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This blog would have been more menacing if I would have actually written it yesterday, but I was far too busy being lazy. On day 8 of my short journey back here to Japan, Tuesday, all the TV stations were showing weather maps and semi-freaking out. Why is that? Why because there were 3 typhoons heading to Japan. Two of these, numbers 8 and 9 (I think), were heading towards Okinawa on the southern part of the island chain, but big bad number 7 had the possibility of slamming right into the middle of Honshu, the main island where Tokyo and yours truly are at. Winds were reported as being pretty strong, but this was while it was over the ocean, so chances are if and when it did hit land, it would be nothing more than a rain shower. It did, however, make the sky a really weird red-ish color around sunset. Actually I don’t know if the typhoon and the sunset color are even related, but they at least happened on the same day.

Click on the image to the left to see the full picture. That color is pretty close to what I actually saw outside of my hotel window.

As much as I hate Roppongi, I headed there last night to get dinner with Sunny since she works there in fancy-schmancy Roppongi Hills. I realized that I don’t hate Roppongi so much as long as I’m in the normal part of town and just avoid the club and bar area, where as we all know there are only 3 types of people: hookers, foreigners, and foreign hookers. But I didn’t go there so it was bearable. Met under the giant metal spider, which only in Japan would be a normal meeting place. Found this Chinese restaurant nearby that was actually run by Chinese people, including a guy who had a super mullet going. Good lord, the hair around here is horrible. But anyway, it was one of my first trips to Roppongi where I didn’t curse under my breath the entire time.

I woke up Wednesday morning around 6AM; I’m not sure why, but I think it was because there was so much noise outside. It wasn’t a typhoon, but there was a pretty good rainstorm going on, and that combined with some heavy winds were enough to wake me up briefly. I stumbled to the window, looked at the rain, probably muttered something to myself like “oh it’s raining,” went to take a leak and then went back to bed. So much for the big bad typhoon. It rained on and off, but I think that’s pretty much it for the devastating storm that had all the TV stations giving weather updates every 10 minutes. Maybe Okinawa will get hit with the other ones.

Over Sunday and Monday, I didn’t do too much of note, although I did make some progress on my business work. On Sunday, I spent most of my day out at LaLaPort, the super huge mall in Chiba. There’s a Toys R Us and an Akachan Honpo there, so I was able to do some work while going back to a somewhat familiar place. There is a Shakey’s pizza buffet there, but it was a Sunday lunchtime, so it was packed. I didn’t feel like spending 2 hours to wait to gorge myself on pizza alone, so I ate elsewhere. LaLa Port is such a huge mall, even bigger than some in the US, I think, but it is mostly clothes shops where you can buy t-shirts that cost 6000 yen. That’s right, $60.

Monday, I headed out to Makuhari. Things really don’t seem too different there from last summer, except for 1 new building or complex that you can see right after exiting Kaihim station. It was kind of weird, since I walked past the bus queue and didn’t even notice it, then looked to my right and thought to myself “did that just pop out of no where?” Chances are it didn’t, but it is Japan, so maybe it appeared out of the ground to launch a robot or something. I was planning on going to Carrefour and Plena to investigate their baby product selections, but instead went to the IES Center around 4. I ended up staying there until almost 6:30, so there wasn’t much investigation done for that part of the afternoon. Got to catch up with the now-assistant director Shin-san, who is awesome as ever but he now has some fashionable glasses. He also moved from his little office in the front of the center to the “main” office area in the back, so at least he has a window now. Although it is a view of an alley, it’s still natural sunlight I guess. He introduced me to the new Director, Marik-san, and was like “he was here over a year ago, but it doesn’t seem like it.” I didn’t think about it much before, but it has been an entire year and I feel like I was only gone for a few weeks. I guess I’m just that well adapted/desensitized to being in Japan. Oh ya, and the new director is a pretty cool guy. He apparently was one of the guys who started United Nations University, and has been in Japan for over 30 years, so you could say that he’s more than qualified to run IES Tokyo.

Went to Y’s afterwards, Shin came to hang out for a bit then had to go for a meeting. Yoko and Tomomi came, and we stayed until close. I missed Y’s so much. Pretty much the same as usual, although I think the food selection actually improved a bit, since they had sashimi, rice (not fancy, but they were missing it before), and those BBQ riiiiiiiiibs. Also a snow-cone machine for the summer. Was given a Nikka and chocolate snow cone, which actually isn’t as bad as you would think. Matsushita-san was awesome as always, and gave us the usual counter even though we didn’t have that many people. I really think Y’s might be the greatest place in the whole country; we have to get a complete A-Team reunion there sometime soon.

I’ll likely come back to Makuhari once or twice more this trip. I’m kind of glad now that my AEON placement is out in Ichihara, because while it’s an hour/an hour and a half away from Tokyo, it’s only 30 minutes from Makuhari. Honestly, I think I might like Makuhari more than Tokyo on the whole. It’s not as big and doesn’t have as much variety or weird stuff, but just for hanging out and everyday things, the place is perfect. Carrefour has everything you need, you can hang out at Y’s and Hana no Mae, and if you want to work out, eat Indian food, and study 1000 kanji a day, then the World Business Garden is right there. Haha.

Two points that don’t really fit with the rest of this entry. Instead of writing a transition to make the flow of ideas smooth, I will just bust into them straight forward:

– By 2011, all Japanese TVs will be digital. They will have to be, or it won’t work with broadcast TV. Since all broadcast signals will be digital, everyone has to have a digital or high-vision (HD) TV by then if they want to watch TV and stuff. Although it sounds like a sweet idea, I guess it kind of sucks for old people who just want to watch the news, or people who don’t really want to buy a fancy new TV. But hey it’s Japan.

– Shin-san said that there is a popular TV drama show (the most popular one at the moment) called Supli (サプリ) starring Misaki Ito that tapes all of the office scenes in the IES building (Sumitomo Chemical Engineering Bldg) in Makuhari, on the 16th floor or something. Every Thursday through Sunday they’re up there taping. If I happen to be in the area, I’ll see if I can sneak a peak at anything. Shin-san says he saw Misaki Ito at the Sunkus downstairs, which is awesome because she is absolutely super mega hot. He also saw them taping the Kamen Rider Kabuto stuff around there, which is awesome also.

Further investigation was warranted on this whole crazy maid thing, and not just because I went to Akihabara again on my way back from that side of the Yamanote the other day.

I still don’t think I want to go into a maid cafe, but right outside of JR Akihabara station, there were plenty of maids handing out flyers and stuff. One such flyer was actually for some service where you can “Go on a date with a maid,” and she’ll follow you around and go to restaurants, arcades, and the other places in Akihabara that the nerds love so much. Not prostitution, I guess, since at least according to the flyer, those kinds of services aren’t included. But it is Japan, so I’ll bet there’s something even more shady about it. The cost was like 6000 yen for an hour, so for a buck a minute, only the rich and super-pathetic nerds can afford it.

Back to my observations outside the station. I was there around 7:30PM, and hanged around the outside of the station for about 15 minutes. During that timespan, I saw the following:

• 6 maids “working” handing out flyers.
• 4 maid cosplayers, i.e. dressed up just for fun.
• 1 person dressed as a cat. I couldn’t tell if it was a male or female.
• 1 wannabe idol singer, trying to peddle her CD by shaking her ass.
• 1 old man sweeping the street (more on him later)

The old guy I was talking about was the resident floor-sweeper I guess, maybe a groundskeeper. There is also a possibility that he was a homeless guy who just likes to sweep. Either way, he was wearing a sweat towel and a Moe~ (萌え) shirt that also said “Akiba in Japan.” After sweeping once, he took a break and went over to the little kiosk near the station and bought a flask of whiskey. While drinking his whiskey, he went over to talk to some chicks, who surprisingly didn’t run away and instead talked to him for a few minutes.

That was pretty much the end of my short investigation into Akihabara again. I don’t understand it really, and will likely never try.

Please also note that it seemed like the average age of the maids was like 15.

One thing people always talk about when comparing Japan to America is the level of service at restaurants, stores, hotels, etc. For the most part, you don’t have the whole “what the hell do you want?” attitude from service workers here. Instead, people are polite and very helpful in any store you go to. Whether or not they’re sincere, it doesn’t matter really, but they at least play the part very well. I had McDonald’s for breakfast the other day, and even though the guy had some kind of stuttering speech impediment, he was about ten times nicer than the normal McDonald’s workers you would run into in the states. You don’t have to go up to the counter and wait for the employees to finish up their conversation about the latest trailer park gossip before grudgingly having one come take your order after losing the game of paper-rock-scissors with their co-workers. Here in Japan, before I even entered the door, the Japanese McDonald’s worker was standing at the ready, smiling, and happy to push the “Filet of Fish” button on his register. Yes, you can get the fish sandwich for breakfast. It is Japan, after all. The only similarity I can see between American and Japanese McDonald’s workers might be their teeth, because damn.

One more quick story about customer service in Japan. I was leaving my room a bit late on Friday, around 12:30 in the afternoon, and had already received a note under my door saying that room cleaning goes until 3, and they wanted to make sure they could clean my room if I wanted. I called the housekeeping number before I left the room, and while I was waiting for the elevator, I heard the maid down the hall get a call on her cell phone or walkie talkie confirming the request to clean my room. Talk about service.

The past 2 days have been somewhat boring and non-blog worthy. I’ve actually been doing my research, acting like a spy inside department stores and such, and later this week I’ll be making a lot of phone calls I think. But this blog’s audience, all 3 of them, want to hear things at least 5% more exciting than that, so here we go! When I say “wasabi,” what do you think of? Hopefully, after skipping the Budweiser commercials and Jackass: The Movie in your mind, you will arrive at “that green paste you eat with sushi.” And you would be correct But did you know that wasabi doesn’t naturally come as a green paste? For lunch the other day, I ordered some combo meal that had some zaru-soba and chirashi (see left), but it also came with some fresh wasabi (生わさび). The store seemed to specialize in that or something, because they even had little bags at the table where you could take home your leftover fresh wasabi. Fresh wasabi is a type of root, and kind of looks like ginger. They give it to you on a little dish with a grater on it, and you grind the root into a green paste that is a lot less neon-looking and not as chemical-tasting as the normal wasabi-in-a-tube stuff that everyone, even Japanese people, are used to. It tasted a little less spicy and more vegetable-like, which was good. I would recommend trying it if you get a chance. The picture below here is of course the fresh wasabi, half grated down so you can see the paste.

In other food related news, I got to add a new animal to the always in-progress “Animals Anthony has Eaten” list. Whale! Yep, I was at a kaiten sushi place and they had raw whale sushi (くじら) so of course I had to try it. It was pretty expensive for that place, 315 yen for 2 pieces, but I wanted to try it since I’d never eaten the blubbery creature before. It was a very dark red, kind of like a beet, meat. I think it’s a fish, right? The taste was very meaty, kind of like beef, but it was also very fatty and a little stringy. It’s not as chewy as squid, but definitely took a good deal more chewing than normal fish sushi. The taste wasn’t too bad, although there are definitely other fish that I would rather eat. I would have taken a picture, but the place was pretty busy and I was sitting right across the counter from one of the chefs, and I was afraid he’d knife me or something. But hey, at least I got to try a new food.

I must have been wrong about the jetlag, because I think I actually have some. I was absolutely exhausted last night, and went to sleep around 11. Got up around 5AM, and stayed up since I couldn’t go back to bed. Decided to start off my day. I’m pretty sure this is jetlag rather than just my sleep schedule being off, because usually there’s no way I would even operate with just 5 hours of sleep, unless absolutely necessary. I spent pretty much the entire day in the Ooimachi (大井町) area of town, which is south of Shinagawa. Why did I go there? Because I knew there was a group of department stores, and it would be a good place to start my work research. Actually doing the work, I feel like some kind of spy or detective, which sounds retarded but is actually kind of fun. I have to snap pictures of the store displays and product selections, without anyone seeing, of course, and then I was talking to a store manager today and two other employees trying to get some basic information about the whole baby bottle issue I’m researching. Kind of cool, plus I think my Japanese is kind of coming back to me. Too bad my reading level can be compared to “retarded 3rd grader with a dead eye.”

I got back from Ooimachi on the Rinkai Line, which isn’t a JR line per say, but is connected to the Saikyo Line. Confused? There was even a sign in Japanese that said “Rinkai Line is not a JR Line,” meaning that even Japanese people must get confused. If the natives don’t get the difference, I certainly shouldn’t be expected to. One sweet thing about the Rinkai Ooimachi Station, however, was that there were 3 computers set up with internet. 100 yen (about a buck) for 10 minutes of usage, right there in the station. Talk about handy, especially for people like me who have no keitai because of stupid stricter laws requiring foreigners to have their alien cards to get a cell phone. Grr. But I really liked having the internet computers there, not because I really had anything important to look up, but just because it’s so convenient. I checked e-mail, Facebook, and that was pretty much it. Again, a great idea.

Since I don’t have a whole lot to talk about today, I will go on a bit of a tangent about Japanese TV. Everyone probably knows that it is, in a word, ridiculous. This is probably one of the reasons I like it and would want to work in it, because some of the most ridiculous ideas ever are made into TV shows. Let’s not even go into some of the really crazy shows, that most Americans see some evidence of in Iron Chef and MXC. The weirdest one was last year when I saw the show where they challenged guys to drink as much beer as possible, then they timed them peeing in the bathroom to see “who can pee for the longest?” Crazy, right? And you thought American late-night TV was bad. Whenever I’ve been in the hotel, at night and in the mornings, I’ve watched mainly news shows. Japanese news shows show the exact same clips and stories all day long, at least from what I’ve noticed. All channels, all day, and sometimes for several days in a row, will show the exact same stories, exact same footage, and related information about the “biggest stories.” Maybe it’s just that this is normal and I don’t watch news shows in the states enough. This whole week the biggest things have been a girl who died in a pool drain in Saitama, and the new flyweight boxing champion Kameda Koki.

I don’t watch a lot of boxing, but I don’t need any boxing knowledge to tell you that this kid (he is 19) is a major tool. He and his two brothers are famous in Japan I guess, training under their boxer father to be boxers themselves. Kameda Koki won the championship the other night, by a 2-1 decision against some equally tooly looking skinny guy from Brazil or somewhere in South America. I didn’t watch the match, but I hear that Kameda was pretty much getting owned the entire match, even getting knocked down twice. How did he win? I don’t know, but I’ll bet it was some kind of underhanded bribery. I’m not going to speculate, since I don’t know (or care) about boxing, but I just wanted to spend this time on my blog to reiterate that Kameda Koki is a tool. After winning, he was crying, weeping, and and generally being a poor winner on stage, acting like a little kid who just successfully stuck all 64 crayons up his nose. The next day, he’s on a pretty much every news show, with many of them having him there for a live interview. Instead of being respectful to the adults and everyone watching him, this little snot now has an even bigger ego, wearing reflective sunglasses and a silk shirt in every interview. Most of his answers are 1 or 2 words only, and he doesn’t have much to say except “I’m going to get stronger.” If I were interviewing this kid, I would have punched him in the face if he refused to take off the glasses and talk like a grown up. I don’t know why he pisses me off so much, he just does. If you look up a picture of him (here I did it for you), you can see that he’s just a little snot whose dad paid off the officials so that he would win and not have to cry in the corner all year.

Back to TV. Another thing you see a LOT of on Japanese TV is shows with people eating. I noticed this the first night I got here, when there was at least 2 hours of consecutive shows like these. These aren’t cooking shows, food review shows, or anything about the history of the food really. They’re just shows that feature people eating. Anything. They don’t even have to be celebrities, they’re just the random hosts of the shows who go around eating at restaurants. Sometimes it’s actually something interesting, like a restaurant that has a giant parfait, or maybe a giant bowl of noodles, but usually it’s just watching people eating and hearing them exclaim “oh man this is good.” Does that sound boring and retarded? Well it is, and I guarantee that Japanese TV stations air at least 10 hours of people eating a week. The two hosts are usually a girl who acts like she is 12, and a guy with a kansai accent who says “waaaaaa” a lot.

I haven’t watched much of childrens programming, but I caught the beginning of some show this morning before I left the hotel. It apparently stars the former sumo star Konishiki, but I guess since retiring from the sport he has been downgraded into a crappy Barney-type character. Showing you this picture will do a lot more than me trying to explain it:

Woke up this morning around 7:30AM. Apparently my weird “sleep from 6AM to 1PM” lifestyle made it really easy to adjust to Tokyo time. I don’t think I’m jetlagged, but who knows. I started off the day by trying to get free breakfast at the Executive International Club here in the hotel, which I knew I wasn’t entitled to since I’m paying Expedia rates on the hotel rather than normal expensive-as-balls rates. I thought I’d give it a shot anyway, but they actually checked with the front desk and I was denied my free food. Instead I went to the nearby conbini and got a sandwich, tuna onigiri, and some cafe au lait. All the old favorites. All that was missing is one of the weird Japanese sandwiches, like a yakisoba pizza roll sandwich, composed of at least 4 different types of carbs. I have time though.

This is going to sound so majorly dorky, but I was trying to figure out what I should do my first full day in Japan, and ended up wasting a lot of time at the hotel and then finally going to Akihabara. There wasn’t really anything I was going there for inparticular, but it’s close and seemed like something to do. So cut me some slack! The big plaza area outside of the station, which is what the picture to the right here is of, was under construction when I was here in the Fall of 04. I saw it mostly done last summer, but now it’s in full force. Seems like a pretty sweet place, with stores and some other stuff. A big open plaza/concrete park kind of area, which seems a lot less crowded than a lot of places here in Tokyo. But anyway, I had lunch at the Edo Sushi place in the department store connected to the station, that I go to every once in a while. It’s cheap and good, which is probably why I go there. I had so much sushi for less than 10 bucks; it would have cost at least three times that much back in Bloomington, and the quality isn’t even comparable. I had some salmon for lunch here that pretty much melts in your mouth.

I went to like two or three different arcades trying to find the Mario Kart game, but no luck yet. I went to a few stores, including the Liberty store that has sweet Kamen Rider stuff. Spent more money than I planned on, just on stupid little things that I tend to accumulate randomly here in Japan. The weirdest thing I noticed today was how big the whole maid and “moe~” (萌え~) stuff has gotten. I don’t even remember ever seeing stuff like this last year. Moe~, to the best of my understanding, is the way that hardcore anime and Akihabara nerds (Akiba-kei, アキバ系) talk about those anime porn girls. Or something like that. Theres also a lot of products that have either Moe or Akiba-Kei on it, I guess it’s becoming like a trend in itself. They had like shirts, hats, coffee mugs, buttons, and even stuffed animals that look like the 2ch ascii art cats. I have a feeling the whole Densha Otoko fad Japan had last fall is partially to blame for this.

The whole maid thing is even weirder though. This started a while back, with the maid cafes. I remember once or twice trying to find these places, and I never did. They were like secret or something. The whole deal is, you go into a coffee shop where all the girls are dressed like maids, they call you “master” and stuff like that. Nothing really sex related at all, it’s just for the Akiba-kei guys who get off on girls who act like they’re 5 and/or are from an anime. At some point between last summer and now, the maid fad got even worse in Akihabara, because just walking around the street, a lot of places (at least 6 I saw in one stroll down the main street) now use girls in maid outfits to hand out flyers, invite people into the shops, etc. They’re not exactly French maid outfits, and they’re not really revealing or anything. Again, the Akiba-kei guys love this. There are apparently more Maid Cafes all over the place, and I found one today somewhat inadvertently. I was browsing around Don Quihote, this multi-level department store that pretty much sells just random stuff, and I went up to like the 7th floor. Only instead of the usual random DonQui products like oversized sombreros and cheap neck ties, they had a Maid Cosplay store. An entire little area selling all sex toys, videos, and of course hundreds of maid outfits for a few hundred bucks a pop. You would think that guys buy these for their girlfriends, but something tells me that they’re instead either wearing them themselves or putting them on their life-size blow up dolls at home. Here’s a pic I took, super secretly:

The rest of the floor was arcade machines where you can win maid-related prizes, complete with 2 female attendants dressed in maid outfits, and a huge Maid Cafe that reminded me of a theme park ride because it was walled off from the rest of the floor. There were two creepy chicks dressed as gothic maids outside of the cafe, trying to get people to come in, and one of them was probably the ugliest Japanese girl I have seen in a costume ever. I wish I could have gotten a picture, but I was afraid if I did she’d blow fire on me or something. But either way, the whole maid thing has gotten more abundant and it’s started to weird me out. I have no problem walking down the street and seeing nerds drool over anime porn and creepy model kits of the girls from Evangelion, but something about the whole maid thing just creeps me out. Maybe it was just the super ugly maid that did it to me.

After that, I came back to Shinjuku and did some browsing in the areas around the station, which are huge to boot. I’m going to hit up the department stores and like Takashimaya Times Square soon, maybe tomorrow. For the rest of the night I think I’m going to relax and make up a tentative schedule of when and where I’m going and doing stuff for my work assignments. On a closing note for this day, I would like to say that writing three long travel blogs in a single night is difficult and taxing, overshadowed only by the physical exhaustion I felt when I got back to the hotel a few hours ago to write these entries. They always say that you use totally different muscles when you’re in Japan, which may be true, but I think it’s just because you do so much damn walking around this country. Compared to life in Bloomington for the past year or two where I drove almost anywhere, my body just aches as if I ran a marathon. Well, maybe not that bad, but I’m tired.

And since I now see how much text I’ve written in these three entries, I’m thinking of not doing complete summaries of what I do here; maybe I’ll just pick one interesting thing a day and talk about that.