Cute Stuff

Hey all! New happenings of the past week - last Wednesday, I had my last teaching class at the elementary schoolers, and one class of third graders all gave me thank-you notes. I thought this would be an excellent opportunity to discuss what big business "cute" is in Japan.

To begin with, there's the stationary. Kids buy stationery and school supplies with cute as the only factor considered in their purchasing decision. I guess it's the same in America, but it's just all that much more prolific over here. I just happen to have some prime examples of this.

Love Bambini - Small fawn was born!

Happy elephant - soursour brand stationery

Marie from the Aristocats and Bunny from Bambi are pretty big figures

Happy food - a pretty common theme. Personally, if I saw my ice cream cone smiling at me, I'd be pretty weirded out.

Says it all, really.

Awesome Engrish - "CHEERFUL DAYS - The first step toward happiness. Footloose and fancy free. Make your daily life pleasant! - I am full of play mind! A wonderful presentiment. I like what is like you. - I feel comfortable with my heart exhilirated."

Kid drawings of Jeff-sensei (I just kinda get all happy when they call me Jeff-sensei)

A game we'd play sometimes where I'd swing a stuffed soccer ball on a string, and call out "high" or "low" and they'd have to jump or duck, and if it hit them they'd be out. From the picture, apparently I've totally KO'd two small children with that thing.

Me towering over the crowd

Me on the playground - I used to play with them during recess. It was great. Japanese tag games are fun, and dodgeball is slightly different but more interesting. The Incan temple with a clock at the top is supposed to be the school, I think.

The coup de grace - one of the kids slipped me a tiny, tiny gum eraser, with a picture of a hamster, with a peach for a head, holding a small, smiling green ball. Overkill, in my opinion. Exasperated sigh.

I have a lot more of that stuff, with origami cranes and paper airplanes and everything. Third graders are really nice. ^_^

Anyway, other cute stuff. Student drawings of themselves is often fun to see - it's usually anime style, with either huge eyes and spike hair or chubby faces, button noses and the like. Capsule machines are VERY common over here, you can get all kinds of small accessories, pins, and danglies for about 100 yen each, in all your favorite popular themes of the moment. Danglies are huge, I swear there's something hard-wired into the Japanese female brain. If it's got a loop, it'll have a danglie attatched within 8 hours. Yes, I have one on my cell phone too.

I don't have a picture of this, and it's a shame, but the most ingenious danglies I've ever seen in Japan was Winnie the Pooh characters... dressed up... as OTHER Winnie the Pooh characters. For example, they had the base characters, and they were all basically the same shape - Pooh, Piglet, Eeyore, Tigger - and they also had costumes of those four characters that would slip over the base characters. They were interchangeable, too. It looked like a costume party where everyone dressed up as their friends. Of course, you could make them look like they were wearing a costume of themselves, too. Darn cute stuff. Hmm, now that I think about it, a "dress up as your friends" or "dress up as yourself" theme might be pretty fun for Halloween some year...

So, that's cute stuff. Serious business.

Last week, I also went to a volleyball match at Kanashima-chu, and saw the Taiko show as promised. I will update with images of those soon. For now, I'm'a call it a night. Take care!

Castlepalooza

Okay guys, this is a nothing post, but I wanted to give this its own post so you didn't miss it. If you have Quicktime, you're in for a treat. If you don't, download it for pity's sake. This is pretty nifty.

http://castle.ad-g.tv/osaka/egindex.htm

You're looking for the Quicktime VR tour. Most of these views are just 360 panoramic ('just?') but on some of them you can look all the way up to the sky and all the way down to the ground. It's like you are actually there, except even better because your pesky feet don't get in the way of your view of the ground. Levitating eyeballs are us. These views are just for Osaka-jou, too. Check out the "Castle Select" feature at the top right. Woot. All the Japanese castle you've ever wanted and then some.

RHCP Concert / Things I would bring to America

Hey guys! I thought I'd get off my butt and give you a quick update on what I've been up to. First and foremost, GO ATLANTIS!!!! Mad props to all my homies in the ground crew. It looked so pretty, and I was so glad to be able to see it over here. You couldn't see the entire launch on the news, and it was slightly spoiled by the Japanese announcer speaking over the launch announcement "And LIFTOFF of the space shuttle Atlantis, bringing additional power to the science laboratories of tomorrow" or whatever was said. I caught the whole thing on spaceflightnow.com, though, and it was glorious. Way to go.

So, on Tuesday of last week, I attended my first big-venue concert ever, and it was a good one. The Red Hot Chili Peppers are on a global tour to promote their songs from the Stadium Arcadium album, and their VERY FIRST STOP was the Tokyo Dome on June 5. I was there. So were two of my friends. So were many, many other people.

This was my view of the stage before the show. I was actually on the floor, pretty impressive considering that I waited until 2 weeks before the show to buy my ticket. The ticket cost about $90, worth every yen. I don't think the ticket was supposed to be a particularly good one - I was near the back of the mob of people on the ground, and we were all standing up. However, a bunch of people in front of you only poses a problem if they are the same height as you. This was decidedly not the case. So, it was a pretty good seat. ^_^

This is the outside of the Tokyo Dome, where the concert was. This is really the premiere concert venue in Tokyo, and therefore pretty much all of Japan. It is home to the baseball team with the largest following in the entire J-league, the Yomiura Giants, and baseball is pretty much the national pastime (pasttime? pass-time? whatever) of Japan, so it's a pretty big place. The concert was sold out. Many people were there.


This is Trent and his girlfriend Yuri, who I went with. We did not buy our tickets at the same time, so while we drove to the concert together, we had to split up. I sat alone, but it was cool because I kind of struck up conversations with the people sitting on either side of me. They were pretty fun. When they played Californication, the guy on my left TOTALLY called what song they were going to play ten seconds before they started. Either he's a good guesser, or he's been to concerts of theirs before and they always do a subdued guitar duet improv bit before Californication. Or he's psychic, I guess that's a third possibility.


Me and Trent. One thing about Trent is that he can never just smile for a photo, he always has to pose and ham it up. He was not actually wearing his cap sideways the whole evening, thank goodness. He's a great guy, though.


This is a photo I took when the band first took the stage. It's kind of an artistic tribute to the degree to which my camera sucks. The blur on the left is Flea Balzary, the bass player, the center is Chad Smith at his drum set, and the one on the right is John Frusciante, lead guitar. Anthony Kiedis, the singer, had not actually taken the stage at this point. The reason I did not take a photo when he took the stage was that I didn't see ANYONE else with a camera out - I thought it might be a faux pas at a concert. However, Trent and Yuri were in the stands, and they said they could see about 300 cameras out at any one time. If I had known that, I wouldn't have been as embarrassed. Oh, well.


This gives you some idea of what the concert looked like in full swing. The quality is not actually my camera's fault this time - it's actually a photo of a screen still of a low quality video that I took with my cruddy camera. Thus, no excuses. Anyway, they had four screens that they zoomed in on the four members of the band with, and a giant lightboard behind it that flashed images in all different colors. It was really cool. Another thing was that the speaker and light rigs were hung from the ceiling on platforms that looked kind of like UFO's, and they all lit up in all different colors at the last encore. It kept with the "interplanetary" theme of the album nicely.
The concert itself was amazing. The band was on stage for about an hour and 45 minutes, and I heard from the news that they played 17 songs, but I lost count. I wonder if that figure takes the solos and improv bits into account - probably not. I've never seen guitar work like John Frusciante's before, it was amazing. The guy's a real virtuoso. I just checked it out, and he made #18 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of the 100 greatest guitar players of all time. It's well deserved, in my opinion. Both in the hard, distorted, heavy pieces and in the soft, subdued, mellow pieces, the entire band was great. The solos and improvization was as great as the actual songs, too, in my opinion. Chad Smith did a 5 minute drum solo at one point that blew everyone away. Toward the end of the concert, the bass player came out and did a trumpet solo, that was a little surprising. They played all their biggies - some of the notables were "By the Way," "Scar Tissue," "White as Snow," "Charlie," "Stadium Arcadium," "Californication," and "Otherside." They didn't do "Road Trippin'" or "The Zephyr Song" or several others that I missed, but they've just got too many great songs to hit them all I guess. The encores were "Under the Bridge" and "Give it Away," and everyone went nuts for those. Everyone was kind of jumping around and dancing, but the crowd was slightly more subdued than I think it would be in America. This is Japan, I guess a few more reservations are to be expected. I was certainly doing my share of jumping around - I bought a poster before the show, and I had to stick it under my seat during the show so that stuck out between my legs. By the end of the concert, the end that protruded was smashed flat from multiple stompings. I may display the poster with the wrinkles intact, as a reminder of how much I enjoyed the show. I was a bit surprised how many of the songs the whole crowd went nuts for - I guess RHCP is really popular in Japan. There were even a few songs that I didn't even know, that most of the crowd cheered for. Huh. In "Under the Bridge," of course everyone brought out their lighters, but this is Japan, so the people without lighters brought out their cell phones. The result was a really cool multicolored effect when you looked around the darkened stadium, and I got a video of it on my cell phone. All in all, the concert was very memorable.

So, I got a shirt at the concert, and it's real evidence that this concert was the first on the tour.


I made the suggestion to Trent and Yuri that since we made the first show, we should try to make the rest of them, too. Just follow them around the world. They laughed. At that point, I was pseudo-serious. ^_^ It would have been awesome to catch the show in Osaka.






Random thought: In this bloody country they call a cold-cut a hamburger, a hamburger a steak, and steaks are nonexistent.





So, lately I've been thinking about everyday things that are cool in Japan that it would not be too difficult to bring home to America if people would come to their senses. I've compiled the following list. This is not everything, but it's a pretty good cross-section. It's not in any particular order.

1) Onsen
Japanese public baths are great. Yes, everyone is naked, but no one feels particularly self-conscious because, hey, EVERYONE's naked. You take a shower first thing, and then you just take as much time as you like lying in giant hot pools, outdoor hot tubs, pools contoured to fit your reclining body, saunas, cold baths, the works. It's a pretty good way to spend a cold afternoon, or heck a warm afternoon too. Good times.

2) Warmlet

Dial-controlled heated toilet seat. I've got one in my apartment. You only have to spend about 2 weeks with one before it becomes indispensible. Great every day, fantastic on cold days. Simple, economical, wonderful.

3) Curry/Indian restaurants
Curry is really big in Japan, and I have to admit it's grown on me. Really good Indian food restaurants are pretty common around here. Good lamb curry with good hot nan bread is something that I'm going to miss when I go home. Even the school lunch curry is a favorite of mine. From the supermarket, I frequently get packs of curry that you heat up and serve with rice. Not restraunt-quality, but not bad. Better if you sautee some pork, green pepper, and onion, and mix it in.


4) Kaiten-zushi
Big family sushi restaurants built around giant conveyor belts. The conveyor belts have sushi on them, and everything's about the same price. You just reach out and take whatever looks good. You can also order specific things directly from the kitchen if you don't see what you want. At the end of the meal, they just come and count how many empty plates you've piled up, and multiply that by 100 yen to get your bill. It's great.

5) Rice cookers

This is my rice cooker, and it sees pretty frequent use. You just put uncooked rice and water in that removable metal bowl, close the lid, and push a button. 15 to 20 minutes later, you get perfect rice. You don't need to program how long to cook it, it monitors it for you. You don't need to pour any water off afterward, it steams any excess water off. It's just a bowl full of great rice. Only thing is, they're pretty expensive. I didn't buy mine, but I guess it would go for about 75 dollars. I've seen them for as much as 400 dollars. I don't know what you'd put in a rice cooker to make it worth 400 dollars - for that price, it'd better inject the rice with antidepressants or something.

6) Kotatsu

This is a photo of my computer set-up. The table it's on is called a kotatsu. There is an electric space-heater screwed to the underside of the table, and when you stick your legs under the blanket, it's all warm. It's great in winter. It's a staple of life to Japanese families - in winter, the kotatsu is the center of the home. Everyone will sit at the kotatsu to eat, watch TV, converse, and what have you.

7) CD rentals
In Japanese rental stores, in addition to being able to rent DVD's and video games, you can rent CD's. They're cheaper than DVD's, and you usually rent them for a week at a time. That's a great idea in my opinion, it lets you hear good music for a fraction of the cost. Only problem is, there's nothing to prevent people from ripping the music to their computer. Those dirty, dirty software pirates.

(embarrassed hypocritical silence)

8) Nashi
Japanese pears are great. You can only get them in summer, but it's worth the wait. The texture is somewhere between an apple and a pear, and they're sweet and juicy and have a flavor that's not quite like anything I've ever tasted. Kind of apple-y, kind of pear-ish, kind of melon-y. Good stuff. I've never seen one in America.

9) Meiji Pizza / Frozen Gyoza

Meiji frozen pizza is really good. The best frozen pizza in America is Stouffer's french bread, and this is not as filling as that, but it tastes better if you prepare it right. Gyoza is the fried dumplings you can get at some chinese places, and Ajinomoto does a mean frozen version.

10) Drink bar
At most family restaurants, you can get drink bar. It's a big bar with all different kind of drinks, including hot coffee, iced coffee, all kinds of flavored teas, sodas, hot cocoa, frozen beverages, etc. You can go up as many times as you like, and get whatever drinks you like. In a country where drinks are small and refills are usually not free, this is like heaven to me.

11) Flavored Kit-Kat

Every two months or so, Kit-Kat will come out with a new seasonal flavor, in addition to the typical chocolate. It's something extra to look forward to. I've been hoarding them to share with my family when they come. We're gonna have a Kit-Kat party, it'll be great. Clockwise from top, they are a bag of lemon fun-size bars, green tea, peach & sakura, bitter baking chocolate, brandy & orange, and dark chocolate. I missed white chocolate, it went away before I realized it was special, and that saddens me.

Well, I've been blogging for about 3.5 hours, so I'll call that a post. Happy father's day, Dad! Take care, everyone.