tried it, so I can’t really say. Definitely worth it, if you ask me.
Here`s a picture of the meal itself, the 1800￥ option:
Talking about eels, you should try listening to them… not the edible ones, but the American band, The Eels. They change genre quite a lot depending on their “phase” (read the lead singer’s biography to understand why), but beautiful lyrics are a constant. If you are into acoustic stuff, I’d suggest you to get the “Daisies of the Galaxy” album…
26th November
Hold it in your hand, love it in your tummy…
Don’t worry, I’m just talking about crepes…
Quite yummy actually… especially the one with banana, chocolate and whipped cream inside…. mmmmmm