If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

The Angel Blue mascot.

One interesting aspect of living in Japan is hearing violent and sexual lyrics played in songs at the most inopportune times.

I was in an Angel Blue store helping Reiko buy presents for a friend’s baby. Angel Blue specialises in clothes for the tween - colours are heavily weighted to blues and pinks and they always feature wide-eyed cute characters proclaiming some aspect of cute happiness and love.

When I was in the store, they were playing Red Hot Chili Peppers. Sample lyric I heard - “Most motherfuckers don’t give a damn.” I’m not an outraged puritan. The shoppers milled around quite happily and even Reiko seemed unaware until I told her

This seems to happen mostly in clothes stores - in the trendy shops of Americamura, they can play whatever they want but in more mainstream stores where there is a more varied clientele, it is a shock.

I’m off to Yamaguchi for a couple of days to meet with Reiko’s family. I’ve worked out how to do future posting so I’ve got posts lined up for most days I’m gone. Here’s today’s.

The above picture admittedly isn’t a great one but it shows an interesting event. My next door neighbours recently decided to rebuild their house from scratch. The bulldozers came in one day at 8 in the morning whilst I was still asleep and I thought I was in the middle of an earthquake as they tore it down.

When they had got rid of it all, they put up bamboo poles at each end and connected them with string to bless it. They left it like that for a week.

Taking a cue again from Kottke, here are the list of cities I visited in 2006.

Osaka (of course)
Tokyo
Hong Kong
Kobe
Yamaguchi
Kishiwada

Not as long as the 2005 List but a little more far flung. It seems I need to do more travelling in 2007.

What does your 2006 list look like?

Christmas in Japan is a strange thing. Christmas, as An Englishman in Osaka reminded me, is only for children anyway. And although I left the grey December skies of England for the mild winters of Osaka, it doesn’t feel like Christmas.

It was only until the last week of teaching that I started to get into the Christmas spirit. Instead of teaching the kids, we made snowmen, Christmas trees and stars to Christmas carols on the CD player and it was a lot of fun. In my last lesson another teacher dressed up as Santa and we spent the afternoon creeping up behind children and shouting, “Ho ho ho”, in their ears.

Christmas Day itself is strange here too. Being paegan heathens, only joking, none of them take the day off. This year I had to go to the doctors on Christmas Day and I helped tidy the front room up - a Japanese tradition in preparation for the New Year.

And Christmas Dinner. Last year I ate sushi, this year we had Indian curry with a roast chicken. We’ve recently discovered Costco where Reiko found a Christmas pudding. Although too sweet for the natives I was unable to stop the orgasmic groaning from my mouth.

And Isabelle. Christmas marks her six month anniversary. All immediate members of the family gave Isabelle beautiful clothes and toys including this hoodie from Reiko’s mother.

On YouTube there are a lot of soramimi videos. Soramimi is a program on Japanese TV which viewers send in foreign songs which have parts that sound like they are saying something odd in Japanese.

According to Wikipedia soramimi means a word used in the Japanese language to describe lyrics of a song that sound like the original, but are actually made up.

In the video above I can understand that he’s saying his eyes hurt. A commenter helpfully gave a full translation:

Mayday, mayday, day (X5), dutty (X5), Sean Paul this one is hot =

Me ite-, Me ite- , ite (X5), dochi (X5), Shampoo, Rinsu ga nai sa!

(MY EYES HURT! (X2) OUCH!(X5), Which one!? (X5) - Shampoo! There’s no conditioner!

There’s a whole load more under the soramimi tag.

I’ve written about famous people doing adverts in Japan before but I like this one of Gemma Ward for the Japanese fashion brand Indivi. I’ve never heard of Gemma Ward but this surreal advert set in a fairytale wood with magical speaking creatures appeals to me.

What I like the most about it is the threat at the end. “Check the new Indivi!”, she warns as if she’ll hunt you down and slit your throat if you don’t do as she tells you. It”s something I remind Reiko of everytime I pass one of their stores.

I was introduced to the concept of prewalking by an American sometime in late 2005 although I didn’t know it by that name.

Prewalking is defined by UrbanDictionary.com as:

To position oneself on a subway platform such that, when the passenger steps off the train at his destination, he’ll be as close as possible to the exit or stairs to his transfer.

With daily train journeys that often last more than an hour each way, this is more of a necessity. I know in which carriage to sit for most of the journeys to the various schools I have to teach at in Osaka.

Who knew being lazy had a name?

Prewalking via Remaindered links weblog

I`ve been considering making the title of this post the byline for my blog when I redesign it. Somewhere below the picture or something would go:

Undercover in Japan
Making children cry since 2005

I promise you I don`t enjoy it. I don`t get sexual gratification pulsating through my body whenever I compel a child to cry.

Today I had a parent`s observation for the 1st grade 6 and 7 year old children I teach. During the lesson, the kids had to walk up to my desk. One of them ran so I took hold of his arm and led him to the back.

He however lost his balance, fell down and started to cry. To the parents watching at the back of the classroom, it looked as if my anger held no bounds and I`d pushed a kid to the floor who had dared disobey my command.

The rest of the lesson was tense.

When I bought the PC I`m writing on now, it came with Microsoft Windows. IN JAPANESE. Microsoft Office. IN JAPANESE. And a dainty wireless keyboard that you see above. IN JAPANESE. This all despite me knowing at that time. ABSOLUTELY NO JAPANESE.

Look at my pathetic spacebar. Either side of it there are keys which change the character set from Roman letters to Japanese. I press these buttons all the time when I`m typing to great frustration. *+%$ I just pressed it now.

Time and time again a window would pop up with a maze of kanji to wade through above a yes or no. Regardless of which button I pressed, the program I was using would shut down taking with it my hard earned work or time wasting session with it.

All the crapware that came with the PC including one that let me make custom-made New Year`s cards, check kanji and get train times was you guessed it.

IN JAPANESE!!!!!!

Needless to say they were all useless but being poor, I was unable to buy an English software or operating system. So i turned to free and open source software to a hugely beneficial effect.

I downloaded firefox instead of Internet Explorer, substituted Microsoft Office with Open Office and downloaded GIMP which lets me edit the photos I take to my heart`s content and saves me shelling out thousands of yen on Photoshop.

There are problems however still. I use the excellent Picasa to organize the many gigabytes of photos on my computer yet even though I select English as the default language, the program recognizes that Windows is in Japanese, thinks I am crazy and loads up the Japanese version. This happens with many other programs as well.

There are other free open source programs I use too - Trillian replaces Microsoft Messenger (in Japanese), Skype lets my parents coo over Isabelle with free video calls. I even dabbled with Ubuntu the free and easy to use Linux-based operating system which I have installed on a partition on my hard drive as a back up resource. There are more but I think you get the idea.

You may be thinking that you know and use these programs already and don`t know why I`m fussing over them. To me these programs are not merely free programs that just ape their pricier counterparts. They are more powerful programs that allow me to go about my life on the internet in ways which the programs that shipped with the computer actively prohibit via their insistence on promoting the language barrier. Without them, I would not be able to productively utilize the massive resources buried in the computer itself.