If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
I went on a school trip today with the first graders to a park. For a part of it I sat with a sweet girl and we started talking.
After work I caught the same bus home with her and my colleague. She told him I told her I walk the path of hell and the pathway to hell is in England.
I can’t imagine how she got this. I don’t even know how to say the pathway to hell in Japanese.
In Osaka, the local Kentucky Fried Chickens like to dress their statue of Colonel Sanders in a seasonal outfit instead of his white suit he usually wears.
I first noticed this last summer at the Tenjin Matsuri where the Colonel is dressed in a yukata - a traditional festival going costume.
Fast forward to Christmas and Santa has magically appeared in front of KFC.
The next two blew me away however. I got these with kind permission from The Shock
Every March there is the Hina Matsuri dolls festival in which it is believed dolls have the power to contain the bad luck from girls.
Here is a picture of a typical doll
and here is a bearded one:
April sees the children start a new year of school and the coming of the new first graders. To celebrate that, the Colonel is decked out in a brand new school outfit.
May sees the Children’s Festival and a fat bearded man is once again in disguise riding a panda.
Baby Belle has a cold of mythical proportions. When she sleeps, snot bubbles expand and deflate from her nostrils.
So we bought a phlegm extractor. There are two ends. You put one end into the nostril. The other in your mouth. You suck on one end and the mucus flies from the nose into a container in the middle.
You should hear her scream.
One of us has to hold her head whilst the other sucks the stuff out. Afterwards, Reiko picks up the sobbing child and calms her. “There, there. Bad Daddy for holding your head. Come to Mummy.”
We went to the doctors yesterday and he had a similar machine. This one was larger and electrically powered.
On a crowded train, a man noticed that another man had his eyes closed.
“What`s the matter? Are you sick?” he asked.
“No, I`m okay. It`s just that I hate to see old ladies standing”
Kansai Time Out is a very high brow publication but sometimes they go too far in their superiority complex. They seem to assume that if you read this magazine, you are all-knowledgeable about Asian affairs.
Japanzine, a competing magazine, has articles on how to drink for cheap in Japan and previews of upcoming music festivals. Kansai Time Out has articles about why obscure Korean politicians should be the next UN General Secretary, obscure Japanese historical figures and a primer on Korean food whose author is so eager to show his complete mastery of Asian food that when talking about how they eat raw fish, he writes:
They dip their hwae in cho kochu jong
?????????????????????????
You’re expected to understand this without any further explanation. You see the problem here is that my knowledge of Korean food is limited to kimchi and great hunks of meat grilled over a flaming barbecue preferably acompanied by beer.
I`m sure he sticks his hwae in the cho kochu jong himself and jacks off thinking about all the people reading his gibberish in the magazine. Sadistic ecstasy it may be but a good article about Korean food it does not make.
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!
A four year old kid came into my lesson the other day wearing a t-shirt that said, “My mother smoke, drank and dropped acid during my pregnancy.” which caused me to splutter my coffee around the room in shock.
