watashi to tokyo

Donki Quijote in Japan

Today we had snow in Tokyo! I am worried that the train ride home will be delayed.

I love this BBC article: "Long hours link to dementia risk." Sometimes I am asked to work until very late, but it is not true that it will lead to dementia. Maybe in some sections, people work day and night on rotation, though I don't need to work on weekends or nights. I can get off around 7 pm everyday, I really hate to work until late.

Sony’s Walkman TV ads are cool. We can experience the possibility of sounds and human creativity. Pink Tentacle wrote about this in more detail.

Yeah! This year's dressed up Orita-sensei appeared at Kyoto University. Do you recognize him? It is Riderman. It’s funny that they didn't choose Kamen Rider V3 (the main character), but Riderman (a side character).

Don Quijote is a well known discount store in Japan. They sell various types of things like food, party goods, home electronics, etc. Their style is "chaos." Most Donki stores look like this; they stack things high and the aisles are so narrow. Since I hate narrow places, I hate Donki and usually don’t go there. Today, I read that their new store opened in Machida and it is much bigger and nicer than the other Donki stores. Oh, I can go there now. This is their first newspaper ad. Good, it looks very cheap. Since Daiso, the biggest 100 shop in Japan, is in that area already, Machida has become a mecca for discount shopping now.

Eraser Stamp

I am not sure I picked this one before, small helicopter GEN H-4. I have no idea why the kimono lady rides on it.

Is it popular to make eraser stamps? I found some cute blogs like this. It's very popular in Japan, there are many cute sites like this, and we had a famous eraser portrait carver "Nancy Seki" before. She wrote an outspoken essay about celebsv with their portrait. Nifty Portal Z has this post, she made the Heart Sutra with eraser stamps. Writing Buddhist sutras is one way of training thought, recently some people do that to calm down their spirit. But I have never seen the Heart Sutra made by stamps...But in a sense it's letterpress printing :-)
This is a site where people show their new product ideas. Click the picture so you can see details of each idea. I like number 022! Buddha's head rice bowl.

Saving money by cooking Neko Manma

I found this movie a few days ago "Why U.S is not competitive with China". I thought it was just an amazing movie though people had a serious discussion in the comments. People are so nervous for the job situation now. It's the same in Japan too. Here is an interesting article of New York Times.

I read a "Neko Manma for adults recipe book" is quite a popular now. Neko Manma(web translated) means cat's meal basically. Now pet lovers will give pet food to their lovely cat, though before we gave just the rest of our meal or made very simple food from our cooking ingredients. However, such simple foods are very delicious, right? So we call such foods Neko Manma (image of Google search by Neko manma) and eat at home sometimes.

But now people will look for variations of Neko manma recipes or at least they have interest in that. Maybe people are trying to save food money by Neko Manma. Putting Katsuobushi and soy sauce (or mayo) as a topping on rice is basic Neko manma. But we don't have any standard, actually my family called rice mixed with miso soup Neko manma.
In that book, there are various Neko manma recipes, some look very good, some look weird to me. Neko manma for adult recipe book
Half boiled egg, green onion and mayo with soy sauce :It looks pretty good. It will be delicious.
Tuna and mayo : This can't be bad at any rate. I will add some cucumbers too.
Miso soup with salmon : This is close to my family Neko manma. :-) I love the potato and onion miso soup one.
Sticky food with raw egg with soy sauce : I would love this, natto, okura (gumbo), such sticky foods are perfect combinations to me.
Potato chips with mayo on rice : Hmmm, I may try but I can't imagine how it is.
Rice with cup noodle soup: Hmmmmmm. I don't need this.
I guess you can try and make your original Neko manma. Simple is best and it can work for your saving money.

Nice speech in Oscar

Congratulations! Kunio Kato got the Oscar for Best Animated Short. I like his "traveler" series. I imagined that he would be such a calm, quiet, middle-aged man after watching his animation.

But he seems like a cheerful guy. Watch his interesting speech at the Oscars. "Thank you, my pencil. Thank you, Academy… Domo arigato, Mr. Roboto!" Ha ha ha, cute!

Departures got the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. The main actor in the movie is Masahiro Motoki, who used to be a pop idol for girls in the 80s. Anyways, congratulations to the cast and crew of "Departures" too (omedetou gozaimasu)!
I can't remember if I saw such ads when I rode the train in foreign countries. Europe, Korea, Taiwan... maybe not. I don't know about the US because I have never ridden a train in the US. In Japan, there are a lot of ads in the trains like this one. And this curtain type ad is called a "nagazuri ad." This site collects old nakazuri ads from the 50s that were found on trains. They are very interesting.

This is a collection of product ads. This one is cute, it has a Savignac mood.
This one is Peko-chan of Fujiya. Though she is very cute now, she once had a scary face.
Do you know who this is? He is Toshiro Mufune. I then realized that he was such a handsome guy.
This is funny! "New Yorker Pantie" The copy says that all American ladies use this! Ha ha ha ha. This is a collection of movie ads, for features like King Kong and Gone with the Wind.
This is a collection of media ads. This one is a magazine's ad about John Foster Dulles. He looks like a movie star in this ad.
This is a collection of miscellaneous ads. This one is funny. You can enjoy drinks at a reasonable price at the American-style bar "Canada." Old ads always have such a nice mood.

inochi by Takashi Murakami

I read this short film is hot in other country.The boy is Inochi kun designed by Takashi Murakami and it was made into short film later. I have never seen that film, it's very weird. I am not a fan of Murakami and can't understand his art basically.

I think I picked this site"monkey farm" before, but I want to do it again because he is great! He is an iron Creator, he made everything by himself. This is fiat tank?. This is his imac. This is his house , when he work the pedals on black bike, roof open automatically. This is art objects, his work was used on cover of American magazine. This is a robot,　I remember I picked this site when he had exhibition of the robot. In his blog, I can see other big stuffs too, I want to see more!

Rare name fetishism

Hillary became a toy for 2ch. They laughed and said that her pose was similar a scene in a music video by the Japanese band Gray.

Maybe I wrote about this before...Google map recommends using a kayak to get to Japan. I checked the Atlanta to Roppongi route today. I can confirm that after reaching Japan, the guide is quite correct. You can get to Roppongi without going astray. Only the kayaking part would be hard.

Japan has few immigrants because of our history of national isolation, so the variety of last names is lower than other countries' though we still have some rare names (we call them "chinmei"). Anyway, this is a funny news item (web-translated): a guy who loves rare names stole nameplates from house entrances and gates. The strange part is that he would lay the nameplates on the floor and sleep on them. Hmm… he has a real rare name fetish.
By the way, here are the most common last names in Japan:
1. Sato: about 1,928,000 people are named Sato-san in this country.
2. Suzuki: 1,707,000
3. Takahashi: 1,416,000
4. Tanaka: 1,336,000
5. Watanabe: 1,135,000
6. Ito: 1,080,000
7. Yamamoto: 1,077,000
8. Nakamura: 1,058,000
9. Kobayashi: 1,019,000
10. Saito: 980,000

Since the population is about 120,000,000, about 8% of Japanese people have one of those last names. My name, Kanazawa, is No. 275. Now I remember! When I stayed at a hotel in the US, the hotel staff smiled at me and said, "What a lot of A's! mAri kAnAzAwA."

 This is a rare name collection list: Mr. Oil, Mr. Candy, Mr. Country, Mr. Station, Mr. Sound, Mr. Vinegar, etc. But the worst thing about rare names is when they're impossible to read. For example, for Mr. I (い), his name is written with only one hiragana―い. But you read the name as "Kana Hajime" (which means "the first hiragana letter"). Because in the past, our hiragana ordering system began with い. Check out the iroha page on Wiki, it's an interesting story.

Talking about funny names, I wrote this post before: a guy traveled to places whose names sounded funny in Japanese. Then I heard that Africans laugh when they hear the name of the Japanese prefecture "Kumamoto" because in some language "kuma" means vagina and "moto" means hot. In Italy, we're not supposed to say the names Isono?Katsuo (the brother in the manga Sazae-san) or Kaga Mariko (an actress). I don't know why they are strange though.

Nice pedometer

Wow! this is a new flash manga, when the blue line appears, you click it and go to the next page. The story is people are infected by a "computer virus" via goggle-type PCs. The virus deletes people's memories. A doctor was developing a therapeutic agent, however he got the virus before he completed it. I think this type of manga will appear more, I don't think manga can stay only in a paper world. Of course we can read manga on the Internet but basically they are scans from the original paper.

In Japan, taxi fare is so expensive, the taxi fare starts at about 790yen (about $8) and then after that every 288m, 90yen counts towards it. But in this bad economy, people try to save taxi money and walk. This passometer calculates how much taxi fare you saved from your walking. That's good.

Pinktentacle had this Stairways to ammonite heaven. She found a lot of ammonite in old department stores in Tokyo. But not only department store, you can find it anywhere. This is a fossil collection blog, he found a huge number of fossils everywhere in town.

I picked "deco den"(decoration cell phone) before, this shop in Shibuya is a sort of antenna shop of deco den. On-screen talents come to make their deco den here. Hmm, it's cute, though it can't fit in my jeans pocket. I don't need it.

Fire and water retardant digital storage case was released. You can use HDD from outside via a USB port without taking media out. It's 165,000yen. Of course, it's expensive but I guess these storage cases will be sold well to regular people.

Shame, shame!

Japan's finance minister to step aside because of this.　Shame, shame!

Not only for him, we are so tired and disappointed by Aso Taro already. I don't know even dogs like him anymore.

I think it was hard to criticize Israel at Jerusalem, but he did and I am very impressed by Haruki Murakami.

I can't understand why that cat (she is the designer of Kitty) and Domo kun are so popular in the world. This is an article "The God MOTHER: Transsexual Mafia boss who wears lipstick and calls himself Kitty arrested by Italian police". By the way this is the strongest collaboration of Kitty and Domo kun.

When you eat sushi, which one do you like most? Nigiri? Chirashi? Roll? Inari? I like Nigiri most but I like Oshizushi very much too. Oshizushi means push sushi. You put some sushi rice and usually add pickled fish on the top in the mold and push them together. The rice has to be a little bit harder though I feel more umami of fish than regular nigiri. The most popular oshizushi is this masuno suhi （pickled salmon). It has to be sold out soon when Ekiben event is held at department stores.

Since we need the mold and it's troublesome to cook pickled fish, usually we don't cook oshizushi at home. But I realized that a mold will be useful because of this nifty portal Z post. She cooked oshizushi with regular fish, not pickled one. Like she said, I think it would be good and actually it is easy to cook more than nigiri or roll and you can enjoy sushi without nori easily. And I like her other idea, cooked meat, tuna flake and mayo, anything you can push with rice so that they are the same as square onigiri and it can be a good lunch.

Mangart

Doppelganger's humanoid sleeping bag is cute ( I know it is not for being cute though). Then I found a cuter sleeping bag "the great sleeping bear", it looks very warm.

This is a scratch calendar, you can delete days from the calendar. It's nice to use when you set some goal or dead line.

BEAMST is T-shirt site of Japanese fashion brand BEAMS. They have really nice design Ts. I like this one, I worked with this designer before wow!) and Mangart is a new project to show manga as art. This atom(astro boy) one is cute. This Takehiko Inoue's one is nice too. 　Is this stripe manga? Yes it is! It's a symbol of Kazuo Umezu. His orochi is made into Tshirts too. It's cool, right?

Do you like chocolate?

This is the movie of employees of Sony making a message with "Post-Its" on their head office window to support the Japan soccer team in the World Cup Asian Qualifying.

Tomorrow is Valentine day. Like I wrote before I really hate the Japanese Giri choco habit on Valentine day. I won't say I don't like to send gifts to somebody who I like. I don't want to send any gift without my heart. By the way, what chocolate is the most familiar one to you since you were kid? Here is a ranking of "what is your familiar chocolate" in Japan.

No.1 Glico: Pocky (I read Pocky light had been released but I have never seen it)
No.2 Chirol: Chirol choco (bite size chocolate with various taste. It's 10yen)
No.3 Netsle: Kit Kat (Kit Kat has a unique taste in each region. Japanese has flavors like soy sauce, red bean, green tea.
No.4 Morinaga: Choco ball (that bird is Kyoro chan, cute!)
No.5 Meiji: Kinoko no Yama (mountain of mushroom)
No.6 Meiji: Bamboo of field (Taken no Sato)
No.7 Meiji: Marble chocolate (it's different from IG's animation Tokyo Marble chocolate.)
No.8 Fujiya: Look chocolate
No.9 Lotte: Ghana chocolate
No.10 Meiji: Apollo chocolate (yes it is named from a space ship!)
No.11 Lotte: Crunky chocolate ( Is this a strange name? I can't understand why this is so funny.)
No.12 Morinaga: milk chocolate
No.13 Meiji: Almond chocolate (it's dangerous for me because I can't stop eating it.)
No.14 Meiji: choco baby (the smallest choco in Japan, I guess.)
No.15 Lotte: Bikkuriman chocolate (kids were crazy over collecting the seal inside of this chocolate and this chocolate was made into animation later. )
No.16 Fujiya: parasol chocolate
No.17 M&M: m&m's chocolate(I don't know that each color has character.)
No.18 Morinaga: high crown (I have an image this chocolate tastes more bitter than usual.)
No.19 Denroku: peanuts chocolate
No.20 Kabaya: finger chocolate

You will know that Meiji and Morinaga are the biggest chocolate makers in Japan from the ranking. Meiji has a real chocolate shop 100% chocolate cafe in Ginza and sells their special chocolate there. This is a monthly pack so that you can enjoy different tastes of chocolate every day in a month. They set a theme of the month, like February was strawberry and March is fruits. So you can enjoy differences on days in a year. I want one but March chocolate was sold out already. This is 56 chocolates you can buy on online. They say the best selling one is number 26 wasanbon that is rich sugar used for Japanese sweets. Anyway my best chocolate is 99% of cacao. I really love bitter chocolate.