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Unbelievable. A terrible tragedy. No more McChicken sandwiches at McDonald’s here in Japan.

I was hanging out in Chiba on Saturday night and things were winding down. Having not eaten any dinner and with only 30 minutes left before last train, I decided to hit up McDonald’s. Now, I very rarely eat McDonald’s, and when I do I am very set in my ways. Of course if breakfast is being served, then it’s Egg McMuffin time. If not, then I will usually get a cheeseburger and a McChicken with medium fries and no drink. Sometimes instead of this I will vary it up and get a double cheeseburger set with Qoo to drink. However, I never vary from these patterns. McDonald’s in Japan is still as bad for you as in the States, but they actually make food fresh here so it doesn’t taste as nasty. The McChicken here is really good because it’s only 100 yen (less than a buck) and they use spicy mayonnaise, which they don’t use at the US McD’s.

So yeah, Saturday. I step up to the plate and make my normal dinnertime order. The woman says “I’m sorry but we stopped selling the McChicken. Instead, we now have the McPork.”

WHAT!?!?!?!?!?!?lkjfladkjsljfd

Out of shock I kind of thought out loud and was like “Pork!?” Then, this was funny. The woman walked towards to the kitchen area and actually asked her manager if the McPork was made with pork. I mean, yeah, this was all in Japanese and we were using the word for pork (豚肉) rather than English like the sandwich name*, but you’d think she wouldn’t have to double check with her boss as to the contents of this new menu item. This would have been even funnier if the manager said it was made with something else, but at least they got the animal right.

Goodbye cheap chicken sandwich. Instead they are now peddling this thing you see to the left, which to be honest isn’t too terrible, but it doesn’t beat the chicken sandwich that once held the headline spot on the 100 yen menu. It is a pork patty covered in like a teriyaki sauce, with some scraps of lettuce and onion on it. Like the midget little cousin of the McRib.

*most sandwich names at McD’s Japan are the same as the US, and in English

I can somewhat understand, yet will never approve of the practice of some foreigners (gaijin) here in Japan who seem to think just because they see another foreigner, they are free to start up a conversation. You don’t know the other person; the only thing you have in common is that neither of you are Japanese. How is this enough reason to start up a conversation with a stranger? In the US, you don’t start up conversations with people randomly, do you? Well, there are people who will do that, and I hate them as well. Especially people in grocery store checkout lines. But that’s another story for another blog entry.

Usually avoid this gaijin conversation situation with my camouflage ability, but tonight I got caught, probably just because I was with a white person and also speaking English. I was in the Chiba Skylark with Blanchard, doing the post-work session of complaining about work and co-workers, and some foreign guy comes in. He immediately sees us and says Hi. Huh?! I thought for a second that maybe Brian knew him, but that wasn’t the case. Strange enough. The guy goes to the bathroom, asking us to watch his bag for a second. Whatever. He leaves and heads to the other side of the restaurant. Maybe 10 or 15 minutes later, I go to use the bathroom myself. Washing my hands, I don’t notice the guy who came in after me, now using the urinal. It turns out to be the gaijin from earlier, because he starts talking to me…while he’s using the urinal! That’s right. He’s violating one of the holy rules of using the Men’s Room. You just don’t talk to someone while you’re holding your equipment, it’s just not cool. I don’t care if we know each other or not, you just don’t do it. Maaaaaaybe while you’re both washing your hands it’s alright to start up a conversation or smalltalk, but in general the bathroom is not a place for speaking.

The guy doesn’t even say Hi (again) or anything, as he’s doing his business; he just starts talking about himself as if I had said “So please tell me about yourself.” He starts telling me about the retarded off-brand English school he teaches at, where he lives, where he works, and where he’s from. Canada, which maybe explains part of his behavior. By the time he finished yapping, I was done drying my hands and he was heading to the sink. I felt like I should say something as opposed to just walking out in silence, so I told him where I was from and just left.

Quick thought: why in the world was the guy using the bathroom when he just went 10 minutes before!?

As a recap: #1 – Just because you’re a foreigner doesn’t mean you should talk to another foreigner you happen to run into. Chances are, they don’t really want to talk to you. If this foreigner is Anthony Leong, he definitely doesn’t want to talk to you. The only exceptions I can think of would be if you are a really hot female, or if your conversation starts with “I have free money, please take it.” #2 – This goes for men anywhere. Don’t talk in the bathroom, especially if you’ve got your Johnson in your hands.

The sad part is not that I watched an absolutely terrible movie, but rather that I knew I was about to watch an absolutely terrible movie. Said DVD is スケバン刑事：コードネーム＝麻宮サキ (Sukeban Deka: Codename=Asamiya Saki), which apparently has the international title and far-fetched translation/interpretation of Yo-Yo Girl Cop. It doesn’t really matter though, because I don’t think anyone should see this movie. There is no excuse for me watching this movie, and no real reason either. Let’s chalk it up to being bored, having a ton of rentals through Discas, and also to the promise of good looking girls jumping around. Unfortunately, even the final action scene with two chicks fighting in leather outfits doesn’t redeem this one. It’s also sad that this film was directed by Fukasaku Kenta, who wrote the screenplay for Battle Royale and directed the sequel, since I would have expected greater things from him.

Quick summary of this film, as shallow as it is. There’s a “bad girl” in police custody. She gets recruited to be an undercover detective in a high school. Her weapon is a metal yo-yo. She’s working on some case dealing with a bomber, and of course there’s an enemy who is also a hot girl who fights with a yo-yo. Before they fight though, they both happen to change into super tight leather outfits. That’s pretty much all there is to it. Apparently Sukeban Deka was a long-running series of comics, TV shows and movies a long time ago, with this being the modern remake. I hope the past ones weren’t this empty. Oh, I found a trailer on YouTube that is good but of course makes the movie seem a lot better than it was. That’s what you get when you cast all the main roles of a movie with pop-stars; Matsuura Aya is the title role and the other main parts are all similar pop-star girls.

Don’t watch this movie.

It’s 梅雨 (tsuyu) here in Japan, the rainy season which usually lasts for about a month from sometime in June to July. This year it started up later than usual, so it will likely last until late July. I’m just assuming so; I’m not Al Gore. Japanese summers are terrible because it’s either raining or super balls hot. And yes sometimes it will also be both. It’s also humid most of the summer, meaning that walking outside for 15 minutes will make you want to go home and take a shower. This also makes riding the trains pleasant, as the usual crowd of evening-migrating salarymen have an entire day of sweat and B.O. in addition to their usual cigarette butt and stale beer aroma. I’m quite thankful that I don’t have to ride the train to work, and when I do ride the trains it’s not usually at rush hour so I don’t have to endure the torture that is being crammed into a train full of sweaty stinky old men. One of my co-workers said that foreigners are more sensitive to body odors and stinky people, which I believe because Japanese people have probably had their sense of smell rendered useless from years of sweaty summertime salarymen.

Summer in Japan brings with it a whole special batch of complaints that are only applicable in these moist and hot months. The sad thing that this is roughly my… maybe, what, 5th or 6th summer that I’ve experienced in Japan, so you’d think I would be over it by now. Ha. Most annoying is the lack of central air conditioning, or sometimes lack of any air conditioning at all. This can be a pain during other times of the year, especially winter without central heat, but in the summer it’s most painful. Generally, Japan relies on room-specific AC units with no real air ventilation or filtration system. It’s pretty much like the window units that they have in motels or in college dorm rooms for kids who have allergies (or at least a note from the doctor faking that they have allergies). At night, you don’t want to leave the AC on all night because you’ll catch a cold from it being too cold and running all night, and also because electricity bills can get pricey if you run the AC all day. Luckily, ACs here have remotes and sleep timers, so you can set the AC to shut off an hour or two after you fall asleep. Unfortunately, this means that about 30 or 40 minutes after the AC auto-shuts off, you wake up sweaty and thirsty. Thus you turn the AC on with another hour or so on the timer. Next thing you know you’ve woken up 4 times in the night and finally wake up with your pillow feeling like it had just taken a swim in Tokyo Bay.

I’m glad that I don’t have to walk very far to get to work. As soon as I get to AEON, my routine is to turn on my classroom’s AC unit so that I don’t pass out in class. Like many puzzling aspects of this ghetto-fabulous technologically advanced country, central air conditioning in Japan is a dream that will likely not be realized in my lifetime.

I made the mistake this evening of turning on the TV. As I was flipping through the channels, I landed on NHK, the national public station. NHK is a lot different from traditional PBS stuff we see in the US, primarily because people actually watch it. There are, however, a lot of trash programs on the station, including educational ones. I think I’ve complained before about my intense hate for the English educational shows on Japanese TV. Tonight may have been the worst I’ve seen, primarily because of this mega flamboyant possibly transvestite foreign teacher:

Yikes is right. I’ve uploaded some poor-res video clips of this show on Youtube. Links are at the end of this post. You can probably imagine how freakishly strange this “guy” sounds, but it’s even worse than that. Please listen for yourself. Although he looks like Mimi from The Drew Carey Show, his voice is much, much higher.

The show is part of the Koukou Kouza series (NHK高校講座), which seems to have all kinds of lessons in different subjects targeted at high school students. I guess this show is actually for retarded high school students, because they have a teacher who speaks around 1 word a minute, and has to resort to extreme body and facial movements to keep your attention as he tries to get a full sentence out. Speaking of retarded high school students, check out the third video I uploaded from this show; not only do the kids speak English like they have speech impediments, but the conversation has no real logical flow either. The entire show is sentence repetition and basic conversations, which all in all isn’t that bad. My main beef with the show was the foreign host, who acts more like a clown that a teacher and doesn’t sound natural at all. If you spoke like that to a real native speaker, they’d laugh at you and walk away.

Of course I understand that you have to speak slowly and clearly for learners of English to understand you; I do it on a daily basis. However, this guy takes it over the top and deserves to be punched in the face for the way he acts. Most high school students don’t need to be spoken to this slowly. The students on the show, for example, spoke a lot faster and don’t need him breaking up every word into its own galaxy. Stop patronizing these people. I worry when I think about people actually watching these shows and thinking they’re going to learn how to speak English from someone like Mimi on TV here.

This guy’s name is Brian Wistner. After doing some hardcore research, by which I mean 1 page of Google search results, it seems as if this guy teaches English at some Christian college in Tokyo, and has also co-authored a book on taking TOEIC. Let’s hope for the sake of his customers and students that his on-camera persona is some kind of self-degrading joke, and he doesn’t really act, speak, or write like he does on the show. Something tells me that’s not the case though. I still can’t stand how pretty much every foreign co-host of these English shows on Japanese TV is a major toolbag. Yes, I said co-host, because I have yet to see a program that is hosted by a lone foreigner. There’s almost always a Japanese person there to lead the action, and that Japanese person usually speaks perfect English without acting like a high-school drama club reject. Hey NHK, here’s an idea: ditch the crap foreigners and just let these Japanese people host the shows.

Here are some clips of tonight’s show, in case you’re curious as to why this stuff annoys me so bad. I used my camera to take video off the TV, then posted them to YouTube, so obviously the quality is terrible. You can still watch them though.

• Clip 1 – Watch Mimi-sensei spell out a sentence as if he were teaching a dog how to drive a Jeep.
• Clip 2 – Another one!? Now he goes and talks to some Australian woman. This is the most awkward conversation using What’s up ever recorded on camera.
• Clip 3 – Since the program was so awful, the kids didn’t learn anything. She’s hungry. Heading home now. Pork chop sandwiches? Duuuuuur.

I haven’t really had to deal with any Japanese bureaucracy for quite a long time, although today’s trip to the Immigration Office certainly made up for the drought. The basic premise of this journey was simple. Since I’m going to Hong Kong next week, I need to get a re-entry permit for Japan, otherwise my work visa is canceled when I leave the country. I can’t do this through the mail? Fine. I’m fine with that. I thus have to go in person to the closest immigration office, which is luckily up in Chiba not too far away. I was informed to go there with my passport, fill out a form, and I will then receive the stamp in my passport that will allow me to come and go as long as my working visa is valid. Sounds easy, right?

I went to Chiba, took the monorail to the City Hall station, and found the Chiba Chuo Community Center where the immigration office is housed. I enter and the place looks like a terrible airport terminal waiting area. Boring white walls, boring white furniture, crappy signs all over the place in Japanese and Engrish, and 1 tiny TV against a wall that was playing some samurai soap opera. On the far side is a barricade of counters, where the officers were working and slowly calling people to step up with their paperwork This place was packed. It actually seemed to be primarily packed with hostess ladies and/or prostitutes, either active (with their old man Japanese sugar daddy in tow), or former (older, even fatter and uglier, and with a bunch of kids). Now, of course not all of these women were necessarily sleazy bar hostesses, but I’m willing to bet a good share of them were.

I use the dispenser machine to get a number for waiting in line. I was number 457. I looked up and saw that they were on around 305. Great. I go back to one of the tables and get my form and fill it out. Went downstairs to the Post Office to get a 6000-yen stamp for the payment. Pretty much the Japanese equivalent of a money order, although it’s just a small postage stamp. I remember holding it and going back upstairs thinking to myself don’t drop it, don’t drop it. I come back upstairs and check out what number they were on. 307. What?! About 20 minutes and they had only moved 2 numbers? I knew then it was going to be a long day.

There is actually a Yamada Denki electronics store less than a block away, so I figured I would have time to go there for a quick look around, then come back. I was gone for almost 25 or 30 more minutes. They were on like 312. To make a long, long, painfully long story shorter, I spent about 3 hours walking around the Community Center building, either listening to my iPod, calling travel agencies to finalize my HK plane tickets, or staring at the Yamaha Music store wondering “why is this in a supposedly government building?” When they were at around 450, I went to go sit near the number display on the counter since you can’t really see it unless you’re really close. Finally, they called me, I submitted my application, passport, and Gaijin card. I sit down, and start writing a mail on my phone. Before I can even finish the short little message I was writing, they call me up. I thought there was some kind of mistake. Nope, it was done. In less than 2 minutes, he had approved, processed, and validated my passport for multiple re-entries into Japan. I’m sure the most time-consuming part was him peeling off the printed barcode to stick in my passport. 3 hours of waiting for the guy to give me a sticker.

I don’t completely understand why you have to hand them your application/passport. You are waiting to just give them your paperwork. You’re not waiting for them to process it, because you don’t need a number for that. You are taking a ticket and waiting for several hours just to hand the desk clerk your documents. Wouldn’t it make more sense to immediately upon arrival receive your paperwork, maybe even do a quick check to make sure that’s you, then let you go do whatever for a few hours, coming back at your convenience to pick up your newly stickered passport? I hate government offices like this.

Anyway, I am all set now. Booked my plane ticket on JAL, paying for it tomorrow, then I’ll be ready to go. I’m looking forward to not only having a 4-day mini vacation, but also to being able to buy tons of counterfeit stuff and eat awesome Chinese food for cheap.