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?“
Last year, I attended a class that introduced foreigners to Japanese home-style cooking. We made takikomi, miso soup, an assortment of tempura, a hijiki and soybean dish, and some instant vegetable pickles (who knew there was such a thing?).
It was surprisingly fun, especially considering that my culinary experience has been rather tame. It was also neat to see how some of the dishes I’ve been eating are actually prepared.
And having worked up an appetite, we were all delighted to discover how tasty our creations came out. =)
At over 3000 years old, Dogo Onsen is the oldest onsen in Japan, and it’s right here in Matsuyama. When the tourism bureau was considering these newfangled RF tag-based tourist guides, they hired a bunch of temps to explain the trial devices to tourists, and a friend of mine was among them. Being something of a technology buff, I had to go check it out.
There were actually two devices. The first was an LCD screen map on a lanyard that pointed out interesting things as you walked around the area. You could choose from two preprogrammed routes: one that took you to interesting historical locations, and one that took you to shopping locations in the area. You could also just walk around, and it would alert you when you got close to a point of interest. It was interesting, but struck me as a bit of a dumbed-down GPS navigation device.
The second device strapped to your wrist and felt much like an oversized wristwatch. To check the devices out, you had to fill out a paper with your home address and email address. The wristwatch device used RF tags to email you information on the shops whose RF “targets” you touched with your wrist. It felt kind of kludgy and inefficient, if you ask me.
Overall, a valiant first effort by whatever company put the program together, but not quite ready for prime time. The tourism bureau seems to agree, because the program was killed after a few weeks. I’m sure the technology will be ironed out in a few years. In the meantime, it was neat to have participated in the pilot program.
A while back, I went on a bike ride exploring my area of town. I chose a major road I knew pretty well, and just… went. These rides of mine sometimes turn into really interesting exploratory ventures, and this time I had the foresight to bring my camera. Lucky for me, I happened onto a used car dealership specializing in sports cars, where I just wandered around blissfully until an employee came out and started talking to me about the cars, showing me his favorites, and it got even better. Here is a slide show of some of the pictures I took.
(Because FaceBook won’t import the slide show, to see the pictures, you’ll have to visit my actual blog here:
http://www.davidhed.com/blog/2010/12/03/bike-ride-2/)
Normally I would post something like this on Facebook instead of my blog, but this is too cool to let it fall off the bottom of a page.
A JET in rural Okayama learned she’d be the last ALT in her town, and put together this project to showcase some of her students and their dreams of using English in the future, in order to support the continuation of the JET program. She uses personal photographs of the students next to their own words answering the question “How will you use English in the future?”
The effect, and the photographs, are really fantastic. Check it out here:
http://www.storiography.com/english-dreams/
Even Parmesan cheese needs a mascot and a cell phone strap in Japan.
When I tell people that I’m officiating weddings on the weekend, a question I’ve been asked a number of times is “Why do Japanese people like ‘Western-style’ weddings?”
The biggest reason is “Because it’s cool,” but if you’re interested in reading more about it, I just happened onto the seiyaku.com web site, which does a fabulous job explaining it:
http://www.seiyaku.com/seiyaku/en/western-wedding.html
Their description is pretty accurate for the ceremonies I perform, too- which makes sense, because Japanese people like to do things the same way everyone else does.
It’s been an interesting day. I woke up super early this morning (5am is super early for me now) to go see this year’s fighting mikoshi festival at Dogo. I didn’t bring my real camera because I didn’t want it to get rained on, so I’m glad I got decent photos and video last year. The pics snapped with my phone camera are pretty useless, but Kevin got a decent video or two.
It’s been raining for the last three days, actually. It started out as a nice steady light rain, but just in the last few hours it’s gotten heavier. At this point though, the rain isn’t as big a deal as the wind, which almost inverted my umbrella as I was riding to work. You see folks, Typhoon 18 is about to hit southern Japan.
I hear about typhoons pretty regularly, but I don’t usually pay attention to the warnings because the east-west mountain range just south of the city usually diffuses any strong weather before it hits Matsuyama. (Unless of course, I’m riding a bicycle across a series of bridges that day. Then it will undoubtedly rain cats and dogs.)
This time is a little different though. I actually have a typhoon warning on my phone, evening classes at my school were canceled (which I didn’t learn until I had already pedaled over there), and the business next door to my apartment building piled sandbags in front of their door.
I think we’re in for some real weather here.
If I don’t post again, look for me in Oz.
******** Update October 9th, 2009 ********
Much ado about nothing down here in Matsuyama. It hardly rained that night, and the next day was beautiful. The city of Tsuchiura, in Ibaraki prefecture however, was not so lucky:
Yesterday, Yuko and I took a one day trip to see Himeji castle near Kobe. We chose Silver Week to do so because I don’t have many consecutive days off right now at my new job, so the five day break (four for me…) seemed an obvious time to travel. Also, they’re going to be doing five years’ worth of restoration starting next month, so I figured I should get on it before they put up the scaffolding. Silver Week happens sporadically (once every five to ten years-ish) when national holidays and the stars align (not kidding- one of the holidays is the autumnal equinox). The name comes from the desire of Japanese commercial interests to capitalize on the entertainment money spent during Golden Week every April.
Our trip was originally going to be a two day trip, but as every hotel Yuko called was completely booked (including capsule hotels, though I later discovered she hadn’t tried any love hotels), we shortened it to one day. Almost exactly twenty four hours in fact, as we caught the highway bus at 6:00am on Monday, and returned on the overnight bus at 5:52am this morning.
Anyway, it was pretty sweet. We arrived in Kobe at about 10am, and went straight to Himeji castle. One of the highlights of the trip for me was eating lunch at Subway before going to the castle. Matsuyama doesn’t have any sandwich shops, and I really miss being able to get a sub sometimes.
Never underestimate Japanese people’s ability to spontaneously form a line. I guess the throng that showed up because of the national holiday was a lot more than normal, so they had to control the number of people inside the castle at once. As visitors entered the grounds from the main gate, they sort of spontaneously started congealing and slowing down to form a line. Being American, I insisted on seeing what the front of the line was up to before joining the back end of it, a trip that satisfied my curiosity but cost us about 15 spaces in line.
I don’t know many Japanese ghost stories, but one that I’d heard before coming to Japan was of the servant girl Okiku who was betrayed, murdered, and thrown down a well. I was pleasantly surprised to find Okiku’s well on the grounds of Himeji Castle.
Even once we were inside the castle grounds, the large number of people visiting the castle on the same day created a remarkably long line to actually get inside the castle building. They set it up very much like a Disneyland ride line, where you go through one waiting area thinking that you’re almost to the front, only to turn the corner and find that there’s another area full of people waiting.
The castle itself provided a commanding view of the city surrounding it, of course.
Many of the walls inside had hooks for weapons and gunpowder bags.
I found the architecture really neat. It takes huge wooden beams to support a six story castle, and they were definitely in evidence. I was a little surprised to learn that the current form of Himeji had never been used in a war, so all of the intricate battlements constructed remain essentially untested.
After the castle, we went to Koko-en garden just outside the main gate. They have nine different styles of Japanese gardens on the grounds, which I would have given a pass, but Yuko was interested. The gardens were very serene and beautiful, to be sure, and they had some landscape art installations that were interesting. It was near the end of a very long day though, and I was tired from all the walking we’d done, so it was hard for me to be as appreciative as I might otherwise have been.
No trip to Kobe would be complete without a steak dinner, so we stopped by “ステーã‚ランド”, the very appropriately named “Steak Land” restaurant near Sannomiya station. We both ordered one of the less-expensive dinner sets, but let me tell you, it was easily the best steak I have ever had. They cook on teppan grills in front of the customer (think Benihana) using only the most basic of ingredients: meat, salt, pepper, butter, and oil. The steaks there come with two light dipping sauces, adding a subtle flavor of garlic or soy sauce, but the steak easily stood by itself. My steak was so tender that when I poked it with one of my chopsticks, it cut a little circular hole through the surface of the steak, but the meat still had a very pleasing texture in the mouth. Absolutely exquisite, I tell you. While we were eating, another couple at the same table ordered shrimp, and it was so fresh that it was actually alive as the chef put it on the grill, its little legs moving around, huffing for its last few breaths of suffocating air.
After dinner, we spent our last few hours in Kobe on the boardwalk called Harbor Land (“ãƒãƒ¼ãƒãƒ¼ãƒ©ãƒ³ãƒ‰”). It was a surprisingly American affair, with an open-air mall atop a parking garage and restaurants, replete with fair-type attractions like a ferris wheel, kiddie rides, crane games, and a playground. One interesting attraction held two “3-D” roller coaster magic motion pods. The experience was 3-D by way of a helmet covering the user’s eyes with two small screens filmed from two video cameras in the front seat of a few famous rides, including the Desperado at Buffalo Bill’s. After riding, I can tell you that it’s fun, but not nearly as exciting as the real thing. It’s kind of like a roller coaster for people afraid of roller coasters, but the experience was worth the $3. We also took our requisite ferris wheel ride and ate dessert at a small cafe with a view of the Kobe tower, overlooking the water. After that, we killed our last half hour or so by leisurely window shopping our way through the closed mall.
Closing out our very long day, we caught the midnight bus back to Matsuyama, arriving just as the city was starting to wake up.
Last up is a picture from my seat in the overnight bus, showing that they only have three seats across, with two aisles (and free coffee and tea). The seats recline pretty steeply, and leg and foot rests extend from the seats as well, so it’s easy to relax. Think about that next time you’re sitting in economy class wondering if there isn’t a more comfortable way to travel.
I leave you with a slideshow of most of my better pictures from the trip. Though if you’re reading my blog on Facebook, you won’t be able to see it. Try this link: http://www.davidhed.com/blog/
No open container laws.
In the left cup holder is an open Asahi beer, and in the right is an open bottle of tea. In all fairness though, Japanese people do not mess around with alcohol and driving a car. There’s none of that “I’ve only had a couple, I’m okay to drive” thinking that you sometimes find in the states. If you’ve had alcohol, you don’t drive.