WTF is this? Part 1 Answer! Pachinko Parlor

Sorry for the long delay in getting back to this I know the suspense has been killing everyone.

The building above houses a Japanese pachinko parlor.

Walking around Tokyo you'll quickly become familiar with pachinko parlors. These are mini casinos that house gambling devices a bit like slot machines.
Officially gambling is illegal in Japan, so it's a bit surprising how ubiquitous they are. By some accounts the annual turn over in the pachinko parlor business is about $300 Billion. Which according to Wikipedia anyway, is about the size of the estimated global narcotics business. So what gives, how can these supposedly illegal gambling institutions operate so openly and so profitably?

Pachinko parlors manage to avoid infringing on the anti gambling laws but not paying out any cash prizes on the premises of the pachinko parlor. Lucky patrons are paid in tokens which must be brought to a separate establishment where they can be exchanged for cash. This "separate" establishment could be located directly adjacent to the parlor. However, parlor staff are prohibited from telling customers where they can go to exchange their tokens.

There seem to be several areas of Japanese society where they seem to be very concerned with whether or not the letter of the law is being carried out, without any regard for whether the actual consequences of the implementation are meeting the goal which was the reason for it's existence. Prostitution would fall into this category as well.

Apparently over 90% of the pachinko parlors in Japan are owned by ethnic Koreans. It's also rumored that many of the token exchange locations have connections to the Yakuza, or Japanese mob.

Also, I believe I promised a prize to the correct guess. So congratulations Brian Pierce! You're now the owner (proud I'm sure) of the hip shaped pillow pictured below.
Let me know your address and I'll have it sent to you, in the slowest, cheapest possible method. So be patient.

If you need a haircut the Dude abides

In a rather strange scene I found myself getting a haircut for the first time by a barber sporting dreadlocks. An older Japanese man who goes by the name Kaz, he runs a salon in Harajuku called "Dude."

Having lived in London for several years and married a British woman he spoke excellent English. In fact, it was this trait that first led me to seek out the Dude in the first place. Haircuts didn't run cheap, but then again nothing does in Tokyo, and fortunately you don't have to worry about tip. While I may have balked at the price a bit, I was sold with the "dude quote" found on the "who's dude" page of his website.

If everyone in the world was a dude

The world would be more peaceful...!!

Stay chilled, stay dude

Really how could you turn down that pitch.

An avowed fan of "dude culture" we were quickly debating the finer differences between surfer dudes and snowboarder dudes, slacker dudes. He lamented that his fellow Japanese compatriots just don't seem to get it, and that Harajuku which was once considered bohemian had become more upscale and commercial.

He's actually moving his shop to Shimokitazawa a place so hip the cats sit in chairs.

Which would actually be more convenient for me, the haircut was great.

Scaling Fuji-san

Mt. Fuji is one of the most iconic images from Japan. At 12,388ft (3776m) it's Japan's tallest mountain, and an active volcano. It towers over the surrounding landscape, many thousands of feet higher then anything in the vicinity. Located sixty miles southwest of Tokyo, it can even be seen on a clear day from the city.

As it turns out, since I arrived during the rainy season here in Japan with few clear days, the first time I got to lay eyes on the mountain I was standing on top of it.

I had the good fortune of meeting someone at the SoA pub night, within a week of arriving to Tokyo, who was planning a trip to climb Mt. Fuji with her coworkers on the second week in July. She graciously extended me an invitation to join the crew and I jumped at the chance.

The plan was to leave Friday evening climb through the night and watch the sunrise over Japan from the summit. It felt a little odd working all day Friday, knowing that instead of heading off to a bar after work I was going to climb a mountain. I've climbed larger peaks in the past, but it was always a journey just to get to them, which allowed some time to put of psychological space between everyday routine and the adventure. With Mt. Fuji it was like deciding on a whim to go watch the sunrise from the hill in you're backyard, except that the hill was over 12,000ft high.

After work I met up with the rest of the crew at Shinjuku station, where we got on the 7:30 bus that took us directly to the 5th Station at Mt. Fuji. The 5th Station is the standard starting spot for the climb up my Fuji, located at about 7,500ft above sea level. The bus trip took about 2 hours.

By the time we arrived at the staging area it was well after dark. Mt. Fuji loomed over us unseen in the darkness. We got started down the trail at 10pm. From the 5th Station it usually takes 5-7 hours to reach the summit. Sunrise would be around 3:45-4am. Even this relatively low elevation offered good views of the surrounding area. We could see the lights of Tokyo and other cities in the distance. The low cloud cover turned orange by the city lights stretched out below us.

Unfortunately the camera didn't quite capture how cool this looked.

The trail started off with a flat to moderate pitch traverse. This made for fairly easy going until we reached the 6th station, which was really just a small police hut that warned people not to continue on without cold weather gear. After the 6th station the trail turned sharply upwards and proceeded pretty much in a straight shot right up to the summit. I was a little surprised by the steepness of the terrain. I was kind of expecting a walk, but ended up having to do a fair amount sustained scrambling for about 5,000ft to the summit.

The trail up to the summit was punctuated by stations 7, 8, and 9, and several other smaller rest huts, that sold progressively more expensive supplies. Trekking through the wilderness this was not, but the huts were old, small, and rustic enough for it not to feel like some commercial ride.

We made it to within a couple hundred feet of the summit when we saw the first bit of pre-dawn light.

As the light slowly got brighter, the landscape below was revealed and we realized just how high above everything we were. It was like looking down from an airplane window.
Those little hills way down there are actually mountains themselves.
Hiking up Mt. Fuji is a very popular activity, near the summit there was a bit of a traffic jam.

The main cause being this shrine marking the entrance to the summit. At the shrine many people like to stop and take pictures, holding up everyone else. At the summit it was freezing, and once you stopped moving you definitely felt the cold. I was a bit unprepared, I had brought layers but I really could have used a winter jacket and a warm hat.

Here's me trying and failing I think not to look cold and sleepy.
Here's the rest of the crew doing a better job of it. That's me in the goofy orange hat that I borrowed because my head was cold. These pictures are all courtesy of Myleen, who is on the left in the red jacket.

I was feeling the altitude pretty bad at this point. A splitting headache, shortness of breath, kind of feels like a hangover due to the dehydration. I drank about 4 liters of water on the way up but it still wasn't enough. I've climbed taller peaks then Mt. Fuji, but always after a few days of acclimatization at altitude. Here I went from sea level to 12, 300ft in less then 7 hours.
Mt. Fuji is an active volcano, it last erupted in 1708. This is the crater.

The trail down was different then the one up. It consisted of long, wide switchbacks of loose volcanic sand. The way down was probably more treacherous then the way up, the sand was sliding everywhere and it was easy to loose your footing. With the fatigue factor it was easy to see people rolling their ankles or worse on the way down. When this picture was taken it was about 6am, I had already been up for 24 hours.

Once we got down it took us another 3 hours to get back to Tokyo. You would think we would then go right to bed, instead one of the guys invited us back to his place for a Barbecue. We arrived around 2-3pm to find an American and a Brazilian (more coworkers of theirs) who had been drinking all day and preparing food for us, including hand made sausage. Pretty sweet way to end the trip.

If your curious to see what I look like after 36 hours with no sleep and 12,ooo vertical ft, here you go.

I call that my le tired face.

Overall great experience, it was nice to get out of the concrete jungle for a change. One of the really great aspects to Tokyo is the proximity to really anything you would want to do outside. You've got massive mountains and the ocean both right there. Definitely won't be my last Japan mountaineering adventure.

Waking up to a shaking apartment.

So after living in Japan for over a month I finally felt my first earthquake. There have reportedly been several already but I hadn't noticed one yet.

This morning though, just before 10am, I was lying in bed why I noticed a slight rumbling in my apartment. I had never experienced in an earthquake before so it took me a few moments to realize what was going on.

At first I thought maybe there was a train going by my apartment.

Then I realized there are no trains that go by my apartment.

That's when it dawned on me there was an earthquake going on. It continued for maybe thirty seconds to one minute. It felt like the building continued to sway for a bit after the rumbling stopped. It's a bit of weird feeling having the earth shake. Every experience in my life up to this point has been building the intuition that the ground is solid, stable, and the point of reference for every moving thing. In an earthquake, unlike being on a rocking boat you don't have the sea or anything to give you a visual sense of how your swaying. You can just feel and hear the movement but you look around and there's no visual evidence that you're moving.

It didn't really feel too violent. There isn't even anything in our apartment that could rattle around. I figured it must have been a very mild earthquake, but then I learned it was actually magnitude 7.1 with the epicenter off the coast of northeastern Japan, the same place as the big one back in March. I'm sure the shaking was much more intense north of Tokyo. Apparently, it triggered a tsunami, but the wave was only 10cm high.

More in Japanese Toilet Technology

Real Japanese genius.

Seriously Japan is like 30 years ahead of the US in bathroom technology.

Gaijin Foibles

If you're looking to read something a bit more eloquent on life as an expat in Japan, you could do worse then to read this piece by the Economist's Tokyo bureau chief.

I can certainly relate to this bit.

Living as a foreigner in Japan, for all its attractions, has many such small humiliations. You may be on a noble quest to plumb the depths of the Japanese soul, but you will take so many wrong turns you end up wondering whether you are indeed too brutish to make sense of it.

I thought I would stop in a traditional Japanese bar/restaurant by my place last night for dinner - as we don't have a fridge, any pots or pans, or microwave yet. I sat down and the guy working behind the counter had already placed what looked like some kind of sea snail in front of me, kind of a palette cleanser I guess.

Now going into this place I figured that the menu wouldn't have English labels or pictures. Really I'm gastronomically flexible and adventurous enough to just order anything at random. What I hadn't counted on was the place not having menus. This made ordering food rather challenging as I couldn't just point and say "これ お願いします(kore onegaishimasu)" or "this one please give me."

There was a black board behind the counter that had the list of dishes on it, of course since most of these involved Kanji I couldn't read (although I knew a few of the meanings) I couldn't say which one I wanted. After trying for a few minutes to explain that I just wanted him to pick anything and bring me some food, he gave up trying to understand and just came back with a beer.

Nice and all but I'm very hungry.

I sat there for 15-20 minutes trying to think about how get some food.

Then it dawned on me,

すみません (sumimasen - excuse me)

I point at the food board and say

二遍目と五遍目　お願いします　(nibenme to gobenme onegaishimasu -2nd one and 5th one please give me)

He says something to the chef - great success!

He comes back a few minutes later with a small bowl of what looks like raw octopus on seaweed, and some small raw pieces of white seafood - not entirely sure what they were but they didn't have the texture of fish. Turns out those Kanji did not mean what I thought they meant.

Interesting meal wasn't bad, but interesting.

I spilled soy sauce on my shirt...

The first thing on my to do list is buy a bed

Followed by a pillow, then maybe some sheets.

The reason being I have an apartment but no furniture. Last night I slept on a thin sleeping pad -called futons here but these aren't anything like the American kind.

I moved into my new apartment yesterday, concluding a rather stressful 4 week search. I'm pretty happy with the result, a coworker who transfered to Japan with me and I decided to get a place together to save money. We managed to find a relatively spacious 2LDK ( 2 bed rooms, living/dinning/kitchen room) in Hatsudai. Here's the view from my new window.

The tower to the left there, is the Tokyo Opera City city tower, in the lower right you can see some stairs that are the entrance to our building. Hatsudai is located one train stop or about a 20 min walk west of Shinjuku, one of the major centers in Tokyo. I'll be writing about Shinjuku a bit later, it's a pretty wild place. We picked the location because it was convenient for our commute and from Shinjuku you can get almost anywhere in Tokyo fairly easily.

A view of our street. Lined with lots of small shops, restaurants, cleaners, etc.

So here's the tour of the new apartment, you enter into a short hallway.

The bathroom and toilet are on the right.

The toilet itself is probably worth a post in and of itself.

Does your toilet have a control pannel? Don't worry if you can't read the button labels which are in Japanese there are illustrative pictures for each function.

The top button at least is labeled in Katakana as ビデ or "Bi de" (for the native english speakers out there pronounced "bee-day"). The toilet features a heated seat with several different temperature settings. One of the smartest features of the new toilet is the water basin on top. When you flush the toilet, the water starts running automatically allowing you to wash your hands with the water being used to refill the toilets tank. I thought that was an ingenious idea to conserve water.

The heart of the apartment is the common living/dinning/kitchen area. You enter at the end of the short entrance hallway.

The glass door in the back leads out to our small balcony. Here's the view of the room from the glass door. You'll notice we have literally no furniture, or a refrigerator for that matter - items also on the to do list.

And lastly here is my room. Certainly smaller then my room in Boston, but not small by Tokyo standards by any means and it's bright with large windows.

Now all I need is a bed...