The Adventures of a Foreign Salaryman in Tokyo

It's cold and miserable here!

2012-01-28T22:04:00.001+09:00

Wouldn't make a difference here...

First off, apologies for the lack of posting recently, work, Toddler Sunshine and the cold here in Japan at the moment makes it hard to find time to do any amusing or insightful posts.

As I mention this every year, I thought I should follow through with my tradition and complain about the cold this year again. Ok, Tokyo is not that extremely cold compared to northern Europe or northern north america but it's the lack of central heating and proper insulation that makes it feel a lot worse here... Although the Salaryman base of operations is a new house and built a lot smarter to keep some of the heat inside, it still is pretty cold inside and now after the whole Fukushima ordeal electricity is not something that you want to use too much of (both for financial and general power saving reasons) making it hard to protect oneself from the cold apart from putting on another layer...

Unfortunately we do not have any temporary escape plan this year either, before babies and stuff, this would be the perfect time to take a quick vacation to a considerable warmer country in south-east asia and get to hate on the heat again before coming back to the giant fridge that is Japan. So we just have to gut through another month or so of cold before spring...

It's completely Loco!

2012-01-19T22:17:00.001+09:00

I wonder if anyone told him that backpacks are for dorks?

There's a select few of the bloggers from Japan that I feel some form of closeness to. As I personally don't actively go out hunt for Japan blogs much it usually takes a little time for that odd virtual "relationship" to form. The closeness does not necessarily form due to content, writing style or stuff like that, probably more out of the approach to blogging. I've never actively set out to get in any kind of blogging community or participated in Japan related message boards so it's more organic than anything.

Then there's also these bloggers that I know of and respect without feeling particularly close to in a blogging sense. One of those is Loco in Yokohama that's run by Baye "Loco" McNeil. As far as I know, he's probably been around as long as this little blog, I've been aware of the blog for a while and while not following it extremely diligently, it's still been a blog that I've enjoyed at times and always respected. But I've never really felt particularly "close" to it and there's one big difference; Loco almost always felt like a pro. He's a Writer that writes a blog because he's a Writer. Thematically and in his posts, he always felt like a pro following a path that he's set out for himself as a writer, not like me who don't particularly care about grammatical errors or plan very much about what I'm writing about a given day. So not "feeling particularly close" to my blog is not really a bad thing in that sense.

So to my not so big surprise, Loco has self-published his first book "Hi my name is Loco". It doesn't feel like a surprise but more like a logical consequence for him moving from a blog to publishing a book. Don't let the cartoony cover fool you though, it's not a collection of amusing anecdotes about living in Japan, from what I've gathered it confronts the theme of racism in Japan head on in parts. But you can click the link above yourself to check it out, read some excerpts and check out his blog to get a feeling for what the book is about.

To be completely honest, I don't really think that much of racism in Japan as I've been exposed to more mean-spirited racism living in Sweden than in Japan as a half-Japanese-Swedish guy with looks leaning towards Asian. But Loco, as a black guy from New York, coming to Japan without much knowledge of what to expect (at least that's what I've gathered) gets exposed to a lot of it from expected and unexpected corners.

I bought the book when I saw it was out and it's currently stored in the Kindle app on my iPad and am looking forward to reading it as soon as I finish up what already is queued up. I'm also quite convinced that it's ten bucks well spent as his blog kinda vouches for the quality (hey, if you check out his blog and hate the writing, then maybe this book ain't for you but then you can get on with your life without feeling like you wasted money). I might post a "review" with my thoughts on it when I've finished up with it as well.

If the above got your interest even a little, you can do yourself a favor and check out the blog and book site and see if it catches your interest.
...now, maybe it's time for me to dust off those thoughts about publishing that collection of essays and thoughts on Manpanzees that's been cooking in my head for a few years...

Neighbourhood Vigilante

2012-01-16T22:33:00.000+09:00

Does anyone remember "Vigilante"?

The area where the Salaryman HQ was established is a very safe area. Compared to other cities of similar size, Tokyo is a relatively safe place (but like anywhere, if you're set on looking for trouble I'm sure you'll find it) and our place in the suburbs of Tokyo is even safer. The community of houses are all new with very little around it and there's no traffic just passing through so any suspicious looking vehicles or people hanging around are sure to be noticed.

We had that one burglary in conjunction with the earthquake when all the predators and bottom feeder came out to play, but after that basically everyone signed up for private security companies (which I grudgingly agreed to as I didn't want to end up as the only unprotected house, ripe for the taking). Also, a lot of the women in the neighbourhood are housewives with small kids, so the area is quite lively on weekdays as well. The only time that I could image burglars striking would be the New Year's vacation when many houses stand empty as people leave Tokyo to be with their relatives, but that's only once a year and no burglaries were reported this time.

Despite this, our neighbourhood "council" decided to make the area even safer and initiate our own little neighbourhood vigilante squad to take turns patrolling the area. As exited I'm about joining a vigilante squad (Note to self; I need to make sure I arm myself with some menacing toy before patrolling) it feels like a completely meaningless and annoying endeavour to begin with, and the other day the chairman came around to check that the Salaryman family were up to do their part for the team. As I try to keep friendly with the neighbourhood I kept the Salaryman family's thoughts about this to myself and nodded and agreed that we'll do our part with pride.

But as he told me the details of our duty I had trouble to not burst out laughing at the stupidity and futility of it all... Apparently, to not make thing inconvenient and make sure that everyone can participate, the "patrol" hours were set to once a day at noon, consisting of walking the maybe 50 meters of roads connecting our community to the main road and see if there's anything " suspicious" going on. Then followed by one "late" night shift once a week, but put at 5 pm to not make it too inconvenient and dark to see properly. Also, it will be cancelled on holidays as many people are away and can't be expected to perform their patrolling duties.

I wonder if any prospective burglars will show the same consideration when planning the next big heist of maybe a wide screen TV, blue ray players and some minor jewelry that a break in in our area can yield them? Will they consider that we're too convenient to not patrol during the actual hours when the burglars are roaming about?

But hey, I'll keep the peace, take toddler Sunshine with me out to patrol and spend 5 minutes walking around, tick off "nothing suspicious" one Sunday a year, but somehow do not feel one bit more secure than before the vigilante squad... If I'm going to do something completely meaningless, at least it's nicer to do it at convenient times.

Evil terrorist Swedes!

2012-01-08T21:52:00.001+09:00

These ones are particularly Evil...

For the first time in ages (at the minimum a little over a year) me and Mrs. Sunshine managed to get a little time to ourselves to go see a movie while the in-laws watched over Toddler Sunshine. The movie we chose to go and see was "Mission Impossible 4: Ghost Protocol" since it seemed like the best option available and a reasonably sure bet for both of us.

As expected, the movie was entertaining (the story didn't make much sense, but it was more about action scenes and exotic locations than anything else) and I almost forgot that 'ol Tom Cruise is a Scientologist most of the time. But the greatest thing about the movie was that for the first time in Hollywood history, the main villain was a Swede! I find it most puzzling that no movie until now has thought to make the main terrorist villain a middle-aged, white and slightly overweight Swedish physics professor? When you think about it, they must be the most hateful and evil people on the planet, perfectly cut out to be a believable and realistic terrorist villain as us Swedes are so well known and feared for our aggressiveness and fanaticism.

It's also a good balance to the image of all Swedes as pervert closet Nazis that the "Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" David Fincher movie probably will create.

The Day that Customer Service Died

2012-01-03T13:48:00.001+09:00

This year we could have a quite peaceful New Year celebration, staying at home in the Salaryman HQ as Mother came to visit, it passed by with little fuss and we could avoid the worst trappings of a traditional Japanese New Year's celebration (e.g. huddling around freezing, horrible traditional "osechi" food" etc.). Although Mother is technically Japanese, she's lived in Sweden now for over 40 years and basically forgotten all the traditional Japanese stuff and has no particular craving for it either.

On the 2nd of January, things are starting to revert back to normal and nowadays most of the big sales start already from the 1st making Tokyo seem a little less of a ghost town. On the 2nd I ventured out to our local mall/department store to just check out the sale and scout a little for an additional TV that we are thinking of getting. Although everything was basically open for business the crowds that regularly haunt the mall on a weekend were nowhere to be seen and the place felt quite deserted. As I went in to the local electronic goods shop to possibly scout for a bargain TV, first checking out what was on display and waiting for one of the usually so aggressive sales reps to put his claws in me. As I was looking around, very much looking like a potential customer for a few minutes, no sales rep came around (usually they are very aggressive as they usually get incentive based on their sales, and TVs are probably one of the more attractive areas for them). Looking towards the service counter I could see three of them hanging around looking bored and tired.

As I realised that no one would come around to discuss my potential purchase, I went over to the service counter and said to one of the guys "Hey, I'm thinking of buying a TV and was hoping to get a little help?". The sales rep looked like I had put a huge burden on him, let out a big sigh and followed me over to the TV section. I pointed out one of the TVs that I had been considering and said "I'm thinking of this TV, is it available?" and without almost no delay I got back a "Nope, that one is not in stock and it'll take a while before we get in new ones" (followed by silence). In a normal case, what I would have expected here is a follow up with alternate suggestions or some kind of pitch, but the rep seemed satisfied with his response and went back to looking bored. So I followed up with a "Ok, but how about these versions that are around the same price, are those in stock?". Again met with a big sigh and a "Fine, I'll go check" as he noted down something in his notebook that probably was meant to be the product codes but looked just like doodles to me. After a few minutes he came back "Nope, those are also sold out, dunno when we'll get them back in stock". With that I gave up and left the store, as TV-less as I had been when I went in there.

On the way out, I stopped by the Subway sandwich shop to get some lunch for the Salaryman family. I've shopped there countless of times before and service is usually flawless, fast and never with any mix-ups. However this day the two girls working the counter seemed completely depressed and for the second time I was met with a huge sigh as I placed my order. The standard politeness was completely gone and replaced with complete and utter indifference.

But in the end, I completely sympathise with these poor souls that have to work on the 2nd of January serving the few people that actually venture out when the rest of the country are chilling out at home. We went out today again and things seemed to have reverted more back to normal, but the 2nd of January seem to be the twilight zone of Japanese customer service when they can't be bothered to keep up pretences.

I'm no big fan of Japanese popular music, neither the mainstream music nor the alternative scene (I hate visual-K with a vengeance) but I must admit that the hit song "Laser Beam" by commercial electronic pop girl-group Perfume has burrowed itself down in my brain.

Enter the (year of the) Dragon!

2011-12-31T23:59:00.027+09:00

Did we ever get to see "Aunt Petunia"?

So, another year is coming to it's end and with some surprise and horror I realise that this will be the fifth year of existence for this little blog. Japan is now finally leaving the year of the puny rabbit for the year of the mighty dragon. As has now become an institution at this blog, I will do a quick review of the year 2011 for you.

Biggest Event of 2011 is basically a no-brainer... The earthquake and following tsunami that struck Japan on March 11 is without any competition the biggest event of the year. To be honest, living in the Tokyo area and working (more than) full time as a salaryman with a hungry family to feed when I get home, it's really hard to believe that it was less than a year ago the earthquake struck. Life in Tokyo pretty quickly went back to normal, but every now and then reminders of the horrible tragedy shows up. The quake itself and the week directly following it will forever be etched in my mind though, pretty scary stuff.

Biggest Non-Earthquake Related Event of 2011 is the changing of jobs (again) making me realise just how painful it can be to change jobs from a comfy (but not challenging) position where you know everything and everyone to a completely new environment way out of the comfort zone, having to go through the 'ol song and dance routine again. Now, almost six months later, I'm finally starting to settle in and getting my bearings, just about when an old friend gave me a call out of the blue with a very attractive job offer (we'll see what happens to that, the job seems great, but the timing for me is equally not-great).

Girl that Occupied my Brain in 2011 is... ... ... toddler Sunshine. I wish they came with a manual, but as she is now over a year and half, she's getting a little easier to interpret. As nice as it is with the Sunshine girls at home, I'm starting to feel the need for a Jnr. Salaryman to maintain the status quo of mutually assured self destruction

Most Important New Life Companion of 2011 is my beloved iPad! As my new job carries with it a lot more travelling across the country in work, the iPad has become invaluable as I have packed enough entertainment there to last me at least a year. The iPad is packed with movies, e-books, e-magazines, games and comics and as if it's not enough to use it out of the home, I basically carry it around with me all the time in the house as well. The only drawback I can see is that I'm getting a bit lazy with it, using my stationary computer much less than before and dropping comments on other people's blogs I read and appreciate becomes a little more of a hassle (sorry about that!).

Biggest Revelation of 2011 is much harder to pinpoint... Looking back, 2011 was actually a quite poor year when it came to great movies and music (hey, at least what came up on my radar) with no particular movie or music artist and/or album that really rocked my world (hey, there were quite a few really good ones though), but when it comes to the world of entertainment I guess discovering the TV-show Dexter and working my way through the first five seasons in the commute comes pretty high. I had heard the name before but never really thought it was worth investing the time to try and watch until Big Bro recommended it and I got hooked.

Best Video Game of 2011 is actually much harder as a large number of really really great games came out in 2011, but for me, the without doubt best game of 2011 has been The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. This game has forced me to neglect both family, work and precious sleeping time as I've been completely immersed in the world of that game. Part of me is happy to say that it looks like I have quite some ways to go until I finish the game, but the other part of me feels bad about me withdrawing into my den to play the game when I really have better things to do. If you're into games, you probably already know the game so I won't mention it in any detail, but it's like a mix of Fallout, the Elder Scrolls, Diablo and a bunch of other games I can't remember now. The sense of wonder and fun of exploration that I felt when playing the game is one that I probably haven't felt since I first played Fallout 2 or even way back to Wasteland on the old C64...

Best Blog of 2011 is probably also worth a mention. I'm not sure on how much of an achievement it is coming from me, as I don't really read blogs that much, basically the stuff that is on my blogroll from time to time ,but I don't go out hunting for new blogs to read. But the blog that I find most interesting is that of Aussie bird Corinne in the outback of Kyoto and her blog "Always leaving things unfinishe" (yes, the final "d" is not supposed to be there). At this point, I get the feeling that we already share most of the readership base (or to be more correct, most of the people who read my blog also check out hers, her horde of foreign women married to Japanese men probably couldn't care less about my blog) so I might be preaching to the mosque here, but if you haven't checked it out I highly recommend you to do so. A very close runner-up is the good 'ol Badboy Chris with his "Confessions of a Badboy in Japan", and the rest is in the blogroll.

Whatever Happened to... of 2011 is a brand new category for this year (let's pretend that I'm consistent here, just for kicks) and is custom made for The Octopus! Good 'ol Octopus had a quite funny blog (although very irregularly updated at the best of times) and was one of "my regular" commentators whose comments quite often made me burst out in a grin-like parody of a smile, but who, since autumn seemed to stop existing on the Internet.

With that, I want to wish all of my readers a very Happy New Year! Hope you all have a great 2012 and hope to see you around here in the year of the Dragon.

Up until now, I've steadily increased my readership base year by year, but in 2011 the earthquake (for obvious reasons) drove a lot more traffic to my site so I feel a bit anxious about having 2012 be the first year that my pageviews go down compared to the year before it, so tell your friends, ok?

Turtlenecks

2011-12-29T16:16:00.000+09:00

This morning, Mrs. Sunshine had dressed up Toddler Sunshine in a new outfit, this time with a turtleneck shirt. As she showed me this new fashion creation she asked me what I thought and the conversation went something like this:

Mrs. Sunshine: (enthusiastic) Isn't she cute?
Me: (sleepy) She looks like Steve Jobs...
Mrs. Sunshine: (confused) Why? Because of the turtleneck shirt? You have a turtleneck I gave you, which you never wear by the way...
Me: (still sleepy) Yeah, I know, but if I wear it I look like Steve Jobs...
Mrs. Sunshine: (slightly annoyed) It's not like Steve Jobs invented the turtleneck you know!
Me: (still sleepy) Are we really sure on that? Maybe he invented that before the iPod and iPad and he always kept some resentment that it never took off like the rest of the stuff?
Mrs. Sunshine: (had enough of stupidity) I don't care, she's cute and she doesn't look like Steve Jobs, now she wants to play with Daddy (handling me a giggling Toddler Sunshine, effectively ending the conversation)

In any case, I strongly believe that she looked very much like Steve Jobs and here is a picture I took of her during the morning.

To further put weight behind my claim that everyone in a turtleneck looks like Steve Jobs I also found a rare photo of Kim Jong-Un, the Great Successor wearing a turtleneck while on vacation at Tokyo Disneyland.

I rest my case.

We're not really working together here...

2011-12-26T21:10:00.000+09:00

Having Mother over here in Japan puts some difficulties to me and Mrs. Sunshine's otherwise good teamwork.

My instinct is to leave stuff for Mother to clean up after me (I see it as signs of affection as she rarely gets to do it anymore).
However, Mrs. Sunshine's instinct is to make sure that THE Mother-in-Law gets treated like an honored guests who should not have to lift a finger while she's under our custody.

So I go about putting up my little traps while Mrs. Sunshine swiftly cleans it all away without Mother ever noticing. We really need to get a little more aligned on our strategy here as both of our actions turn out to be somewhat futile.

Merry Christmas to all of you!

2011-12-25T20:15:00.000+09:00

It really is about time!

Christmas merriment, little toddler Sunshine and visiting Mother from the old country is keeping the Salaryman family busy in a good way, making me miss posting the traditional Christmas greeting yesterday. From tomorrow it's back to work for a few days until we go on the real New Year's vacation.

I just want to wish all my readers a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year (I'm sure I will post more before new year's, but just in case)! Hope all of you managed to get chill out and charge up for next year.

Ikea - You've gone too far!

2011-12-22T20:57:00.000+09:00

Too soon?

Like most people, I have a bit of a love-hate relationship to Ikea and their furniture. On the positive side the design is usually relatively nice with reasonable prices but the assembly of the stuff usually end up with a lot of cursing and questionable results. In recent times we have started to go around this problem by paying some of the Ikea peons to assemble the stuff for us even if it cost a little extra.

Those not from Sweden might not know it, but Ikea is founded in an area in Sweden which is famous for the people there being extremely stingy. The founder of Ikea, Ingvar Kamprad, is notorious for being stingy even by the standard set by the local population (he's also a former nazi in case you didn't know). So Ikea is also famous for their lower than industry norm salaries, but for some reason a lot of people seem to want to work there (at least in Sweden).

But there has been one thing with Ikea that has had my unconditional love since they established themselves here in Japan; the Swedish food section. I've been to Ikea many times just to buy some of the Swedish food, brands and stuff that I could not get anywhere except at Ikea here in Japan. However, now the stinginess of Ikea has struck again and a decision seems to have been made to phase out all non-Ikea products and replace them with generic dull own made products. The new products have exciting names such as "Bread", "Drink" and "Chocolate" and are packed in exciting one coloured packages. To add insult to injury, they are also quite expensively priced.

I used to be able to go there and get some nostalgic Swedish food of brands which I grew up with and loved, but it's basically all gone now, exchanged with stuff that makes it look like a North Korean supermarket. For expat Swede's it's a huge betrayal and I'm not sure I will able to forgive Ikea for this stupid move in making more buck out of their food section...

The deadliest of food, the Blow fish...?

2011-12-19T15:33:00.002+09:00

There are many myths about Japan that for some reason keep surviving even though they were either wrong to begin with, or true at some point until current times caught up.

Apparently this is actually the mascot of the Yamaguchi prefecture PD...

One of the myths that I actually find somewhat amusing (as opposed to annoying) is the belief that eating the Japanese "Fugu" blow fish is associated with a relative high degree of risk. Ok, the basic concept of it is not completely wrong as the fish is poisonous and eating it raw with some amateur fisherman preparing it, then serving it could result in a quick trip to the hospital and possibly fatal outcome. As far as I know, there also is special licenses that you need to take to be allowed to prepare and serve the fish in a restaurant. So to be fair, the myth that it's dangerous is very much grounded in reality.

However, practically speaking, eating raw Fugu in a restaurant in Tokyo probably carries significantly less risk than eating at any fast food chain. I haven't counted, but I would guess that there are several hundred restaurants in the Tokyo area serving the fish to thousands of guests on a daily basis with no incidents. I've eaten it many times, but what I find most puzzling is that so many Japanese seem to think that it's a delicacy... Ok, it doesn't taste bad, it's just kinda bland (particularly raw without any seasoning). So, unfortunately, if you plan to visit Japan and had planned to "gamble with death" with eating Fugu, I have to dissapoint with the fact that you are probably taking higher risks each time you cross a street.

But ok, you want to come to Japan and you want to have something dangerous to eat? I can help you with that! A while ago one of the big thing in the news was a couple of fatal cases of food poisoning from people eating the raw beef dish "Yukke" at a Korean BBQ/Yakiniku place and more reports coming in from all over the country of suspected cases of food poisoning from said dish. If you want to have the highest possible chance of dying from eating this dish, I would recommend you to seek out the cheapest crummiest looking Yakiniku places you can find. To ensure the worst possible raw material, I would recommend one of those "eat as much as you can for almost nothing" places.

As proper regulations for preparing Yukke now has gotten much much stricter, it seems like many places go around this by making a similar dish but just calling it another name, thus dodging the regulations and still giving you a fair shot at a glorious death from food poisoning. Best of luck!

I drink to forget... 2012 version

2011-12-17T22:01:00.000+09:00

Ok, you know the comic?

Ok, in case you are wondering why the updates here are even fewer than usual, it's because Japan has entered the depressing "bounenkai" season again (I wrote about it four years ago so if you've forgotten you can catch up here)...

It's quite exhausting and this week I have had drinking events four days in a row, one with friends, one with a customer and two internal... This usually means that I don't get home until twelve at the earliest and get at best five hours sleep, going to work hungover and then just have a rinse and repeat the following day... But the long New Year's holiday is in sight and I just try to survive until then!

The Unique Japan

2011-12-08T00:05:00.000+09:00

I've lived in Japan over ten years now and have gotten used to life here since long ago. So there is rarely times when I see or experience something and think "wow, this is something that I could only experience in Japan". But there are somethings that still make an impression on me without fail, unique Japanese things that I could never experience anywhere except for Japan.

Visually I would say that walking through a busy street looking for a client's office and coming upon a small hidden away serene temple is one of those thing that really strikes me as completely Japanese. Another one is getting up from the subway into the busy nightlife area of Shinjuku at night, seeing all the neon signs and the complete mix of people stumbling around the street. These things are something you could never experience anywhere outside Japan.

Audially I think it's a tie between all the female robot voices talking to you in Japanese from every machine and the busy noise in a Japanese izakaya of people screaming orders, laughing and the general happy noise. You could would never experience this anywhere outside Japan.

Something like this, if all the men were drunk on cheap liqour

Olfactory (or "smell" for those of you who might not have English as a first language) The most Japanese smell that I know is that of a late night commuting train packed with people. The smell is a mix of old man, stale sweat and cheap liquor all mixed into one very unique odour that could never be experienced anywhere outside Japan. The mix sounds disgusting, and it is, but after being immersed in it for 5 minutes I find it somewhat soothing. This is a very unique Japanese smell and I doubt I could experience it anywhere else. Out of the senses listed, I would probably name this the most "uniquely Japanese" sensory experience.

So if you come to Japan and want to have an unique experience, take a late train on a weekend, heading out from the city towards the suburbs and make sure that you are completely sober for the full experience!

Deep Deep Underground - The Commuter Battlegrounds

2011-12-03T20:24:00.000+09:00

In the Subway at 2AM anything goes...

When you lived a bunch of years in Tokyo like I have, you develop some form of relationship with the network of subways in central Tokyo. Although the regular JR train lines (the JR lines do not go underground) might have some small variances (I do enjoy in particular the silent English lessons on the Yamanote line tv screens) they're basically the same wherever you go in central Tokyo.

The subway though is different and even though most of the lines are operated by the same company, Toei Metro, they still have a distinct "personality" based on the time they were built and the areas they go through. The train line I hate the most is without doubt the relatively new Oedo line which is built so deep underground that you pass through Hell, Hades and Hel before finally reaching the train platform. Usually the trek from the sunny surface to finally reaching the train takes longer than the time you actually need to ride on the train.

To it's benefit, I must admit that the stations are usually very nice and clean and in some of the vast corridors they have some fancy artificial sunlight effect going. Also, all the stations are equipped with barriers and automated gates, probably having saved thousands of drunken salarymen from a sordid death through falling on the tracks. Also, probably even more significantly, this has probably saved Toei a lot of money as they could reduce the corpse cleaning crew.

Still, it doesn't matter, I still hate the Oedo line. It does go through some fancy areas but that just makes me hate it even more as I might need to occasionally use it... I often go out of my way to avoid this line, sometimes making both elaborate and innovative train switches...

As you might have figured out, to follow up on my commuter terrorists series, I will also guide you a little through the battlegrounds of the commuter war, starting here with the Oedo Line. Up next; The Ginza line: Sluts and money

The Summit of the Year!

2011-11-28T18:42:00.000+09:00

Kumamon in the middle flanked by the runner ups

Yesterday, one of the hottest news was the "Yuru-Kyara" event where image characters from all over Japan gather together for a few days of an intense "summit". It's not really clear exactly what is discussed between the characters at the summit and it seems mostly to consist of said characters prancing around and trying to get elected as the most adorable mascot of the year.

Apparently it was a really intense election where the mascot of Kumamoto prefecture ; "Kumamon" managed to win first place, followed by the chicken-like character of Aichi prefecture "Bari-san" and in third place the distinctively creepy mascot of the Kokubunji area of Tokyo "Nishiko-kun".

I hate him so much...

Actually, I find this kinda amusing and among the herd of image characters (around a hundred) that gathered for the summit, there were very few distinctively creepy and/or disturbing characters. I do find it disturbing though that the Kyoto character "Sento-kun" still seems to be around and about as I had hoped that someone would have put him out of his misery by now. To add insult to injury, it looks even more hideous as a costume than the illustration...

There you have it, the most up to date and exciting information on current events in Japan, presented as always by your favorite Salaryman!

Suburbian neighborhood complications...

2011-11-24T18:38:00.000+09:00

I should get Mrs. Sunshine a claw glove for X-mas

After several months of staying vacant, it seems like a new family have moved into the house that has stood empty after the traffic accident that apparently killed the father of the previous family (see here for a recap). As the house is a few rows down from us, we haven't really given it much thought apart from when passing by the garden-turned-jungle so we're neither excited or annoyed by a new family moving in.

However, a few days ago, the new family apparently did their "walk around the neighborhood, say hello and hand out towels" routine. Mrs. Sunshine had been out playing with Toddler Sunshine and seen them a little from a distance as they were ringing the doorbells to the houses around us. She installed herself at home and expected the doorbell to ring and get a nice towel set within a few minutes, but as time passed and no one rung the doorbell she thought that they might just have done the greeting to the houses immediately next to it (not really wrong, but proper manner dictates that people 2-3 houses away also deserve a towel). But as she looked out the window she could see how they now had moved to houses further down ours, but for some reason skipped our house.

As she retold me the story when I came home in the evening, she was visibly annoyed by this breach of etiquette but was thinking that they might come by the next day, temporarily frightened by the foreign name on the nameplate by our house. But no one came around the next day either and the family has been seen scuttling around their new house, much to the annoyance of Mrs. Sunshine, seemingly finished with their rounds of greeting.

Mrs. Sunshine is generally a very pleasant and friendly person to deal with for people that don't know her, but a blatant breach of etiquette such as this ensures that the new family has ended up with a very negative balance to make up for. The politics of suburbia can be complicated and frightening indeed!

Commuter Terrorists: The Giggling Madman

2011-11-20T19:54:00.000+09:00

I thought I should follow up the previous Commuter Terrorists posts with another type of commuter terrorists; The Giggling Madman...

To be fair, this type of terrorist is not a very common combatant on the rush hour trains and as far as I know, I've basically the main culprit of this particular form of terrorist.

Imagine a fully packed train, everyone is irritated, uncomfortable and just waiting to grit through it with the least possible difficulty possible. The person standing next to you is a regular Salaryman, watching some form of TV show on his PSP, nothing particularly odd or strange about the scenario so far. But then, imagine how that Salaryman starts to burst out in giggling followed by explosive laughter (maybe even spitting out some saliva on the people sitting in front of him). This is exactly what I have been doing during the commute last week and the cause of it has been watching through the tv-show "An Idiot Abroad - The Bucket List" featuring Karl Pilkington. In fact, after making people uncomfortable on the train a few times due to spontaneous and uncontrollable laughing fits, I have felt forced to turn it off a few times to watch something less funny.

As long as you're not going to watch it in a crowded train, I can highly recommend it. Although I find it slightly disturbing how I, at quite a few times, somehow can't but agree with Karl Pilkington's take on some things...

Hey, was this racist of me?

2011-11-16T21:40:00.001+09:00

I'm sure one of the was Ukrainian

The Salaryman base of operations lies in a pretty Japanese little enclave, almost completely ethnically cleansed of everything but the Japanese. I have rarely seen any Westerners at all in the neighborhood or in the vicinity of the station, passing by one or two, probably on their way to the station to go back home after doing some English home tutoring or so. But that's about it, otherwise it's all Japanese.

But last weekend, I took toddler Sunshine to a local playground, but not the closest one we have in connection with our gated community as all the kids in the neighborhood were hiding or just refusing to come out and play. I've been there with her quite a few times and there's always kids running around there, so I thought it would be more fun for her. For some reason, it was even more kids than usual there and a fair number of parents hovering over their little offspring just like me.

I saw one kid who looked suspiciously half-Japanese/white but didn't really think that much about it, but after a half an hour or so I noticed two white ladies, probably in their 30's or so standing and chatting just outside the playground, obviously with their kids running wild inside. As foreigners are hard to come by in the neighborhood and I thought it could be nice to at least introduce myself and little Toddler Sunshine, I walked over to them and said something like "Hi, I haven't seen so many foreigners around here, I'm glad to see that it's not only me" with an attempt of a smile. I was met with blank stares, and then confused expressions as they realized that I was talking to them. A few seconds of silence followed, me still with the smile attached to my face and toddler Sunshine attached to my arm, then one of them said "No speak English". Slightly confused in turn, I switched to Japanese and repeated the greeting and added, "where are you from?". Then they seemed to catch on and replied back in Japanese "we're from the Ukraine". A few seconds of awkward silence followed and I squeezed out, "oh, ok, nice to meet you, wave goodbye to the nice ladies now Toddler Sunshine" as I walked back to the playground with Toddler Sunshine.

I had assumed that they maybe would be European or slightly worse but still acceptable; Australian or even, failing all else, American and thought it could be nice to know some people in the neighborhood coming from something of a similar cultural background as me who might also be interested in having their kids get to know other more international kids. But Ukrainian not able to speak English...? The only thing we probably had in common would be the "whiteness" (and for me, that's only 50% anyway) so my interest in socializing with them quickly dropped down to somewhere below 0 degrees C.

I almost feel like my shift from friendly interest to complete disinterest in the realization that they were Ukrainian was slightly racist, but hey, in the suburban life sometimes you just have to do some things you are not always proud of to survive!

Commuter Terrorists: Win some, lose some

2011-11-10T21:41:00.001+09:00

Like being locked in between these guys...

As everyone have figured out by now, the commuting war is harsh and unforgiving. Everyone can be your enemy and having friends with you only serve to drag you down and delay you in getting a reasonable seat and a safe haven from the worst battleground as they might want to "socialize"; talk, sit together and other stupid things. No, the commuter battle is fought alone.

Sometimes split second decisions needs to be made, either to go for it or to stay back and wait for a better opportunity to strike but risk to lose it all.

This morning I was forced into making such a split second decision... It was in the morning train, at my station with almost 50 minutes on the train in front of me. The train was not too crowded yet, but in just a few stations I know that it will be packed with enemy combatants and if I cannot secure my ground quickly I will leave myself vunerable for attack. Then I see it, an open space even though there are a few people standing, momentarily confused as to why no one has gone for the opening I take a better look and see that the available space is half of what is normally available due to a quite abnormally obese Japanese man taking up one and a half seat by himself.

I hesitate for half a second before I decide to go for it and forcefully squeeze myself down in the seat between the obese smelly man and the regular sized salaryman on the other side. With some effort and force I manage to wriggle my way in the seat (and I'm of a larger size than the regular salaryman). I quickly realize that I'm sitting extremely uncomfortably between the fat man who's huge, smelly, makes strange noises and have to move his whole arm to turn page in his little book, which makes it even more uncomfortable for me. On my other side, the regular salaryman is obviously pissed off at my invasion and claiming of territority and tries to make me even more uncomfortable through subtle tricks such as pressing his elbow hard into my side while pretending that he's sleeping.

I knew that I was taking a huge risk and would actually have been more comfortable standing but gambled on one of them getting off at one of the major transit points just ten minutes away, but to my horror I realized that they're not going anywhere... I consider cutting my losses to stand up and just hold on to the best of my ability, but the train is quickly filled up with passengers and I missed the opportunity.

During the whole 50 min of train time I have to put up with the noises, moving and smell of the obese man while the salaryman keeps up the pressure with the elbow, sometimes moving it a bit to try and find a more painful spot.

Sometimes you just have to admit that you lost and today was such a day.

The Breakup...

2011-11-07T22:32:00.002+09:00

Ban it!

I guess it started here on the blog a little while ago... I guess I should have seen it coming, but it still doesn't really make it easier...

You see, for many many years, probably from almost my beginning days as a Salaryman here in Japan I have had a very good working relationship with the font Arial. In the beginning it was not that serious, I used is most of the time, but sometimes I forgot and just used the default times roman. But as time passed, our relationship deepened and I started using Arial for basically everything written, both in work and in private. If you sent me a file in Times New Roman, chances are that I did a quick "select all" and quickly changed it all to Arial before I bothered reading through it.

The change happened here on the blog on June the 8th... Suddenly I felt like it would be nice to use another font and changed to trebuchet here on the blog. I guess I should have seen it coming already then, that me and Arial had started drifting apart, our working relationship was still OK, not very dynamic or exciting, I no longer felt any enthusiasm for changing the font in other people's documents to Arial but did it mostly out of habit.

Then, just a few months ago, I started using Calibri a little, just a bit on the side. I had seen the font in use in other documents and found it appealing and started little by little using it more myself. Me and Arial still tried to keep things as normal as possible, but it was clear that the flame had gone out, our relationship was no longer exciting or dynamic, it was just running on fumes and good 'ol times.

Last week I did the breakup. It wasn't easy, but I think it was best for both of us. I changed my default font and font in e-mail signature to Calibri and sticking with that font now for all documents. It feels fresh and exciting, every time I do a "select all" on a document now I feel a rush as I see the document turn into a nice looking Calibri fonted document.

It feels sad to have said good bye to Arial after all the years we spent together and all the documents that it helped me create or make better looking, but it was time to move on. I'm a very monogamous font kinda guy, I have a font and then I stick with it for letters, power point, excel and any other software that uses a font. I hope that me and Calibri can stick it out for many years but we are still getting to know each other. I have toyed with the thought of changing some old documents I'm still using from Arial to Calibri, but have so far resisted since it would feel wrong to ruin all the memories of our good times together.

But hey, maybe I just once in a while could play around a bit with Courier for some stuff, after all, I have Trebuchet mainly here for my blog and there's no reason why Calibri would ever find out...

The factory burned down and he stole all my money

2011-11-06T21:05:00.000+09:00

This needs dry-cleaning

When we moved into our new Salaryman base of operations we got a sales visit from a dry cleaning company that would come by to pick up our dirty laundry when we called them with quite reasonable prices. The sales rep/driver was a little scabby looking but friendly enough. Although we're not a huge volume dry cleaning user, we used the company regularly and found it reasonably convenient and fast.

After a few months, our regular guy announced his retirement and introduced the guy who would take over after him. The new guy looked normal enough and we didn't really think much of it as our local dry cleaning guy is really a very minor extra at best in our lives and will likely not be mentioned at all in any of my biographies.

However, quite quickly after this transition the problems started. The guy would not come when we called, either he would not pick up his phone or he would just show up unannounced making Mrs. Sunshine quite uncomfortable (especially since he also smelled a bit of alcohol and yes, he drove). So we decided to ditch the service and switched instead to a regular dry cleaning place even though it required the effort to hand in and pick up the stuff at the shop.

Another few months passed and we didn't really think much of it until the owner of the pick-up dry cleaning firm suddenly stopped by when Mrs. Sunshine was home. He then launched into an apology for the previous representative and told her that he had mishandled his job and then taken off with all the money he could get his hands on and now was on the lam. Then apparently the actual dry cleaning facilities had mysteriously burnt down leaving him on the brink of ruin. He then gestured to his shaved head and told her how he had shaved his head as a new start and asked for our continued patronage of his company and ensured us how he would personally manage the pick-ups of our dirty laundry.

...but we found the whole situation a bit too sticky and decided to stick with the safe "big chain located in the supermarket" instead as we felt like we were being dragged down into the dirty world of underground dry cleaning...

To me every day is Halloween

2011-10-30T20:56:00.000+09:00

Admit it, she's adorable!

The Halloween tradition has been picked up a little here in Japan (still I can't figure out why they picked up on Halloween and not Easter with all the cuddly rabbits and chicks). But it's mostly about selling some pumpkin related stuff and getting some candy and stuff sold, not much effort goes into it. For any real Halloween terror, I think you might need to go to Chris place in West Japan.

Generally there is no "trick or treat" tradition at all here in Japan, but our Mama Mafia took it on them to set up such an event for the kids in our little gated community. I do doubt that many who participated actually had any idea what the "trick or treat" phrase actually means, but since everyone got their fair share of candy it didn't matter much in the end anyway. As you can see in the picture, Toddler Sunshine did however look completely adorable in her little Ladybug suit, which was the only thing that mattered in the end.

On a related note, just recently Toddler Sunshine surpassed Mrs. Sunshine in knowledge in using the iPad, expertly manouvering herself exactly to the annoying apps with songs and stuff that we got for her to keep her pacified. I'm not sure if I should feel proud or slightly concerned as when she will pass me by as Mrs. Sunshine knows her general way around computers and regular software...

How to have lunch with a Japanese person you don't want to talk with

2011-10-27T22:42:00.000+09:00

Delicious bowl of Ramen, love the chicken feet touch!

Let me teach you a little trick that might come in handy for foreigners in Japan. Say that a Japanese person that you know, but don't particularly enjoy talking with, invites you out for lunch (reasons for not wanting to talk could be anything ranging from English Vampires, co-workers that you don't really have anything to talk about outside work or generally people you don't want to spend more than necessary time with) and you feel that you can't make up an excuse or decline.

It's almost inevitable that the Japanese person will ask you what you want to eat and you should answer "I'd love some Ramen noodles!". With almost 100% guarantee the person will enthusiastically agree to your suggestion as I've after ten years in Japan have yet to meet a Japanese person who straight up dislike Ramen. You might get dragged into a conversation about which soup base you prefer but just try to stay out of it with a general comment like "I like them all so you pick one in a place close from here".

The geniality with this strategy is that when a bowl of Ramen is put in front of a Japanese person he/she/it will inevitably cease all conversation and focus on eating the Ramen soup, fast and methodically, without talking until the bowl is finished. If it's a popular place there might even be people waiting for a seat allowing you to eat yours more slowly as your lunch partner would be forced to leave the seat for another hungry patron as soon as he/she/it finishes up. If there is no line of people waiting you have two options.

1. You match the eating speed of your lunch partner, this is the most natural way to do it but can be hard as a skilled Japanese person can go through a bowl of Ramen with intimidating speed which can be hard to match

2. You eat as fast a you can and if the lunch partner finishes before you and tries to initiate a conversation while you still have food left you should focus on eating the food just nodding and grunting for replies while eating. This would not be considered as rude as they would relate to the focus on the Ramen and not conversation.

After being seated and ordering a regular Ramen bowl you should have it in front of you within minutes, minimizing any longer unwanted pre-food arrival conversation. However it is of utmost importance that you refrain from ordering anything from the side-dish menu apart from the regular Ramen (gyoza, fried rice etc.) as the rules of Ramen eating would no longer apply as strictly and conversation tries might be initiated.

As this strategy should minimize any conversation to the absolute minimum you could even feel generous and say "Hey, this was really great, we should come back here again for lunch again sometime!". On the opposite side of the coin, if you're going for lunch with a Japanese person you want to have a conversation with, you should avoid a Ramen place and if your partner suggest it, well, the reason might be that he/she/it just don't want to talk with YOU...

Note: This does not work with Udon noodles or Soba noodles so do do not felt tempted to try!

The day we killed a dog in Aomori

2011-10-26T21:40:00.000+09:00

This is a story from my sordid Salaryman past that I have been thinking about posting for a few years but never really gotten around to it, partly because I want to make the story justice and partly because it involves the painful death of a little dog which really isn't funny... Just for the record, I probably should state that I'm quite the animal lover (leaning more towards cats than dogs, but like dogs too).

I was travelling in the northern prefecture of Aomori (just below the Hokkaido island) with one of the sales reps that I knew very well and was very friendly with. We had just finished one hospital visit and were heading towards a local Izakaya (Japanese pub/restaurant) for a "grease them up with a free dinner and booze" type of business dinner with our main distributor in the prefecture. As the place was on the other side of the town and we were running a bit late my colleague told the taxi driver to get there fast (although it should be mentioned that it was a quite mild request and not an order for the driver to burn the rubber, break any and all traffic laws and/or drive like a maniac).

The driver was a happy little camper (although you need to picture an old man since all taxi drivers in Japan seem to be around their 70's) and happily obliged, engaging my colleague in talking about how he surely could get us there on time as he knew all the fastest hidden routes through the city. He was driving quite fast through smaller streets, but I didn't really think about it as the speed wasn't obscene or felt dangerous.

It was getting darker outside, although still in the early stages of twilight and the driver was happily chatting with my colleague as he drove in on a smaller street next to a park. All of a sudden I register a shadow in my peripheral vision, coming fast out from the park towards the car, before I could think anything else there was a distinct bump and a crushing sound as something went under the front wheel and then repeated on the back wheel... At this point I'm honestly not sure if I actually heard that cracking sound of bones breaking or if is my imagination who filled that part in for my memory.

Then a female voice screamed out "Fifi! No!!!" in a voice filled with terror. The taxi came to a grinding halt and I remember how I felt wet with cold sweat and thinking "Please tell me we didn't just hit a kid". I looked back through the back window and saw a woman with a desperate expression hunched over a small brown dog that yelped in pain mixing with the crying of the woman.

I looked at my colleague who probably looked as stupid as me with an open mouth and an expression of shock, something that likely was just a fragment of what the driver felt. As the taxi driver feebly opened the car door to see what had happened the female voice screamed at him "You! What have you done to my dog!?", now mixing the terror with a good amount of fury. I could see the dog moving it's head but with the lower half not moving, I didn't feel like looking closer and thankfully the woman was covering that part of the dog. But I realized that we had likely run over the lower half of the dog, breaking any bones in there and making a nasty painful mess of the intestines and that the dog was as good as dead only it would take some time of horrible pain for it to get there...

I looked at my colleague and we exchanged a wordless "what the hell do we do now?!", after a few seconds he said "let's get out of here". By this time the woman was screaming at the driver and he looked completely helpless, standing a few meters from the nasty scene, no longer the happiest taxi driver in Aomori. My colleague quickly pulled out the money that the meter showed and put it on the driver's seat and we got out of the car, quickly withdrawing with a quick "we're good here, the money is on the seat, thank you" to the driver who likely didn't hear a thing. And we sneaked away in the shadows and didn't bother getting another taxi.

Not my proudest moment, the most merciful thing to have done would have been to put the dog out of its misery, but I wouldn't be able to do that to a little cute dog, and I feel quite sure that the woman would not let any of us come close to the dog. So in hindsight, I'm not sure if we could have done anything more useful. Sure, the driver was to blame to some extent as he was driving over the speed limit but the woman should have kept the dog on a leash as well.

As we walked away into the night I said to my colleague "for a while there, I thought it was a kid we had hit...", still white in the face, he just nodded showing that the same thought had struck him. We didn't talk about the incident anything during the evening as it might have put a little shadow over the "grease them up dinner"... I have no idea what happened in the end, but I would guess that the taxi driver took the woman and the dog to a veterinary in his taxi, but I don't think that there was much that could have been done to save the dog.

Being a Salaryman in Japan is not all fun and games...

I'm afraid of Americans!

2011-10-24T20:54:00.000+09:00

As avid readers might recall, I pretty recently returned back to Japan from a trip to the big USA (East coast to be more specific), I think that most of my regular readers are smart enough to figure things out without me spelling it out, but in any case... Don't get me wrong, I actually like the US (although I don't necessarily always agree with the foreign politics run by the country) and most of my foreign friends here in Japan are Americans., but there are some aspects of American culture that I find a mixture of amusing, annoying and confusing...

Growing up in the cold, semi-socialist isolated country of Sweden (I'm taking about the late 70's and 80's here) people are just not very outgoing and friendly to people they don't know. However, once you made a friend in Sweden they're usually loyal friends for life, much like dogs, but it takes some time to get there. I mention this to give you a little background where I'm coming from here.

Visiting the US means becoming engaged in conversation with strangers at every turn... Back home in the old world of Sweden, if a stranger tries to engage me in a conversation there are are four questions that immediately run through my head:

1 Is he/she a drunk?
2 Is he/she a lunatic?
3 What the hell does this person want from me?
4 Is it a foreigner that doesn't understand how things work here?

It could probably be charted up as a decision tree thingy although one doesn't necessarily rule out the other. As this basic thought process is not unique to me, but quite normal in Sweden it becomes accurate in a twisted logic as people will not engage people in small talk of fear of being seen as a drunk, lunatic and/or overall strange person (e.g. foreigner) and the only people who will are drunks, lunatics, foreigners who doesn't know basic Swedish manners or people who wants something.

Even though I have lived over ten years in exile here in Japan now, it's very hard to change how my mind works and it doesn't help that Japan isn't a particularly outgoing country either. So coming to the US where everyone is overly social (particularly those who rely on tip...) means that my mind constantly has to go through the above thought process only to deliver the answer "You are now in the US, the thought process you initiated is not compatible here".

The constant talking, chatting and socializing I have to go through in the US is mentally exhausting... In Sweden you can easily go through a whole day without talking to anyone apart from the minimum necessary exchange of words when shopping or so, while in the US I find myself having to engage each and every person I meet in small talk knowing that don't really care at all; they're just doing it because it's the thing that you're supposed to do. Not to mention how paranoid I get when in restaurants and can't shake the thoughts "this waitress is probably a major bitch just pretending to be nice to milk some tip out of me"... After a few days of this, I find myself drained of energy, but still, it's a nice place to visit and the problem is at least not that the people aren't friendly...

It's confirmed, we're all the same!

2011-10-20T21:15:00.001+09:00

Recently I attended a corporate event where we had a quite large exhibition in Osaka in one of those trade shows that we regularly participate in. Nothing special about it really and it's something that I've done about a hundred times over the years working here in Japan.

I was there quite late and still on site when they brought in the workers that would dissassemble the booth and do all the heavy lifting, ot only for us but for all of the 50-something companies that had participated. As I looked around, all of a sudden I noticed the very high proportion of Judas Priest and Iron Maiden t-shirts and long hair in the guys that helped out with the dissassembly.

The longer I live here, the more convinced I get that people really are fundamentally the same all across the world. I'm sure that even in Saudia Arabia, North Korea or Iran, workers coming in would also be wearing Judas Priest t-shirts and have long hair. Even in one of those rare tribes in the middle of the rain forest with no contact with outsiders, I'm sure that when a new hut is about to be built, the builders will be wearing Judas Priest t-shirts. I really should get one myself since I've always fancied myself as a wannabe working class kinda guy!

(sorry for the lack of image to this one! My iPad is not really cooperating with me now, I'll add it when I get the change)

Count the little blessings...

2011-10-16T21:15:00.000+09:00

No Picard, it just looks douchy!

Sometimes I feel like I've been living so long here in Japan now that I've stopped appreciating the little everyday things. I'm of course talking about the people walking around with bluetooth headsets for their mobile phones permanently plugged into the ear that are very common in the old country and I also saw quite a few of when I recently visited the USA...

I was reminded of it the other day in the subway when I saw a westerner walking around with such a headset and how immensely douchebaggy you look with one of those. I can understand that such a device might be helpful if you're working in a call center, but wearing it in the subway (where reception will be fluctuating between bad and nothing) just make you look like a clown.

So, I guess I should enjoy the fact that I live in a country where it's considered douchy and odd to use one of those unless you're driving. Sometimes it's the little things that count!

Just a minor fart!

2011-10-12T21:26:00.001+09:00

To follow up on my previous posts while we're still on the earthquake theme, I'll just pull another one while I'm at it. Sensational disaster scenarios aside, the last months Japan has been spared of any larger aftershocks/quakes and the frequency seem to revert back to normal, as it was before the March 11 disaster. So, in terms of daily life, quakes are no longer at the top of the mind, at least not for me and the Salaryman family or at work.

However, last week, for the first time in many months, there was one of those "earthquake imminent" alarms in the Nagano region (I became aware of it as I was watching the NHK live news at the time, the warning did not get sent to Tokyo mobile phones). As Nagano is a bit from Tokyo I wasn't really worried about our personal safety, but it's still quite some tension from the time of the alarm until the quake actually comes. The news anchor looked very nervous and they immediately switched to some live feed from a building in Nagano to capture the quake. Seconds passed where nothing happened and the anchor man only repeated that people in the Nagano area should seek cover, a few more seconds passed without any shaking at all until about one minute fom the alarm when a measly "2" on the 1-7 Japanese scale gently shook Nagano.

Ok, it's great that it wasn't a big quake or anything and I assume that the Japanese authorities prefer to err on the side of safety when issuing these alarms nowadays, but the feeling I get is the same one as when you suddenly feel your stomach moving; making a desperate rush to the nearest bathroom under fear of crapping in the pants, but when finally safe sitting on the toilet (assuming it's not a Flaschspüler as you are never safe on one of those) only letting out a fart. It's a mix of relief for the false alarm and annoyance of the emotional trauma and desperate rush I had to endure for nothing...

...and this was the best you could come up with?!

2011-10-10T19:14:00.000+09:00

It will look something like this (grandma fire brigade to the lower left)

Just a little bit earlier I was watching tv and one of the news shows did a feature on what could possibly happen when the overdue huge kanto earthquake, aka "the big one" would hit Tokyo. Quite sensational in nature, it showed how the Tsunami would carry with it burning debris and ignite large parts of Tokyo city turning Tokyo into a burning inferno with huge loss of lives and property as a consequence.

Although sensational in tone, it doesn't necessarily rule out that they're not completely wrong, so I watched with particular interest when they turned to the question "so now that we know that this might be a result of the big earthquake, what can and should we do to minimize the damage?".

...what they did show was a unit of voluntary "firemen" made up of old ladies which apparently had been formed in one of the wards of Tokyo city. The sweet old ladies seemed to have considerable problems running in a straight line and managing the fire hose. But yeah, if this is the first and only countermeasure that Tokyo city has put in place to combat the threat of going up in smoke, I feel more, not less secure...

I have however done my calculations... As the Salaryman family lives a bit outside of central Tokyo and I spend approximately ~12 hours of the day at home and also have some travel around Japan and the globe, I should have a slightly less than ~50% risk of being in central Tokyo when the big one hits... With the grandma fire brigade being the best countermeasure put in place, maybe I should see if I can reduce the risk a few percentage more...

That's my girl!

2011-10-08T22:35:00.000+09:00

Relax, it's not opened!

Earlier in the day Mrs. Sunshine tried to solicit a kiss on the cheek from little toddler Sunshine. First toddler Sunshine stared at her for a while with a skeptical frown, looking like she was considering something, and then with a surprising speed and power she promptly gave Mrs. Sunshine a quite impressive bitch slap. While Mrs. Sunshine was recoiling in surprise, toddler Sunshine followed up with sticking her index finger up Mrs. Sunshine's nose giggling loudly. Then a few seconds later she gave Mrs. Sunshine a kiss on the cheek.

It's times like these that I find really touching, her sense of humor seem to be just like mine although still a little rough around the edges. She's my little girl indeed!

Well, if he's getting some, you really have no excuse!

2011-10-04T04:55:00.000+09:00

So, after some adventures in the east coast of the US, I now finally find myself back at the Salaryman HQ in rural Chiba. The jetlag that the trip has given me is of monumental proportions and at 3AM this morning I found myself wide awake and promptly got up to sit and drink coffee in the darkness.

During my absence, there is one quite interesting piece of news that I picked up on my return and it's related to our favorite Wig-Helmet guy, Nishiyama (aka Nobita-kun) and his personal romantic life... Apparently, last week, he was found to have "improper" relations with a lady in her early 30's in the ministry, kissing and fondling her in public in the workplace and as punishment was promtly put on a one month forced leave of absence. As I checked the news out, I also realized that I had missed a similar incident in June where he had been found to have improper relations with an assistant at work and was removed from the position of spokesman.

There is nothing that implies that these "improper" relations and public displays of kissing and fondling were of anything but mutual nature I must admit that I feel quite impressed with our little Nobita-kun's virility and success with the ladies. He is of course married as well so he's quite the busy little beaver juggling the young girls, work and family life!

So there you have it, there really is no excuse for you, if Nobita-kun can get some with the young girls, there really is no reason why you shouldn't either! But I can't help but wondering how he handles the wig-helmet during an intense session of love-making with one of his younger energetic girls? Does he place it on a hanger before, revealing his true nature or does he keep it on, desperately trying to keep it in place during the act? Much to contemplate indeed.

I need to go home...

2011-10-01T09:26:00.002+09:00

Heard earlier today as I was forced to share a ride with a woman apparently from Utah, constantly talking to the driver as we drove around in Maine...
"So yeah, I really think that Utah is a rising state, we got all kinds of events"
and...
(to driver) "I don't see any basements, don't you have any basements here in Maine?"
Driver: "We do, but they're usually under the houses"
Utah Lady: "Oh, that's why I haven't seen any!"

I need to go back home...

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Back in the USA

2011-09-26T09:24:00.000+09:00

First of all, I should apologize for the lack of posting recently, it looks like September might hit an all-time low in number of posts for a given month... Really sorry about that and rest assured that it's not because of a lack of ideas, inspiration and willingness, these last few weeks I have had to do some travel in Japan for business where time to blog has been quite limited.

Yesterday I arrived to the USA for a week of meetings in the corporate head office on the east coast. A time difference of 12 hours gives it a slightly surreal feeling as the days have turned completely upside down.

So far I am already getting slightly annoyed with the cheery waiters/waitresses and gotten served a portion of food large enough to sustain 4 Japanese salarymen for the better part of a month. I've also gotten ripped off by a taxi driver who sensed that I was just fresh off the banana boat and getting annoyed with the tipping custom here in the US... More to follow later on....

Defining Childhood Moments of My Life

2011-09-15T21:50:00.000+09:00

Now I'm old and withered

As a special treat, I thought I should share with you some of those special occasions that have made me the man that I am today and I strongly remember even though it was long ago...

Going to the Museum of Natural History with my father and brother at age 4 or so and standing fascinated staring at the collection of mutated specimens pickled in formaldehyde, the siamese twin baby and the two headed snake I strongly remembered and how I wondered why they didn't just make the whole museum about that stuff (I do still wonder actually)
Reading a Moomin comic at age six or so and realizing that I had my first pre-pubescent crush on the Snork Maiden (that has passed, the later crush on the Smurfette remains a little)
Around the same age when Dad brought home our first computer (a ZX81 home computer) and letting us play a video game where you were hunted by an invisible monster in an invisible labyrinth (yeah, no graphics at all) but I've been hooked on games ever since
When my brother played a tape with a Pet Shop Boys song that he had recorded from the coolest radioshow at the time (we only had three channels in Sweden, one played classical music, the other was all boring talk and the third one sometimes played pop) and getting so fascinated by the sound of electronic music (that never really let up either)
Going with Mom to her local Japanese foods shop in Stockholm at age 9 or so and walking around bored, looking into their freezer with frozen food and being freaked out when I realize that they had a huge Octopus in there (don't eat the stuff, I take it out of the takoyaki)
Reading the last Superman Story "Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow" before they rebooted the whole DC universe at age ten or so and feeling oddly emotionally moved by the story (this was the time when no one died, the girls didn't have huge boobs and Superman mostly fought with a cowboy on a winged horse or some gay looking guy with thigh-high boots, and hardly carried any emotional weight). It remained with me so much that once when I was visiting home from University I spent the better half of a day digging through the childhood comic collection to try and find it and see if it really was as moving as I remembered it. A few years later I found it and realized that it was written by Alan Moore who I had been a long time fan of, so all the pieces came together
Visiting Japan for the first time with my mom at the age of 15 and almost immediately getting the odd feeling that I had somehow came home, in a place I hardly knew

Ok, maybe I should have included marrying Mrs. Sunshine, having Toddler Sunshine and getting my iPad (in no particular order) but those are not really childhood moments, so I leave them out. But there you have it, everything you need to know about me comes from these moments (but no, Mrs. Sunshine doesn't look anything like the Snork Maiden)!

Another one for the little one

2011-09-14T22:06:00.000+09:00

It's pretty great!

I've settled in very well with life with my iPad, although the most intense and passionate affair has calmed down, my iPad has become a trusted friend and companion. Ok, maybe sometimes I download a few too many apps that actually are completely useless, but since they cost nothing or next to nothing it's really no big deal anyway and I just delete them when I get bored with them.

A few weeks earlier I got the brilliant idea to download some apps for small kids, interactive kid's songs and shit, to see if those could help pacify and entertain Toddler Sunshine. It worked... In fact it worked a little too well... Every time she sees me holding the iPad she immediately drops everything and very determined makes her way to where I'm sitting, forcefully climb up in my lap, starts staring at the screen and if nothing exciting shows up within five seconds she puts her filthy fingers all over the screen trying to get to the excitement. Her favorite app at the moment is "Talking Carl" as she seem to somewhat have figured out that it repeats the sounds she makes in a high-pitched voice (Toddler Sunshine's voice is quite high-pitched to begin with...).

So, I did the only thing I could do... I recently ordered another iPad, this one white and only 16GB compared to mine of 64GB (no 3G for me, I'm connected enough with the smartphone) for Mrs. Sunshine to have at home for herself and to give her a tool to tame the baby as I bring mine with me for the commute. I don't see myself as an Apple fanboy, but can't deny that I love the iPad!

Degrees of urgency

2011-09-08T21:30:00.000+09:00

You know where this is from, right?

The other day at work I was faced with the filing of some essential paperwork and received some help from the assistant of the office. As I had basically finished filling out the forms but felt a bit confused on the urgency level as I was faced with three options: "standard", "speedy" and "urgent" written on the form to cross one in. As I asked the assistant for advice the conversation went something like this:

Salaryman: (slightly puzzled) Hey, for this, what level of urgency should I pick? It's not that urgent, but it can't take forever either?
Assistant: (cheery) Mark "urgent", we always do that since they never get to it otherwise.
Salaryman: (slightly hesitant) You do that? But isn't there a risk that other more really urgent stuff gets delayed then...?
Assistant:(still cheery) Everyone always do "urgent" so it just gets done in the order it comes in.
Salaryman:(feeling the pull of the corporate void) Oh, I see, maybe they should divide "urgent" into "urgent", "very urgent" and "extremely urgent" then instead?
Assistant:(thoughtful) Hmmm... Maybe that would be good actually.
Salaryman: (getting into it) Yeah, and then they can just remove all the options except the urgent ones since no one uses it anyway

Assistant: (thinking deeper) Yes, we could do that since it's no point to keep the other options

Salaryman: (pleased with myself as the lunacy trap is set) Yeah, exactly, and when there's only the three urgent left they could be renamed to "standard", "speedy" and "urgent" instead!

Assistant: (looking confused) No? That would not work as there is only one degree of urgent then?

Salaryman: (deciding that enough is enough) Yeah, you're right, didn't think of that, how stupid of me! I'll just check urgent then!

Always nice with some good 'ol fashioned corporate insanity!

The Fake Beers of Japan - Happoushuu

2011-09-07T22:07:00.001+09:00

However fake beer is not good for kids

The subject of the Japanese "fake beer" called 発泡酒う　"happoushuu" has probably been discussed about so many times that it's a bit boring and unimaginative to bring it up here in this usually so groundbreaking blog, but I'll do it anyway, encouraged by the comments in the previous post.

Most people reading this blog might already be quite familiar with Japan and know of this nasty little bastard half-brother of real beer. For the record, I should probably say that I generally like the regular real Japanese beer. The three big brands Asahi, Kirin and Sapporo make quite good light beer comparable with good European brands. When it comes to darker, heavier beer the Japanese have some ways to go though, but I don't particularly mind since I prefer the lighter beer in any case.

The thing here in Japan is that beer comes in a special tax bracket which is a bit higher than that of other alcoholic beverages (I'm not completely sure why this is the case though...). So if comparing a pre-bottled cocktail with a beer with the same alcohol percentage, the beer end up something like 30% more expensive due to the added tax slapped on top. What the sly Japanese beer makers set out to do to work around this tax problem was to brew "beer" with a malt percentage just below the official limit defined for beer and use substitute for malt to cover the rest of the brew. These beer variants are not allowed to be called "beer" as they fall outside the formal Japanese definition and have received the name "happoushuu" which means something nondescript as "sparkling" or "foaming" alchol. Japanese official definitions aside, I think that it could be argued that it's actually beer, albeit low quality as the use of malt substitute distort some of the beer taste. You can read up more here on Wikipedia if you happen to be interested in the history of these type of drinks (hey, some stuff was new to me too).

For a visitor and/or non-Japanese speaker it can be really confusing as these fake beers look deceptively like regular beers and have product names as close to something beer sounding as possible. All the big beer makers carry a large fake beer portfolio, sometimes with can design very similar to their more premium quality beer cans. The big give-away is of course that the price is considerably lower (about 150jpy for a fake beer while the real deal goes for 230jpy for a 330ml can).

"So, what's the problem then?" you might think. Well, let me tell you what the problem is, although the quality of the fake beers has considerably improved in the last decades (ten years ago they were pretty foul), they still carry with them an aftertaste that you don't get with real beers and they give a hangover that's not in adequate relation to the amount of beer consumed (granted, this might have been improved upon in later years without me knowing since I avoid the fake beer like the plague since many years back).

When I have guests over at the salaryman base of operations, I always make a point of buying the real deal and not cheaping out with fake beer. The problem is that sometimes when visiting friends you get these fake beers shoved on you with the words "here Salaryman, have a beer!". Sadly enough, it seems like these fake beers have become the norm for most people at home and the times I get offered a real beer is getting more and more rare... Thankfully you still get served real beer at restaurants and bars, even though some extremely cheap "drink as much as you want" sometimes are suspected of not serving the real deal...

As a Salaryman, it goes without saying that I like beer (it's almost a requirement) and I try to stay as far away as possible from these fake beers as I can. Sure, there is a smaller financial gain in switching to the fake beers, but before I do that there are other less essentials corners that can be cut, such as lowering the quality of toddler Sunshine's food and removing non-essentials such as Mrs. Sunshine's massage therapist and her visits to the hair salon. It's all about priorities and I've got mine straight!

"Sit like you Shit" - My Favorite Japanese Words

2011-09-05T19:28:00.000+09:00

Maybe this is actually worth a separate label, but since I've just done a few posts on the subject of my favorite words in Japanese I can't really be bothered...

The way it's done!

But I thought I should highlight one very popular way to relax and chill out here in Japan, which also has a very suitable name given to it. I will let the picture to the right illustrate this for you, demonstrated by a true master in the art. The word in question is うんこ座り "Unko Suwari" and literally translates into something like "crapping sitting" as the way of chilling out without a chair is reminiscent of how you need to place yourself to utilize the traditional Japanese toilet.

This particular way of sitting works very well with a cigarette in one hand and a cheap Japanese "fake" beer (the happoushuu stuff that is very close to beer but can avoid the higher beer taxation through a lower malt percentage in the brewing). It just reeks of class, I'm working on it but haven't yet nailed it down perfectly but will keep working on it!

Life, Death and Murder in the Chiba Suburbs

2011-08-31T21:52:00.001+09:00

"...and when I'm finished, bring the yellow tape

To tape off the scene of the slaughter"

A while back we had a tragic incident in our neighborhood as the husband of one of our neighbors apparently passed away in a car accident, leaving the wife and young kids behind (granted, the source of the info was the infamous Mama Mafia so he might as well have run of to support the uprising in north Africa for all I know). As sad as it might sound we had no real connection to the family as the accident happened just at the time they were about to move in and we only met them once when they came around for greetings with towels (yes, so we had an ominous feeling from the start). So the house has remained empty for more than a year and we really didn't think about it much more than the occasional talk about whether someone new would move in or not.

Then the other day a cleaning crew was at their house and was sorting out the jungle that the garden had turned into making it likely that something is about to happen with the house. The conversation I had with Mrs. Sunshine went something like this:

Salaryman: I guess they'll sell the house, the wife probably need the money for herself and the kids now that the husband is gone?
Mrs. Sunshine: (matter of factly) Actually there was an insurance included in the contract, so if the breadwinner dies the insurance pays off the loan, so she should be ok.
Salaryman:(surprised) Huh? That's great actually, I didn't realize that but good to know that you and the baby don't have to struggle with that if anything would happen to me.
Mrs. Sunshine: (neutral) Yeah, I thought so too...

(a few seconds of ominous silence)

Salaryman: (jokingly, on the surface) So I guess I should be a bit careful, huh?
Mrs. Sunshine: (not letting anything show) Why?
Salaryman: Well, if you would murder me you could get a lot of money through that insurance!
Mrs. Sunshine: (immediately without a second of hesitation) Yeah, I totally know, but I just don't wanna go to jail?
Salaryman:(feeling constructive) Well you could murder me in a sneaky way, I would totally murder me if I were you! Why not some rare poison that the police is too dumb to figure out?

Mrs. Sunshine: (thoughtfully) That's true... I guess I could do it smart without getting caught...

(another few seconds of uncomfortable silence)

Salaryman: (nervously) Hey! I'm only joking here, you wouldn't murder me, right?!

Mrs. Sunshine: (a bit too long pause before speaking) Of course not, I would never murder you, I love you (big smile)

From now on Toddler Sunshine will have a bit of everything I eat, just to be safe. The whiskey and chili oil might be a tad bit too early for her, but it's for the common good!

Word gets around...

2011-08-29T20:50:00.001+09:00

Beware the Mafia!

I do realize that in this blog I seem to start things that I don't really follow up on properly... On my "at some point when I have time, energy and inspiration" list there is to do a follow up post on the "buying a house in Japan" series, as well as "making babies in Japan" and there's also a post on Japanese otaku and how they actual became useful during the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami disaster. But at this stage, the combined force of the summer heat and the stress and stuff going on with recently changing jobs, I have to admit that I am lacking in time, energy and inspiration....

It's a bit depressing to see the visitor numbers dipping a bit in the recent months (up until recently, I've always had a very slow but steady growth in monthly visitors, but hey, since I started the blog the first year with 10 visitors a day there's plenty of room to grow...) and a few "followers" also seem to be dropping off to bigger and better places, but that's something that comes with the territory of the slower pace of posting I guess.

Well, that wasn't really intended to be the main topic of today's post. Today's topic is actual a little follow up on life as a house owner here in Japan, although not chronologically correct at the stage where the story is now. But anyway, we bought our house in an area with a bunch of new built houses clustered together in a little community. The Salaryman family were among the first people who moved into one of the 45 something houses in the cluster.

It quite quickly became obvious that most of the people who had bought houses in the area were somewhat similar to us in terms of age and family. Basically everyone in our neighborhood is ~30 something with one or two small kids (and others on the way, I think there are at least two women currently pregnant). That everyone is new also means that there still is no clear hierarchy among the housewives (as most are as the kids are small) and alliances are still being forged.

However, something that we refer to as the "Mama Mafia" has emerged and is a cluster of around ~10 of the women in the area with kids in similar age. Previously, they used to have their gossip meetings just outside our house. Before Baby Sunshine was born, they were a little cold to Mrs. Sunshine, but as soon as the baby came into play, they seemed more eager to recruit her into the mafia. She has so far managed to avoid becoming a full time patched in member, but is something like an "associated member" of the Mafia at this point.

The amount of gossip that goes around the Mafia is also quite astounding. A few weeks earlier Toddler Sunshine had a bit of a fever, not extremely high, but still high enough to warrant a visit to the doctor for some nice drugs and a few days of taking it easy in the house. As Mrs. Sunshine emerged from that and met with the Mafia when Toddler Sunshine was up and about again she found out that word on the street was that Toddler Sunshine had been infected with some form of really dangerous killer virus and had been between life and death for a week (even more surprising since Mrs. Sunshine barely had told anyone about the babies little cold). More recently we also heard how the area we live in is really dangerous and that a woman had been violently abducted from the local 7-eleven, but a quick scan of the news showed nothing of the kind (and such an event would be nationwide news).

Mrs. Sunshine is keeping to the strategy to stay on the good side of the Mafia but avoid getting too entangled in all the scheming and dirty business that is going on. Recently a non-mafia member mama approached her when the Mafia wasn't looking and was trying to make friends and half-whispered "I'm also a bit left out of the group, just like you" to which Mrs. Sunshine barely managed to repress expressing that she was as involved as she'd like to be... Compared to this, the politics in the office are mild mannered and fun...

Odds and Ends (to borrow a subtitle from Chris)

Japan have a new prime minister and I can't really muster up any enthusiasm for it at all, Noda is his name apparently, but he'll probably be gone in a year anyway so no need to remember it...
As a father, I am starting to worry a bit as Toddler Sunshine shows no interest at all in toddlers her own age, nor older girls that want to play with her, but older boys (well, for her "older" means age 2-5) seem drawn to her and she giggles like a little girl when they flock around her...
I am getting quite annoyed with blogger as I for some reason have not been able to post comments for some reason this last week; I've been trying to comment on Bigger in Japan, Corinne's, Project Me and Saraf recently but kept getting refused to log in (and not being able to post "anonymously" with e-mail and website link either for some reason), this obviously happen AFTER I've written the comment and then after two or three tries of rewriting it I just give up... My apologies, but rest assured that there should be a few very insightful comment in there!

The porn video booths of the Kintaro Group in Japan are not taking one for the team!

2011-08-26T21:20:00.000+09:00

The other day, I passed through Shinjuku and came across a sign for the Kintaro porn video group (ok, to be more specific, this seems to be one for their "Momotaro" brand, but there doesn't seem to be any difference between them apart from the name). They're everywhere so I usually don't really take any notice of them since the basic stuff they advertise never really change, but as I was waiting for the traffic lights to switch I took a little closer look bored as I was.

This is how the sign looked like and I took the liberty of marking the place that I found most of interest...

You should also keep in mind that we here in Eastern Japan are still in the middle of the whole "save electrocity" scare where everyone is encouraged to turn down the aircon, turn off all the lights and generally turn off everything that needs electricity all the time. So far, Tokyo has been doing good and there has been no need for any rolling blackouts, and as long as it continues this way we should be ok as the cooler autumn is now not too far away.

However... What does Kintaro advertise?! Well, they boldly state that they provide really cool rooms (and have a girl in a bikini top inviting salarymen to come and cool down). First of all, advertising "cool" rooms is a bold slap in the face of every person and industry here in Tokyo that are suffering and sweating our way through the summer for the common good. But when you start look into it a bit more, for the Kintaro porn video booths to have "cool" rooms means that they not only have to have the setting on the aircon to quite cool to begin with, but they also have to compensate from the heat emanating from a whole bunch of salarymen jacking off in unison in their little booths and compensate for that (I would guess that would be around ~5 degrees C or so extra).

So yeah, hey! Kintaro, thanks for helping out, NOT! And to believe that they dare to call themselves the "friend of the salaryman". Oh, and for those of you new here, don't miss the video from the Kintaro Group I posted way back, it's a gem (here)!

Farewell Shimada Shinsuke!

2011-08-24T22:07:00.001+09:00

I'm not a huge Japanese entertainment/celebrity buff as I live a typical Salaryman family life here in Japan, watching the Japanese news, morning shows and occasionally, when I'm too tired to check out a real TV channel, bits and pieces of a Japanese Variety Show. So, after more than ten years here I know my way around the basic celebrities.

Wada Akiko and Shimada enjoying the spotlight!

In the Japanese world of so celebrities, there are a few chosen ones that have achieved almost God-like status in the Japanese world of TV. A few that comes to mind are singer/actress/whatever/tv host Wada Akiko, Tamori, Beat Takeshi, Sanma Akashiya and Shimada Shinsuke (I just noticed I wrote the names Japanese style - family name first, can't be bothered to link information about them, if you want to know more you can just google the names). There are probably a few more that could be added to that list of the "elite" and grand-old-men/woman of the Japanese TV entertainment industry, people that up-and-coming celebrities are expected to pay proper respect to.

Of the people above, I've always strongly disliked Shimada, he seemed like an arrogant asshole that got off on making fun of people, using his status as celebrity to put other people down while trying to uphold an image of a upstanding man who places importance on proper manners and respect, if a little mischievous. However, a few years back, the first cracks in the facade started to show when he physically abused a female staff during the shooting of one of his shows (if I remember correctly, it involved slaps in the face, pulling of hair, general shouting and face-spitting, all generously handed out by Shimada). He got a slap on the wrist with a few months of being quarantined from his shows, but the Japanese people seemed to forgive him as he made a comeback and reclaimed his fame.

However, this morning, I awoke to the pleasant news of an urgent press conference (those urgent ones always signal that something entertaining has happened) where Shimada announced his retirement from the entertainment industry due to connections with the Yakuza. From the official story, it doesn't sound particularly exciting, apparently an old friend of his joined the Japanese mob (after they had become friends) and through the friend, Shimada had occasional contacts with a high ranking Yakuza and after this coming to the knowledge of the agency he works for (the power of these "agencies" is another completely different story, but there most be real and researched articles about it out there) they came to the agreement that it's not suitable for him to have those type of contacts and therefore they came to the "agreement" that he should retire from the entertainment industry. As I strongly dislike him, I'm all for that and never again having to worry about turning the TV on and be met by his arrogant looking mug.

But... there must be much more to this than the official story and it's getting me really curious. I have severe trouble imagining that only this would cause the agency to take such drastic measures, particularly as he's such a heavyweight and moneymaker for them. During the press conference there came some vague hints from Shimada that at one point the Yakuza had "helped him" solve a problem that he had. Maybe it's only me, but I'm getting quite curious on the nature of this "problem" and exactly how the Yakuza could "solve" it for him... I also suspect that there was some blackmailing involved in some form...

Well, post the Noripi deal followed by the Kabuki Actor turned-violent-ashtray-drinking-beat-up-victim deal it's been quite dull on the celebrity scandal front, but this has potential to become more amusing. I'm just a little worried that the press has too much respect for Shimada to dig deeper in it (the Yakuza friends probably doesn't encourage it either...). Well, in any case, good riddance and you will not be missed by me Shimada!

Penis Mnemonics

2011-08-21T17:46:00.000+09:00

A magnificent BALLE substitute

Joining a new company is a bit like joining a cult where you're the new guy who's not yet up to speed on what everything is. One particular thing in my new company is the excessive use of abbreviations and special jargong for basically everything they do (I have the feeling that in many cases they deliberately deviate from accepted industry language just to make the newbies confused).

So now I am trying to memorize about >100 different abbreviations for the products, intended use of the products, company meetings, internal titles, diseases and medical techniques as well as a host of names for ongoing projects. But what I fear most is not the hurdles I have in front of me until I get it all in my brain, no, what I fear is when I become one of "them" and forget that it's all made up and casually throw it around, forgetting the official terminology in favor of the corporate one...

However, one project has showed to quite easy to remember as the abbreviation turns out to be the same as a Swedish slang word for penis. So, at least "Project BALLE" will remain firmly in my head. I usually giggle at least a little in my head when I see it written down.

I guess we all have to pitch in...

2011-08-15T21:47:00.000+09:00

Do as it says!

It's not that often that I post pictures of interesting "Engrish" that I have encounter here in in Japan, but this poster, found in a business hotel in Kanazawa was pretty great and topical too, so I couldn't resist posting it.

I'm not really sure what the poster is trying to tell me, that it wants me to save electrocity seems feasible, but it also seems to urge me to save cool biz and not smile much? I guess we all have to do our part!

"Hi, my name is Bitchiko"

2011-08-14T17:50:00.000+09:00

We're astounded by her feats of crankiness

When it comes to women's names here in Japan, it's quite common for the names to end in "ko" as in popular names such as Yoko, Keiko, Atsuko and a host of other names. However, don't get fooled into thinking that every name that ends in "-ko" means that it's a woman/girl as there are male names that also have this ending (although, a tell-tale sign for beginners is that the male names are usually a bit longer). For those taking notes, the "ko" at the end of most women's names are written with the character "子" and means child so the meaning of the name usually literally means "child of" (the meaning of the first character).

So, yeah, with that educational segment taking care of, Mrs. Sunshine has recently given (former Baby) Toddler Sunshine a separate name for her when she makes a big fuzz and generally being a nuisance with refusing to do something. The name is "Bitchiko" and apparently at her former job there was a particularly bitchy lady that gave birth to this very descriptive nickname. Granted, literally implementing the meaning "child of..." for Bitchiko when used for Toddler Sunshine carries with it some not very good implications for Mrs. Sunshine... Still, it's a good name and can be quite descriptive at times.

...in other news, the heat is still relentless here in Tokyo now... A weekend like this it's hard to muster up any energy to do anything at all but to lie flat and complain about the heat...

Ayaman Japan - "Poipoipoipoipoipopi~"

2011-08-12T21:32:00.000+09:00

For lack of energy to do any real significant post that would stimulate and challenge you, instead I thought that I should highlight one of the latest minor fads here in Japan. The girl trio Ayaman Japan with their hit song Poipoipoipoipoipopi~ or "ぽいぽいぽいぽぽいぽいぽぴー" as it's written in Japanese. Take a look here:

I must admit that I find them and the song and group quite entertaining in the absurdity and relative outrageousness. Apparently the girls started out as "party entertainers" for drinking parties to get people going (and yeah, I can actually see how that would work pretty well) and now recently hit some minor fame with their infectious "ninninninnin" and "poipoipoi" thing. One of the girls is also officially in charge of "boobs" in the group, something that I feel plays to their benefit.

Mrs. Sunshine hates them with a vengeance because it's so stupid and ridicilous, me on the other hand often can't resist stuff done in bad taste, and compared to all the AKB48 it's a bit refreshing.

My sincere apologies!!!

2011-08-08T21:24:00.001+09:00

Easy! I'd let Aquaman live!

I just realized that we're now already into August in a Tokyo that has "power saving" propaganda constantly on TV, posters around town and constant reminders on the Internet, and I still haven't written my traditional seasonal "It's way too hot and I want to get out of here" post!

I know that for many of my readers, that post is the highlight of the year on my blog and I can't believe that I have still not written this post. And it's hot... ... really hot this summer. The long train ride is almost unbearable as the air conditioning is turned down to a bare minimum in the packed train, today was sunny, humid and almost 35 degrees Celsius making sweat come gushing out of pores of my body that I didn't even know could do that. Previous years, taking refuge in a refrigerator cold store (usually resulting in the annual "summer cold" after going from dripping to sweat into freezer cold store), but now, even the stores have turned down their airconditioning to a mere 28 degrees...

No longer is the office any refugee to speak of either... To begin with, the temperature is set to 28 degrees and gradually lower it as the day progresses and to top it off, they turn it off completely at 17:30. The idea was to make people leave earlier, but since this is a Japanese office (even though the company is foreign) and getting people to leave on time is next to impossible and add to that me feeling some significant pressure to not be among the first to leave as the I'm the new guy and you have some serious sweating going on that doesn't let up until I get comfortably back to the Salaryman HQ.

So, in short, it's sweltering hot all the time when I'm not at home (we do not take any extreme measures when it comes to power saving...) and with little Toddler Sunshine we don't really have any easy escape to cooler places lined up for us either... Two more months of this and it should be getting better... So yeah, it's hot, it's really really hot...

The Corporate garbage dump

2011-08-07T18:05:00.000+09:00

One of the big ones...

Although the myth of Japanese companies offering "life-time employment" has since many years ago been crushed, I think it is fair to say that generally, the larger Japanese corporations are very reluctant to get rid of any staff unless in really dire straits. Also, ending up in such a situation where staff needs to be downsized is seen as a major failure and the last resort.

In my previous company, we had one guy who had been recruited from the healthcare subsidiare of such a major firm. The change was one from a very stable secure job to one of uncertainty and a solid history of several cycles of downsizing world wide. He seemed to be ok with this (although I doubt that he really understood what he was getting himself into...).

We are quite friendly and during a recent after-work drinks session I was a bit curious on the actual situation in the huge corporation he came from and where the completely useless and moronic people ended up. It went something like this:

Salaryman: So yeah, if someone's completely useless and they want to get rid of them, what do they usually do?

Friend: (upbeat) Well, they usually get sent down to one of the less prestigious subsidiaries!

Salaryman: (interested) Ok, but say that the person is so useless, although not doing anything that legally warrants the person to be fired?

Friend: (thoughtful) Well... I have heard of people like that... They usually just get bumped downwards in the corporate subsidiary hierarchy...

Salaryman: (curious) So, ok, but was there such a thing as the conglomerate toilet where all the useless turds ended up after being proven useless in all the other places?

Friend: (lightning up) Oh yeah! That was the subsidiary in charge of the facility maintenance! That's where all the morons ended up, that's the end of the line! They were completely useless and even managers there earned less than assistants in the healthcare company!

So, there you have it! If you encounter someone who works with facility management, they probably just haven't been flushed down properly!

The most unnecessary loan word in the Japanese language!

2011-08-03T21:33:00.000+09:00

Raisu Krinkles!

I'm a bit too beat to go through my old posts and link here now, but my loyal readers might remember that I have discussed the enthusiasm that the Japanese have for loan words borrowed from English and making up new and unique faux-English abbreviations.

I usually don't mind the English words sprinkled in (but mostly pronounced in such a way that a native English speaker might have problems hearing that it's originally an English word) but there are some that are clearly unnecessary as the Japanese language has words that carry exactly the same meaning and is easier to say for a native Japanese speaker.

One example that comes to mind is the use of "ベター" (Betaa) from the English word "Better". So when saying "this is better" instead of the regular way of saying it ("のほうがいいです") they replace the Japanese word with the bastardized version of "better" ("のほうがベターです”). I don't particularly mind this use, but I find it quite amusing and use it as often as I can.

However, the most unnecessary loan word in the Japanese language is... ... ... "raisu": "Rice" pronounced in Japanese. Remember that this is a country where the whole food culture is built on the foundation of rice. I dare you to find a Japanese person who doesn't like rice and most people eat it basically every day, many with three meals. Baby Sunshine quite frequently refuses to eat anything else, showing that her quarter of white genes are fighting a losing battle. So for this, the most fundamental and basic of all foodstuff in Japan, it is not uncommon to use the English word for it here in Japan.

I think that this would be somewhat comparable with Eskimos importing the English words "Ice" and "snow" for daily use instead of the words in the native language...

Hiding in plain sight...

2011-07-30T16:02:00.001+09:00

Sometimes it's prudent to hide

This ties in a little with a couple of previous posts where I talked a bout the "gaijin nod" greeting and my, not always completely clear ethnicity.

Earlier this week I found myself on a business trip to the Kyoto area and as I was walking from the meeting venue during a short break I was quickly approached by a confused looking female tourist who had gotten lost and wanted to ask how to get to some temple in the area. Her relief in finding an English speaker was quite short lived though as I had no idea as to the location of the place she wanted to go (to add to the intial confusion, she was Asian-American and looked basically Japanese in my eyes). I didn't bother to explain that I wasn't Japanese, just that I "wasn't from the area".

Later in the day as I was heading home in the Shinkansen train I saw a quite confused looking tourist trying to find his seat and unsuccessfully trying to ask several passengers without really getting any help due to language problems. As I've myself many years ago also have been a tourist here without understanding much Japanese, I do make a small effort to help tourists on the basis that I would have appreciated the same.

As he was looking very confused I called out to him, checked out his ticket (and yep, he had an unreserved seat ticket and was in a car for reserved seats) and told him where the unreserved cars were but that he likely could just take an empty seat in the half-full train if he just moved if someone came. He seemed very relieved to have gotten some help and said "thank you so much, you're the first Japanese person I've met this trip that can speak good English!". Fearing that revealing my non-Japaneseness would force me into a long uninteresting conversation I just shrugged it off with "well, it's Japan" and demonstratively immersed myself in the iPad.

So it's almost like having a secret identity that I hide and protect, but unfortunately I don't have any kind of special powers or anything noteworthy, but the secret identity can at least protect me from tourist related conversations which is not that bad in the end.

Ads

Hell - Redefined

2011-07-26T21:01:00.000+09:00

Imagine me as "US" and the kids as the kids

In a previous post over two years ago (see here) I defined hell as "Hell is the 6 hour Shinkansen train ride from Fukuoka to Tokyo, stuck in the smoking car". Up until now I have seen no need to revise this definition although it probably should be mentioned that this specific torment is now off the map as they have implemented 100% non-smoking cars in the Shinkansen nowadays.

However, as of today I feel that I need to redefine "hell" as I experienced something much much worse... The new definition is "Hell is to in the return commuting train during rush hour, find myself in a car occupied by a vicious horde of 5-6 year old kids who scream, climb all over you and some delicate stuff in the bag and generally won't shut up and sit still for even a minute". The train was too crowded to escape much and besides, they had infected the whole train car. Naive as I was, I was hoping that they would get off pretty early and clear the car completely, but this was not the case as they were all remaining when I got off.

In comparison, I'd rather take a six hour ride in the (now extinct) smoking car of a Shinkansen bullet train than endure this ever again...

Anuses, testicles - My Favorite Medical Devices

2011-07-25T21:20:00.000+09:00

Bonus point if you recognize the Doctor! Hint: His family
also gave the name to a high quality tractor brand!

Working in the healthcare industry, sometimes you come across some interesting and slightly different products that people are actually passionate about while I have to keep myself from giggling, childish as I am.

Here are my favorites:

Artificial Anuses - Ok, when you read up on it, it really isn't as amusing as it sounds, but still can't help giggling when I hear the name...
Testicle Implants - A smaller offspring off the artificial beauty business, you lost a testicle to cancer and don't feel the same with an empty sack? Well, why not get yourself a silicone testicle implant? Last time I checked, they were available in three sizes
3 Liter sized boob implants - Legendary boob implants that a European company apparently custom made for a pornstar who wanted to go bigger and better than the competition. I'm still waiting for those 3 liter testicle implants...
Enema Syringes - Ok, these are more normal, but still remember strongly when I was in a meeting with a guy from a propspective partner company and how passionate he was about their newest enema syringe and how "smooth" it went in... We never did any business in the end, but I'm sure it was a great product!

I'm sure there's plenty more freaky stuff that I have yet to encounter, but if I Salaryman on I guess I'll run into them sooner or later!

The "Gaijin Nod" Controversy

2011-07-23T20:43:00.000+09:00

They wear G-strings to war

Now I'm getting myself into a highly inflammatory and heated topic - the Gaijin Nod and how to handle it... For those of you unsure what this means, the "Gaijin Nod" is the occurrence of foreigners living in Japan passing each other on the street (or wherever) to give a nod as to recognize a fellow foreigner in Japan.

The "Gaijin Nod" does usually not extend to tourists (and it's fairly easy to see who's a tourist and who's a resident foreigner) and does not really exist as a real phenomena in the Tokyo area due to the comparatively large amount of foreigners.

It seems like some foreign residents here in Japan embrace the habit and give the Gaijin Nod enthusiastically, but quite a few people take the opposite stance and deliberately out of their way to look the other way to avoid having to acknowledge the other foreigner.

Personally, having spent some time in the country side as an exchange student ages ago, initially embraced the concept of the Gaijin Nod, being relatively new in the country and not that great Japanese ability there was something comforting in it. But my ethnically ambiguous appearance quickly made things quite confusing. At times, I would do the nod and only get met with a skeptical frown as the fellow foreigner probably only saw a Japanese person and didn't recognize me as a foreigner. This happened enough times that I completely stopped with it but then I also sometimes got faced with the opposite - a foreigner approaches but I just carried on forward and then I get a Gaijin Nod, but with my brain failing to process this until I had already passed the person, making me look arrogant.

So yeah, conceptually, I'm quite ok with the Gaijin Nod but felt more or less forced to stop with it and now, living in Tokyo it's no longer any issue. A complicated topic indeed...

The Japanese female soccer team and the butches!

2011-07-20T20:45:00.000+09:00

I just love this one...

I think that most people saw the news on the Japanese female soccer team winning the world cup the other day after a quite tense second half against the US team, ending up with a decision through penalty kicks. I was trying to sleep through this as I still felt a bit bitter about the Japanese team beating the Swedish team a few days earlier, but the baby had brought up Mrs. Sunshine and I could follow the game through her enthusiastic cheering and cursing (as a former "almost made it pro" tennis player she really gets into watching sports...).

In any case, I think this type of good news was just what Japan needed with the aftermath of the quake and the ongoing power saving propaganda at the moment. Never mind that most people didn't know that the female soccer world cup was ongoing until Japan made it to the semi-finals.

As the team returned home the other day, they received a heroes welcoming with media, fans all over the place at the airport (again, never mind that when they left basically the only ones to see them off was their families, if that even).

Yesterday they participated in one of the morning news shows we usually have on in the mornings in the Salaryman household ("Mezamashi tv" for those familiar with Japanese morning shows). The whole team was in the studio and answered pre-recorded questions from fans. My favorite question came from a little girl who asked the team "Do you have boyfriends and do guys like girls who play soccer?". To put it all in a frame of reference, the team looks something like this...

Can you spot Butch Dykeman?

...so yeah, you can judge for yourself, but to me at least half the team looks pretty butch (hey, that's perfectly fine though)... But the funny thing was the reaction when the team heard the question, there were quite a few grins that seemed to say "if that little girl only knew". Unfortunately Baby Sunshine distracted me so I missed how they handled the question. In Japan, female homosexuality is not something that is very openly talked about and being open about it would make any advertisement deals more difficult...

(Hey, I might be completely wrong though, maybe all of them are straight as a flagpole but just look a little... ... manly?)

Weapons of Mass Distraction - Surviving the Commuter War

2011-07-17T18:06:00.000+09:00

Those of you who have been following my series on the commuter terrorists waging their war on the Tokyo train-lines, must realize that it would be foolish to venture out to the subway/train battleground without any weapons of my own.

After buying the house and increasing the commuting time, the need to stock up on defensive weapons became even more urgent. Now I have amassed quite the arsenal of Weapons of Mass Distraction to keep me somewhat entertained and shielded from the horrors of the commuting war. There are three primary weapons at my disposal;

1. The iPod

The iPod (not touch, the older version) comes into use mostly for listening to music during the trek to and from the station and while waiting for the train. If the train is extremely crowded and both hands are needed to hold my ground I use the iPod as a last-line defense. In the past I have also turned to audio books and podcasts/radio shows and although it is some relief, it does not completely shield me from the war. Although the iPod I own is capable of video playback, I find the screen to be too small to watch anything meaningful on.

2. The PSP

The PSP is probably my most utilized WMD as the relatively small size makes it comfortable to hold with one hand and can be managed even in very crowded trains. I very rarely use it to play games on, partly due to the lack of interesting games and partly due to the need to hold it with both hands, making it more difficult during crowded trains, instead I use it to watch downloaded TV shows (and sometimes movies). Assuming I have some fun/interesting stuff to watch this can be a very potent weapon and make me actually look forward to the train ride as time to watch TV shows is limited otherwise. Currently I'm watching the show Dexter as recommended by the Big Bro and I find it very much entertaining, but as I work my way through two episodes/day on the train I will finish up the available five seasons very soon and will need to find some other stuff... I am very much looking forward to Sony releasing the next-generation PSP "Vita" by the end of the year since I have hopes that some more amusing games will be available.

3. The iPad

Ok, generally speaking, the iPad is the greatest thing ever (or at least the iPad 2 that I have, have never used the first version) but it's not really optimized for the train battles as it is a bit too heavy to comfortably hold with one hand while under attack from all fronts. The iPad mostly come into use during those rare occasions when I get the chance to sit down and get a little more space and can use it to read comic books, books and play some of the more entertaining games I have for it.

If I realize that I have left the house forgetting any of the above I am in for a rough time... I do however only use my WMDs for defensive purposes and even keep the volume down reasonably low as to not disturb my comrade in arms.

Ok, normally I would be against racial profiling...

2011-07-15T21:11:00.000+09:00

If you look carefully, you can see him spitting

This morning, as I was making my merry way to the new office from the subway station I was very surprised to see the way packed with people standing in line for some sale or opening of a new one of the big Japanese electronic stuff store (can't remember if it was BicCamera, Yamada, Yodobashi or whatnot, doesn't really matter though).

I basically had to elbow my way against the tide and from the look of the people it seemed like a mix of mostly Japanese but also a quite significant number of Chinese tourists looking to spend some cash on Japanese electronics. I guess this means that nuclear scare that washed over the rest of Asia has calmed down now and they're coming back to pour their needed money into the limp Japanese economy.

To try and keep some form of order, employees of the store were spread out with a few meters distance with signs pointing in the right direction for the crowd to move in (not that it was moving an inch as far as I could see). But what I found quite amusing was that among the directional signs were also one employee with a sign saying "Please do not spit on the ground", first in Japanese and then under it in Chinese. The thing though is that basically noone spits here in Japan (apart from rebellious kids and Yakuza/Yakuza-wannabees and they very well know that it's not perceived as a nice thing to do) while it's more or less normal in many other Asian countries obviously including China (but to be fair, I haven't seen it in Singapore or Hong Kong and feel a bit unsure about Taiwan).

Ok, I have to give it to them, they did a real effort in not pointing anyone out by having it written in Japanese first, followed by Chinese. A sensitivity that I've rarely seen anywhere else, but I also have the feeling that in this particular case, they might as well had it just in Chinese...

The Dark Side of Salaryman...

2011-07-12T21:30:00.000+09:00

He's Evil!

I've been in the new company for less than two weeks and am going in very mild as I really don't know anything on how the company works, the personality of my colleagues (that well) and have a lot of work to do to come to grips with the products and extreme amount of complicated processes that seem to be in place for everything. So at this point, I'm extremely polite, keep the offensive jokes to myself and am probably perceived as a very careful and mild person. As the office is 100% Japanese, I also communicate only in Japanese which further enhances the politeness.

However, the other day we had a dinner with an American visitor over from the head office as we talked in English my "foreign" personality got turned on which is more dominant and in comparison, a lot more aggressive than how I interact with my Japanese colleagues at this point. I didn't really think much about it since it comes quite naturally to me when I interact with a Westerner in English.

However, apparently it made an impact on some of my colleagues who during an after-work beer session vividly told some other colleagues how different I had behaved and that I had shown the "Dark Side Salaryman" (he did mean it as a compliment though). I reassured him that in the not too far future they will be longing for the time when I was mild mannered and silent.

...changing jobs is for sure always an interesting experience but quite frustrating to have relearn everything when I used to know exactly how things were done...

Penis measurement - is this really appropriate?

2011-07-10T21:27:00.001+09:00

Pump the reservoir

Last week I participated in a sales meeting in the new company, followed by a quite rowdy dinner. As the "new and foreign bird" I obviously drew quite a bit of attention to myself as people were curious on the foreign Salaryman that had suddenly joined them. For the most part it was all fun and games and in a good atmosphere.

However, with quite large beer consumption follows the call of nature and a few times I felt the need to relieve myself. As it was a quite big group, there usually was quite the crowd of fellow salarymen by the bathroom. After my turn came up, I relieved myself without giving it much thought and as I was going to wash my hands I heard a few voices behind me calling out. "Hey, Salaryman, you're a foreigner, but your penis is not that big at all? How come?". My first reaction was one of slight confusion as to whether I had actually heard right (and surprise that my penis had actually been closely observed), followed by the second disappointment in the knowledge of the anatomy of the male reproductive organ.

Without much delay I shouted back "Hey, yeah, maybe it's not that big now, but I'm just taking a piss you know, when it's ready for battle it grows in size and be thankful that you never will see that since it's quite the item!".

This is the life of a foreign Salaryman in Japan...

User-Hostile Systems

2011-07-06T21:33:00.002+09:00

The latest OS

At current, I'm mostly stumbling about and trying to get my bearings around the new job. I still haven't found my next Cpt. Awkward BFF but people are generally quite nice and helpful as I sometimes feel like a little kid since I can't figure out how to use the printer in the correct way.

A lot of the time now is spent on trying to understand how things work, what all the actual formal process are and then also trying to figure out the informal culture while looking like I'm really having the time of my life. Nevermind the time I have to spend figuring out the drugs and products that I will be managing (and add all the diseases and complications that they are for that I need to get detailed knowledge of).

One huge success of the day was that I finally figured out how one part of the IT system worked; the part where I can request additional software online to be installed on my computer. The system was not very user-friendly and extremely difficult to navigate and figure out even for a person relatively used to computers, but what turned it outright user-hostile was when I finally successfully had logged the request and was transferred to a screen with large red letters (in English) saying **WARNING** and then in much smaller Japanese text under it: "Your request has successfully been filed".

I'm not really sure if I need to be looking over my shoulder now even though the software I requested is freeware and shouldn't piss anyone in the IT dep. off too much, but I can't say that I wasn't warned.

Under maintenance!

2011-07-03T18:55:00.001+09:00

Regular programming will resume momentarily

First of all, apologies for the lack of posting recently and responding to comments (as well as commenting on other blogs!) lately. Most of my time recently has been eaten up by everything that comes with the change of jobs and Baby Sunshine (who soon should be upgraded to "toddler Sunshine") so I've just been a tad too busy and tired lately, but it's all good.

I think/hope that I will be up and running at full speed again pretty soon but please bear with me a little longer!

The Foreign Boyfriend Pt. 2

2011-06-27T16:41:00.000+09:00

A beloved illegal Alien

(Check here for part 1 of this story)

...as the topic of Chieko's new boyfriends skin color had been finished, the questions now turned to the slightly more controversial topics of the boyfriends; 1. Illegal Alien status 2. Future career prospects and ability to support a family 3. 12 year age difference. At a first glance, it might look like three completely disconnected issues, but for the conspiratory minded it kinda creates an interesting scenario as A) Single Japanese women in their upper 30's are known to be more eager to get hitched, B) One way to possibly get a legal visa to Japan is to marry a Japanese woman (and even better, have a baby).

Considering that Chieko is known as a really nice girl/lady who sometimes is a bit naive and think the best of everyone, the general atmosphere in the group was that of strong skepticism. One of Mrs. Sunshine's girlfriends, Rie, is also very well known for completely lacking any form of checkpoint between her brain and her mouth and always ready to give her opinion any topic, she immediately took the lead in the interrogation which was something like this:

Rie: (with an extremely skeptical frown) How did you meet this dude to begin with?!
Chieko: (still with an air of happiness, not yet picking up on the general skepticism) A friend introduced us, she thought we would be such a great match.
Rie: (seems shocked) A friend? Introduce you to this guy, who's an illegal alien and working with garbage disposal and thought you would be a good match?
Chieko: (looking a bit confused) ...yes?
Rie: (bursts out laughing and pours herself another glass of wine) No! That's not a friend, that's something else (laughing to herself)
Mrs. Sunshine: (chips in as Chieko looks like she's about to burst into tears) Look Chieko, maybe you should just take it very slowly and not rush into things, he might just be out after a visa...
Chieko: (eyes red) yeah, you are probably... (interrupted)
Rie: (finished laughing but very eager) So wait a minute, why did he come to Japan in the first place?!
Chieko: (looking like a deer caught in the headlights of an 18tn truck) He came for his career...
Rie: (basically spraying out the wine in her mouth laughing) A career as an illegal immigrant working with garbage disposal?!
Chieko: (bursting into tear, sobbing) yes... (trying to say something more but keeps crying)
Mr. Salaryman: (trying to calm things down) Look, it's probably a pretty horrible job, but compared to what he can make in his own country it might be a lot of money so I can understand that
Chieko: (still crying, nodding)
Rie: (softening up a little as she seem to realize that she should ease up a little) Do you love him enough to be willing to go to Mali and live with him?
Chieko: (temporarily stopping crying) Maybe, I don't know...
Mr. Salaryman: (can't help it as I've been playing with my iPad and reading up on Mali) Oh, look, I hardly knew this country, here's some quick facts (reads up some pretty depressing statistics on the situation of Mali)
Chieko: (starts crying again)
Mr. Salaryman: (zooming in on the area with google earth and showing her) Wow, there's not much there is it? Mostly desert it seems like...

After that the situation got a bit calmer with more advice on taking it very slow and be a bit careful and make sure she really loves him etc. etc. I also managed to squeeze in that we knew a very good lawyer that might be able to help them if they decided to get hitched and needed some help with the visa (Mrs. Sunshine went back and forth afterwards as to whether that was a mean joke on my side or a legitimate good recommendation. In the end she settled on it being a bit mean but possibly actually helpful).

That's the exciting story of the foreign boyfriend. I'm looking forward to getting continuous updates on the progress from Mrs. Sunshine.

(Disclaimer: For the sake of fairness, I don't know the dude and he might be the greatest most honorable man, just trying his best to make a living in Japan to support his family and now accidentally had came upon his true love here in Japan.)

Mean and hurtful comments about body odor

2011-06-25T19:46:00.000+09:00

As I am putting my affairs in order preparing for my imminent departure from the current company I returned some stuff into the company storage room (where the sales promotion goods is kept) and found it to be very neatly organized and not the usual mess.

Strap-On Girl is in charge of this and as I passed her desk on my way back I threw out a "hey, the storage room looks really neat now, that's great!" she lit up a bit and replied "yes, I spent a whole day organizing everything in there (pause for a few seconds and expression changes from a smile to half-sad) ... ... that's when you made that mean and hurtful comment about my body odor... I had been working in there and it was really really hot, so that's why I had gotten so sweaty".

I reply back immediately as I start to walk away "no, you must have me mixed up with someone else, I would obviously never ever say such a thing to a lady". To maintain my friendly relationship with her, I think that complete denial might be the best strategy!

How to be a hit with the ladies in the office

2011-06-21T20:21:00.001+09:00

Never heard of it

It's getting hotter in the office these days as the power saving efforts are turning up the temperature in the office a few degrees higher than previous years (I think we're up to 28 degrees C now), but it's in no way unbearable. As summer has barely yet begun we'll see how things look in July and August when the real relentless summer heat will strike. But the sweating has started.

In the afternoon earlier today Strap-On Girl waved me over to her seat as she needed some help with figuring out how to do something in a software that I'm reasonable good at. As I stood behind her looking at her computer screen I noticed a quite strong odor of sweat and immediately blurts out "wow, someone really reeks of sweat here, is it you (looking at the sales manager next to her), me or you Strap-On Girl?". The sales manager shakes his head and I felt reasonably confident that it wasn't me and after a few seconds of silence Strap-On Girl meekly squeezed out "it might be me...".

"Wow, that's quite a musky.... (sniffs a bit and considers the correct description) ...pungent odor you've got going there. I would never have guessed it came from a lady, it's almost like a... ...a ripe old man... very impressive..." comes out of my mouth without getting caught in the checkpoint that usually exist between my brain and my mouth.

Then I went ahead and solved her problem and went back on my merry way to a less smelly part of the office. I'm certain that she appreciated my honesty.

I quit!

2011-06-20T20:36:00.002+09:00

Is it only me who feels Batty is trading down?

One of the highlights in any corporate job is always to hand in an unexpected resignation letter, always fun to see the shock, desperation and then confusion that comes with the realization that I'm heading off to better places.

As you can understand, I'm heading off to bigger and better things, leaving Cpt. Awkward, The Shadow, Strap-On Girl, Doctor T and the whole menagerie behind for a new zoo. Instead of a crappy mid-sized European company, I'm moving the show to a major American company and expect a lot of meaningless business jargon, intricate and annoying corporate politics and and a complex bureaucracy. So those of you worried that the stories might dry up, fear not, I'm sure that my new hunting grounds will give ample opportunity for some 'ol fashioned corporate insanity.

My biggest problem now is how all those "farewell drinking parties" are going to be able to take place before I join the major American health care firm... Maybe I should just go on a week long binge, placing myself at a bar and have the people rotate and pay tribute?

Eddie Murphy black? - The foreign boyfriend pt. 1

2011-06-19T17:00:00.000+09:00

I think this product is off the market now

Recently Mrs. Sunshine had a bunch of her girlfriends over and as one of them had brought along her husband and little kid, I had difficulties hiding and was drafted in to the festivities. Her friends are nice enough so it was reasonably pleasant and gave a valid reason for me to drink beer from quite early in the day.

Two of her friends are still single and after a few hours some exciting squealing about "girl's talk! girl's talk!" erupted and the questioning turned to how the single girls were doing on the boy's front. The first single girl quickly dodged it with a "well, you should ask Chieko, she's meeting an interesting man...". Chieko blushed as all the girl's eyes turned to her and questions as to what's going on hailed down on her. "Yes, I've met someone, but there's a catch and my parent's might not approve...". Again a hailstorm of questions from the girls "Is it a foreigner?", "is he black?", "is he unemployed or really low income?", "is he a lot younger?" etc.

When the questions finally calmed down she looked a bit anxious as she answered "yes, most of the things...". It turned out that her new boyfriend is an illegal alien from a very poor African country, works with garbage sorting (being an illegal alien sort of limits the career opportunities), is 12 years her junior (she's closing in on the big 40) and of course black...

For once, the whole group of girls fell silent for a few seconds while this sank in and the atmosphere became a little awkward as it became apparent that Chieko had expected a little more enthusiasm to the news that she now had a boyfriend.

But after a few seconds they started to recover and it seemed like the consensus was to sort out the "easy" stuff first and the comments started with "well, of course it's perfectly ok that your boyfriend is black" and moved forward to "but how black is he exactly? Like really black black, Obama black or Eddie Murphy black?" and "is the penis really huge?".

As it was girl's talk and I don't know the girls that well I kept a pretty low profile during this inquisition but I found the frame of reference in regards to blackness to be quite amusing. As it turned out, he was said to be more "Eddie Murphy black" and be moderately well equipped.

(The whole thing was quite interesting and as my time is a bit limited now, I'll follow up the second half of this interesting discussion in a separate post)

Hey, how about that MacDonalds?

2011-06-15T23:14:00.001+09:00

5 out of 5

There’s a number of helpful sites in Japanese reviewing and recommending restaurants. They are usually quite helpful since they allow the user to search by budget, cuisine, review score etc. in addition to location. Based on the number of reviews available it seems like a lot of Japanese are quite active on these and quite the quantity of reviews available for even the smallest restaurants.

...but some of these seems almost a little too eager... By chance, I happened to come by the review of the local MacDonalds joint located in our office building and noticed that it had gotten a total rating of 2.5 out of 5 and quite a number of written reviews going into depth on the ambience, staff and food quality. Ok, I’m all for people sharing experiences and reviews on actual restaurants, but why take the time and effort to do this for a stupid MacDonalds restaurant?! Who does actually spend the time to write a detailed review on a MacDonalds and who in his/hers right mind would check out reviews before deciding whether to go there for a BigMac set? Puzzling indeed...

(Ok, as you all know, I hate it when this blog becomes educational, but if you are able to read some Japanese and don't know these sites that well you can try your hand at Tabelog and GurumeNavi, they cover most of Japan)

THIS is what's wrong with this country...

2011-06-12T16:10:00.001+09:00

Vote for this one?

That Japan is in a pretty bad shape at the moment should not come as any surprise. I'm not only talking about the obvious impact of the recent earthquake and disaster, even before that the Japanese economy has been in a pretty bad state of affairs with the national debt growing out of control.

The political parties are in a complete state of dissaray, and post-Koizumi it seems like it is impossible to have a prime minister stay in office for longer than a year... Post Prime Minister Koizumi, Japan has worked it's way through five prime ministers in as many years and now Kan has vaguely commited to step down from the office in the near term future. Other posts in the cabinet also seem to change about the same pace as I change underwear.

Then, on top of this we now have the additional financial impact of the recovery of Japan as well as energy converservation efforts that might be lasting for a pretty long time.

So yeah, what do the people of Japan seem to care about? Well, one of the biggest news lately was about the "general election" to select the most popular AKB48 girls... Apparently one "vote" was included in each physical copy of their latest single, which subsequently ended up with record sales of a little over a million copies sold.

On the news they interviewed some really sad people who had bought hundreds of copies to be able to boost the vote for their favorite girl. One guy in particular mentioned how he had bought a large number of singles to support his favorite, and when asked if he had a girlfriend he answered "no, that would be really bad, what if I met (his favorite AKB girl) her and then couldn't hook up with her because I had a girlfriend?"...

I'm not sure if this is symptom of the problem or the problem itself... But hey, maybe this is the key to actually get more younger Japanese people interested in politics? Have the AKB48 girls take over the government, at least people would vote and they could hardly do a worse job than the people there now!

Ethnicities I have been mistaken for

2011-06-09T08:47:00.000+09:00

How can you defeat such a man?

One of the questions that always gets difficult for me when overseas (particularly outside Europe) is "where are you from?" as it always gets really convoluted with explaining that "I come from Japan now, but I'm also kinda Swedish". Over the years, I've been mistaken for a lot of ethnicities and though I should give you a quick roundup here:

1. Hispanic Mexican
In a taxi in Florida.
Taxi Driver: Where ya from bro?
Salaryman: I came from Japan now since I live there, but I'm from Sweden
Taxi Driver: (surprised) No shit? You look Mexican man!
Salaryman: (surprised in turn and not sure on how to take that) Huh? Mexican? Never heard that before, really?
Taxi Driver: (enthusiastic) Yeah, for real, you should go there, you'd fit right in!
Salaryman: Well, maybe I will, maybe I will...
(Note: I've never been to Mexico but if I do, I am curious as to whether I will "fit just in" or not)

2. Arab
In Japan many years ago my Japanese Aunt told me that I should shave the beard of because "It makes you look Turkish and there's been a string of robberies recently by Turks so you should shave it off!". I laughed it off and said that I've never been mistaken for Turkish or Arab ever so I won't.
Two days later at the airport terminal, waiting for the bus back home, in Sweden when I just had returned.
Elderly Arab man looking at me: (...)
Salaryman: (wondering why the man is looking at me but not really caring that much)
Arab Man: (walking towards me and stopping right by me, in broken Swedish) Excuse me young man, do you speak Arabic?
Salaryman: (surprised) Eh... No?
Arab Man: (disappointed, before walking away) I see, sorry.

3. Italian
During a business dinner with an senior Italian colleague in France, discussing people from our Swedish office with a group of people
Italian VP: (loudly) These Swedes are so dull and slow, they never show any emotion!
Salaryman: (focusing on the food)
Italian VP: (pointing at me) But you! Not you! You are like Italian, you look Italian!
Salaryman: (wakes up) Huh? I do?
Italian VP: (excitedly) Yes! You do! And you have body language like Italian (flailing wildly with arms) most Swedes are so dull (mimics someone sitting with the arms tight to the body and laughing heavily at his own imitation of a dull Swede), you are ok!
Salaryman: (having trouble coming to terms with the double insult of insulting Swedes and the labelling of me as "Italian like") Oh, ok, thanks I guess
Italian VP: (throwing arms up in the air) Yes, haha! (feeling like he's given me the best compliment in the world)

4. Chinese

In an otherwise empty beach bar in Khao Lak, Thailand with my brother during a family vacation. Sitting having drinks with big bro, catching up on stuff as we haven't seen each other in a long time. Very bored looking Thai bar girl comes over.

Bar Girl: Hi! Where ya from?

Big Bro: (very casually as to signal that we're not really interested in making conversation) We're from Sweden

Bar Girl: (aggressively sounding) No!

Big Bro&Me: (bemused) No?

Bar Girl: (pointing at me and my brothers face) You look like Chinaman!
Big Bro: (tiredly) Yeah, ok, we're half-Japanese, if you don't mind we'd like to talk alone?
Bar Girl: (looking triumphant as she walks away) Ok! Sure!

5. White
Japanese Colleague: So you're mom is Japanese?
Salaryman: Yep
Japanese Colleague: (confused) That's so strange, I can't see it at all, you look just like a typical Swede to me...
Salaryman: (slightly amused) Really? You think so? You know, most Swedes don't have black hair like me?
Japanese Colleague: (still confused) yeah, I dunno, I just don't see it at all

...this is of course discounting all the guesses me and Mrs. Salaryman has received when we've travelled together. Most common guess we get is Singapore or Hong Kong (probably because our combined Asian looks and our speaking English).

Now, if I just can find a way to be mistaken for Black, Indian and Native American I think I've covered it all!

Ikebukuro – Where the Saitama farmers go to get drunk

2011-06-08T20:32:00.000+09:00

Watch out for the Saitama rednecks!

Mother Salaryman left Japan for Sweden over 40 years ago now and has not looked back much.

Before I moved over to Japan and gave her a bridgehead to launch further advances into the country, she visited only a handful of times over the years. Also, before the age of the Internet, staying in touch with Japan was not particularly easy and getting her hands on a few used old Japanese magazines from the only Japanese goods shop in Sweden took considerable effort and cost a fortune.

So, in many ways, Mother Salaryman’s image of Japan is frozen to the 1960’s. I remember once when we were walking somewhere in Tokyo and we asked a policeman for directions which he very friendly gave us and Mother was quite shocked since “when I grew up here, all the policemen were so mean, how strange that this one was friendly”.

When I first moved to Japan and announced to her that I would be living in Ikebukuro her reaction was a despiteful “Ikebukuro? That’s where the farmers from Saitama go to get drunk and spend the money they get on booze and women! You should not live there, it's not a nice place!”. I laughed at her and told her that things have changed and it’s no longer the 1960’s…

This time though, I was proven wrong… Some things never change. Although I still like Ikebukuro and it’s sleazy “Shinjuku’s little brother without the sights” vibe, it does serve as the final outpost of Tokyo towards the wasteland that is called Saitama… It is of course annoying that Mother turned out to be right in the end, but it also taught me a lesson about the Saitama farmers...

(So yeah, I changed my font from Arial to Trebutchet... Does anyone care or notice?)

I think you called the wrong guy Pt. 2

2011-06-06T21:01:00.000+09:00

How many did it sell?

It's been a while now since I've had any particularly annoying and/or amusing phone calls at work (ones that come to mind are the old man with the piano and the Sneaky Lying Bastard Indian guy pretending to be Swedish). But today I received an interesting phone call to my direct line. The conversation went something like this:

Salaryman: (reasonable friendly in Japanese) This is the company, Salaryman speaking

Dr. Fraud: (English with american accent, sounding pretty normal) Yes, hello, my name is Dr. Clark calling from Cairns hospital, is this customer service?

Salaryman: (getting a bit suspicious since we don't do sales outside Japan) No, this is marketing, but maybe I can help you?

Dr. Fraud: (seems nervous) Well, it's about an order, so if you could please put me through to customer service?

Salaryman: (smelling blood in the water and turning up the assholishness, deceptively friendly) Well, I'm sure that I can help you, what is the inquiry? What product?

Dr. Fraud: (very nervous, stuttering) Well... I-I-I don't have the order number now, I must check with my secretary, I'll just call back

Salaryman: (even more friendly) No worries, we don't carry that many products, surely you must know what type of product this is about?

Dr. Fraud: (even more nervous) Well, yes.... I-I-I it's... uh... Can I call back?

Salaryman: (devious) Hey, do you even know what company this is and what type of products we sell?!

Dr. Fraud: (on the verge of panic) You sell... medical devices, right...?

Salaryman: (calling the bluff) Well, if you're a doctor calling about an order, surely you must know what field we're in?!

Dr. Fraud: (Hanging up)

Obviously it was a headhunter trying to get the contact details for our customer service manager. I know how hard and nasty it is to do cold-calling from my consultant days and am usually relatively nice to companies doing cold-calling as long as they're honest about why they're calling and what they want, but these headhunters calling and lying to get personal information are pretty bad.

Vroom Vroom. Bitches better watch out!

2011-06-04T20:12:00.000+09:00

Vroom Vroom

We recently got Baby Sunshine a really cool pimped out trike for her to roll around in the neighborhood and maintain order. The decision was between a pink Hello Kitty, a pink Minny Mouse, a red Anpanman or this unisex Pooh trike. I was initially in favor of the Hello Kitty one, but as it turned out that some fancy features were missing, we settled for the Pooh one.

I think we might have a future little 1%:er biker on our hands here and I'm sure that you can agree that the picture is both intimidating and cute at the same time?

(The title of the post I took from an old post I read over at Green Eyed-Geisha's blog at some point, thought was funny and then completely forgot about it until it popped back in my head when I saw this picture...)

Don’t pray for Japan !

2011-06-03T20:23:00.001+09:00

I want one of these

I’m an atheist and have always been. It’s really no big deal for me and since I grew up in Sweden where you would be considered more or less odd if you were strongly religious, it’s quite natural. I do still remember with shivers the horrible boredom I suffered when my old childhood pal Martin made me come to church with him on a Sunday since his mom is Christian and forced their kids to go and I joined in to keep him company… I did it once, but after that I preferred to stay at home and fight with my brother over who could use the C64 to play games (discounting the rare occasions when we actually played together…).

Other than that, the only time the family went to church was mostly on Christmas to keep grandma happy when she was visiting and more out of tradition than actual religious reasons. Apart from a relatively recent Christian wedding I felt obliged to attend here in Japan (mercifully short though) I haven’t attended any form of religious service for almost 20 years and feel good about that.

Then moving to Japan where religion seems to be replaced with a more general institutionalized superstition, it’s really nothing that particularly sets me apart. So being an atheist is not any particular dramatic statement or carries with it any form of controversy for me. On rare occasions some Japanese person might ask me if I’m Christian because I’m from Europe , but a “No, not really” is usually enough to end that topic. I’m generally not particularly outspoken about it either, as long as religious beliefs can be put aside I don’t particularly mind if anyone has (moderate) religious faith in any direction (hey, no one likes the extremists anyway).

...however, sometimes it can hit a nerve… After the big earthquake and the resulting disaster (I refuse to write “311”) Japan received a lot of support and sympathy from all over the world. That is something that was/is both needed and appreciated, as the disaster will leave a mark for many many years to come; personal for those who lost family and friends, economically for Japan as a nation (already before the disaster in quite dire straits…) and environmentally for the Fukushima area. But I also started to see a lot of messages saying “Pray for Japan ” and this really rubs me the wrong way… To me, as an atheist, “praying” is about as productive and helpful as picking your nose and borderline offensive to me. Probably something like telling a person of Christian, Muslim or Jewish faith “may Odin watch over you”.

Ok, I know that the people who said/wrote “pray for Japan ” did it out of the goodness of their hearts with nothing but good intentions and I waited to post this until the dust had settled a bit. I also realize that some people in the US use “pray” as a more general well-wish without any deep rooted religious intent, but still I much would have preferred a message like “I give cash for Japan” which is actually really helpful, or hey, if that fails why not just a simple "support Japan"…?

Whew! That felt good, I rant way too little, don't I?

Under Maintenance - Going back to blogger comments

2011-06-02T21:22:00.000+09:00

Didn't work out either

Nothing important really, I just removed the "Intense Debate" widget from the site to go back to the old fashioned built in boring blogger version. The whole thing took a bit longer to load and I just felt more comfortable about the old fashioned way here on my blog. I think it works great on some other blogs (thinking particularly about Badboy since more debate usually is done there). Just in case anyone wonders...

I just noticed that I also now killed all the previous comments that were done when I had the widget in place... That's a bit annoying and my apologies to everyone who commented before and now got deleted into oblivion, didn't think of that and I'm probably more annoyed than you about it...

Normal programming will resume shortly.

Let's dispense with the formalities

2011-06-01T21:19:00.000+09:00

You might not see it, but this picture illustrates the post perfectly

Earlier in the week I was in a quite late meeting in the company with Cpt. Awkward and his peons to discuss the result of an inspection from the authorities and how to handle some of the follow up actions we had been given to show how we adhered to the environmental regulations of the Tokyo City. As our little situation was a bit special with no clear precedence, we came to the conclusion that we needed to talk with the authorities to get some better guidance on how to do this.

Now, me, late in the evening and a meeting with Cpt. Awkward and his peons is generally not a very good combination since my tolerance for confusion, discussing around topics and their changing opinions just when we seem to be getting close to a conclusion, can make my mask of sanity temporarily come off... At this point, I was so tired of the whole discussion that I decided to try to see if I could up the confusion to levels beyond Cpt. Awkward.The discussion went something like this.

Cpt. Awkward: So we should request an informal meeting with the authorities since having a formal meeting takes too long to set up...
Salaryman: (Still holding on to sanity) Ok, sounds good, can you book that informal meeting quickly?
Cpt. Awkward: (thinking) Yes... We probably should book it informally...
Salaryman: (starting to come loose a little in the seams) Yeah, ok, so you don't want to book the informal meeting formally?
Cpt. Awkward: (confident) Yes, we should do it informally, that's best (stopping to think) ... but they might come back to us and ask us to do it formally...
Salaryman: (starting to break down inside) Ok, but then we just have to book the informal meeting formally then, won't we?
Cpt. Awkward: (thinking hard for a few seconds) Yes, but then they might also ask us to have a formal meeting instead of an informal one...
Salaryman: (facade is cracking and decides to throw fuel on the fire) Ok, then why don't you try to ask informally if it's ok to informally book the informal meeting?

Cpt. Awkward: (like it's the most natural thing) Yes, I think that's the best way

Salaryman: (decides to throw some more gasoline on the fire just for the hell of it) Otherwise I guess you can formally ask if it's ok to ask informally for an informal meeting, and then if they want to have it formally we can informally follow up on that, through formal channels if needed?

Peon of Cpt. Awkward: (looks confused and seem to be catching on, looks at cpt. Awkward but seem to decide to keep her mouth shut so the meeting can end)

Cpt. Awkward: (silent, thinking hard, opens his mouth as to talk a few times after finally making up his mind) Yes... I think so...

Salaryman: (had enough) Ok, then we have a plan, if we need to discuss more internally we can have a formal meeting to follow up, but we can also talk informally too, (just to be mean) you guys will make the minutes of this meeting right, best to have the decisions down formally

Cpt. Awkward: (relieved that it's over) Yes, Peon, please do the minutes
Peon: (looks like she's just been handed a death sentence) Yes...

On the way out of the meeting room I do my good deed of the day and tell her to ignore the last part and just make it simple. Sometimes I feel that the only way to keep my sanity is to just let it go for a bit...

Japanese Candid Camera

2011-05-31T21:34:00.000+09:00

Ok, this is not normally something I do here on my blog, but there's this quite hilarious candid camera episode from the show "Bakushou Panic Face" that they show here on the TBS channel (recently the changed the name to "Bakushou Powerful Face" for some reason though). The stuff in there is a bit hit-and-miss, but this is a classic one that is too good to be missed out just because you can't understand Japanese so I have quickly subtitled it (I did it quickly and pretty rough, but it should help you get the gist of it).

Just so proper credit is given where it's due, I found it here at youtube in the Japanese version and then slapped on subtitles here...

So... What was it you did exactly?

2011-05-30T21:03:00.001+09:00

Eerily accurate...

One common problem in our little company has often been the unclarity of responsibilities and who's supposed to do exactly what. When hiring, the company often does away with such petty things as job descriptions and instead goes for general broad strokes, hoping that the small stuff will settle itself eventually.

However, recently it reached the boiling point with too much confusion on who actually is supposed to do what. In a normal company it usually would have been handled by HR working to sort out what is needed and then make sure that the tasks and responsibilities are distributed accordingly.

Our HR decided to take a little different route though and sent out a communication to everyone to list up what exactly it is their departments do, compile this in one document and then distribute back to everyone thinking that everything would have been solved. Now, this didn't take into account that some of the more vague stuff that no one really wanted to do was left untouched and ended up not being included in any job description. This also gave the people who claimed it's "not their job" ammunition since they could now formally state "it's not in my job description so we shouldn't do this!". Leaving some stuff to go very ripe until it reaches the point that it's so "stinky" that someone feels the need to clear it out just to get rid of it bothering everyone.

Sometimes I really feel that I'm working in some form of Bizarro office...

Too soon...?

2011-05-29T18:14:00.000+09:00

New and better products

We have an annual trade show exhibition coming up later on in the summer and it's a pretty big event and one of the largest annual events of the year which we really need to participate in.

Preparations for this has been ongoing for quite a long time and has caused us a bit of a headache since we really don't have anything new to show this year and felt a bit worried that it would reflect badly on us just showing the same 'ol stuff while our competitors show off all the newest and much more fancy stuff. So we have struggled with a theme for our booth in the exhibition for quite some time and discussed numerous ideas which in the end all turned out to be crap and we had almost given up on doing anything interesting.

Then we had the earthquake and all the disruptions that came with it and in a recent meeting we had a little brainstorming and decided that we would dedicate some focus in our booth on the disaster and show our support to Japan and our Japanese customers in this difficult time.

At the end of the meeting everyone felt quite satisfied and a bit relieved that we had found our theme for this year and I threw out "So yeah, I guess the bad news is that 20,000 people died and many many more lost everything they own, but hey, on the positive side we finally got that theme sorted out, huh?". The room all of a sudden got completely silent and people started to nervously look around before some smiles and muffled laughter was heard. I felt I had to clarify and followed up with "Hey, it's called "black humour" you know?". This caused some additional minor confusion and one of my colleagues who actually was familiar with the concept explained to the others how it's something that foreigner likes and it's a joke that's not really a joke but actually is a joke.

After the explanation a little more laughter and nodding broke out in the room followed by mumblings of "Ah, "black humour", now I understand". If someone actually kept track of the stuff I get away with just because I'm a "foreigner" it would probably create some form of national outrage...

100 Followers, thank you!

2011-05-28T22:01:00.003+09:00

I just noticed that I had recently received my 100th follower signed up! I'm only doing the blog for fun, but there is of course no point if no one's reading it. It's also always hard to measure how well the blog is received, comments is of course one way, the hardcore page views another but I've also always looked at the followers and have probably at least once checked out each and every one of you (or at least as much as the blogger profile allowed me to).

So just a short post/note to say thank you for reading! Please don't feel
Intimidated and drop an e-mail or comment if there's anything you want me to discuss. Thank you!

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad
(yeah! That's right! I wrote this from my paddy, how about that!?)

Obama bobble heads, ABC Store and earthquakes

2011-05-26T20:42:00.001+09:00

Obama with good friend God-Jesus

I have wondered a bit on what is required to be able to claim that I'm "an earthquake survivor"... Granted, there only were 5 or so deaths due to the quake in some capacity in the metropolitan Tokyo region, out of about 10 million or something, Mrs. Sunshine and Baby Sunshine can claim a little more than that since Chiba prefecture actually claimed 20 or so deaths and has a smaller population (don't ask me the details since I'll just embarrass myself with my lack of knowledge of my local area, but I guess maybe about 5 million or so).

So yeah, I guess I'm a little more "great pacific earthquake survivor" than I'm an 9/11 survivor (although technically I did survive 9/11 too, being in Tokyo at the time and having just about a safe distance).

But now we have finally finished the rebuilding in the Salaryman household after the damages we suffered during the quake. My computer actually crashed down into the floor but is strangely enough working fine with no urgent need to be replaced, but we had bought a Obama bobble-head doll during our honeymoon in Hawaii. This bobble head was half-jokingly referred to as our "earthquake barometer" since we always checked if his head was moving when we suspected an earthquake.

At the time of the big quake, he did his job very well, so well in fact that he fell down from the top of the bookshelf that we had put him on and broke his neck... Mrs. Sunshine tried to restore him, but it provide futile as the broken neck ruined the bobble-ness and any effectiveness as earthquake barometer...

However, as it turned out, the ABC Store (who seem to have a monopoly like hold of the Honolulu convenience and tourist shop market based on our honeymoon there) actually not only does mail order services, they also had the bobble head available for purchase! So now we have restored the order. If Obama's head is moving, then there likely is an earthquake. If he falls down and breaks his neck, it's a really big earthquake. Maybe we should recommend this to the Japanese Meteorological Agency who monitors the earthquakes in Japan?

Did I just fart or do you know something I don't?

2011-05-25T20:49:00.000+09:00

The only way to prevent it!

One of the big misconceptions of Japan that seems extraordinary hard to set straight is the belief that some Japanese people wear those face-masks due to pollution. This is obviously wrong since Tokyo has comparatively good air quality compared to other cities of similar size.

The reason for wearing the face masks are either people having a bit of a cold hoping that the mask can prevent them from spreading it further (very unlikely btw, but anyway) or due to strong sensitivity to pollen or other airborne allergic agent. Granted, during the worst 1H1N swine flu scare, a lot of people took to wearing the masks in hope of getting some protection from it and for a while they were completely cleared out all across Tokyo and the factories were working hard to keep up with the extremely increased demand. Never mind that no studies has shown any actual reduction in infection risk due to the simple masks used in Japan.

Mrs. Sunshine wears them when she has a cold and moving outside in crowded areas although I have never used them unless in situations when more or less forced to (such as visiting a hospital in work during the 1H1N scare and it was enforced). I'm ok with other people using it but don't really see the point personally.

However, today I noticed a person that upped the stakes considerably... One guy on the train wore a full air filtration mask (you know, basically like a gas mask but without the eye cover). My first initial thought was "he must be a bit crazy" quickly followed by "does he know something I don't?!" and then back again to "No, he must just be a bit crazy scared of radiation or something". We'll see if this is a trend or an isolated case, on one side the face masks are getting a bit old so maybe the filtration masks can be a way to get the speculation on why the Japanese wear them going again?

(On a separate note, the sales rep with the pregnant wife came over to my desk today, beaming with joy and proudly exclaimed to me that he was now the father of a healthy baby girl. I told him congratulations and asked him to "show me picture" (which I actually am not particularly eager to see since all newborn look like monkeys) and refrained to mention how proud I am of my iPad 2 and given the choice, would chose the iPad over his daughter in a heartbeat)

She's so adorable...

2011-05-23T20:23:00.000+09:00

She's adorable even when she's bad!

Yesterday me and my two Sunshine's had lunch at a family restaurant (the "Italian" chain Saizeriya if you must know, not the greatest food but baby friendly and decent price). We ate our stuff and Baby Sunshine ate her can of "codfish with vegetables in cream sauce" from Kewpie and was a good enough baby.

As we had finished up and I went to pay the bill at the cashier I started to hear a baby crying... Loud enough to easily be heard across the pretty large restaurant, as the crying never seemed to stop I started to get a little annoyed and was thinking "what an annoying baby, the parents should make sure she doesn't disturb everyone like this" and then I looked towards them and realized that it actually was Baby Sunshine who had started acting up and in an instant my mind switched to thinking "oh, poor little baby, but she's so adorable even when she's crying..." with glazed over eyes and a stupid smile until the cashier asked me if I wanted to pay...

I guess being a father carries with it some form of mental disturbance, but I'm ok with that.

Are you an Otaku?

2011-05-22T21:07:00.001+09:00

"Otaku is Beautiful" indeed

This post is basically me setting the scene for a discussion about the role of the otaku guys and gals during the earthquake and tsunami disaster, but getting it all in one post might be a little too much so I'll start with the basics on the otaku first.

So the first question that might come up is "what is an otaku?". There is a common misconception here that those sweaty dudes that hangs around Akihabara (and always calls it "Akiba", never the full name of "Akihabara) enjoys maid cafes and watch cartoon rape porn are the only type of otaku.

This is not the case, being an "otaku" is more about having one's life revolving around a certain interest or hobby and dedicating most of the available time and money on the topic of interest. The actual topic of fixation can be basically anything from dieting, fashion, AKB48, rape porn, AKB48 rape porn, music, model trains etc. etc. I'm not completely sure here, but I would think that being a paid professional on the subject in question kinda disqualifies you from the otaku label as it's no longer just an interest or hobby.

Basically, "otaku" is not a slur or insulting in principle, but since investing the amount of time, money and effort into a single subject is borderline obsessive it usually means that the otaku is not "normal" from most perspectives.

To help you do a quick diagnosis of someone you believe might be an otaku but you're not completely sure, I have here devised a formula for you to apply to people you suspect of being otaku:

Amount of free time spent on subject

(<20% 1, ±40% 2, >60% 3, ALL available time 10)

Amount of disposable income spent on subject

(<20% 1, ±40% 2, >60% 3, deliberately cut down all other costs to spend all money on hobby 10)

Percent of friends similarly into subject

(<20% 1, ±40% 2, >60% 3, Could NEVER be friends with someone not into subject 10)

Family situation

(has a girlfriend but not living together 1, single living alone 2, lives with mother to save money to spend on hobby 3, has wife and kids, not divorced -10)

A result of <8 would show that the person is not an Otaku

A result of 9-12 shows that the person is a borderline Otaku and might cross the line

A result of over 12 gives a fullblown Otaku

So there you have it! Now you can investigate the people around you. Generally I have nothing against otaku's in general, but I do find these "Akiba" type of otaku extremely creepy...

Ok, now I have the iPad2, now what?

2011-05-21T21:12:00.000+09:00

Ok, yesterday the iPad 2 came in the mail and it's a sexy little thing indeed! I've already scoured the web for lists of recommended apps and downloaded quite a few already and spent most of the night yesterday and the day today playing with it and trying to figure out cool stuff to do with it.

So now I have a bunch of games, all the regular stuff like Skype, E-book/Comic reader and a few photo editing apps as well as some more "boring but useful" stuff like currency converter, weather news, train information and current electricity capacity in Tokyo.

So yeah, what should I get? Some more fun photo editing app would be nice to have and any other useful and fun stuff. Also, if there's any recommendations for stuff that Mrs. Sunshine might like? Hit me!

It could be any day now... tense and nervous waiting for the call isn't it?

2011-05-19T20:35:00.004+09:00

Today, as I was passing by the sales reps part of the office on my way to get a drink from the vending machine, one of the younger guys I don't know that well was in the office. I know that his wife is expecting so in order to mingle a bit with the people I stopped by to do some small chat. It went something like this:

Mr. Salaryman: Hey, how's it going with the pregnancy, are you a daddy yet?

Young Rep: (smiling nervously and fiddling) No, but the due date is today...

Mr. Salaryman: (patronizing smile) Oh, so you could get the call any minute now

Young Rep: (nervously looking at his watch) Yeah... it could be soon...

Mr. Salaryman: (even more patronizing) Haha, yeah, you must be nervous and excited, I know exactly how it feels

Young Rep: (looks like he's expecting some advice) You do?

Mr. Salaryman: (starting to walk away) Yeah, I'm supposed to get the iPad2 I ordered really really soon, could even be today but could be a little later so I'm feeling exactly like you

Young Rep: (manages to look both annoyed and nervous the same time, mumbling) I'm going to be a father you know...

Mr. Salaryman: (walking away, humming a merry tune to myself)

But I never got the call today, so I guess the delivery date for my iPad2 won't be until tomorrow... The rep I have no clue about since I have to focus on the pad!

Put your lips around my nude crunky balls!

2011-05-18T21:51:00.003+09:00

Ok, generally this is not the place to go for funky misuse of English here in Japan, not that I at times can find it quite entertaining but most of it just slips by as background noise these days as I've grown used to abuse of the English language here in Japan.

However, today I found this box of chocolate promising "Crunky nude balls" inside. But I didn't buy it for myself, usually when I find some bizarre type of snack that seems disgusting or have some really really odd flavour combination that I myself would never eat, but I still want to see and hear someone's reaction when eating it, I give it to Strap-on Girl and watch as she eats it and gives her comment. As the Japanese girl she is, more than often it's "Hey, this is pretty good, you really should try it!". Obviously she knows that it's a running joke from my side, but she's a sport and plays along as she's not as sensitive as me.

However, today I left this box of nude balls on her desk with a note saying "Here you go, try putting Salaryman's crunky nude balls in your mouth, I'm sure you'll like it". Thinking about it, that's actually borderline sexual harrassment if it wasn't for A) Her mind is so clean that she probably don't get the real filthiness B) She knows that I have a peculiar sense of humour (compared to the rest of the office) and humours me in my little jokes.

I have yet to put any nude balls in my mouth, but hey, when she opens it I might try some, the actual content does seem reasonably tasty! Somehow I have a feeling that it would be hard to market this product outside of Japan though...

Let's join a cult!

2011-05-17T20:29:00.003+09:00

During golden week I had a small BBQ party over at the Salaryman house with a bunch of old Japanese friends I don't see that often anymore since most of has have started families and everyone getting together is difficult to puzzle in. It was a "family fun" type of event with plenty of small kids running around the place and making a general mess and nuisance.

But one of my friends, a lady who was a former colleague a few years back and with whom I have maintained a friendship turned out to have found a new interest in "spirituality". She knows that I'm quite uninterested in that type of stuff and kept it quite limited to me directly apart from showing me the great amulet she had bought that would adsorb and protect her from radiation but I think that my reply of "Wow... that's really amazing... but I'm fine thanks, now I'm just gonna go get me another beer, I've heard that that protects me against radiation too" signaled that I wasn't too interested in hearing about it.

But every time she was left alone with another of my friends around the BBQ grill she launched into explanations on how you could learn to see people's aura and stuff like that, to much confusion of my friends with limited interest in things spiritual. She also mentioned that she had started to take "spiritual development" classes to the modest sum of over 1 million JPY (~$10,000). I can tell for sure that someone is experiencing a lot of development for that sum of money, but more likely the scammers holding the course than the person taking the lessons... But hey, to each their own, she's still a nice person and a good friend and it seemed to be quite benevolent in nature at least.

On a related note, the other day I talked to a colleague of mine, "The Doctor" who has a quite long academic career behind him before he went into business. As he showed me an article that he had co-written related to a therapy we were looking into. He seemed to get a little nostalgic and drifted off a bit as he explained "And I wrote this with this guy... really nice guy and very dedicated to the research... but then he got caught up in some form of cult and just up and left... Hmmm... this was about the same time as the whole Aum deal... I wonder what he's doing now... (changing to a sad frown)".

At this point, I have no real inclination to join any form of cult, but if I did change my mind the Romasophie movement would be my cult of choice!

Economic Alcoholic

2011-05-15T20:41:00.004+09:00

(It seems like Blogger had some problems earlier and that all the comments on my previous Apple-loving post got deleted, sorry about that, it wasn't me!)

Readjusting back to work after the Golden Weeks hasn't been easy and combining that with a particularly energetic Baby Sunshine who likes to go up and play (and loudly exclaiming this from her little crib) at the early morning, I feel lacking a bit of energy to do any of those hilarious and profound posts that I have in my head until I've caught up a bit more with sleep and being back to work.

But at a recent stop to the local liquor store I couldn't resist snapping a shot of one of the Japanese available hard liquor types. For this tetra pack of almost 2 litres (1800ml to be picky) with an alcohol content of 35 percent you pay less than $10 USD... Coming from Sweden where alcoholic beverages are taxed according to alcoholic content (the higher alcohol % the higher the cost) and you have to pay $20 USD for a 700ml of a really crappy vodka of 40% alcohol, this feels mind boggling.

I'm sure that this Japanese liquor tastes like poison, but hey, if you're an alcoholic strapped for cash, you should move to Japan! Anyone actually tasted this stuff?!

I Love Apple!

2011-05-12T23:20:00.000+09:00

I have never been a particularly huge Apple fan in my life. I had an iPod I liked and used and I recently ordered an iPad I'm still waiting for, but I went for the iPad before any Android tablets more for simplicity and because I know the stuff than hardcore brand loyalty.

The other day, I decided to send in my much used (~4 years or so) iPod for service to have the battery changed as battery time was getting pretty bad in the last months, requiring me to recharge the thing every day. The iPod in question was bought before any "iPod touch" models came into the market and by today's labels I guess it should be called an "iPod classic 80gb". Since I just ordered an iPad, I feel happy with an iPod geared towards music and not apps and was hoping that a battery change might bring a few more years of use for my old iPod, even though the 80Gb limit started to hurt a little.

Just two days later after sending it in, I received a package back in the mail and found a completely new iPod in there. Then I checked the attached letter saying "there were other problems apart from the battery that we could not fix, instead we send you a new replacement product". The iPod was of a significantly newer version and also has 120Gb memory and is considerably thinner than the one I sent in.

Thank you very much Apple! That's how you treat a customer and I'll be sure to send this one in very soon and be really pissed off if I don't get the same type of service!

It's all about Power!

2011-05-10T20:34:00.002+09:00

Now we're approaching two full months from the devastating quake and tsunami and with the aftershocks easing up considerably the last few weeks, people here in Tokyo have gotten back to their old routine. The weather has also, up to today, been quite comfortable with little need for air conditioner or heaters. So even though the actual electric supply problem with limited volumes remain, I think that a lot of people have just forgotten about it and gotten back to their old routine.

However, today was an abnormally hot day, quite humid and up to 27 degrees Celsius during the day making people turn up the air conditioner for the first time in many months... One of my latest obsessions has been to follow the usage of power online through the yahoo page (here) with data from TEPCO showing the percentage of available power used almost live (there's one hour lag or so on the data) and today I slowly saw how the percentage started to rise up during the day, creeping up to almost 90% during the afternoon... Earlier in the day, the forecast for the week also showed a projected level of over 100% later in the week...

...I think we're going to see more power outages as the real summer heat comes in over Tokyo but I still can't shake the doubt that if they only closed down all the pachinko parlors, turned off the vending machines and hi-tech toilet seats that 50% of the power could be freed up for use in other critical places such as hospitals, elderly homes and our bedroom during night...