Wednesday, December 23, 2009

Enhancement Vegetables KitKat

Like I said in a previous posting "There's something everyday". For instance today I walked into a 100Yen shop (Dollar store) and found Veggie Kit Kat. I'm on a health kick and was curious enough to try it. The first stick tasked pretty good but by the fourth stick I started to feel sick.

This delicious (I use the word loosely) snack was made in cooperation with a juice company famous for a vegetable cocktail. The actual name of this KitKat is Itoen Juu-jitsu Yasai (vegtable enriched) which is the same name as the cocktail. Both have the same weird aftertaste, kind of a carrot taste. The main flavours are apples and carrots. An apple is a fruit, not a veggie, but oh well.
According to Wiki, "KitKats have also become very popular in Japan, a phenomenon attributed to the coincidental similarity between the bar's name and the Japanese phrase kitto katsu, which roughly translates to "You will surely win!" This has reportedly led to parents and children buying them for school examination days as a sort of good luck charm."

I'll be on the lookout for more KitKats, I'll let you know what I find.

Tuesday, December 22, 2009

Do the Locomotion with Softbank


The cell phone company I'm with is called Softbank. The day I came in to buy my cell phone this advertisement was playing. I thought it was so funny the first time it played but then they just kept playing it again and again. They have this thing here where they really love little catchy jingles. It's really annoying to hear the same 30-40sec jingle shoved down your ear over and over again. It happens in stores all the time. Anyway, this group is called SMAP. There the Backstreet Boys of Japan. I think their funny. Its for a cell phone.

Saturday, December 19, 2009

Purple Monkey Osaka

The Kansai area is very fun to live in because Kyoto is just one hour away from Osaka. It's like living in Philadelphia and getting to New York in just under an hour. It also costs about $4 to do it. I have classes in Osaka every Thursday but it rarely gives me an opportunity to explore so the first weekend in December I finally convinced Helene to get out there for a day of shopping.

The shopping was incredible. Apparently, all the aristocracy once lived in Kyoto and Osaka was a merchant town. Thus, today there's little in the way of tourism there but the shopping is great.

The area we went to was like the Times Square of shopping.





The amount of stores and restaurants crammed into this neighbourhood can make even the biggest shopaholic go crazy. Most of it looks like this. Hundred of people down the little covered street and every intersection goes off into more streets of shopping madness. Mostly clothes but there were plenty of baubles.

Every one of these signs is some form of store or restaurant. This little place in the corner was the Thai restaurant where we had Blunch (see, I told you it would be a thing). Now I don't know about Thai food in Canada but the stuff I had here was so good I couldn't believe it. It's really true what they say that Asian restaurants overseas never taste the same. I have no idea why. One particular thing that many restaurants seem to employ here is a different system than the waiter harassment system so popular in North America. Rather than the waiter coming to your table and asking you lots of questions when you don't want them to, they leave you alone. Nor is this like the French system, where they leave you alone and forget about you, your order and your drinks, no this system is much better. I'm pretty sure some up-scale restaurants use it in the West but here it's common in many places for there to be a button at the table for you to get the attention of your waiter at anytime. Basically it rings like a doorbell and your table number comes up on their scoreboard. Very convenient.
Yes it's very colourful and I loved looking around at all the pretty lights everywhere.

I love this advertisement. Not sure what is says but I would think its "Even though I'm lost in time, in hostile lands, I can only think of finding the Toshiba Regza TV".

We ended up picking up some local Osaka specialty foods/treats. That's another thing they have here in Japan, specialty sweets. Every city or area makes some kind of speciality snack that you cannot buy anywhere else in Japan. So when Japanese people travel in Japan it's customary to pick up said special snack from wherever they go and share it with their friends upon their return. I always get some crazy sweets from all over Japan from my students because they love to travel. Take this little crunch Mt. Fuji with the white chocolate snow on the top and the dark chocolate on the bottom. They were really tasty kind of like a high quality CRUNCH bar with less sugar.

Purple Money Dishwasher. Yes a purple monkey pet store. And do they sell monkeys...Yes they do. Some of them were really cute and if I could afford the $2000 price tag then it might be worth thinking about it. Not sure how legal this is in other countries though. What's funny is that two of the moneys that they were selling were so ugly, I wondered who would ever buy them. Yeah, I'm heartless.
I think one day I will have to buy a monkey. I hope it doesn't give me a new strain of disease that my body is not yet ready to deal with. I guess we'll have to wait and see. Really thinking about getting a pet in the near future. Maybe a dog but most likely a cat. I've never been a dog person but I've mutated into one.

So back to the shopping. It's fun to go into specialty stores that offer European goods and you get really excited at the prospect of paying $5 for bacon bits. I never really ate bacon bits very much but now it seems important to.

If the little streets and shopping district weren't enough for you, take a look at this picture. Above this building is a highway. This building may not look like much on the outside but on inside it goes up four floors and down two or three. This thing is long and FILLED with clothing shops. It was mostly formal wear or classy clothes. No real name brands like Gap or Tommy. This place was more for suits, hats, kimonos and nice accessories like briefcases. I guess I found where the rich conservatives shop.

Not really sure what this was originally but it appears that once upon a time you could pay and ride these little round booths all the way up for a view of the city. I suppose when that became lame they renovated this building into a super discount store. We must have been in there for over an hour. It was hard to find the way out. Maybe it was once a fun house.

Don't get me started on how much Hello Kitty crap they have in this county. Yeah, I'm adorable. But most Japanese know "Hello Kitty" as "Kitty Chan". I suppose that sounded too oriental to sell worldwide.

This was a sign I found on the boardwalk. I guess it means no signs. Kind of hypocritical if you ask me.




The day was fun. I ended up buying a Gundam, and Helene found some clothes. A nice sweater can run you about $18, that's really impressive. Oh and Gundams are the #1 toy in Japan. I'll talk more about it when I finish my current one. I'm a geek.


And Sega is the biggest video game arcade name in Japan. Back in the day they lost the home gaming war to Nintendo. Guess now you know where they ended up.Good for them.

And Now for Something Completely Different 1

This is the first of many Etc. stories since, well, they're fun too and you can't fit most of them in regular postings.
Cute cakes.



Or how about this sign I found. Yes they've created a meal between Lunch and Dinner--Introducing BLUNCH. It will be a thing soon. Trust me.

I thought this table was pretty awesome. No chairs just long benches and in the centre you can cook or heat.

Right above the table there was a hood fan to catch the smoke. Yes a tiny fireplace in the centre of your table. Overall, I like the idea of having a huge table like this. Chairs suck anyway.

I know the new open concept is very popular right now, but this restaurant really did it well. They prepared all the dishes in front of the patrons and you could really see where each thing came from. This kind of thing is very popular in Japan, especially at a Yakitori bar. You order little skewers of meat or vegetable and they barbecue them in front of you. This place is a huge upgrade but the same basic idea.

I finally found one. Everywhere else it's in Romanji so I can read it. I want to find things in Japanese damn it. I hate globalization. I'm still looking for an old Coke can thats all written in Kana for my collection.


I've been meaning to find this picture again for a while. O.K. the first few make sense. This is reserved seating for injured/disabled, pregnant, with children or senior. That's the first four. But the last one... The message at the bottom says "People with internal disorders" and there's a picture of a man with a heart in his chest. I thought it meant people who were upset because it kind of looked like the man had his hand to his head. Then maybe internal disorder meant that he had heart problems, but finally it was explained it was for people with pacemakers. Go figure.

It is true that Pac-Man did go around in the night eating little yellow balls. Maybe they were pills. Was Pac-Man a drug addict who went around dark alley ways eating pills and hallucinating about ghosts? Only, God knows. But in the meantime, this pharmacy decided it would be fun to use that image as its main mascot. Yummy Pills.

Even Brad Pitt sells out. He looks so dreamy cuffed to himself.

Lastly, this guy just wants to show he's really happy to see you.

Everyday, there's something to see or something to tell. I wish I could tell them all. For instance the other day, there was two guys on little motorcycles. They were the size of suitcases. The wheels were no bigger then a basket ball. When the light turned red they put their legs down and they looked like children on a kid's bicycle. When the light turned green they started pushing the bike until it was at a rolling start, hit a big button in front of them and they were off. I've never seen anything like it. Amazing.

Friday, December 18, 2009

Hospital Resort

Wednesday night was my first visit to an Emergency Room at the Second Red Cross Hospital in Kyoto and it showed me wonders of modern medical technology that I didn't even know existed. Everyone knows that everyone hates hospitals. The long lineups, the bad magazines, the smell. There's lots of reasons. But, after this experience, I won't hesitate to get sick and come running to a Japanese hospital. Helene gets national health care for about $20 a month which really seems worth the price for the service I got. As for me, I bought some insurance before I left Canada.

I felt something like this when I first got to Japan. At the Tokyo Airport I had to pass through security en-route to Osaka. It was fast, calm and very comfortable. By far, the most relaxing processing I've ever experienced. Somehow they have a way to make unpleasant situations very tolerable and easy. Service with a smile.

First of all, the hospital did not have a big neon sign to identify the Emergency ward. I think that it's not very common to go straight there. I honestly think that Japanese people wait until the main wards are open in the daytime, respectful of true Emergency situations. The following day I had to come back to the Hospital for more meds and I was told to go to the main building where it was crazy busy as I was accustomed to at a hospital. The first night though, the Emergency ward was deserted and I got the doctors' attention within 3 min of sitting down.

I got into the Emergency ward with Helene who tried to act as a translator. (Languages is her thing and she seems to be picking up Japanese like clockwork). I barely had a chance to sit down when I was approached by a doctor who asked me if I spoke Japanese. He then quickly called another doctor for the initial English interview. I was then directed into a huge room with spotlights and technology everywhere. It looked like I stepped into the futuristic laboratory. There I was met by not one but three doctors who each took turns asking me questions. Also two nurses stood by to help out if needed. One quickly started giving me an ultrasound while the other took my blood and set me up with an IV drip. The third stood in the back with my file writing down everything that everyone said.

Now, I don't know if this is normal treatment. I'm not sure if it was because I'm Gaijin and they wanted to make a good impression or maybe it was a slow night and they had nothing better to do.

Now, I've never had an ultrasound before and I don't know what they're using in Canada these days but I have seen pictures from Canadian ultrasounds and I can tell you that the technology I saw here is far next-gen. When he asked me to breath I could see detail from the inner lining of my tummy wall. They took pictures and it was impressive how much detail you could make out.

Afterwards, I was sent for a CT scan. When all the doctors exited the room and stood behind the thick piece of glass, I started to worry but that fear was nothing compared to the daunting loud English recording that freaked the living hell out me, telling me to breathe in and hold my breath. They really should check the volume on that thing. It almost gave me a heart attack. The pictures from the scan were so detailed I could make out every little rivet in my intestines. Then they looked at a side view which seemed like a large camera flying through my pelvic bone into my intestines. It was like a little movie of my insides.

Afterwards, most of the doctors scattered and a few sat there arguing about my results. The nurses had a good laugh because everyone was trying to communicate with very limited vocabulary. One thing that amazed me was that no matter what happened there was always a nurse by my side. Wow, that's service. Not including the IV drip which lasted a while, everything took about an hour. Wham, Bam, thank you doctor.

They told me to come back the next day if the IV wasn't enough. So I did, and the main hall was very cool. The main desk asked me what the problem was and directed me to the ward of the hospital specifically for me, in my case Gastroenterology. Where I was interviewed and given a prescription for the exact amount I would need. Honestly, they gave me five pills.

The check-out machine was cool too. You put in your medical card (which they gave me), it makes a bill and prints off exactly what their overall prognosis was for your records.

In Canada, you just go to the Emergency and they deal with you. If you have a problem you just come back to them. I never figured what the rest of the hospital was for since everyone goes to Emergency. I'm sure there are wards but I never went there. Don't even ask about France. You'll be lucky if they listen to you after you waited for 4 hours. You have to put on a show to get attention there.

Holiday Apendicitis

Today is the three month anniversary of my arrival in Japan and I can honestly say that I’ve changed a great deal. However, an update on my personal realizations and epiphanies will have to wait until another time. This story I suppose starts in a strange way but I think this is the only way to tell it. It ends up with me in the hospital.

Background: I arrived in Japan weighing in at 202lbs (91.5kg). Over the last three months I’ve gotten my weight down to 187lbs (84.8kg). A few of them dropped off within the first few weeks because of how much we were moving around. Japanese food is very good for losing weight. On top of that, I’ve been keeping a steady gym schedule of three visits a week. Lastly, Helene and I have been reading a lot on healthy eating and toxins and a few other ideas about eating practices have come up but, nonetheless, I’ve curbed my eating style to include more fruit than ever before. All this accounts for my weight loss. I don’t remember when my weight was this low. It must have been in High School.

Cause: Last Thursday, I went out to dinner with a few of my students. I recommended that we go to a German restaurant. (Regardless of what happened, German food is still my favourite.) Without unnecessary detail we ate a lot of food and, for those of you not in the know, German food is heavy on the system. I’m pretty sure that the bingeing I did that night heavily affected my situation, maybe it even was the cause.

Effect: On Saturday evening after a great day of shopping and exploring the city, I came home dizzy and a little nauseous. I fell asleep fairly early without much dinner and woke up the next day, at 1:30pm with a strong fever, stomach pain and back pain. I felt awful, the smell of food just made me sick. Couldn’t do anything but watch TV (SHARK- An excellent lawyer show with James Woods, only went for two seasons but I really like it). Fell asleep again at 8pm with lots of clothes and a hot water bottle. Woke up the next day, Monday, with a crazy headache and back pain like nothing I’ve ever felt before. My neck was so stiff that it hurt to move it in any way. After some stretching and drugs, I honestly felt strong enough to go to work. I thought that if I really felt bad I would go home. Everything sucked but it was tolerable.

Pain: The lower abdominal pain and back pain lasted for the rest of the week with a little fever. I have two doctors that I teach every Tuesday and they said that if the pain got worse I should go to the hospital. Well it did and on Wednesday night I went to a Japanese Hospital. It turns out that I was suffering from appendicitis. They gave me some anti-inflammatory drugs intravenously and, when I was done, told me to go home and come back if I wasn’t feeling completely better. The next day I came back feeling a little better and they gave me a prescription for more antibiotics and told me to come back if it got worse.

Moral: No I don’t regret eating all that delicious German food. What I learned was that, if I did the macho thing and dealt with the pain without going to the Hospital which I was persuaded to do (actually, my girlfriend force-marched me there!), then I probably would be going in for surgery right now. See, an appendix infection doesn’t actually hurt that much. All the secondary symptoms seemed unrelated but it worked something like this: The infection slowly started to infect my kidney which caused my lower back pain, leading to my neck jamming up that caused my intense headaches. The neck would keep jamming up even though I massaged it out. I honestly thought that the abdominal pain would pass.

Don’t screw around with the appendix It may not do anything to help you, but if it gets infected it can mess you up!

Wednesday, December 9, 2009

Free Café

About two Sundays ago Helene and I came across something that confused and shocked us. But even saying that kind of gives it away. So, I suppose the best would be to start from the beginning.

There was a special exhibition going on at the Kyoto Royal Palace that many people insisted that we should see. I'll skip over the part where we went to the exhibition, I'll leave that for another time. Trust me there are lots of pictures and it's a story worth telling. No, today, I need to tell you what happened after we left the palace.

Walking down the street we come across a sign that read "FREE CAFE". Sorry the picture is blurry because it was dark by then. At the time we were joking about funny Japanese signs we see here and there. How we come across things that say "WARNING" and the rest is in Japanese or "AWESOME" with a lot of blah blah in Japanese. Maybe they don't have words like that in their language or maybe they find it witty or perhaps people understand these phrases. I'll be sure to throw some pictures up when I see them. Anyway, exactly at this time we were looking around for funny English signs, when we come across this one.

I looked up and read it out-loud and immediately was thrown back. Everyone knows I love free stuff. I live by the code, "if it's free take it and figure it out later if you need it". This must confuse you as much as it did me. We looked around for some sign of what we were about to deal with. Helene was so weirded out by the concept and told me to go inside first.

This sign was out front. Not sure what any of it says but it was very clear that is cost nothing for whatever it was, most likely coffee. Entering the cafe we immediately faced a line. Go figure, something is free and there's a line. Looking around everyone had a cup of coffee, munching on rice crackers, happily chatting and having fun. "I want coffee" I thought to myself so we stood in line. The further we got in the line the more we could see the front of it and we realized that we were really going to get free stuff and that there didn't appear to be any catch. Does this not weird you out as well? My North American mind still doesn't really comprehend this.

The place was very clean and professional. I looked like a Starbucks with one exception, that there wasn't all this stuff that the cafe was selling upfront. As we got further down the line there was a juice and tea machine with this stand of cups beside it. Even this thing was cool. You pressed the button on the bottom all the way in and it somehow dropped only one cup down. Afterwards you had the choice of two different coffees followed by milk, cream, sugar and a communal stirring stick. At the end was a selection of four different rice crackers. Once the person in front of me was done with the tongs for the rice crackers he smiled and passed them to me. Everything was so civil. We stat down baffled and began to eat out rice cakes and drink our coffee wondering what the catch was. At the back there was a little booth selling the rice crackers so we thought this whole thing was to promote their snacks and perhaps it was. Those rice crackers were really good.
After you were done everyone brought their cups over to another table where you poured out what was left in your cup, left your tray in the proper pile. Everything was thought out.

Within a few moments a woman came over to me (I know you've been waiting for this) and handed me a pamphlet. Which read "Your Gateway to Real Freedom". No this is not some kind of weird religious thing where they were asking me to pledge my life to some deity or something like that. It was far deeper and interesting than that kind of cliché.

The pamphlet had 18 pages to it so I`ll sum up what this concept is all about.

Free cafe is a concept designed by the Harimaya Honten company to share Japanese traditional rice crackers and to "share with young people the seriousness and pressing nature of global environment problems, the fundamental solutions that currenly exist and the track in real time the process being made." Noble huh? "People are welcome to use the cafe at no charge, at any time and as frequently as you like with only one rule that people treat each other with respect and courtesy" How does this relate to global warming you may ask? Actually, the free rice crackers are directly related to how to solve global warming. Yeah, I was shocked by this revaluation too but keep reading and I'll explain why.

Awareness of the cause of environmental problems is the target of this Free Cafe system since most of the issues discussed today by governments are about secondary problems. Conversations on CO2, recycling, etc. are all meaningless if the main problem is not approached.

According to the pamphlet, the root cause of all environmental problems is the meaningless strive of people to dominate one another politically, economically, academically, etc. rather than seeking real happiness and coexistence. Then it goes into a long explanation basically coming to justify why some people have what others do not, "the have, and have-nots". The cause of this is the over-use of the left hemisphere of the brain. The right hemisphere deals with intuition and the left with logic. Our social activities today are primarily based on thinking how to dominate others. This represents an over-use of the left side of the brain. Think about our school system or job hierarchy or how countries view other countries. Everything is based on showing who is better which is a very inward view of the world. On the other hand children use both sides of the brain equally and thus can see things and grasp things that are fundamentally simple but adults are not prone to understand them as easily.

The proposal offered is to live in harmony with nature and other people in everyday life. Jealousy and animosity cannot possibly bring happiness. In order for people to be happy they must be civil, respectful, tolerant and courteous to all others. If you go back and read the beginning of this post you can see how easily that can be accomplished. If we act in ways that benefit other people and not ourselves then the issues of global warming will fade very quickly. I suppose the owners of this company simply wanted to promote honest peaceful coexistence.

The themes represented here are not new. Sometime I will write about my thoughts on all this stuff but what this cafe represents is a crucial issue that goes beyond global warming. I not sure if the concept of Free Cafe could work in other countries, at least not now. But the fact that something this profound exists in Japan is the a good start. What do you think? Could this work in Canada?

Since were on the topic of coffee shops, this is a sign I found outside a local Starbucks. It may not seem that special at first but here in Japan smoking is permitted in most coffee shops and restaurants. Because it`s straight forward that smoking is prohibited in most other countries in places like this, there is usually no need for a special sign. Here is one that I bet you`ve never seen.

Friday, December 4, 2009

In Nintendo We Trust.

I thought a little trip back to 1985 would be worth writing about for a moment.

The Nintendo Entertainment System (abbreviated to NES) was awesome and changed the world and blah, blah, blah. It was great for its time. Rumour started to float around that it was called the Nintendo Famicom in Japan (FC). But I only really knew that when talk started about the Super Famicom. The truth is Famicom was short for "Family Computer". Yes, its lame name, I can`t defend it, but remember how amazing the NES was.

Why all the talk about stuff that happened 24 years ago?
Here are some pictures you probably have never seen.
I love how controller 1 has the start/select buttons and controller 2 does not. Remember how you would have to hit start on each controller to figure out which was was player 1. And the cord comes off the side of the controller, weird.
This is the Famicom disk system for saving games. It was a unit that used floppy disks for data storage. It was announced, but never released in North America. Well that just makes me mad. Do you know how long it takes to beat some Nintendo games. Even if you could sit there for all the hours necessary to beat some of these games, chances are that the system would randomly screw up and not work somewhere down the lines, if not within the first 10min. What the hell!!! Why didn't we get this thing? Stupid dust! It was always the dust.

Here is a rare anomaly. Whats wrong with this controller? This is the first model before it was recalled in 1984. Yes, it has square buttons. They probably figured that you would rip open your thumb if you played too much. I`m guessing it was recalled for a reason. Since then, all game controllers have round buttons.

Now lets travel to 2006 where a company called Yobo made this thing. It plays Nintendo and Super Nintendo games. Its called the FC Twin. Apparently, it doesn`t work with all the games but its still sounds decent. I guess it payed off keeping all those games. in my basement. Now I know that if my Super Nintendo breaks down this is where I should turn.

Or should I? Maybe I should wait.

Now, lets fast forward to 2009 where we have an all new revelation. Portable gaming devices like the Sony PSP and the Nintendo DS are so smug, what with their “tiny” game cartridges that fit “conveniently” into the consoles. Trust us, you want none of that. No, no, you’d much rather have the Retro Mini X Handheld NES a genius device which somehow manages to awkwardly deep-throat the boxy, lumbering cartridges from the original Nintendo.

Anyone looking to play their old games in a slightly larger format can hook the system into any television and use the included wireless controllers. (Why are they modelled on the old Super NES controllers rather than the original NES ones? Don’t question. Just enjoy.) Added bonus: There’s even a wireless Zapper Gun, so soon you can be Duck Hunting all over again. Unfortunately, even though technology has evolved, the gun still won’t let you cap that damn dog that keeps popping up and laughing at you.

All I have to do now is just wait a little more for the Super Nintendo Retro Mini X. I`m sure it will come out one day. I`ve always rejected these portable game systems. Why play a crappy 4bit Tetris game on the go when you can play an 8bit one at home. All the fancy new systems have the same problem. But this thing plays the same damn games you play at home. So your not missing out.

I love technology, I love Nintendo. And if your interested what its like over here. in Japan in 2009. Nintendo is master. Everyone who I see with a portable system has a DS and when I talk to people they talk about the Nintendo Wii. Same goes for the stores. Nintendo stuff is everywhere and Sony stuff is here and there. As far as I can see Playstation is a distant second and there is ABSOLUTELY no sign of the X-box here.

In case your feeling nostalgic here is a game that just came out. I thought it worked with the theme of this post.