Popee is a brilliant series of animations that is longer being made, apparently because of complaints that it might be bad for kids. It is no more violent than Tom & Jerry, but certainly creepier and incomparably esoteric.
For better or worse, my daughter loves these. The same animator also made a series called Stain, well worth watching.
We have a house on a wild hillside in Fukuoka, and I have been clearing the ground to lay sod.
We’ve had lizards up here for a while, but something surprised me as I went at the weeds. It was fat like a slug, moved like a snake, and about 10cm long. No legs – at least that I could see. It looked kind of like a salamander, so I went on to Google Japanese salamanders, and indeed there are Japanese salamanders with tiny legs when they are young.
But, then I learned that the salamanders native to Northern Kyushu and Yamaguchi region grow up to 1.5 meters long!
They are not all that common anymore, apparently. So, just for your information – and to keep you from fleeing in terror if one of these critters approaches you while you cool your feet in a local mountain stream.
Here’s a picture of the Japanese Giant Salamander:
Once upon a time, shouchu dominated the cheap rotgut alcoholic market, and nihonshu (sake) was for more refined drunks. Then, evil foreign governments pressured Japan to accept cheap imports of Scotch whiskey, which they did. Shouchu makers, feeling threatened, decided the only way to compete was to refine the image of shouchu and make it more attractive. It worked. While Westerners are belatedly getting into “sake”, Japanese are busy sampling the regional varieties at elegant shouchu bars.
Nihonshu (sake) is sooo 1990.
However, as shouchu moved up-market to invade nihonshu territory, nihonshu has now returned the favor. They are moving down-market to invade the sparkling shouchu (chuu-hai) business – a longtime mainstay for cheap shouchu makers.
Whether this is a wise move or not will be decided tonight by the missus and me.
Kampai.
Fukka Express: All Japanese truckers have attitude, but Fukka Express
drivers have more.
Ayumi: You know your career has taken off when a smitten fan paints your visage on the back of a love van. . .
. . .and you know your career is over when your portrait is spotted being unceremoniously carted off to the scrapyard.
Chief Cabinet Secretary Nobutaka Machimura said that he “definitely” believes UFO’s exist, perhaps in a subtle dig at the new fingerprinting scheme in place at airports for all aliens, resident or not.
While the government did not provide any concrete plan for fingerprinting aliens arriving by UFO, they did say they would keep “a vigilant watch over Japanese airspace and are ready to scramble fighter jets to intercept suspicious airborne objects.” Apparently, the palace shaped UFO below slipped through during no-pants shabu-shabu hour.
There has been no report on the human seen being abducted by the turret-like alien appendage.
Japan passed a new set of laws that has made it very difficult to use an international license if you are residing here. Basically, if you are a resident, you must have been outside of Japan for at least 3 months before you can start using your international license. It is then good for a maximum of one year. However, if you leave the country and then come back in again within 3 months, that invalidates the license, according to the Fukuoka Police. If you have an accident, you may be arrested, fined 300,000 yen, refused permission to drive in Japan for a year, and your insurance company may refuse to pay out. This law is only sporadically enforced, so it is a question of whether you can risk it or not. I would have risked it, but for a new child, and an aggressively risk-averse spouse.
I was trying to steel myself for the inevitable failure, and repeated humiliation at the hands of sadistic bureaucrats. I had heard of people failing 15 times, each time costing several thousand yen and a pointless day away from work. To pass after the 2nd time was the equivalent of a gold medal I was told. The first time is there simply to humble the foreigner, so don’t even sweat it. Just go and fail so you can get the whole process started. Half the fun would be seeing what arcane reason they could come up with for failing me. Would it be chewing gum, wearing Old Spice After Shave (a very good reason, in fact), lifting my pinky off the wheel during a turn? I agreed to write about the experience, not only to help others, but to give myself some small reason to justify going through the gauntlet. So, I was ready. They might berate me, waste my time and money, test the limits of my emotional endurance, but in the end they would just be fueling my story which would be posted on the Internet to their great shame. Well, so I told myself. In the end, it worked out a bit differently than I had planned.
I got the license on the first try.
Whatever people tell you, don’t come to Japan to celebrate New Years. At least not in the traditional way. I mean, it’s a great place if you go to a “countdown party” in one of the bigger cities. All the girls who are too naughty to be home with their families, like a proper Japanese girl, are out with you. And that’s just great. Bring a bag of condoms, or at least some Saran Wrap and insecticide, and remind yourself in the morning not to marry anyone lest you find your wife sleeping with the local rugby team next year. Or next week. Stick to the Western style celebration, and your new year will be as good as in Moscow, Paris, New York, or Rio. Well. . . maybe not Rio.
But, if you desire real boredom and drudgery, by all means enjoy a traditional Japanese New Year. The year can begin, or end, with making mochi. You know, taking perfectly good rice and pounding it into a highly dense and weighty blob that is the culinary equivalent of a black hole. It is a well-known fact that, if elderly Japanese didn’t choke to death on mochi, the lifespan in Japan would be well into 15 decades. And that might start people talking, which for Japanese is worse than death. Assuming you survive the mochi and its manufacture, you will have the privilege of enjoying New Year’s Japanese style, which, for a foreigner, can only be achieved through in-laws or trusted friends. You will visit their home, have a splendid meal, and then, as the evening really gets into gear, you will all sit down and watch TV. Not just TV, but NHK TV. That means no tits. (Except this year, when there appeared to be tits, but they were just tightly fitting t-shirts).
The NHK program is celebrity karaoke, with costumes, and ends a quarter before midnight. By this time, you will have drunk innumerable glasses of beer, nihonshu, and shouchu, hoping to die rather than endure another minute of cathode ray, plasma, or LCD screen torture. However, by some mystical power, you will not die from drink. You will not even die from boredom. This is all calculated. The NHK program ends 15 minutes before midnight because, had it gone on a minute longer, you would have keeled over, died, and finally had some peace. NHK spends 90% of its budget researching these things. They know what they are doing.
At a quarter to midnight, NHK cuts to a temple, or shrine, or some other place with big bells and few people, and starts to ring the bells. Very slowly. The bells continue to gong every minute or so. When they stop, you know it is midnight and the new year has arrived. Or did a few minutes ago. Or a few seconds ago. Who knows? This confusion prevents you from doing anything exuberant and un-Japanese, like cheering, kissing, or popping champagne bottles. You just kind of nod nervously to each other, say “akemashita omedetou something or other” and then timidly eat your buckwheat noodles.
Happy New Year, schmuck.
And, if this isn’t enough for you, you can all go out to a shrine and wait in interminably long lines to pray to gods who have long forgotten you, if they ever knew you existed. This is the stuff of New Years Day. You will love it if you are a person who loves to stand in line at Disneyland on holiday weekends.
Or maybe I just appreciate a little solitude.
All said, I took my 4-year old daughter to the aquarium on the 31st, to avoid some of this ritual. There were some performing walruses, and I was trying to show my daughter that big, ugly and scary creatures like walruses were not necessarily bad when one of the big ugly and scary buggers took a liking to me. So eager was I to show my daughter that they were not horrible monsters, I didn’t shirk away as the fat, fanged one gave me a big snog on the lips, whiskers, fish-smell and all. I am quite sure that I am one of the few white people who can say their first New Years kiss came from a walrus.
Happy New Year.
Poor Mari….she’s my favorite. If I ever become a j-pop singer and part of the...
Shes definitely at the top of my hot list.
perfeckt 10:10