This wasn't in the job description... (the insects...)

No, I would not do her whatever you would offer!

So far I think I've handled the family life here in Japan pretty OK if I may say so myself. I get along well with the neighbours, have toddler Sunshine play well with the swarm of children around her age roaming the streets of our little enclave.

Among the younger children in the neighbourhood, it seems like boys are in a majority and although I have gotten some minor concerns about Baby Salaryman from observing them play, it's mostly minor stuff like accepting the fact that Baby Salaryman is bound to be more excited by some form of Power Rangers, Gamen Rider and Gundam Giant Robots than Superman, Spider-man and He-Man and the Masters of the Universe. Although I find the prospect of this somewhat alarming I also realize that it will be a losing battle to try and fight it straight on and have come to terms that it's what happens when you raise a boy in Japan.

However, now in the hot summer months I realised another terrible thing that will be extremely hard to avoid... The insects... Japanese kids love to catch insects, trap them in containers and keep them as some form of pets. These insects are nothing like an innocent ant-farm, we're talking real beasts here like the Rhinoceros Beetle that can be of the size of almost a fully grown persons palm of the hand. Then of course an assortment of other larger sized insects with legs, antennas and nasty stuff all over the place. To my horror I heard that the kids catch these monster bugs in our local small park during the night, supported by their fathers who help them find and catch the bugs...

As you might already have figured out, I have difficulties with bugs. Granted, the fear, disgust and hatred I feel for the cockroach is special but I there is no love lost between me and bugs in general. I did not realise that being a good father here in Japan included encouraging my male offspring to hunt and play with these monster bugs. I guess I have another couple of years to figure out how to manage this, but perhaps I can outsource this part of Japanese parenthood to the father-in-law and keep our house bug-free?

...in any case, I think I might have found out the reason why Insect Porn actually has a market here in Japan...

So close, yet so far away

They're close friends (he didn't add a "san")

In Japan, how to address people correctly is a very important thing. Generally, the polite way of addressing people you know is with the last name, followed by "san". There are some varations on this with "san" being substituted for "chan" or "kun" which suggest some degree of affection ("chan" is mostly used for girls and "kun" for guys, but they can be used for both sexes). But generally speaking in a work setting, if you call people by their family names and add a "san", you can't go really wrong as it's usually better to err on the side of politeness than the other way around.


Among private friends it's much more relaxed. Calling someone by their family name and "san" is not really wrong, but can be seen as a little too polite and putting some distance between you and said friend. For really close friends you can drop the courtesy suffix alltogether and even call them their first names (although this should be agreed upon beforehand as it could possibly offend some people if they don't consider themselves as close friends as you thought...).


Last night, I met up with my old buddies from the previous consulting job, the Boy and Luke whom long-time followers of this blog might be familiar with since previous posts. The Boy was on a temporary visit back to Tokyo so we squeezed in a dinner to catch up on stuff and share some old jokes about the insanity of the office we lived through in the consulting world. The Boy shared a story that I found quite amusing and I will do my best to retell here.


His older sister got married to a Japanese guy a few years back. The Boy has been getting along well with his brother-in-law, sometimes meeting up for dinners without the sister and generally striking up a friendly relationship. All these years, The Boy has been addressing his brother-in-law with the polite form, calling him Murata-san while in return being called by his first name only without any courtesy suffix. This can be seen as somewhat acceptable as the brother-in-law is older than the Boy and as he's married to the Boy's older sister he does not need to extend the same courtesy to the Boy.


However, during a dinner they had together hanging out, the Boy had started to feel a little weird about addressing him as "Murata-san" as it creates a feeling of distance and the Boy thought that by now they had become such good friends that he could do a little more relaxed approach. So he very politely suggest to his brother-in-law that maybe he could start addressing him as "big brother"  (onii-san お兄さん) instead if he would be ok with that. He was met with a few seconds of silence, a cold stare followed by "No, I prefer if you address me as Murata-san". Awkwardness followed and the conversation never really recovered after this for the remainder of the dinner as the Boy's attempt to close the gap between them had been quickly shut down with no room for negotiations.


Let that be a lesson to you all.


(Does anyone know how to get rid of the double-line breaks that seem to be the default in blogger now since recently... It's really annoying me...)

Eddie Murphy black? - The foreign boyfriend pt. 1

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) 

Home Security, for a price...

After the recent burglary that our little neighborhood experienced a few months ago (see here) and a rush among many of our neighbors to start using the services of one of the many home security companies here in Japan, we started to feel the pressure to do the same ourselves.

Not that I personally felt overly worried, but Mrs. Sunshine thought the whole thing was a bit scary and being one of the few houses without any form of security services would increase the risk our house ending up as a burglary target.

The two main players here in Japan are the market leader SECOM followed by Alsok (hey, I think at least, this is not backed by any statistics!) with some minor players like CSP. As the shrewd businessman that I am, I am very careful in picking which company to use and the main tool I use to determine this is through watching the commercials that they show on TV.

First, let's take a look at the runner-up, Alsok and their commercial featuring the olympic medal winner female wrestler whose name escapes me at the moment. This is probably the first time that she actually has worn make-up!

Then, we can see the commercial from SECOM. This one is a bit older though, the more recent ones feature the boy band SMAP:er Kimura Takuya (whom neighborhood blogger Corrinne's sister in law has very strong feelings about), but the newer ones are a bit harder to understand if you don't know Japanese so I think this one is representable enough.

As you can probably understand, the decision was easy and we went with SECOM. After a visit from their lady "Advisor" (read: sales rep, whom shockingly enough was one of the first people ever that Baby Sunshine didn't scream out in terror when first meeting her, not sure if that's good or bad though...). We basically went with their full plan, which without having electrified floor or hidden laser turrets, still felt pretty hi-tech and was asked as to whether we wanted to purchase the system or rent it. Purchasing the system would have amounted to a hefty 350,000 JPY (~$3,500 something) and I briefly managed to through the lady rep off guard when I told her that if we would purchase it, it would be among the most expensive things that we have in our house and that I would be afraid that the thieves would steal it.

We sealed the deal and one week later they would come over and install all the hi-tech equipment and we were told that they were extremely busy, so there would likely only be one person doing the job. Come the next weekend and four people from SECOM show up at our base of operations, later on joined by a security guard who came in without knocking (ok, the front door was open and a lot of stuff was moved in and out) casually hung out in our living room for a little while, telling one of his colleagues that was there that he came over because "I had nothing better to do and thought I could hang out here". I think someone had words with him because five minutes later he was gone as silently as he had joined the party.

But all in all, we're happy with the security now and even installed a lock on the inside of our bedroom door that probably would withstand a medium size dwarf going at it for a few minutes before breaking down (Mrs. Sunshine wanted it for security while I thought more of the convenience of stopping Baby Sunshine from wandering in at ... ... ... inconvenient times when she's a bit older). Perhaps a break-in to our house could be featured in the next Mission: Impossible movie?

Earthquake Press Conferences - The truth told in the margins?

The whole earthquake, tsunami and Fukushima power plant disaster here in Japan have been accompanied by a parade of press conferences and I must admit that I have had problems following exactly who is what and from what perspective that they're talking all the time as it's been from various government functions, Tepco, Tokyo Power etc.

One of my "favorites" in the press marathon press conferences have been Nishiyama-san, a bureaucrat from the Ministry of Finance. That his understanding of the nuclear crisis was limited was clearly visible in his hesitation to answer questions, frequent pauses and then leaning to the side so one of his peons could whisper to him what to say. He has also gotten the nickname "Nobita-kun" due to a perceived likeness to the boy in the Doraemon comics.

I was watching one of the press conferences on the Fukushima struggle to cool down the reactors last Friday, streaming on the computer. On the right hand side of the tv window a chat/message board was available with a constant stream of comments from the Japanese audience watching it online. Most of them were not particularly interesting or amusing, but one nugget came from someone watching just as the press conference started:

"How can you trust someone who hides his own baldness to be open about a nuclear disaster!?"

A very insightful analysis indeed. However, I'm not sure that the fundamental analysis is correct, since it looks to me like Nobita-kun have a very rich hair and doesn't do a comb over? Something to ponder indeed.

A cheap bottle of wine and a porn mag? - Jokes that Mrs. Sunshine does not appreciate

The 14th birthday of Mrs. Sunshine's Nephew is upcoming and he's in that awkward stage of puberty that we've all been at one point in our lives, somewhere in the limbo between being a kid and a young adult. Mrs. Sunshine complained about how difficult it is for her to buy a good present for a boy his age and asked for my advice. The conversation went something like this;

Mrs. Sunshine: What would you have wanted when you were his age?

Salaryman: (immediate response without any hesitation) A bottle of cheap white wine and a porno mag, we should get him that!

Mrs. Sunshine: (frowning) I don't think my brother would appreciate us giving him that

Salaryman: (upbeat) No problem, we'll just sneak it to him and tell him to enjoy himself!

Mrs. Sunshine: (frowning harder) Well, in any case we're not going to do that and it's not funny!

Salaryman: (slightly cautiously) You know that I'm only half-joking, right, we'd be his favorite aunt and uncle forever if we give him that?

Mrs. Sunshine: (still frowning) Yes, I do realize that and that makes me even more concerened...

Salaryman: (sighing) Fine, let's get him a boring book about dinosaurs like your brother suggested...

Mrs. Sunshine: (frown replaced by a twinkle in her eye) ...at least now I know what you want for your birthday!

There's always a silver lining I guess!

New Year's Day in Japan

For Japan, New Year is the main family event during the year where most people go back to their home town to spend the holidays with their family. So also for the Salaryman household, as Mrs. Sunshine's grandmother is alive and well back in Osaka, we promptly packed up Baby Sunshine, tucked ourselves into a Shinkansen bullet train over there to spend a few days with her family.

New Year in Japan is mainly about;

1. Watching the horribly dull music "competition" kohaku that just goes on and on with artists catering to all tastes from Grandma to Kids, making most of it dull for everyone. This year, boy-band Arashi MC:ed the event

2. At the morning of New Year's day, do extensive greetings to everyone to wish them a happy new year and ask for their benevolence during 2011

3. Eat the traditional Osechi food which remarkably manages to combine everything I don't like about Japanese cuisine in one amazing and in the Sunshine family, it is only consumed with very moderate amounts of alcohol adding insult to injury

4. Give the kids their small envelopes with New Year's gift money Otoshidama and watch them greedingly fondle their newly acquired wealth. Even baby Sunshine seemed to get caught up in this until she started to try and physically consume the quite significant amount that Grandmother Sunshine had given her (also leading to a minor argument with Mrs. Sunshine where I argued that we should just take the money and waste it on unnecessary luxuries as an advance on all the costs we have with food and lodging for the baby, while Mrs. Sunshine argued that we should set up an account for the baby and save it)

5. Visit a local shrine to hand over the wishlist for 2011 to the Gods and give them some small change in exchange for them granting us good health, extreme wealth and overall happiness in 2011

6. Struggle with the crowds trying to get back home as millions of Japanese are trying to do the same, gloat at the poor bastards who didn't book their seat on the Shinkansen train and have to spend several hours standing

7. Check the harvest of New Year's cards and be pissed off about the people who you sent cards this year but haven't sent any and be nervous about if the people who sent a card but wasn't on the Sunshine-Salaryman New Year's card list will be pissed off at us for not sending a card, if needed, quickly write and send off a card and pretend like it's raining

あけましておめでとうございます！今年もよろしくお願い致します

I had a dream...

Last night I had an interesting dream...

I dreamt that I had ended up at a concert with the Japanese boy-band Arashi (see the picture) and was walking around in the audience. I had no idea what I was doing there since I'm hardly a fan of their music, but I was walking around, mingling with the audience and enjoying myself before the show had started...

...somehow my wandering took me backstage and I opened a door and found myself face to face with the whole group as I accidentally had walked into their dressing room. To my surprise all of them were in the nude as they were about to change into their (fancy) scene costumes and to my great surprise none of them had any genitalia, instead of genitalia they just had a small hole to pee from. They seemed happy to see me and we did some cold talk about the weather and other things until I breached the question and asked why they were lacking their genitalia. The dressing room erupted in disgusted "ewww! It's so disgusting", "oh, I hated those filthy things" and they explained to me that they had their organs it surgically removed because it was so disgusting and how much more comfortable they were with the small pee-holes that they had replaced it with. After that I waved goodbye and wandered out on my merry way, thinking "they seemed like nice guys, a bit odd with the genitalia but not surprising really".

...then I woke up and had to go pee and felt quite thankful that I still had it all where it was supposed to be. I guess this is what happens when you have tacos just before going to bed?

The Difference Between K-pop and J-pop in Pictures

In recent years, there's been quite the boom of korean pop artists here in Japan and the whole K-pop phenomena. First I was going to write a lengthy academic post discussing the differences between K-pop and J-pop and do an in-depth analysis of the pros and cons of each, but then I realized that this is probably best illustrated for you with pictures.

First, let's see a representative example of a J-pop girl's group...

Then, let's compare it to the most recent K-pop stars here in Japan; "Girl's Generation"

Of course, it would not be fair to not make the same comparison between boy groups either, so find a representative example of a J-pop boy band...

Which you can compare to a typical K-pop example...

The above comparison should provide all the information you need to understand the differences between K-pop and J-pop!

(To help you out a bit; in J-Pop, the girls look like kids and the boys look like girls!)

Empty Nest - Salaryman style

Those of you who have followed my blog from the beginning or has made sure to catch up on the older posts probably should be familiar with "The Boy", my former junior colleague who I first met when I joined the management consulting company that I was in when this blog got started. After I left the consultant company to become a more regular corporate suit, he stayed on and we have kept in touch as something akin to friends since I left, frequently meeting up with the old gang for drinks and very interesting rowdy conversations. Particularly me, The Boy and Luke makes for quite a dynamic team.

Considering that he's almost ten years my junior and that our first professional relationship was defined as that of him as a junior employee and me as senior, I have grown very fond of him and see him a bit as something of a mix of a surrogate son and a Mexican illegal immigrant worker I have do my dirty work for me. You can find a digest of the posts where he has played a part in some way here.

But now my little Boy is all grown up and moving out of Japan to go back to school for some fancy degree in some fancy school in Britain. Of course, I still have my biological little daughter, Baby Sunshine here with me, but seeing the Boy all grown up and moving out of the country, to a harsh and unforgiving world, makes me both worried and proud.

Looking back, some of my favorite episodes with him was probably that awfully long month we spent together with Cpt. Britain in Project, working with the boob project. After spending a month working together all day long, eating breakfast, lunch and dinner together, day after day, slowly grinding each other down, but with nothing else to do really. The final weekend together when we had to stay in Paris to finish up some things and no energy to do anything big and the Boy asks me in a very tired voice "So, yeah, you wanna have dinner together?" and I gather up all the energy I have left to put on a big smile and very enthusiastically exclaim "Yeah, I think that's a great idea, you know, I have the feeling that you and me haven't really spent enough quality time together recently".

On the bright side, maybe he'll take me to the London Dungeon and Tussauds if I squeeze in a visit!

(...and of course the title of this post is a friendly nod to neighborhood blogger Karen!)

Respecting your elders - the Japanese Senpai-Kouhai system

In Japan, the "Senpai" system is an integral part of the society, I won't go into a lot of detail here, but it's basically about respecting your elders and those with more experience with you (wikipedia here). Basically, when you join a "group" (company, club, society or even experiences such as getting pregnant, getting married etc.) you are expected to learn and pay proper respect to those who have more experience.

In normal "grown up" society this is nowadays pretty benevolent and not pushed too hard, but it can take forms close to bullying in schools and in some instances; where the junior "Kohai" have to perform tasks for the senior "Senpai".

An older colleague close to retiremeent age told me of how, when he had joined the company as a junior employee, the older people, after a day of supervising some construction work in the bad heat of the summer, went out to drink. As they had been on a construction site, they had been wearing helmets, sweating profusely. He told me how they made him go buy beer for the whole group and forced him to drink from one of his senior's sweaty helmet, guzzling it down in one go. He finished with complaining to me about how they never paid him for the beer either...

Then The Boy told me of how things had worked when he was in junior high and enrolled in the school club activities. The older student there made the juniors play the computer role-playing game in fashion on their gameboys and do the boring stuff like fighting random foes for experience points to level the character to such a point that the senior could continue the story and the fun parts. For the junior to actually do anything fun like continue the story or purchase any equipment in the game was strictly forbidden.

It's a harsh system, but someone I get the feeling that things have loosened up considerably in the later years...

AKB48, Teddybears, Tiamat, Pizzicatto Five and Arashi

There are many things I like about Japan, however Japanese pop music is not one of them. My ignorant impression of Japanese pop music is that it comes into one of the following categories:

• Girl groups like Morning Musume and AKB48 catering to the Lolico crowd of single men in their late 30's early '40s with a creepy obsession of the girls. These groups are also pretty good at being horrible singers with voices slightly below "that girl at work that is decent at karaoke"


• Boy Bands straight out of Johnny's like SMAP, Arashi or even worse; Hey Say Jump. I'm not sure who actually likes these bands, but my guess is that the non-threatening appearance makes them particularly appealing to insecure young girls and gay men, I can't imagine who else would listen to it considering that singing usually is not their strong side


• Visual Kei bands like Glay, Gilgamesh and whatever they are called. I find this category in particular quite offensive since they take the attributes of a sub-culture but play really bland stale regular rock music which is alternative only to appearances, to an old EBM Electrohead like me it's only about posing


• Shonan Rappers who seem way too happy with life, rapping about how great it is with beach life, girls and generally partying; pretty far off from N.W.A. and Public Enemy


• The rest, basically normal R&B inspired mainstream music like Ayumi Hamasaki and whatnot, nothing that interests me particularly although it doesn't really offend me

So, I mostly stick with Western music and yesterday I realized that the Swedish band Teddybears had released a new album "Devil's Music" (hey, since they're pretty big now they don't really need much promotion, but check out their song Punkrocker ft. Iggy Pop here) which triggered a frantic search in trying to get hold of the album. After quite some time of searching the options available I could not find any torrent site having the album and iTunes refused to let me buy it since it's not offered on the Japanese site and not officially released in Japan yet either and meeting the similar situation at klicktrack.com teasing me with the text "This release is unfortunately not available from this shop in your country".

After being very close to giving up and ordering a physical copy of the CD from the old country I finally managed to find a Swedish record store having it for download, and since the site only was available in Swedish I guess they figured that they could contain sales to Sweden only without locking it for other countries I finally managed to get hold of a copy.

It's good stuff, the groove that Teddybears can create in their best moments is up there with the best moments of Fatboy Slim and My life with the Thrill Kill Kult. Although it didn't reach the heights of their previous album "Soft Machine" I still highly recommend it! After the recent quite disappointing release by Dark Tranquility and the lack of lifesigns from Tiamat it felt good to not be let down by the teddies.

Staying a night at the "Manga Kissa"...

In Japan , there are several options for those having a night out with friends and end up missing the last train and without the means to take a taxi or other transportation home.

One of the more famous are the "capsule hotels" which offers a small bed, washing and changing facilities. I have actually never stayed at one, but it doesn't seem that bad unless you have difficulties with confined spaces.

The second option is to take advantage of one of the "all night" offers at one of the many "Manga Kissa" or Manga coffee shops. Those place usually offer a comfortable seat, a large selection of manga comic books that you can borrow and read as you please, perhaps a computer or tv and a small space with a partition giving you at least a bare minimum of privacy. Also they usually offer free soft drinks. I would liken them to Internet cafes if it wasn't for the fact that Internet and tv are the secondary things and the extensive library of manga books is the main pull.

It’s been quite a few years since I frequented one of these places, back in the day when I had just moved here and did not yet have Internet access I went to those to do my mailing and Internet surfing, but in the last ~8 years I have not been to one.

Recently the Boy told me how he had missed the last train and ending up ditched by his friend a bit too far off to take a taxi home. Since it was just a matter of 5-6 hours, he made the decision to spend the night at Manga Kissa until the first train in the morning (they usually start up around six am).

However, the world of after-dark Manga Kissa showed to be a scary place after dark... The place he had picked had semi-private rooms with large partations and "saloon type" doors to your little booth and for some strange reason this place had a pretty extensive collection of hardcore porno manga (usually this is not the case) a section which was pretty heavily in use by a portion of the clientel. As the Boy was walking back from getting his soft drinks, passing by the booths, quite a few of the chairs he could see were shaking more than they should when you’re just supposedly reading a comic book. Also, strangely enough, the booths where shaking chairs could be seen seemed to be the same people who commuted to the porn corner...

Sleeping turned out to be much much harder than the Boy initially expected, despite a pretty comfortable chair and ability to dim the lights. Apparently a manga kissa at night is about as calm and serene as a mental asylum with people banging on the walls, the occasional howling and just when things seem to calm down, some sadistic bastard turns on the soft ice cream machine which operated on a noise level the same as heavy industrial equipment...

In order to turn this post into something a little educational, if finances are limited and you end up in the middle of Tokyo with a few hours to kill before the trains start moving and you don't want to spend the money on a capsule hotel or love hotel, then an all night pack usually doesn't cost more than around 2,000 yen. It's a pretty agreeable price as long as you don't expect to be able to sleep too well...

I almost feel a bit bad... Almost...

As I was setting up a smaller party I e-mailed and talked to some friends and invited them, including the Boy. Most of the times it goes something like this:

Salaryman: (cheery) Hey, you need to come to the party I'm setting up, a bunch of people you know will be coming so it'll be fun!

The Boy: (suspicious) But you always have me do stupid shit for you every time you have a party, translating, picking people up and shit like that...

Salaryman: (slightly hurt) What?! C'mon, we're friends and help each other out sometimes, right? But this time you don't have to do anything, I promise!

The Boy: (still suspicious but softening up) You sure? I don't need to translate, buy shit or do anything? I can just come and enjoy the party like everyone else?

Salaryman: (cheery again) Sure, I promise, it'll be fun!

The Boy: Ok, fine, I'll come

Then the morning of the party I give him a call

Salaryman: (cheery) Hey there Boy, you excited about the party today?

The Boy: (again suspicious) I'll come, why are you calling me now?

Salaryman: (overly cheery) Well, I just need you to help out with a few small things...

The Boy: (suddenly very very tired) C'mon, you said I didn't have to do anything this time...

Salaryman: (overly friendly) Well, things have changed, c'mon, help me out here, I need your help, don't be like that!

The Boy: (exhausted) F**k, fine, what is it? But this better be the last time...

Salaryman: (cheery) Of course!

I almost feel a bit bad sometimes, but just barely...

The porn video booths of the Kintaro Group in Japan!

This topic actually goes way back from 2008 after a porn video booth shop had burnt down in Osaka and I blogged about it (post here). You might think that nothing has moved in my plans of having this seedy aspect of Japanese sex-culture, but in reality I have had ongoing discussions and negotiations with the Boy ever since that time...

As the negotiations continued recently and the Boy claimed that he could consider going but didn't want to go far from his filthy lair. After going online and actually locating a shop within 10minutes walking distance from him, I found this great video on the Kintaro group homepage! This guided tour is pretty great, so instead of having a crappy non-cooperative peon going there for me I thought I'd slap some subtitles on this movie for all to see! It actually is pretty far off from glory-holes and semen stained furniture (well, it looks like all the furniture is easily wiped off...). My favorite part is how the pornstar several time mentions that Kintaro is "the friend of the salaryman" and also shows how convenient it is to go there during work time since they have LAN sockets so you can answer mails and pretend to be available, pretty great so I should do that!

Let's Kintaro!!!

Looking deeply into condoms in Japan

As we are now reaching those slightly stale and awkward days between Christmas and New Year's when you don't really know what to do with all that celebratory atmosphere you built up to for Christmas and hope to maintain the momentum until the New Year's eve, I can't really be bothered to maintain my regular sharp analysis of Japan current affairs and politics.

So, instead I thought I should let you all readers know of the wonders of the Japanese condom market and one particular player with significant share; Okamoto Condoms and their animal condom series (what? I don't have any real source for it but I googled it and someone somewhere on the Internet said it so it's good enough for me!). I'm not going to get into the whole Japanese condom sizes vs. those regularly sold in the western markets, but I think it's pretty uncontroversial to say that the standard Japanese sizes are a bit smaller than the specs of those targeted for the western markets.

But, as in any market, there are niches to fill for those who do not fit into the standard norm and Okamoto does not shy away from this. For those with larger appendixes requiring larger condoms, they have the "Super Big Boy" condom (see the picture below). Note how the key visual to illustrate this is a horse...

I've seen the above brand around for quite a long time, but earlier today by chance I happened to see their newest addition to the family...The "Mega Big Boy"! For those for whom not even the Super Big Boy is enough and if the name isn't enough they have chose to use an image of an elephant as the key visual...

But if you have been blessed with a slightly smaller and perhaps more convenient size of penis where even the standard sizes prove to be a bit too large, what do you do then? Fear not, Okamoto has thought of you too and launched the "Smart Boy" just for you and the key visual is an... ... ... eagle...?

I can see the connection between Horse - Large penis and Elephant - Really Large PENIS but I fail to see the connection between an eagle and a smaller penis and I'm still trying to figure out what's smart about having a small penis?

Getting Married in Japan Part 7 - The Toastmaster...

From my earlier posts, I think you can see that considerable planning needs to go into a wedding here in Japan . But not only is the preparation phase dealt with very carefully, it is also of high importance that the actual event goes smoothly. I will deal with the program and events for the wedding reception and the planning of that more in detail in an upcoming post since there are quite a few amusing stories in that as well.

But this time, I thought I should discuss the role and responsibilities of the toastmaster during a Japanese wedding reception. Well, in terms of role, there is basically no big difference compared to a toastmaster at a European wedding reception; they are the ones making sure that the speeches and events fit in well in the program, and are in charge of making sure that things go somewhat according to plan.

For a Swedish wedding, this is not an extreme challenge since time does not need to be so strictly managed and there is a lot less risk of offending anyone by mispronouncing the name or having the order mixed up and making relative X hold his/hers speech before the much more important relative Y. As you can understand, it’s much stricter in Japan …

This area was probably the one where me and Mrs. Sunshine-Salaryman had the most arguments (thinking about it, this was basically the only area of friction) since she was very concerned about things going correctly according to Japanese customs so none of her more traditional and conservative relatives would be insulted, while I wanted to have it in a relaxed and personal way. The difficulties we had was in finding a middle ground in this and also how to solve the language problem since the guests would be a mixed bunch of Japanese and English speakers with quite a few not bilingual, requiring either a bilingual toastmaster or a translator to one of the languages.

Most people in Japan probably use a professional toastmaster/MC since that gives some assurance on things being managed professionally and with a minimum of mistakes. The toastmaster/MC would then be exclusively committed to that role and would not participate in the overall dinner and merriment. I was very resistant to the idea of having a professional toastmaster and especially the one bilingual American MC they had available annoyed me with that "HEY EVERYONE LET’S HAVE A GREAT WEDDING, MY NAME IS HARRY" faux-foreign style that some of you fellow foreigners who have lived in Japan might understand (it’s foreign, but packaged in a way that makes Japanese more comfortable with it, but makes the non-Japanese crowd feel awkward). Not to mention that it would cost a significant amount of money (around $2,000 USD…).

Since things were reaching the desperate stage and we needed to decide how to deal with this. After asking around among some of my bilingual friends here who I thought might be up to the task, but considering that these friends live in Japan and know how a wedding here works they also knew what kind of pressure this would mean, and as a result; they politely declined (just enjoying the party probably was a lot more appealing to them).

In the end, I turned to my good old friend Mr. Politician who was coming for the wedding, all the way from Sweden, and used to public speaking. In the normal Swedish way he accepted the task with honor, mentioning who he had been the toastmaster at some weddings in Sweden previously and was very honored to be asked and gladly accepted... I believe that he probably thought it would be a fun and relaxed task...

However, after waiting a few weeks after having him accept the task and making sure that it would be too late for him to turn back on his promise, I started to gradually reveal the extent of the task before him...

I am not sure on how he reacted to the stuff we mailed to him in advance to allow him to prepare for the task at hand; the time schedule charts in excel, down to individual minutes, and long strings of text that it was VERY IMPORTANT that he read exactly as they were at exactly the right time. To solve the issue of translator, with a non Japanese speaking toastmaster, we simply assigned that to The Boy, who I perceive as a cross between my son and an immigrant worker I can abuse. He only needed to follow the toastmasters lead, so the work was considerably lighter.

One of the first things I did after my friend arrived in Japan was to take him to the wedding planner for a detailed review of the activities and his tasks during the reception together with the wedding planner. During the two hour long meeting where all details and events were discussed, my friends face got gradually whiter and whiter as the extent and responsibility of his task sank in, with a tight time schedule to manage, Japanese names to remember and things he needed to take care in, to not risk offending any conservative Japanese family member.

With the risk of ending this post with a little anti-climax, in the end, he passed it with flying colors and managed to keep a nice balance between Japanese time keeping and Swedish informality, making both sides of the family very happy with the event. But at the end, he looked completely exhausted and mentioned to us that "this isn't like a Swedish wedding at all, now I know how it must feel to be the MC of a royal wedding in Sweden...".

So yeah, if someone asks you to play toastmaster at a Japanese wedding, consider it very carefully before you accept...

The image characters we rely on for protection

As I previously, tongue-in-cheek, did the ranking of the top 3 worst image characters in Japan (here) I didn't really think much about it and aimed for a entertaining slant for the post. However, as I the other day noticed the official image character of the Japan fire department, I figured it is time that some serious critical journalism takes a good look at some of these characters that represent official authorities that we depend on in our daily lives. I think it is fair to say that, as a Japanese tax-payer, I should be able to put much higher expectations on such characters than those developed for commercial purposes. If you are a faithful reader you already know that I am unreliable and extremely slow in following up on earlier promises, but it is my intention to follow up other areas and investigate their characters further on as well.

The characters that are the focus of my investigation this time are Kyuuta, representing the Tokyo Fire department, and Piipo-kun, representing the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department, very important tasks as you can easily understand.

Kyuuta - Protecting you from fires

This is the official character of the Tokyo Fire department and information about who he/she is and what its objectives are is very difficult find which raises the questions "what is it Kyuuta doesn't want us to know?". But yeah, after the whole Keisei Panda backstory mess, it can be a relief to have a character without a ridiculous backstory. In fact, the whole Kyuuta feels a bit amateurish and underdeveloped actually, the name comes from the final "9" ("kyuu" in Japanese) in the Japanese "911 number"; 119, and the red color of his clothes shows that he's a firefighter and the color of the helmet is for water, to extinguish the fires. The antenna can apparently flash when he needs to go extinguish a fire, but he doesn't seem to have any other biological means of making noise than his/hers mouth. I do find it pretty cowardly that they haven't assigned Kyuuta a sex, call it a boy or girl and then live with it.

(Also, introducing here for the first time the "character rating scale 1-10, 10 is the best")

Cuteness: 2

Freaky backstory: 1

Educational: 4

Creepiness: 6

Total Verdict: 3 - All in all a pretty lame character and it's pretty obvious that it was primarily made to get kids to remember the 119 number, but that's no excuse to make a half assed attempt. I would advise them to hire Sanrio and have a proper character assigned to the job, it is hard times and we can't afford to keep lame characters afloat just for the sake of it. That he has his own theme song that is extremely lame doesn't really help his case either (listen here).

Piipo-kun - Protecting the streets

Unfortunately the Tokyo PD saw the lead of the fire department and decided that they could not let themselves be seen as sloppy and not dedicated, and they created their own character. The official explanation to the design was "we took some cute characteristics of animals and used them when we created the character". One of the better things with this character is that he, as well, do not have a bizarre backstory. He does have a family however, but they are not much featured and are just serving as props in his adventures. The basic concept of Piipo-kun can be summarized in one word: "surveillance". His ears are large so he can hear what you are talking about, he has an antenna so he can react quickly to any of your sudden movements and his eyes are large so he can see what you are doing. The name is an amalgam of the English words "People" and "Police".

Cuteness: 4
Freaky backstory: 1
Educational: 3
Creepiness: 4
Total Verdict: 4 - I find this character slightly more likeable than Kyuuta, but not by much. The main redeeming feature of this Piipo-kun is that he at least is slightly cute and even if he is surveying my every move, he doesn't seem like he would pose much of a fight if it came to that.

Addition: After some more research, unfortunately I found out that Piipo-kun as well happens to have his own theme song... Not sure which one is worst, but I think this one is slightly better than that of Kyuuta since the katakana Japanese-English at least makes it amusing. Subject yourself to the song at your own risk here (click the link next to the flash icon)

2 Million Dorks spending $4.5 BN USD on 377,873 sqkm of land?

To follow up the “Otaku” and Akiba theme since a few posts back, I believe that I have some new insight into this that you might be interested in knowing. The other day I had a discussion with the Boy about the Japanese dork phenomena, triggered by his description of visiting a maid café since a visiting friend of his so desperately wanted to experience this, now pretty famous, Japanese speciality.

The Boy seemed considerably less impressed with the maids than with the ensemble of dorks that had picked the same time to visit the café. Among the more amusing anecdotes he told me was that of the guy who showed one of the maids his four huge binders full of photographs of him with different maids (it should be added that most places charge at least $5 for a photo pose with the guest so this guy had invested considerable amounts into his collection), and that of the guy who wanted his maid to do a special pose for the photo like that of his favorite character in some obscure anime and getting alternatively pissed off at the maid when she failed to capture the pose “no, not like THAT, like THIS” and talking to himself when she again failed to get it right “heh, Azuka would never do THAT (chuckles at the absurdity of Azuka doing it like that)” and quite a few other interesting characters.

In any case, the discussion led us into a market sizing of the Japanese dork population and as I was applying a rationale taking into consideration the adult male population of Japan , % living in metropolitan areas and then applying a % to that around ~1% to get a potential dork population. I think the estimation we ended up with during this exercise was somewhere around 50,000 dorks nationwide in Japan . But as any good management consultant and/or market researcher will tell you, you also need to check for external sources to see if there is data supporting the estimate and remarkably we found this page (in Japanese). Since I assume that most readers of this blog cannot read Japanese, let me give you some highlights from the article.

The article presents some research findings from 2005 done on the “otaku” market and the different segments of Otaku that exist. Market research company Nomura Research Institute are described as “Otaku market analysis pioneers”, it should be added that, up until today, I had great respect for NRI since the research from them I have used in the past has been of very good quality.

They estimate the total Otaku population of Japan to be close to 2 MN people/dorks and the potential market, in terms of money they spend on their obsession to ~$4.5 BN USD. Frightening figures… However, there is some consolation in that this does not only take into account the classic "Akiba otaku" (Dork usually found in Akihabara focused on Manga, Anime and computer games) but a broad spectra of otaku, including fashion, cars, computer hardware etc.

And yeah, when you add up the manga, anime and gaming dorks, you end up with almost the exact figure that me and the Boy came up with during our soft market sizing exercise. What can I say? I’m a pro.

Worst Image Character of Japan - Top 3 2009

Before I kick this epic post off properly into it's full glory, my own personal stance to the topic in question should probably be clarified.

As many of my readers probably know, "Image Characters" are very popular here in Japan. Plenty of companies and institutions have these characters to "soften" the message and to help illustrate whatever the message is in a cute way. Personally I don't have any problems with this approach although I know quite a few foreigners here in Japan, and a few Japanese as well I should add for good measure, who thinks these image characters are stupid and the concept in itself is for children and not for grown men.

However, sometimes these character really don't hit the mark... The larger companies go with surefire characters, homegrown such as Hello Kitty, Doraemon, Atom Boy or imported ones such as Snoopy, Moomin, Miffy or similar. The cuteness of those well established character brands is well established so there is little risk of missing the mark. Even if you can't afford to get the actual Hello Kitty license, you can at least try to get the Keroppi license...

With that lengthy and cumbersome disclaimer out of the way, let's get the real post on the road! As you might understand, this post deals with those characters that weren't... well... maybe that well thought out? Characters that fail to evoke that feeling of affection and just plain miss the mark, by far.

Worst Characters of Japan

Number 3 - The Keisei Panda

Well, this character just makes me uncomfortable... You would think that it's hard to use a panda and not get the "cute" right, but this Panda is anything but cute, I'm not sure but I think it's the mouth that gives it a slightly creepy look. The Panda is the official character of the Keisei Railways credit cards and to it's credit it has to be said that it's thankfully not very well known among the general public and I have a feeling it never well. Let's just not mention the weird backstory about how he came to earth from the rich and bountiful "Panda Planet", sent by his father to save the earth...

Number 2 - Kuutan, the Narita Airport Character

This one just feel so off the mark in so many ways... In a bid to improve the image of the Narita airport this character was created a few years ago. You would think that a better way to increase the image of the airport would be to make it more accessible and customer friendly instead of paying some stupid agency tons of money to come up with this lame design... To it's credit, the backstory is hardly there at all and Kuutan keeps a very low profile these days...

Number 1 - Sentokun, the Nara Prefecture Character

The worst of the worst, the image character of the ancient capital of Japan and home of the free roaming deers and beautiful buddist temples; Nara. I've been to Nara quite a few times and it's really an amazing place that I would recommend people to visit even if in Japan with limited time. It's less hectic than Kyoto but contains many impressive temples in a calm and nice environment. But then... this character? I believe that a mix of buddism and deers was the general concept for this one, but what they came up with was just plain... .... disturbing... His favorite foods are stated to be "tasty things from Nara", that is just a pretty obvious sign of "character creating block"... Sentokun is the well deserved winner of the "worst character of Japan 2009"!

(I'm sure that there are plenty of other bad seeds out there, so if you have any other really bad characters in your mind, please drop a line in the comments and I might follow this one up with a full top 10, I'm sure the material is out there...)