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This is my tempura meal with tuna sashimi rice bowl, egg custard and miso soup.

This is a Billiken which is a God of Luck. The Billiken is a symbol of good luck that became a national craze in the early 1900s in America. People seem to be divided about whether it is Asian or Egyptian. It also seems to be the name of the college basketball team Saint Louis Billikens Whilst I was taking the picture a couple of passerbys went up to it and tickled its feet which I presume is for good luck. This verse is from the linked page:

I am the god of luckiness, so always keep me nigh.

Misfortune’s frown will disappear, at one flash from my eye.

Be sure that I am on the spot, when projects you begin.

I am the god of luckiness. My name is Billiken

Today I went trainer shopping (sneakers for the American readers) and got laughed at again. This always happens when I go shopping. They ask me my size and I say thirty (it`s measured here in centimetres) and a unsurpressible guffaw is emitted from their mouths. The average shoe size is 25 to 26 and most shops only stock up to 28. It`s been a hard slog trying to find any shoes these last nine months and I have made do with what I had no matter how painful walking/running in them has been. Today I took a stand and managed to bag myself some well fitting footwear! Can anyone give me a hell yeah!

I managed to find the article from the New York Times describing the Japanese singing samurai. You can read it by following the link. It is also big news in Japan that he will soon be shown on American MTV and will therefore reach a far wider audience. I think the reaction will be more derisory than positive as the act is certainly a bizarre one. However we here love you Matsuken!

This is from the linked article:

To many, the enormous success of “Matsuken Samba” struck a deep chord in a Japan gripped by uncertainty and pessimism about its future. Here was a samurai icon for a quarter century, no longer bent on fighting with his sword for a better society, transformed into a hedonistic samurai who lives only for the samba.

At last a decent sized British meal of Bangers and Mash eaten at the excellent Irish pub The Blarney Stone Osaka. Greasy goodness!

I`ve had attacks of diarrhoea for the past week. I won`t go into the gory trouser dropping details but I get an attack lasting about a day and then I can go up to two or three days feeling healthy and then I will wake up in the morning with stomach pains and then spend the majority of that day on the toilet again. This has happened on three separate occasions.

I bought some medicine yesterday which is Chinese herbs but Japanese medicine (don`t forget it`s Japanese medicine or the Japanese family you live with will all scorn you for insinuating that their medicine is foreign.) It is foul tasting pellets of which you take three at a time. The only problem is that one of the main active ingredients is creosote. I thought they used that to paint fences?

This is a very funny site called Uncyclopedia. It is like an encyclopedia but “full of misinformation and utter lies.” They have an entry for Japan which is hilarious. Some choice nuggets of wisdom are:

Japan is the nation that is on the other side of the world. It’s that one that isn’t China.

and

Lying on a fault line, Japan is vulnerable to many natural disasters, up to and including earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis, tornadoes, avalanches, and capitalism.

To read the whole article, follow the link.

This is a picture of the mighty Star Wars Pachinko. Three Darth Vaders (No. wins you 3000 yen or 30 dollars or 15 quid.

These are pictures of the area in which I live. I went to a nearby hill and took pictures in four directions whilst walking the monster. I had to move about twenty meters down the path for the second two but what you have in effect here is an almost 360 view of where I live. My house isn`t here. It`s somewhere to the left of the first picture and to the right of the last.

You can see from the top two pictures that it is a small suburban area with space cleared for development of apartment blocks or more houses. The bottom two pictures show how there is also a lot of farm area for rice mainly (but also cabbages and other food.) In the summer the smell of rice is really strong around here. You can see how the buildings differ in the four pictures. In the top two you have the modern suburban houses but in the bottom two you have the more traditional larger (and expensive) farm houses.

This is a local shop in the area replete with mandatory cigarette vending machine. It`s a strange shop as it seems to sell only bags of rice and cigarettes although it acts as a post office as well. I`m not entirely sure what to call it.

Octopus sushi