We can thank the Chinese for this one

You know I had really intended to hold off on the whole post funny pictures of ridiculous things in Japan for a bit. It's kind of a cheap way to get laughs, and it will probably get old after awhile. But jesus this one was tee'd up for me. Here's another shot just to appreciate the scale of the things.

That mind you is a twenty or so person table underneath the bell. Now I know what you're thinking dear reader, "Oh in a city of 32 million people there's bound to be some ridiculous things, you probably found this image on the internet somewhere rode the train an hour, then spent another half hour wandering around to find this obscure place." That would be a perfectly reasonable thing to think, except that this is from a chinese cafe on the 2nd floor of the building where I live. I literally sleep 50 or so ft above this on the 7th floor.

A coworker and I decided to give the place a try after a few hours of apartment hunting. We were seated at the large table with the bell and sat there at least 20 minutes before realizing what was right infront of us. I think we even touched the bell wondering if it was metal (undetermined). When we realized what it was we looked around and saw the entire place was decorated along these lines. The only reason I didn't take more pictures was because I didn't want to seem too obnoxious after standing up and taking these two.

I will be investigating this further...

Impressions at 2 weeks

Some brief impressions at week 2, keep in mind I've only gotten to experience an tiny, tiny, sliver of the incredibly diverse Japanese culture and people. I don't mean this account to be authoritative or to really come off as knowledgable in any way. Just impressions thats all.

1. Everyone is very polite. I mean everyone, waiters, store clerks, mail men, even bouncers. When I'm out for a run in the morning, police officers will say "Ohiyo Gozaimasu" a polite good morning. My boss, an American who recently moved here told us a story, in which he stepped out of the way of an oncoming ambulance with it's sirens going and the driver of the ambulance thanked him as they went by. Maybe it's the Bostonian in me but it weirds me out a little bit when when people are overly nice back in the states, it's hard to not think that it's a front, are you really that excited to take my order? Not that I want to deal with Debby Downers either, but I generally prefer to deal with people who come off as genuine. The thing about Japan is that the politeness feels genuine, maybe I just can't pick up the subtle clues yet, or maybe I'm being treated a bit different because I'm a light skinned foreigner, but for some for some reason I don't think so.

2. Part of the reason I don't think so, is because everyone is so conscientious and diligent about their job. Like people at the McDonalds really care about getting the job done right. I think back to my days as a Best Buy employee where it was pretty much do the bare minimum amount of work not to get fired. The people at the local government office where I had to register when I got here were very concerned that I fill out everything properly and made sure everything was in order before I left. Anyone have that experience at a DMV at the states? Sometimes it almost feels like they take it too far, they are so concerned with getting things done properly that they aren't flexible.

3. Food is excellent across the board, which probably follows from #2. While technically it is true what they say about portion size here, it is smaller relative to standard American sizes. I think the portion sizes aren't that small, but you just don't have the option to go to something like Olive Garden and get a large portion of reasonably priced mediocre food. It's almost as if the size quantity trade off just doesn't exist here. That said, lunch specials are fairly standard here, you may pay like 10-12 dollars you usually get like a 4-5 course meal that usually include some primary meal of meat/fish/noodles along with rice, soup, salad, and coffee. Which all combined is a pretty good deal and filling. I've yet to really to really explore brunch here, and while I'm sure the food will be excellent that's the one meal I'm most expecting to be disappointed at, since brunch in the US is by far the most optimal solution to the quality/quantity/price problem. God I miss the Colossal Hungry Man Special...

4. Even the cheap beer here is good. Asahi - extra dry is actually really good and refreshing. It doesn't really bother me when I can't figure out how to order a more exotic brew. It's actually caused a bit of an identity crisis, in America I considered my self a bit of a beer snob, never caught dead in a bar with a Millar Light. How can I be a beer snob in a country with no bad beer? Maybe I'll have to become a shochu snob instead.

5. Definitely going to need to learn to speak Japanese. While I guess it would be possible to get by here without speaking it, I don't think you can really live here without engaging with the language. It's not just that lots of people don't speak English - although that's certainly part of it, you would shut yourself from meeting and interacting with a lot of people - there seems to be a whole rhythm to how people interact here that can't be translated into another language. I'm on the ice wearing sneakers, when everyone else has skates.

2 tickets to the gun show at Muscle Theater going for about 12,000 - 20,000 yen

That's about $150-200 US.

Oh you think I'm kidding

When I saw this wandering around Shibuya I was fairly confused, I mean was this a typo?

From their website

Muscle Musical's performance transcends languages, there are no lyrics, but top Japanese athletes show a fully energetic performance where the "muscles play the music"

Other then that though the website is pretty vague about what happens at these performances. But it does say these Muscle Musicals are the raison d'etre of the Muscle Theater.

Fortunately in this day and age we're not forced to choose between satisfying our curiosity and dropping $120 dollars.

Enter youtube

$120 = Bargain

Katakana and Japanese Words Borrowed from Other Languages

Can you figure out what this means? It's actually not as hard as you might think, the first word here is the same in both English and Japanese, although with a slightly different pronunciation. But, in order to read this you must know Katakana and trust me when you are in Tokyo you are going to want to know what this means.

Katakana is one of the three Japanese writing systems. Two of these are phonetic alphabets collectively called the "kana." Katakana is one, Hiragana is the other. Katakana and Hiragana are really mirror images of each other kind of like upper and lower case letters in english. Each symbol either represents a vowel sound or a consonant then a vowel sound. For example アrepresents "a" and ホ represents "ho" in Katakana. The pronunciations of the vowels and consonants are the same as in Spanish I'm told. (I know I'm dropping a lot of knowledge right now but bear with me here).

The major difference in usage between Katakana and Hiragana is that Katakana is used to represent words "borrowed" from other languages. One of the things that really surprised me about learning Japanese was just how many of and how common these borrowed words are. Essentially they take the word from the other language and try to stay as close to the original as possible but using the Japanese alphabet. Of course because the Japanese alphabet is missing a lot of the phonetic sounds used in english the words become a bit different - lacking L for instance.

To native english speakers a lot of these words can sound like odd mispronunciations of words we know. For instance

Beer - ビ－ル (biiru)

Tequila - テキ－ラ(tekiira)

Bread パン (pan - from portuguese)

oh and

Sexual Harassment -セカル ハラセメント(sekaru harasemento) learned that one during my new employee initiation.

To see the full alphabet head on over to wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katakana

Now back to the sign, the first four characters are in Katakana, the last character is from the third Japanese writing system called "Kanji" which are essentially chinese characters which represent ideas rather then phonetics.

The first for characters are カ "ka", ラ"ra", オ"o", and ケ"ke", oh yea that's right KARAOKE!

The last kanji symbol stands for "building" or "mansion" so this can be read as "karaoke mansion." Which as far as I can tell is a chain karaoke spot around Tokyo, I've seen a few of these place all around the city. I haven't had the opportunity to check one out yet but it's very, very high on my to do list.

One other thing Katakana is used for is foreign names. I had to get business cards with my contact info in both Japanese and English, this led to a rather large debate among my team at work about how exactly to Japanesize my name. The big debate was over the start of "Hoover" the "oo" is most closely associated with the "u" sound in japanese but japanese doesn't use "hu" the choice was between "fu" and "ho". We went back and forth a bit trying both out loud and eventually settled on

マシュ－ フ－バ－ (Mashuu Fuubaa)

So that's my Japanese name and I've got 100 business cards with it.

Quick random list

So far I have

1. Eaten french fries (Furaida Poteto) with chopsticks at an Irish pub
2. Had a stranger fall asleep on me on the train.
3. Sat through new employee orientation given in Japanese
4. Ordered 100 business cards with my contact info in Japanese and English
5. Discovered coffee flavored jello is not good at all
6. Ordered breakfast via an unmanned electronic ticket machine at what was a rough approximation of a diner while waiting for the subway to open
7. Lost the complimentary umbrella that came with my temporary apartment
8. Been sold another iphone (a white one!) by a Peruvian

Who's afraid of a little radiation?

In case anyone out there is still worried about radiation levels in Tokyo, I'd like to direct you this chart put together by XKCD a couple months ago.

http://xkcd.com/radiation/

Also check out this comparison of radiation dosage on trans-pacific flights.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jurvetson/5731894295/

Even within a few miles of the plant radiation levels are fairly low.

I don't mean to downplay the scale of the human and environmental disaster by any means (I will likely have more on this later). There are certainly valid concerns out there of the impact of the leak on crops, livestock and fisheries, but I think the scale of the ongoing danger posed by the radiation leakage has been a bit overblown.

So there's one less excuse to come visit me!

Oh so you thought this would be easy

Tokyo's system of public transportation is renowned for it's scale, efficiency, and complexity. Tokyo is a thoroughly rail based city with all major centers of commerce anchored by the stations. Of course I didn't realize just how complex the system was until I arrived here.

For instance here is a map of the Tokyo subway system.

Complicated yes. This is what I expected based on my googling of the Tokyo subway system. Of course I realized once I got here this excludes all of the private rail lines, (that is not publicly owned but anyone can ride them) which are also an integral part of Tokyo's transportation infrastructure. Here is a map showing all of the private rail lines (at least as far as I know)

And as it turns out each of these single lines is an oversimplification as many different trains run along the same lines and make different stops. For instance the Keio line which I take on my daily commute has trains that come in 6 flavors, local, commuter rapid, express, semi-special express, and special express.

Keep in mind that this is depicted as a single line on the broader Tokyo rail map (the 2nd one) above.

This means determining the most efficient commute route is actually a fairly complex optimization problem.

My standard commute would be say take the express from Shinjuku to Tsutsujigakoa, then the local to Kukoryo.

Or it may be faster to take the semi-special or special express from Shinjuku to Meidaimae, then the express to Tsutsujigakoa, then local to Kukoryo.

Or then again I may take the semi-special or special all the way to Chofu and then take the local back two stops to Kukoryo.

Which route is faster all depends on which trains are coming quickest.

The reverse of my commute is further complicated by the "New Keio Line" which technically goes to Shinjuku as well goes to a separate station from the rest of the Keio line and continues on past it.

On the upside trains arrive and leave on the exact minute they say they will, and some kind of train comes virtually every minute during rush hour and every 2-3 minutes on off hours.

The main hubs in this transportation are these massive underground complexes, that include malls, shops of all kinds, endless escalators, and even public artwork. I've learned the sense of direction which I hold in such high regard does not extend at all to these subterranean labyrinths and have managed to get myself horribly lost in Shinjuku station whenever I try and deviate from my normal routine - which I'm just getting down now.

I'll leave it up to the reader to imagine what the results would be if this incredibly complex system was managed by the MBTA...