Among its many fine qualities, I think I like this packaging’s enthusiasm the most:

Taken at face value, “Easy & Surprise” will no doubt both prove to be extremely accurate.

A little late this one, but perhaps you heard there was an election in Japan.  The last PM of Japan, Mr Aso, was spectacularly unpopular – even more so than President Bush.  Yes, really.  In a country famous for being tactful, my Japanese teacher likes to call Aso “an idiot” with feeling.

So, at the end of August, ex-PM Aso’s Liberal Democratic Party were replaced with new PM Hatoyama’s Democratic Party of Japan.   Actually, we should probably say “swept from power” rather than “replaced”, because the election was an absolute rout.  Bear in mind that the LDP had held government for almost the entire period from 1955 until now.  With an electorate so happy to stick with one team, you know the previous administration must have screwed up pretty badly indeed.

The election may have been a few months ago, but the evidence remains.  I really like Japanese election posters – they’re so much more peppy than Australian ones to my mind.  Speaking of which:

Our first is for PM Hatoyama himself.  His poster’s slogan is quite stark: “Regime change”.  Don’t think that too much is going to change, though – Japanese politics is very nepotistic.  Hatoyama is a 4th generation politician; in fact his grandfather was PM too.  Mr Aso is no slouch in that area either, with a grandfather and father-in-law who were both former prime ministers, as well as a sister married into the royal family.

This is Oota Kazumi, another DPJ member.  She doesn’t have a cool slogan, but you have to love a friendly smile and fist pump, suggesting she will destroy her political enemies in a most cordial fashion.

This is Nemoto Takumi:  “First I’ll energize the area, then bring the future you wish for”.  If you ever watch the documentary Campaign about the Japanese election process (which you should!), you can learn how to do these kind of vague promises like no-one’s business.

Mashiko Teruhiko says, “As Minister for High Necromancy, I will command my legions of the undead to crush those who would oppose us”.

Ha ha, just joking of course: Cabinet positions like Minister for High Necromancy are only chosen after the election.

Tattoos using Japanese or Chinese characters have been popular in Western countries for some years now, but I hadn’t ever really talked a great deal about this trend with my Japanese co-workers.  Tattoos aren’t too common here, still having a strong connection to yakuza crime gangs.  Not having any interest in tattoos myself, I didn’t know much about it except for the urban legend of the Chinese tattoo artist who, fed up with people asking for tattoos with Chinese characters, started secretly  interpreting requests for “Princess” to mean “Spoiled Decadent Western ****”.  I’m assuming he had very small handwriting.

To relieve a patch of boredom waiting for a delayed flight recently, I decided to see how Time magazine was getting along these days.  After I was done picking through it, I brought it back to the office for people studying English.

The first person I showed naturally zoomed in on the Japanese tattoo on the soldier’s arm:

In Japanese, this is pronounced “kichigai”.  The first part, “ki”, means “spirit”, “feeling” or “mood”.  The second part, “chigai”, means “different”.  Put them together and you have a person with a “different feeling”, which is  a way of saying someone is mentally deranged.

Now, when you look this up in a Japanese-English dictionary, it says “madman”.  In Western culture, we can take this to mean a risk-taker or a daredevil, but in Japanese, it literally means someone with a serious mental illness.

“I feel sorry for him”, one of my co-workers said, “he has no idea he’s walking around with such a stupid tattoo.” To his eyes, it would be like deciding to get a tattoo saying “I am certifiably insane” on it.  He advised me not to even remember the word, lest I accidentally say it.

Of course, Japan has the opposite trend that anything bearing English words has its cool quotient raised considerably.  Walk around Tokyo for a day and you’ll see any number of T-shirts with grammatically “creative” and offensive English on them.  However, at least people here have the good sense to do such things in a non-indelible fashion.

If you’re like me and did archery when you were in school, you might have thought it basically wasn’t too hard.  Swagger up, notch an arrow in there, away it goes, then off to geography class.

In Japan, they worked out how to make archery much harder a long time ago, and they called it kyuudou. The Chinese characters that make it up can be translated as “way of the bow”.  There’s something wrong with you if you don’t think that’s awesome.

Archery (Japanese transliteration: aacherii) and kyuudou are two completely separate sports in Japan.  Archery uses modern equipment (composite bows and range finders and whatnot), while kyuudou is very traditional. The thought process is similar to a martial art.  You don’t just loose off arrows willy-nilly: each shot follows a careful, strict procedure, not dissimilar to a karate kata.  You bow when you enter the kyuudou range, precisely pace out the steps to your allotted position, and follow the rigid set of steps for stringing your bow.  Every stage is done with precision and thought (or thoughless-ness, depending on how zen you’d like to get).  It’s not surprising to learn, then, that kyuudou can be performed for meditative reasons too.

The way of doing is very important: my teacher several times remarked on one student or another having “beautiful” form, the arrow hitting the target apparently secondary.  Or, so the philosophy goes, a beautiful form will inevitably hit the target.  So, as in many Japanese activities such as tea ceremony, the manner of doing, rather than just the result, is highly prized.

One the major differences to “regular” archery is that kyudou bows (yumi) are much bigger than regular bows – they stand well above head height when strung.  So, it draw it successfully, you need to lift it above your head, pushing out your front arm first:

Then extend your back arm as you drop it into place beside your cheek.  Your back hand is extended past your shoulder.

Then, when you let the arrow (ya) go, it’s apparently important to fully extend your rear arm, though I forgot this on each of my attempts:

Just to make things harder, targets (mato) are only 36 cm in diameter, about half the size of regular archery targets:

Here, the various stages of preparation are neatly presented.  The guys on the right are sizing up their targets and notching their bows:

When it came to my turn to have a go, it was challenging to say the least.  My Japanese has improved a lot in the last two years, but hasn’t extended to words like “the notch in the end of an arrow” (mizo) and the three fingered glove (yugake) you use to draw the bow.  My teacher was an old Japanese lady who apparently decided not to show much mercy to my less-than native comprehension skills.  Still, by pushing and prodding me into place when necessary, I ending up doing something approximately like actual Japanese archery.

After 30 minutes of practice on a straw target only 2 metres away, my teacher decided to give me a shot at the real thing.  It was interesting that while I thought none of the Japanese kyuudou students who were there really paid much attention to me, I heard later that when my back was turned and I was shooting, this foreigner was well and truly the center of attention, everybody wanting to see if a gaikokujin had what it took.  Unfortunately, I don’t think I represented the rest of the world with aplomb.  I had three attempts:

Attempt 1: I make lots and lots of mistakes.  I walk to the wrong place, I move the wrong foot, I drop the arrow at least three or four times.  In kyuudou, you don’t grip the arrow between your fingers; it just sits there on the string by itself.  There’s something very anti-climactic about drawing the bow back, feeling the tension and power running through it, you’re ready to shoot… only to hear the dull thunk of the arrow hitting the ground beneath your feet.  Result: my arrow hits the wall about 20 cm from the target.  Okay, it’s a miss, but as a first attempt I’ll take it.

Attempt 2: I drop the arrow another couple of times.  My teacher comes over and shows me how to grip the arrow again.  I’m getting quite embarrassed.  I shoot, but over-correct for my missed shot last time, and my arrow goes thudding into the wooden barrier above the range designed to stop stray arrows from skewering any kids in the park next door.  My teacher does not look impressed.

Attempt 3: I hit a target!  The only problem being, the target belonged to the person shooting in the next lane, not me.  Still, the feeling of actually hitting something resembling that I was trying to hit is exhilarating.  Perhaps I look a little too happy with myself, because my teacher ends up reminding me three times “…but it wasn’t your target”.

So, hopefully at some point I’ll be able to go back for another go.  Compared to my high school days, the two metre bows used in kyuudou feels frighteningly powerful; that when you release the arrow you’re not sure if the whole bow isn’t going to shatter into splinters on you.

So, now that I’m a kyuudou expert, I think it’s time for me to move on. Maybe it’s time for yabusame – Japanese horseback archery.  Although I don’t even know how to ride a horse, let alone without holding on, how hard can riding a horse while firing a bow be?  Look for the answers in the outpatient report of my local hospital.

As far as I know, a window seat is an undisputed perk in a Western workplace.  Not only do you get to admire the gleam of your perfectly polished wingtips, but you also get to observe the passage of  time as the sun gracefully wends from bright morning light, filled with the potential of a new day, to the satisfying, warm glow of a sunset signaling the winding down of a day full of achievement.

Window-less, lesser employees, however, must desperately try to photosynthesise energy beneath soulless, white fluorescent lighting, unaware of the passage of each of the days that they remain trapped in a battleship-grey, cubicle hellhole ergonomically designed to wring the last drop of their creativity and will to live.

So, windows are nice.

Or so I thought until last week.

I discovered that in Japan, a window seat is a bad thing.  It’s a signal, a warning indicating that you’re on the way out.  If you’re lazy on the job or are just over the hill, and find yourself moved to a window seat, management is trying to tell you, “Really, it’s going to be more productive for all of us if you just sit there all day and watch the clouds passing by.  When you get tired of that, well, you know where the door is.”

And to think that when I got my window seat, I thought it was all going so well. Luckily, as of today, someone put a cubicle wall between my desk and the window, Office Space style.  With these kinds of mixed messages, I’m not sure what to think.

So, to summarise, if you can see this from your desk in a Japanese work place:

…start polishing off your resume.

Seen while traveling up north to the town of Koriyama during the Silver Week five-day long weekend in Japan:

I originally thought this was a clever ad for the Japanese version of the Beastie Boys, but the signs say:

New virus strain protection

For infection prevention; for personal use

Personal set:
50 day rental – $150 AUD
14 day rental – $110 AUD

Now, Japan is a fairly health-conscious country through the use of face masks and the like, but “personal use” hazard suits to stop you getting the ‘flu? If this is the correct interpretation, I’m thinking it was a pretty optimistic entrepreneur who thought people would start getting around town dressed like this.  I might rent one, turn up to work and see if anyone says anything.

It’s fair to say that Japan is fanatical about garbage.  In Tokyo, 5 out of 7 days are garbage collection days.  Two days a week are for burnable garbage.  One day a week is for recyclables, and each type (glass, plastic etc) must be strictly sorted into separate plastic crates.  One day every two weeks is for items made out of steel and other metals (except aluminum, because that’s tossed on recycling day).  The other day (on weeks alternating from the steel week, but on a different day) is for light bulbs and non-metallic objects which can’t be burned.   Whew.

Rather than big plastic wheelie bins or metal trash cans, rubbish is placed in plastic bags and literally heaped on the footpath.  They are veritable mountains of refuse – walking to the train on a garbage day, the bigger piles reach head height.  The crows near my place used to have a field day on these days until the council made netting mandatory.

When the garbage truck comes, there’s not a robotic arms to be seen (unexpectedly, Australia is ahead of Japan when it comes to robotic garbage collection).  The garbage is collected by a couple of guys who grab the hundreds of bags piled outside each building.  They apparently have some kind of supernatural ability to detect non-conforming refuse.  On multiple occasions, they’ve been able to detect a single morsel of food clinging to a piece of recyclable plastic inside a single bag, at which point they slap a big, obvious, red “REJECTED” sticker on the suspect bag and will refuse to take it.

Although the bags of garbage have no identifying names on them (a rule enforced by some buildings), my landlord always knows who the troublemaker is.  Me.  It’s always me.  The rules for garbage sorting are quite complex (there are flowcharts and sub-flowcharts involved, which are naturally in Japanese), and it took me some embarrassing months to work out the more subtle rules.  For instance, if you have a yogurt container, the foil lid must be washed, separated from the plastic body and disposed of on different days.  More confusingly, the body of a tuna can is made of aluminium, but the lid is made of steel, so they, too must be washed and disposed of on different days, although they’re both made of metal.

My landlord seemed to think it was kind of amusing the first couple of times I got rejection stickers.  “Ha ha, that crazy foreign guy!”, he’d think.  Then the joke seemed to get old very quickly for him, and he started getting quite cranky.  I recall lots of eye rolling.  I wanted to say “No, no, don’t you understand?  Where I come from, we have robot trucks and the recyclables are sorted using dark magic.  These archaic methods are unnecessary!  Can’t you accept that you, and your entire system, are inferior?”.  Instead, I just politely thanked him, shut my apartment door, then randomly redistributed the garbage into different groups in new plastic bags, and hope I’d hit the secret winning combination the next week.

Anyway, given this background of fanatical garbage separation, I was most amused to see this bin carefully labeled “Combustibles” and “Non-combustibles” on the front.  Perhaps you can see the same problem I did.

When I was a teenager, I always used to stay up late on a Saturday night to watch Saturday Night Clive with Clive James. Uh, when my busy social calendar of being invited to rockin’ underage high school parties permitted it, of course.

By far, my favourite part of Saturday Night Clive was when he would show weird TV from around the world, and my favourite part of that was when he would show Japanese game shows. There’s probably no Japanese game show that saved Mr. James more script-writing time than Endurance, the show where the person who could tolerate being dragged pants-less across gravel, trapped in a glass coffin with snakes or simulated-ly drowned the longest wins.

Ah, thems were the days. Unfortunately, Japanese TV today is a far more sedate affair, much more reliant on goofy comedy and celebrities rather than the simple pleasures of laughing at an unfortunate dancing around with a weasel down his pants. In spite of that, every now and then you find a charming, simple idea on one of the many, many game shows available on Japanese TV.

The idea of this quiz show is that contestants are given a question to which they must provide a number of answers (such as “Name 4 movies by director X”). To make things slightly more interesting though, they must speak their answers into a microphone which is only raised when their partner runs over a threshold speed on a treadmill:

This makes it a bit more entertaining, except that the time limit for each question is only 15 seconds and the threshold speed required is only around 15 kph, so the runner hardly breaks a sweat. Then again, the participants are generally celebrities from the pool of talento, so the idea is really more to lob them softball questions while making small talk about their new DVD / movie in between.

Ah, for the old days… bring back Endurance, I say!

If you had to name cultural influences on Japan, where would you begin?  China – of course.  Korea – you’ll find Korean restaurants everywhere.  Brazil – ?  Yes, Brazil.

Early in the 1900’s, a large contingent of Japanese people known as nikkei (lit. “descendants of the sun”) made the long trek to Brazil in the hopes of finding great wealth.  This didn’t really pan out, but the Japanese community remained there and formed a new cultural off-shoot.  Decades later, as Japan became an economic powerhouse, a lot of the descendants of the original nikkei living overseas came back to Japan in the hopes of finding great wealth.  This didn’t really pan out either, with the Japanese economy tanking from the nineties through to today.  Although the nikkei were granted special immigration rights, being of Japanese descent, their non-native-level Japanese skills meant they were largely only qualified for low-paying manual labour.  With the number of jobless rising in the recent tough economic times, the government is now literally paying Nikkei Brazilians between $3k – $4k AUD to leave and never come back, neatly exporting some of their unemployment problems.

Anyway enough of that kind of geo-cultural talk, it’s samba time!  A big contingent of Japanese-Brazilians in Japan means that every year in Asakusa there’s a massive summer parade with all things Brazilian: bright colours, feathers, music and plenty of bare flesh.  Get there early though – arriving one hour late like the author will only guarantee you a spot behind a six-deep crowd, wondering why it is no-one has yet invented telescoping cyborg arms for taking photographs above people’s heads.

Against expectations, this guy is making those sequins and feathers work for him.

These guys were capoeira-ing their way all the way down the parade route in 30+ degree heat.  It looked exhausting.

Threading your way down through the crowds was a nightmare.  A co-worker got their 1 hour before start time and still didn’t get a good place.

Japanese summer festival food – watermelon, cold drinks and of course, cucumber on a stick.

Self-confidence is key to participation, no doubt:

The End.

For the fans of Japanese animation out there, you might like these coin lockers advertising the Neon Genesis Evangelion movie that came earlier this year.  You can (or at least, could) find this in Akihabara, technology paradise, where coin lockers are in plentiful supply for all those giant robot figurines you’ve been “investing” in.

I’ve also just realised that besides now, the sum total of my manga and anime-related postings is only one other time!   You’d almost wonder which country I was actually in.