I don’t even know what to say to this, really. Other than intentionally choosing a name that would drive away English-speaking customers, the only possible explanation for this shoe’s phenomenally bad name is that no one checked what the name actually meant in English.
If you find yourself questioning how a nationwide chain of shoe stores like ABC Mart might do something like that, feel free to browse through Engrish.com a bit.
Those of you who live in Matsuyama will know that I’m not writing about this season, so I’ll start by saying that I took this picture last year.
This was at the height of water shortage fears, with rolling water shutoffs scheduled to start in only a few days’ time. I took this picture in a convenience store near my apartment, where they were selling these twenty liter water tanks (empty) and two liter water bottles (full) at a brisk pace.
This scene really struck me because Matsuyama is not a dry place. We regularly get rain here, and as a result things just grow out of the ground on their own. This is an astonishing fact for someone from Las Vegas, where everything not made of stone needs artificial irrigation. We’ve quite literally made an art form out of low/zero water use landscaping, called xeriscaping.
The thing is, Matsuyama city draws its water from a nearby dammed river storing rainfall, and if the rainfall level stays below the consumption level for long enough, the city just shuts off water, like rolling blackouts in times of power shortages.
Contrast this with the seemingly-interminable hemming and hawing over water controls we’ve had in Las Vegas since I moved there in the early eighties, while Lake Mead drops lower and lower every year. There’s never been enough water to support the population and growth rate, and yet we now have about two dozen full size golf courses.
If water in Las Vegas were priced according to its scarcity and replacability, no one would be able to live there. If, however, they just raised the price of tapwater a few percent, people might think twice about running the tap while they brush their teeth.
Anyway, to bring it back around, I’m occasionally startled by the clarity and efficiency of things in Japan. Enough so to share it with y’all.
I found this live goldfish “UFO Catcher” (“Crane game” / “Claw catcher” whatever you want to call it) in an arcade here in Matsuyama.
You catch the fish using slotted plastic scoops attached to what looks like a normal claw. If you get one, the fish drops into a lower collection pool where an attendant scoops it up and puts it in a plastic bag for you to take home.
“UFO Catcher”s (as they’re universally known here) are supremely popular, second only to purikura photo booths in number. In fact, there are businesses that simply contain large numbers of these machines, and seem to be doing fine.
The Japanese on the box touts it as an “exercise belt,” but the only remotely plausible idea I’ve been able to come up with for this one is that your misshapen skin kind of looks like ripped abs if you wear this. That would be under your clothes of course, because if anyone actually saw you wearing this, they’d think you ran through a hammock so fast it got stuck in your skin, and your chances of looking cool would drop faster than if you’d showed up dressed as Urkel from Family Matters.
Seriously though, does anyone know what this thing is supposed to do? I’m flummoxed.
You may or may not have heard about gift melons in Japan. These are unusually expensive melons given as gifts on special occasions, or as business gifts to special customers.
Here you can see eight “Emerald Melon” cantaloupes selling for about $20 (Â¥1980) each. These are actually on the lower end of the “gift melon” scale, some of which sell for hundreds of dollars apiece. Here’s a link to an online retailer selling what appear to be the same melons for 5000 yen apiece:
http://item.rakuten.co.jp/tosago/f314_5250/
Incidentally, the lower sign is a display for Fuji apples at just over a dollar (Â¥105) each.
Japan is obsessed with individualized packaging. Case in point: I bought this bag of cookies without reading it too carefully expecting… I don’t know, a bag full of cookies, right?
When I opened it though, I found exactly FIVE cookies, each individually wrapped in its own little clear plastic bag. It’s the same story with most foods here though, so I can’t be too surprised.
I’ve seen party bags of snacks, segmented into handful-size plastic bags of snack mix. I’ve even (coincidentally) bought packages of sembei, those delicious Japanese rice crackers, with each cracker individually wrapped. And don’t get me started on bakeries that put each item on a piece of plastic, then wrap that whole thing in a small plastic bag, then put that bag in a large plastic shopping bag for you.
For a country that prides itself on being ecologically minded, there sure is a lot of excessive packaging.
There’s a religious pilgrimage on the island of Shikoku called the Shikoku Henro (Pilgrimage). There are 88 temples scattered across the island, connected by 1200 kilometers (~750 miles) of road, originally traveled on foot (still the preferred method of making the pilgrimage, though slowly losing ground to modern transport).
I’d like to make the pilgrimage by bicycle at some point, not out of any sort of religious dedication (which would be obvious if you know me), but for the sense of accomplishment and the opportunity to see many out of the way places in this part of Japan that most foreigners don’t see.
That being the case, I was delighted when the local international affairs office set up a “mini Henro” walk connecting three of the temples in the Matsuyama area: Jodo-ji to the southeast, Hanta-ji to the east, and (the mac daddy of the area) Ishite-ji in the eastern part of Matsuyama.
Alissa, Sam, and I were the only foreigners out of the group of 20(?) people that went walking that day. We covered just over five kilometers (a little over three miles) wearing our official pilgrim vests and carrying our official pilgrim staves.
It was a fun day out, walking under beautifully blue skies just after a refreshing rain, and we even got to be in the prefectural newspaper in a picture with some of Sam’s students we just happened to run into. Good times. =)
The Engrish around here catches you by surprise sometimes. I spotted this on a purikura photo booth in a local video game arcade. You can see the pink sign touting this machine as the No. 1 most popular photo booth (out of 20-ish in the place), and if you look even closer, you can see the boots of two girls currently editing their pics.
It looks like a normal booth until you spot the Engrish tag line that reads “How many girls wanna take some shots?“
This one will probably be a little obscure for those of you with no interest in etymology. Or the Japanese language. Or etymology of unusual terms in the Japanese language.
See I’m not sure if you’ve heard, but Japanese is a really hard language to learn. F’r instance, there are different counters for all sorts of things. The words for counting bottles, books, large animals, small animals, appliances, cars, people, and pieces of paper are all different, (and there are many more) which brings me to today’s word.
The two kanji there are read “tsuitachi,” which is the word for the first day of the month, and up until now I’ve had a hard time remembering it because it bears no resemblance to any of the other counters I mentioned. In my Japanese lesson this evening, I was fumbling for the word when my Japanese teacher gave me a brief history lesson explaining the root of the word. (It gets a little geeky here…)
The word for “moon” is “tsuki,” and the verb “to stand” is “tachimasu.” (You may already see where I’m going with this.) It’s just a hop, skip, and a jump from “tsuki” + “tachi” to “tsuitachi.” Knowing that Japan used to use a lunar calendar will help you draw the logical connection between a “standing moon” and a new month.
If you’re not quite there, it may help to know that the first kanji (朔) by itself means “new moon,” and the second kanji (æ—¥) by itself means “day.” Again, “new moon day.”
See, now doesn’t that help? 😛