Tokyo Architectural Digest, Take 2

Here are some pictures of building I saw in Tokyo last month. Aside from Roppongi Hills far as I know none of them are particularly famous or anything...just thought they were worth the look.


Audi building in Harajuku, looks like a giant crystal. Click to enlarge and get a full appreciation of how big it is.

More Harajuku....

A little off post topic, but hey Maritimers, check out whats cooking on that stick at the shop across the road- Donairs! A back-home favorite on the other side of the planet (even if that's not what they're called elsewhere). Delicious. I ate two that day.


Roppongi Hills. Note the gigantic spider statue, complete with eggs in sac attached to body. It's good to know that during the holiday season, while you shop and spend your money in the spirit of Christmas cheer, your insect overlord is watching over you.




Buildings about a kilometer up from Harajuku. Not particularly famous as far as I know and not even on a particularly crowded street. The last one looks like its made out of googly coke bottle glass.

Canada's Macleans is better than Time or Newsweek

Actual Cover


Left of center, we Canadians have always put out some good media under the radar. But as far as the mainstream goes, we've traditionally played second fiddle to our neighbors down south. NBC's Knight Rider was better than CTV's Neon Rider. The NFL is better than CFL. And while I haven't seen the latter, American Idol is probably a lot more entertaining than Canadian Idol.

When I was growing up, Macleans, Canada's weekly news magazine, suffered a similar pole position next to the US's Time and Newsweek. My dad, who had been brought up in the UK on more respectable news sources, subscribed to it because it was cheap and the only thing magazine of it kind really available there, but he wasn't crazy about it, and even at the age of 12 or so I could see what he meant. You'd flip through it and suddenly find yourself on the last page, no better for it. It had that distinctly lukewarm, "the Canadian version of something better from somewhere else" feel to it.

But recently Macleans has been ahead of the pack. I have access to every major news source in the English language here, but more and more I find myself turning to Macleans first, not just for news from Canada, but for the rest of the world too (If you're in Fukuoka, you can find it at the city library).

How good is it? Check out some of these stories. And while you browse them, try to imagine ever seeing anything like them in Time-

How George Bush Became the Next Saddam

A gripping, thoroughly informative account of the tenuous alliances between warring factions in Iraq, several notches above any coverage I've seen in the American media. It's not an armchair dispatch from the safety of the Green Zone, either. The journalist Patrick Graham is right in the middle of it, bullets whizzing overhead. He's crazy, and we're all the better for it. Hats off to you, sir.

Last Letters from Kandahar

We Canadians didn't send troops to Iraq, but we did send them to Afghanistan, and like Americans we support our troops but wonder what they're doing over there and what good it's really doing.

This article, a Remembrance Day tribute, publishes the last letters troops sent before their deaths. Some were prepared as final words in case of death, some were written without any knowledge of what was to come. All are heartbreaking.

Could the Next President be Even Scarier?

We all have a habit of thinking that everything bad going on in the US is because of Bush, and that as soon as he's gone, everything will get better again. But as Maclean's points out, the front-runner Republicans are just as bad if not worse, and even "liberal" primary candidates like Clinton are far to the right of the rest of the world.

The tabs: No men allowed

On a lighter note, they explain why gossip blogs and tabs fixate on every last move of minor celebrities like Lindsey Lohan and Britney Spears (who hasn't had a hit in years), and all but brush over truly big news about their more famous male counterparts.


Why is Macleans so much punchier now? Journalism became much more competitive 6 or 7 years ago. Maybe this is the new generation of journalists in Canada, poised and full of determination to do something important.

But sadly, I think it speaks to how far Canada and the US have parted ways over the past 7 years. Canada used to be the "me too" country, following the leads and trends of the US. But since the election of George Bush, all that changed. Canada remained proudly liberal. As early as 2003, when mainstream America was cheering on the Iraq war and hailing its architects Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz as geniuses, Canada strongly opposed of Bush, giving him an 85% disapproval rating. Today, I can only suppose its even higher.

So while the stories above may look like screeching, reactionary liberal-fringe fodder by American standards, the funny thing is that by Canadian standards Macleans is very much a mainstream newsmagazine, and its views represent the center of Canadian political opinion.

And while I don't want to offend anyone from the US here, I think it also says something about how the American media has been dozing off into mediocrity recently. If they had journalists doing the legwork Macleans is doing in Iraq, people would have a better idea of what was going, and better yet, might have been informed enough not to get embroiled in that fiasco in the first place. The "last letters from Afghanistan" piece isn't a condemnation of the war, it's just a reminder of the profound human cost. But if Time ran a similar story in the US, the right would be up in arms.

How to do TV Product Placement Properly

So with the advent of Tivo, advertisers are using product placement in the actual TV shows to get their goods in our subconsciouses.

I just noticed it for the first time while watching Gossip Girl, the TV adaptation of one of the new generation of books for teenage girls about highschoolers that stab each other in the back in a vicious quest for popularity.

Based on the lives of the children of elite Manhattan socialites, Gossip Girl is kind of like a teen version of Sex and the City. It's a great target for advertisers looking for placements, because it's so focused on portraying the characters as the ultimate in teen cool that a lot of products and fashions probably get dropped free of charge in attempts to make the show look as with-it and on the cutting edge of trends as possible anyway. Every show starts out with establishing shots of the characters at some hip new bar, and close-ups of sushi getting cut, sans logos. Keeping the brand name on a bottle facing the camera is just the next logical step.

The episode I saw was pretty jarring though. The characters were playing the video game Guitar Hero at a party, and their enthusiasm for this entertaining new product was just a little too intense to work. For what seemed like a full minute and a half, the lead character gyrated around with the plastic guitar controller while everyone cheered her on. I can't say for sure it was a product placement, but if it wasn't, I sure as hell don't know what else it was.

Here's my rule for effective product placement- it should look like the show is using the product for credibility, rather than that the product is using the show for credibility.

Ironically, focusing on the game for a full 90 seconds with loud, blatant references to it scripted into the dialog probably helped the makers a lot less then a place in a quick, 3 second establishing shot would have. If it had been in an establishing shot, or subtly in the background of a scene where the characters talk about other, more pressing matters, I would have thought, "So the set designers actually put that game in the scene, huh? I knew it was popular, but I didn't think it had gotten so cool that they would be using it for credibility. It must be really big right now".

By forcing it into the script though, it has the opposite effect. the minute it reaches the foreground of the scene, people's guards go up. The best advertising is subliminal, right? Why not work to keep it that way?

Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas everyone. Hope you're having a great holiday. To mark the occasion, here are some of my neighbor's Christmas "illuminations".






To put the size of those bushes in perspective, that's a full-scale Christmas tree in the background.

In Niigata, Christmas didn't have a lot of cache. Christmas Eve was a night out with your sweetheart, sort of the equivalent of Valentine's Day. and no-one really got or received presents.

But in Fukuoka, Christmas is a big deal, and people take those decorations seriously. I hate to say it, but the decorations here put Canada's to shame. Back home, we always just used those multi-colored bulbs, and maybe to get really high-tech we'd get the ones that blink. Here, they get these fader bulbs that create swoosh and swoop patterns, like some magical sparkling sapphire mist. There are stories of people spending $1000 dollars in extra electricity bills just to keep them lit through the season. And most people here aren't even Christian! If I'm downtown later I'll take some pictures of the ones in the center of town at the shopping centers. Those ones will really blow your mind.

Super Mario Galaxy is Fun as Hell

Ever since I can remember there's been concern that video games warp children. Speaking as a former video-gaming child, I can say that video games don't harm them in and of themselves, they just take up valuable time with which those kids could be learning more productive things, like building fulfilling lives and getting girlfriends.

By the time adolescence kicked in I just couldn't square playing games much longer. To this day when I play a video game, even a really good one where I find most of myself wrapped up in finding the mystic stones or what have you, deep in the pit of my stomach is a gnawing sensation which warns me that I'm wasting my life. It always keeps me from getting too into them.

All those responsible disclaimers aside though, I've spent large chunks of the last 24 hours playing the new Nintendo Wii game Super Mario Galaxy, and I just have to say- it is fun as HELL.



This video review gives an idea of the graphics, but you really have to try it to get what its about. You wave your little Wii wand around and he flips, spins and reverses gravity. The levels are jaw-droppingly cool. If any video game ever qualified as an artistic achievement, it would be this one.

I've played games that involved me more and took up more of my time, but I've never played a game that's been so much unadulterated, child-like fun. We were laughing and clapping with delight at all the game's tips and turns like 8 year old schoolgirls on nitrous oxide. It was just awesome. It makes the games we played as a kid look sick. The Wii has some "classic" games on it, and they look laughable in comparison.

Book Review: "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius" by Dave Eggers

This book almost won the Pulitzer prize somewhere around 2000, and has been one of my favorite reads of the last few years. It's a literary autobiography about a guy who moves to San Francisco after the death of both of his parents to start a hipster paper, raising his younger brother as a young dad all the while (He goes on to help found Salon.com, and the hipster publisher McSweeneys.

The author actually tried out for the first season of MTV's The Real World, eventually hanging out at their house once and actually appearing on screen briefly. As far as criticism of this book goes, I think it can be best summed up by this letter written by one of the author's friends to MTV producers during auditions for the show-

"I am a Kirk Cameron-Kurt Cobain figure, roguishly quirky, dandified
but down to earth, kooky but comprehensible, denizen of the growing
penumbra between alternative and mainstream culture; angsty prophet of
the already bygone apocalypse, yet upbeat, stylish and sexy!"

"Oscar Wilde wrote, 'Good artists exist in what they make, and
consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are. A great
poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetic of all creatures. But
inferior poets are absolutely fascinating...[they] live the poetry
[they] cannot write' As with Dorian Gray, Life is my Art!"


The author admits he fears his friend is making fun of him in particular writing this, and with good reason. This book is filled with cool people and zany good times..you get the impression that the author is really good at convincing people he meets that he's a fun, quirky charismatic guy in person...and as a writer, he does a great job persuading hundreds of thousands more people that he's a fun, quirky charismatic guy in print.

Aside from some comedy books done with his younger brother, Dave Eggers has written two fiction novels, both quite boring in comparison to this. As a writer of fiction he's average. But his flair and art is in promoting his own life, and if you get him started on it, a mixture of introspection, narcissism and self glorification propels his words across the pages. Speaking about himself, his writing is engaging in a way that his fiction never is.

This all might sound like pretty faint or damning praise, but the fact remains that for this memoir, Dave Eggers is at the top of his game, and he charms with a luminescence few can match. If you view it as fiction based very closely on fact, it's easily one of the best novels of the decade.

Mika's "Happy Ending" lifts the motif from Aphex Twin's "Alberto Balsalm"

The song below has been embedded into my brain since early high school. Listen to the keyboard motif that starts out the song, especially the last 3 notes on the second repetition (doo-DEE-Doo)



Now listen to this song by Mika, international pop superstar, and one of the few unit-shifting entertainers that made EMI any money last year. Pay special attention to the 3-note piano motif that goes through the verse between his lines (doo-DEE-doo)



I know that the context is much different and that the songs are completely different in every other way. One is played on a grand piano, and the other on spacey synthesizers. Mika plays it in a different key, too.

But is it just me, or underneath all those trapping is it basically the exact same motif?

Blogging

Just been going through the posts on this blog. I've been surprised by how good it's been to me for what I've put into it...I assumed I would just be typing into oblivion 90% of the time, with maybe the odd sympathy-read once in a while from someone I know. I started it anyway because I felt like writing again and it beat doing a diary, a practice I could never get into. I'd rather write to one or two strangers than no-one at all.

But lo and behold, it seems like everyone I know bumps into it at some point. At all the places I work, again and again people come up to me, and say "Hey, you write a blog, right? I ran into it at random last night while I was searching for info on teaching/the nova collapse/stuff in Fukuoka. It was actually not that bad". And odder still, some people even started reading it kind of regularly. I've met people over it, made friends, and even got offered a couple of jobs because of it, including one that I had actually wanted for years. I didn't see any of that coming.

The common joke is that no-one cares about your blog posts about your summer deck or cats, but what's odder still is that sometimes people actually do. Its funny how a decent blog can become a habit. You'll bump into a blog by a JET living in the country, or a Wal-mart cashier in Denver raging on about the albums he illegally downloads on bittorrent. It'll actually be pretty good, if not earth-shattering, and so the next time you're bored online and you've checked all the usual stuff, you decide to take another look, just for the hell of it. Then maybe you bookmark it, or add the feed to your toolbar in Firefox, and find yourself wandering back to it every week or so.

And then, without even realizing it, you actually do find yourself caring about the photos they took of their trip to Nagoya or wherever, as if it was someone you actually knew and got along with. But in a way it is, and you do.

So I bought a Wii

Its funny reading about Wii shortages in the U.S. It seems like the Cabbage Patch Doll of the 21st century- no-one can find one. Used Wii's are being auctioned off for over double the retail price, sometimes hitting over $500 with a couple games thrown in.

Here in Nintendo's motherland Japan, it's a lot easier to get a hold of one. The other day I heard that someone was selling an almost new one in Fukuoka Now's classifieds with an an extra controller, an extra classic controller, and extra gamecube controller, the new game Super Mario Galaxy, the Zelda game Twilight Princess, Wii Sports, the new Biohazard, and a gamecube Biohazard, all for 29,000 yen, or about $230-240, and decided what the hell, because if I got one new those are the games I would buy anyway. I just got it today. (incidentally, if you ever need anything cheap in Fukuoka, check out that board. There are some ridiculously good deals. When foreigners leave, as often as not they literally give away all their stuff to whoever will pick it up).

It's in Japanese, but all the kanji has phonetic characters over it because its aimed at kids who are still learning to read, so its not too difficult to figure out. And most of the games are pretty self-explanatory anyway.

When I told people I was thinking about buying it, they were worried they would never hear from me again. But playing around with it, it doesn't seem like one of those super-hard-core nerdy "I've been playing this game for 70 hours straight" type gaming experiences. Its more of a casual thing for kids and people that just want to mess around with it for a bit, like me. It also seems a lot more social, because leaping around your living room with nunchucks just doesn't feel right if you're doing it all alone. I figure it'll be something for me and my girlfriend to do on a lazy Sunday afternoon. And Ali, it'll give you something to do when you get here in March if you don't feel like going out. Maybe Dad will play too!

Laying down the law in Japan

Found some old pictures I took of signs when I first came to Fukuoka. Today, they probably wouldn't catch my attention because I'm used to them, but I thought they'd be interesting for people who haven't been here, so I'm posting them with my original thoughts about them at the time (this one's for you, Nessa! :) ). Let's play a game- If you don't read Japanese, can you guess what they mean? You can click on them to enlarge, and then scroll further down the page when you've made your guess.









This one is a sign in the library telling people not to try to fix rips they find in the books with scotch tape, but rather to take them as they are to the front.

It kind of says something about giving requests in Japan. In Japan, people are considered to be inherently good and well meaning. But sometimes, without meaning to they can do things that are unintentionally problematic. To simply order them not to do these things would be a little too direct, so instead adorable little creatures are dispatched to put a stop to it, as cutely and non-threateningly as possible. It looks a lot less overbearing when they're the ones telling you not to.

Just one of the many ways authorities lay down the law...without bending anyone out of shape, even slightly.

Here's another one...If you don't read Japanese, can you guess the meaning?












The problem here is that she's using two seats, one just for her bags. All those eyes are others judging her selfishness. The ad doesn't order you not to use two seats, it tries to illustrate to you what everyone else is thinking.

It takes a lot of work and thought for Japan to be as impeccably polite and considerate as it is. Ads for etiquette on trains can get really detailed. Another thing thats really common is ads about the noise ipod earphones make. In Canada, I doubt it would even occur to authorities to make an ad like that. Usually, the trains are so noisy you would never be able to hear them anyway.

But here, the trains are so quiet those actually can be the sounds that stand out. In fact, it seems like the more people are in the train, the quieter it is. A few weeks ago I was in Tokyo and squashed into a train with literally a hundred people, to the point where you could barely move. No-one made a sound, just spaced off into their little worlds of cell phone messages, Nintendo games, books, and earphone music. With that many people cramped together, it's the only way to stay healthy.

Japan is no longer a leader in Electronics

Great article in Newsweek explaining why Japan is falling behind in consumer electronics and left wondering, "How come we weren't the ones who invented the ipod?"

I've felt this way about electronics here for a while. The rise of the personal computer- big, ugly, beige boxes first built by IBM, powered by Intel, and operated by Microsoft (all American companies, you'll notice), really took Japan by surprise. When I first came here, I was amazed by how illiterate young people here are with computers. My students often don't know the first thing about PCs, and can barely open Microsoft Word. That's partly a consequence of the cell phone technology, I think- back home, Instant Messaging and email were gateway products to get kids interested in computers, who then branched out into using other software. In Japan, cell phones have had those domains covered for 10 years. So migration to computers has been much slower.

As a result, the workforce is relatively unskilled, and the whole country is playing catch-up. Ever browsed a Japanese Web Page? For all the love of design in this country, they're usually terrible. Ever used Japanese software? Consider yourself lucky. It's often close to unusable.

Success in the world of personal computers requires people that use, understand and write software themselves. Indeed, the whole nature of the PC revolution was based on innovations by users. Chat rooms, the web browser, the first software Mp3 player, Winamp, heck, even the very use of Mp3 as a format for music, came from hackers and computer users, not big corporations deciding what we would get next.

American companies adapted and jumped on board. Apple built a portable hardware mp3 player, the ipod. But Japanese companies seemed either oblivious to all these grassroots innovations, or insecure. It was as if they were saying. "What are we supposed to do with all this stuff? How are we supposed to build a product for it if it's not ours?"

Indeed, Sony even put out a rival mp3 player that didn't play mp3s. They didn't want anything to do with a pirateable data format that came from outsiders. The players used a proprietary format, and were a huge pain to use. Internationally, they failed miserably, and even here in Japan, they're stuck with half of the ipod's market share.

Even just building computer hardware, which you would expect would be simple, has been tough for them. Japan is great at making closed systems, products built in-house from top-to-bottom. The company slaves over a system, and takes care of every detail for the users.

But the internet/PC age has led to an environment where competitors all share the same internal standards in terms of parts, and the real innovation comes in how they're used. I think it broke Japan's heart to sell computers powered by Intel Chips and run with Windows software, both of which they have to buy from Americans. If you buy a Sony Vaio, it's littered with in-house software, in attempt to make it a true "Sony" computer experience. They just don't get it. In America, built in software that comes pre-installed on a PC is called "Bloatware"- and most experienced computer users just delete it immediately.

Another problem is price. Sony has been called a lot of things over the years, but cheap hasn't been one of them. High prices are fine if you have the best product on the market. But right now, Sony just can't deliver. The high prices just look arrogant and unjustified.

For example, I'm writing this on a Hewlett Packard laptop. I'm not exactly a fan-boy of HP, but when I was strapped for cash a few years back and trying to pick out an affordable computer, there was just no competition. With HP, one of the few American computers widely available at the big electronics store here, I could get laptop with a 1.5 Ghz processor and stack it with about 750 MB of RAM, all for about $700.

A pretty common deal in America, I know, so you may not be impressed. But consider the Japanese competition- the rival big-name brands in here (Sony, Toshiba, etc) all offered the same basic laptop, only with a "trendier" (i.e uglier) casing, and a plasma screen instead of the standard LCD one, for prices that ranged from $1,600 - $2,000. In other words, about double or triple the price.

They didn't even offer lower-end, budget models without the plasma upgrades. At all. Electronics companies here are obsessed with keeping their profit margins high, and keeping everything as expensive as possible. They even lobbied to pass a law that would make it illegal for second hand shops to sell electronics more than 5 years old, so that people would be forced to keep buying new stuff. They came very close to passing it, too. The general public was passive about it. The only thing that stopped them was musicians that wouldn't have been able to buy vintage amps and guitar pedals, and gaming freaks that wouldn't have been able to buy old Nintendo games.

So sadly, for all the cool Japanese design and technological wizardry I write about on this blog, when it comes to consumer electronics and the types of products that I actually buy and use in my everyday life, I find myself buying American time and time again.

There is one area of electronics where Japan reigns supreme- Cell Phones. My 3G Casio cell phone is years ahead of anything I've seen abroad. But the tragedy is that Japanese companies are getting their butts kicked worldwide by companies like Nokia, who in my opinion make inferior phones, but understand the markets better.

Helsinki Fashion!

You think Japanese fashions are weird? Check out what's going on on the streets of Helsinki! Click on the other photos on the right. Go ahead, I double dare you!

Vesa (26)

"The latex mask is by Kirsi Nisonen, the hoodie is by Daniel Palillo, the KTZ leggings are from Wunder, the Japan inspired boots are vintage Diesel.
Nu rave and renaissance, the time of Christopher Columbus and baggy shapes inspire me – but always with a touch of Nazi Germany to avoid a too clowny and buffoon look!"

Ah yes-nothing like a little Nazi Germany to smooth things out!

Fukuoka Motor Show 2007

I'm not a huge car fan, but going to the Fukuoka Motor Show seemed a fun way to spend a Sunday afternoon. Given Japan's reputation for Technology, I was expecting things to be a little more sterile, with guys in lab coats explaining the ins and outs of complex motors while everyone listened quietly and politely, with the occasional ooh and ah. But it definitely had more of a "monster truck rally" vibe than that. The loudspeakers blared rock music with those high pitched, wailing 80's electric guitar solos, intermingled with techno and Kanye West songs. Dancers capered around the cars, and 19 year old models were waiting to have their pictures taken next to the goods.

We missed the world's greatest car commercials festival, which was too bad. But here's a breakdown of the other stuff, starting with the motorcycles-

To start out simple, here's a relatively common "Big Scooter" (not the cool term for them, but the one most people use) by Suzuki. They have automatic transmission, making them essentially 2-wheeled cars. These have become more and more popular here. My students that crank rap music and idolize 2pac ride these around.

The Yamaha Tesseract- if you look closely, you'll see it has 4 wheels.

The "biplane" by Suzuki. 1000cc engine, and push buttons instead of levers for the transmission. As one writer pointed out, it looks like a bomb.

My favorite- the Yamaha Luxair. This is a hybrid motorcycle, but not for environmental reasons. The extra electric engine allows it to accelerate at a much faster rate than a gas engine alone could (While it isn't the official name, the engineers dubbed it "Dr.Jekyll and Mr.Hyde" I wonder which engine Hyde is?). It also has a deluxe stereo system (this being Yamaha, after all) with a "noise canceling" system that prevents loud winds from ruining your song.





The Suzuki pixie, a "personal car" that runs on hydrogen. The bigger car on the left is a "mothership" that stores them and transports them around. I suspect this is just auto-show fare...a bit too gimmicky to be practical in real life. I doubt it'll reach mass production anytime soon, if ever.


These kids are having their picture taken in one. The younger one is not happy about it.


If I'm not mistaken, this vehicle and the two below are Nissans. Actually, these cars are a lot closer to what you'll see in Japan in everyday life than you might expect. Nissan is famous for colorful, low-cost vehicles like these. They have a big market share in Japan, but just can't seem to duplicate that success elsewhere in the world. Can you guess why?








Nissan's Pivo2. I assumed that this was just a "for the car show" type gimmick model, but Nissan insists that it's for real and will debut in all-electric and hybrid models in 2010. Each wheel has its own electric motor (with batteries each the size of an A4 size card), and can rotate 90 degrees. That makes parallel parking a snap. You can wedge into anywhere. Watch a video of it Here. If your patience doesn't run out, you'll also hear the model get directions from the built-in-robot, which can understand your questions. It's also supposed to detect the driver's emotions and offer driving advice based on them.

Now this is really cool, and practical too (hard to see the picture, I know, but click on it and it'll enlarge). It's a four camera system that will let you see your car as you do a tricky parallel parking job...from above. It freaked me out at first, I thought they were relying on satellites or something. As it turns out, just based on the cameras from the 4 ground angles, the computer can recreate what the view from above would look like. Cool huh?








Finally, the Mazda Nagare. If you saw this in a movie, you'd think, "geez, those CG effects are so fake".

Got Locked in the Train Station last night

Went out drinking with my future co-workers last night, and came back a little tipsy on one of the last trains to Fukuoka. I arrived at Hakata Station, the big central train station in the middle of the city. Hakata is connected to an underground network of malls, the subway, etc...its a pretty complex affair with multiple exits. I was going through my customary exit at around midnight, which passes by an in-station bakery and various other random stuff. There are toilets there, and I really had to go. The lights were off but I could see from the light coming from outside of the room, and like I said, I really had to go. I was in there maybe 2 or 3 minutes.

So I go out and head to the exit, only to find it locked. I turn back to return from the hall I came from to get back to the main train station, only to find it...locked. Big aluminum shutters sealing it off.

I was trapped in the train station!

Apparently I had gone in the toilet at precisely midnight, when they close down, and this being Japan, they didn't waste a second. I called 911 (well, 119 over here) and said, "uh, this probably isn't the number I should be calling, and I'm not sure how to put this, but I'm kind of trapped in the train station right now." The operator was kind of annoyed (understandably, considering the real emergencies he has to be ready for). He told me to give him my number so the train station could contact me.

So a train station guy called me, but he couldn't figure out what exit I was locked in at. As it turned out I was technically in a connected mall, even though it was on the first floor and generally considered to be a train exit by laypeople who don't understand the complex legal issues delineating one strip of hallway from another. I mean its just one huge complex and all looks basically the same wherever you go.

So he had to call the mall people and I had to wait like another 15 minutes. Eventually the caretaker and 2 train cops (real cops? I dunno) showed up magically from an locked stairway to let me out. The caretaker kept trying to cover himself by pointing out that he had turned off the lights in the bathroom, but the security guys just seemed pleasantly amused . Happy happy Fukuoka.

I was thinking after though...I didn't even know Japan's 911 number 119 here until last year when I went to driving school here and learned all that stuff. And if I didn't speak Japanese reasonably well, I never would have been able to explain over the phone what had happened, or where the hell I was, and they wouldn't have been able to find me. I would have had to have camped out there all night and waited til 6 or 7 AM when they re-open. Just goes to show how one person's funny brief little incident could be another person's hell if they didn't know the language or the everyday ins and outs of the country.

Going to an auto show now, should wind up with some pictures. Also have about two more posts to do about my Tokyo trip the other week, but it takes a while to upload stuff...

Me Singing at Brighten

Been meaning to put this up for a while...this is me singing at the International Karaoke Festival at Brighten College last year. Rules- Japanese people had to sing a foreign song, and foreigners had to sing a Japanese one. I chose "Ai no Shirushi" (signal of love?) by Puffy Amiyumi. There's an instrumental breakdown near the end, so rather than just stand there awkwardly waiting for it to finish, I got the ground to raise their hands in the air and wave them back and forth like a rap video (I was thinking of Jay-Z's "Show me what you Got")

Watching it brings back memories...Brighten is closing after next year and I'm moving on to University work. It's been a great place to work with fun, motivated students. I think I've showed this photo before, but here it is again-
Bonus- that song I'm singing is actually really catchy if done properly. Here's the original, though the video is sort of creepy-


Here's the song that first got me into them, way back in Canada watching Muchmusic late at night. Video kind of looks like an old gap commercial-


Here's a relatively new song from them that I just heard while looking up the other two. I'm actually really digging this one right now-

Nike in Japan -The Secret of the 1Love Airforce 1 store in Tokyo

It's hard to find size 12 shoes in Japan. Nike is one of the few companies here that provides size 12, and even that it usually slim pickings. More often than not I just have to take what I can get, settling for colors I don't like because they're the only shoes that fit my feet. so I was surprised to see the hip-hop blogosphere drooling over a set of Nike shoes that were not only available in Japan, but only available in Japan, at the Nike 1love store in Harajuku, Tokyo. It is currently the only store in the world that sells these unusual brands of Nike sneakers. The sneakers coming out of this store have very short production runs, making them so rare that some models are eventually re-sold in the US for thousands of dollars. I was in the neighborhood last week and decided to stop by.

I assumed it being a Nike store, it would be on a main road next to a Sony store and a huge Starbucks. Not so. It turned out to be a small, inconspicuous little shop in the fashion district, huddled in unceremoniously amongst all the independently owned hipster boutiques. Its not even like they have that many customers. The store only had 2 or 3 people in it at a time, and was empty when I got there.

Looking in, all you can see is the fishbowl shoe Aquarium. Don't get the impression this is just a small display at the front of the store. It more or less is the store. As you can see from this better picture linkjacked from dezeen.com, it takes up most of the surface area of the shop.



As it is explained on Dezeen, this display was designed to look like an Aquarium, with all the shoes pointed in the same direction, so that they resemble a school of fish. When the store opened earlier this year, it was filled entirely with dummy white shoes for design purposes. However, as various releases of the store's stock comes and goes, styles from the previous months are inserted into the aquarium, so that it serves as a museum of what the store has sold in the past. Here's one of the weirder ones I saw, definitely a "Japan only" kind of thing-

Some of the models where really cool though, and I preferred them to anything Nike sells in mass production world-wide. Check out these-






Here's the question though- why does a huge, multi-national corporation such as Nike, with retail outlets all over the world, open a cramped little backstreet shop in the fashion district of Tokyo to sell fantastic and bizarre sneakers that can't be bought anywhere else? Considering how short the production runs are (a few months per cycle?), they can't possibly make a profit off it, at least not the kind of profit they're accustomed to.

So here's my theory about the function of the shop- Producing a shoe in mass quantities likely takes a lot of money. If you guess wrong about the color and style people want, you could wind up with a lot of overstock , and lose a lot of money. So corporations test market their products, paying people they deem as trendsetters to participate in focus groups and tell them what's cool.

It began to occur to me that most of the designs, bad and good, had a bit of a "drawing board" feeling to them, that they were the wild and wonderful ideas of Nike designers that may or may not get the go-ahead for mass-production. My guess is that for the most part, that's precisely what most of these very "Limited edition" shoes are- samples. But rather than test them out just using the regular focus groups, Nike decided to make Harajuku, the cutting edge fashion district of Tokyo, it's own personal focus group. They sell the shoes at a slight premium (about $180-200 each as opposed to the standard $120-150 here), and then stand back to see what will hit and catch on. If the hipsters that shop in Harajuku get excited about a new style and it sells out quickly, Nike knows its might be on to to something, and gives that style further attention for a possible national (or even worldwide) mass release.

So think of it as the opposite of a factory outlet store. Rather than pay a cheaper price for last year's overstock, you pay a higher price for next years' pre-stock, and for a premium, buy the privilege of being part of Nike's experimental new focus group.


Bonus- Nike commercial here in Japan

Tokyo Architectural Digest

Here are some pictures of building I saw in Tokyo last month. Aside from Roppongi Hills far as I know none of them are particularly famous or anything...just thought they were worth the look.


Audi building in Harajuku, looks like a giant crystal. Click to enlarge and get a full appreciation of how big it is.

More Harajuku....

A little off post topic, but hey Maritimers, check out whats cooking on that stick at the shop across the road- Donairs! A back-home favorite on the other side of the planet (even if that's not what they're called elsewhere). Delicious. I ate two that day.


Roppongi Hills. Note the gigantic spider statue, complete with eggs in sac attached to body. It's good to know that during the holiday season, while you shop and spend your money in the spirit of Christmas cheer, your insect overlord is watching over you.




Buildings about a kilometer up from Harajuku. Not particularly famous as far as I know and not even on a particularly crowded street. The last one looks like its made out of googly coke bottle glass.

So I wrote the Japanese Proficiency Test today

My first time taking one. Aside from flipping through a few kanji flashcards the night before, I didn't study for it at all, just kind of walked in and wrote it. I'll almost certainly pass it, too. But it's almost as much an embarrassment as it is victory: I only did the 3rd level.

There are 4 levels, 4 being counterintuitively the easiest and 1 being hardest. 4 is beginner level grade school stuff; hiragana and katakana alphabets, 100 chinese characters, count to 100, know the days of the week and months of the year, be able to say "this is a pen, that is not an eraser", that kind of thing. 3 is intermediate level and a good deal harder. 2 is a good deal harder still. 1 requires you to spend literally around 1,000 hours studying obtuse chinese characters that even a lot of educated Japanese people don't know. Taking one Japanese class a week? At that rate, it'll take you 20 years just to get to the point where you can reasonably attempt Level 1. Even if you study 4 hours a week, it'll take you about 5 years.

I "speak Japanese" (I stress the scare quotes), so I always wondered about the tests. On one hand, they're all grammar, reflect the obtuse, uncommunicative nature of language education and testing in Japan, yeah, yeah, I know. But even so, just based on Osmosis of living here and my own haphazard study habits, I should be able to pass them...shouldn't I? What would my level be if I tried? Where would I peak out?

Back in Niigata, where foreigner turnover was high and the bar for being a westerner that spoke Japanese was a lot lower (at least at the time), nobody save for a few aspiring professional translators really took any of the proficiency tests. Robert, the local bartender who used Japanese at work for 9 years straight and whose wife didn't speak a word of English, wouldn't even attempt the level 3, citing the heavy stress on grammar and all the kanji. Greg, a successful restaurateur who dealt with all his staff in Japanese, had tried it and bombed. Chad, a JET who actually studied , had suffered a similar fate.

Flash forward to Temple University here in Fukuoka, and it's a different game. At least three of my classmates had the level 1, or at least probably could have if they had been bothered. One had studied to be a translator, another had a master's degree in Japanese Literature from Cambridge University. Level 3 was what you studied for even if you didn't particularly claim to speak Japanese. Meanwhile, at the International School, the Japanese manager complimented my Japanese and told me I had the best Japanese of any of the ESL teachers on staff. Of that staff, two had passed the Level 3, and one had laughed it off as easy.

So I didn't really know what to think when I finally decided to go for it this year. I talked to the pros and it became apparent that level 1 wasn't a serious option for me yet. It came down to 3 and 2, but the jump in knowledge between them is very steep. I estimated that I was somewhere between the two, leaning towards level 2. So I had two options- I could commit to a serious study regimen of several hours a week, learn several new kanji, study the honorifics with a level of detail I never have before, and try the Level 2, or just breeze through the Level 3. I, um, chose to breeze through the 3 (Don't peg me as a total slacker- I don't talk about work much on this blog, but I'm busy, man).

So anyway, yeah, it was easy, easier than getting my driver's license here by a wide margin. The listening section was very easy (Very simple conversations using a basic vocabulary, and t-h-e-y s-p-o-k-e v-e-r-y, v-e-r-y c-l-e-a-r-l-y). The dreaded grammar section turned out to be stuff I learned to do during my second year in Niigata, so aside from some vocab I probably could have passed it even back then.

Still, it whetted my appetite to do the Level 2 and start taking studying seriously again. Looking at the criteria, and the study regimen for it would really be what my Japanese needs to progress anyway. My Japanese plateaued after living in Niigata. It would be nice to have a clear goal to study seriously for over the next year.

BONUS- Check out this very funny tirade about how hard the test is here at the Japan Times

Bonus bloggy type stuff- At lunch, I left the test site at Kyushu University only to find a crowd of people lined up on the other side of the road, holding "rising sun" flags, the one Japan used before they lost World War II. While it isn't a racist sign per se, it has gradually become something of a symbol of conservative patriotism, and is often painted on the sides of the vehicles of members of the radical right, who drive around blaring through their loudspeakers about how Japan should rid itself of foreigner influence.

"Uh, why are Japanese people rallying and holding the Asian equivalent of the confederate flag outside of a testing center for foreigners learning Japanese?" I wondered. Then I noticed that many of them were holding pamphlets with what looked to be mug shots of various foreigners. As I posted about earlier, every now and then a foreigner commits a crime here, and the media stirs everyone in a frenzy. So it looked even creepier.

Know what it was? It was a qualifier marathon for the Olympic games in Beijing next year, and as the crowd was happy to tell me, they were coming out to cheer on the foreigner runners. Why the rising sun flag? Because this was going on chiefly in the morning. God Bless Fukuoka.