alpha whiskey hotel

Ramen truck by Ikebukuro Station

I admit that I’ve always loved “ramen wagons”.  Like any other mobile food vending cart, it parks in areas of heavy foot traffic, and has stoves in there so that the owner can make up some fast food to serve his hungry customers.  Unlike most other mobile food carts, however, the food is not meant to be taken away, but eaten on the spot.  The walls of the wagon fold down to become the table that customers eat at. 

Some “ramen enthusiasts” (this is Japan — of course there are “enthusiasts” dedicated to ramen) will tell you that the only true ramen is that which comes from the back of a truck.  I won’t go that far, but I will say that I do really enjoy these trucks.  There’s something about sitting at the oasis in the middle of the heavy foot traffic in front of the station, warming yourself up with a nice bowl of pork ramen, and chatting away with the other customers, most of whom are..  well-lubricated.. after a night on the town.  For some reason, eating at one of these ramen trucks comes with the expectation of joining in whatever conversation is happening around the tables — each truck turns into a sort of “mini party”, so there is almost always some fascinating conversation to be had, such as the following that happened last Friday night:

Drunk Guy #1: So where are you from?

Drew: [usual smart-ass answer] Nerima.

Drunk Guy #1: No, before then.

Drew: [pointing to "Canada" hat] Canada.

Drunk Guy #1: And you’ve been living here for…

Drew:  The better part of 5 years now.

Drunk Guy #1: Oh, you must be on a tourist visa then.

Drew: No, I have a job, I work.

Drunk Guy #1: [to Drunk Guy #2] Hey, this guy here is from Canada and he has a job here!

Drunk Guy #2: [comes over] You’re from Canada?  That’s great!  I know a lot about Canada!  I have one thing to tell you, a catchphrase from your home country.  Are you ready?  [puts his hand on my shoulder, looks me in the eyes]  ”Yes we can!”

Shane Sakata from The Nihon Sun recently put out a call to Japan Bloggers to take a snapshot out their window and post it along with some narrative. I did this same thing a couple days ago as the inaugural entry in my new incarnation of Picture of the Day, but I thought I’d post a higher-resolution photo and longer narrative here.

This view is from the window directly behind my desk in my 6th-floor office by Higashi-Nakano Station. The view looks Northbound at the construction on Yamate-dori, which has been ongoing since I came to Tokyo and probably for a while before then. The main result of the construction was the (so far) 6-kilometer Yamate Tunnel on the C2 Loop of the Tokyo Metro Highway. Now that the tunnel has been open for a year, they’re going through and refinishing all the roads that they tore up, as well as building interlocking brick sidewalks and a row of trees on each side of the road.

Having this bird’s eye view has not only given me something to look at when I need to take my eyes away from the computer (my coworkers are now all convinced that I should have been a civil engineer), but it’s also given me great insight into the road construction process. Great care is taken to minimize interruptions to traffic flow. In the attached picture, you’ll notice that the 2 northbound lanes have been shifted onto the sidewalk (rather than simply reduced to 1 lane) to allow for the construction on the island in the centre of the road. You should also be able to see in the right-hand side of the picture, some leftover lines in the road from where the southbound lanes were similarly shifted to allow for the construction there.

This construction (at least on the section of Yamate-dori that I can see from my window) will be ongoing until October, 2009. After that, I guess I’ll have to find something else to look at.

It was a depressing, horrible, bleak building, and I always felt like I might end up sicker than I started after a visit there. Just two years ago (in 2006!) they finally removed the asbestos from the building.

Still, no matter how dingy it was, no matter how out-of-date the equipment, it was comforting to have a hospital right there, only 500 meters away from my apartment. If I got sick, my plan was always to eschew the largely-useless ambulance and take a taxi to the local hospital instead.

But. I hurt my foot a couple weeks back and limped down the street to the hospital, only to find a “we’ve closed forever” sign on it. So instead I went to the shiny new modern hospital a couple stops away on the train… Sure, they had good equipment and good doctors, and I didn’t feel like a good earthquake could shake the place apart, but it didn’t have any of the character of the 45-year-old Marumo Hospital building.

Marumo is on the route that I take when I have my weekend morning walk, and I went by the other day to see the demolition already underway… A bit sad that 45 years of serving my neighbourhood has been replaced with piles of wood and rubble, but progress marches on I guess…

The Tokyo Sewage Commission operates two weather radars to allow them to dynamically open and close drainage pipes in response to heavy rainfall. They provide this data to the public in the form of a very useful website which shows updated rainfall maps every 10 minutes.

I happened to see the following notice on the site this morning:

If you can’t read Japanese, it says “This is accident prevention month! Our goal is to have zero accidents!”

Thank You, Tokyo Government! I had been planning on having several accidents this month; I’m glad that someone warned me about this month’s goal before this morning’s planned blindfolded drive to work…

Mainichi Daily News ran a story about a week back about a dry-cleaning firm and its treatment of foreign labour:

Six Chinese female trainees at a dry-cleaning company in Yamanashi Prefecture got into a row with the company when they complained that they were being paid under the minimum wage, and three of them suffered injuries including a broken bone, it has been learned.

The article goes on to say that the employees complained that their monthly salary of 50,000 yen (about USD $500) was far below minimum wage, and that their overtime pay of 350 yen/hour (later raised to 450 yen/hour) was less than half of the region’s minimum standards for overtime.

When the six workers submitted a written request for their wages to be raised, the dry-cleaning company showed up at the company’s dormitory with 10 other people, and tried to force the women into a van taking them to the airport and sending them to China.  During this scuffle, one woman’s leg was broken when she jumped out of a second-story window trying to escape, and two others were also injured, presumably by the company employees who were trying to force them into the van.

The company president later visited the foreign workers’ union headquarters and apologised:

“If they were Japanese I wouldn’t have done it (tried to force them to leave). I was asked for a high amount of unpaid cash and thought I couldn’t negotiate. I’m sorry for their injuries.”

Nice.  ”You don’t have to worry, Japanese government.  I wouldn’t have tried to kidnap Japanese girls after they demand that I start following employment laws, only dirty foreign ones.  Please rest assured.”

That’s OK though; the Justice Ministry has said that the company might be punished:

“The failure to pay wages, the human rights violations and other actions constitute illicit behavior, and there is a possibility that this warrants banning the firm from accepting trainees for three years,” the official said.

Translation:  ”You might have to wait three whole years before being allowed to abuse other foreign labour in this way”.

In the “Western bloggers in Japan” community, there is often a lot of grousing about what is seen as horrendous acts of racism: “I had to see 8 whole apartments before I found one that would rent to a white man!”  ”Boo hoo, when I went to buy my iPhone I had to show a different kind of ID!”  ”A lady gave me the stink-eye on the subway!”

Truthfully that stuff bothers me a bit too, but I can’t get worked up about the small stuff when I know what kind of problems the immigrants who aren’t lucky enough to have been born in a rich country face:  Not being able to rent anything but the most disgusting shacks of apartments… working long hours in poor conditions…  in some cases, being imprisoned by the Yakuza and forced to work as sex workers for Japan’s business and government elite..  And then when finally one case actually makes the news — an abuse and kidnapping and assault case — it’s met with a slap on the wrist like that.

This sort of thing is what the “Westerners in Japan” blogosphere should really concern itself with; not petty bullcrap like iPhones and video rental memberships.

I have mentioned the “Here in Japan…” speech before. This is the lecture that we tend to hear, that tries to convince us that any argument between a Japanese person and a Non-Japanese person is actually a cultural difference, rather than a simple difference of opinion.  This is because Japan is a Beautiful and Unique Flower,  and no human civilization anywhere else on the world has anything in common with the Japanese… oop, sorry, I need to take a break to refill my sarcasm tank.

Anyway, as most readers of this blog will already know, Google released its Street View service in Japan last month.  This is a service that had Google drive through the streets of Tokyo (and presumably other metropolitan areas?) and take pictures every 100 meters or so, and make those pictures viewable in Google Maps.  Like a lot of people, we all had a lot of fun with it at the office…  People were looking for their houses, favourite stores, the office…  We were checking our parking spots looking for our cars and motorcycles, we were checking favourite hangouts to see if we could see anything interesting.

But it didn’t take too long for the cries of protest to start from the Japanese blogging community. This post (english translation here) is the most famous and the one that I’ll talk about.

Anyway, there’s a reason I started off this post talking about the “here in Japan” lecture.  Mr. Higuchi’s letter to Google raises some good points, but it’s so couched in the whole “we Japanese…” us vs. them mentality that it’s really hard to read those points without emotions getting in the way.

His letter rubs the wrong way almost from the start:  He is quite convinced that the employees of Google Japan feel the same way as him (Why wouldn’t they?   They’re Japanese, and We Japanese Are All The Same), and that they have simply been unable to convince their idiot American bosses of the truth that Google Street View offends Japanese Sensibilities.

But really, let’s look at his main point about why “We Japanese” do not like Street View: “We Japanese live close to the street in small houses, and so consider the exterior of our houses to be part of our living space as well”.   He backs this up with examples of things that only “We Japanese” do, such as shoveling snow from the road/sidewalk in front of their house, and decorating the front of their house with plants and the like.

Now, those of you who have lived in non-Japan parts of the world can see where I am going with this: this is not a “We Japanese” thing; this is clearly a “We Humans Who Live In Close Proximity” thing.  If only he had started off differently, like “People in Tokyo live in even closer proximity than people in New York, so maybe you haven’t considered this…” this would be a lot more well-received than playing the “You Americans could not possibly hope to understand We Japanese” card.

It’s time for everybody, on all sides of debates, to learn:  Different culture groups aren’t really as different as first they seem, so if you are trying to make some argument like that, see if you can phrase your argument in terms of “we humans” rather than “we [race]“.

Well, another one of those Darwin-defying cyclists just about ruined my drive home tonight.

There were 2 lanes of traffic in each direction, and a red light up ahead.  I was moving along in the outside lane; the inside lane was already backed up from the red light (Japanese drivers often forget that the outside lane is available which is why it is often free-moving even when the inside lane is backed up). All of a sudden I was thinking to myself, “Hmm, I think I just saw something from the corner of my eye, better be care–” and BAM there he was.

Now, for those readers already familiar with Tokyo cyclists, or those who have read my earlier posts on the matter, you may safely skip the remainder of this paragraph, for it goes without saying.  For everyone else, however, you may be surprised to know what this man was wearing.  Black from head to toe.  And of course, his bicycle had no reflectors or lights.  He was the perfect ninja bicyclist.

He had evidently crossed the street, driving through the stopped lane of cars without checking to see if both lanes were stopped.  I had little choice but to leave bits of tyre and brake pad all over the street as I screeched to a halt to avoid him.  And of course he had the gall to give me the stink-eye, as if I had committed a horrible sin by driving along in my lane exactly as the law dictated.

But I finally figured out what it is that bothers me so much about the idiot cyclists here.  It’s that when I finally manage to do one of them in, Japanese laws say that it’ll be me that’s held 100% liable.  It’ll be my driving license that gets revoked, and it’ll be my insurance that has to pay up, no matter how poorly dressed the guy was, or how egregiously he was breaking the law.

Ah well, in the mean time I’ll continue to get my revenge by honking at every cyclist who I catch being an idiot.

My neighbourhood doesn’t really have a whole lot of legal motorcycle parking.  There are plenty of bicycle lots (and you can usually keep your bicycle at your building anyway).  Moped lots are cheap as well (3000 yen/month) and car lots are on par with what you would expect in Northwest Tokyo (20,000 yen/month).  If you have a motorcycle, though, your options are limited.  You can either rent out an entire car space (if the car lot owner will even rent to a motorcyclist), or you can park illegally.

Luckily, the police in the area are well aware of the plight of the motorcyclists, and generally they look the other way if they notice a motorcycle, particularly one with local plates, parked illegally.  A police officer once told me “Listen, as long as you aren’t so blatant about it as to park right in front of the station, or right on the main road…  Basically, if you pretend that you’re trying to hide your bike from us, we’ll pretend that you’ve succeeded.”  That said, if too many residents complain that a pile of bikes has got too big or intrusive, the police will put a nice “move your bike” warning out, and you’ll have to find another hidey-hole for a few months until you’re asked to move it again.

This is why I was annoyed to see the fellow with the white moped parked at the left.   Not only was he a moped, which means that there was perfectly good (and cheap!) moped parking less than 50 meters away from where he was parked, but between the way that he parked at an angle and the way that he stuck his helmet out the left side of his bike, he was using up almost half the sidewalk!  Bikes parked like this make it inconvenient for the local residents, making it more likely that we’ll be asked to move our bikes elsewhere.

Compare and contrast with how I’ve parked my bike.  It’s much bigger than the moped, but takes up much less room.  Can’t believe the moped driver is so discourteous…  Next time I may just move the moped back along the fence so that he’s parked in a way that makes sense.

When I first came to Japan, I loved the Naan Dog from MOS Burger.  It was a wiener and some sweet-ish curry wrapped up in a piece of Indian naan.   Needless to say, I was devastated when I walked into my local MOS Burger one day to find out that they no longer sold that product.  A similar incident happened that summer with the Thai-style coconut curry from Matsuya.  One day: delicious curry that sold really well, next day: gone.  Over that summer, I watched a lot of the products (foods as well as consumer products like laundry soap and toilet paper) that I had grown accustomed to disappear.  I used to joke with my friends that “the stores pull any item that is too popular with gaijins”, which is where the phenomenon of fast-disappearing products got its nickname “Gaijin Curse” within my little circle of friends.

Of course now that I know and understand Japan a bit better, I know that fast-disappearing seasonal products are a fact of life here. Even so, it’s fun to imagine corporate bean-counters watching secret camera footage and deciding to cancel products based on their sales to foreigners. “Oh crap, that Drew in Tokyo likes our fabric softener too much; time to get out of that line of business”. The Gaijin Curse is not even limited to food and consumer products! My buddy managed to Gaijin Curse an entire train: a 100% reserved-seat train whose seat fee was only 500 yen and which inexplicably skipped by many major stations to drop my buddy off at the little whistle stop where he lives.

Now, not all Gaijin Cursed products are tasty or useful.  Many of them had deservedly short runs.  We needn’t look any farther than Pepsi’s legendary screw-up of last summer, or this year’s equally delicious beverage. And I think that we can all agree that McDonalds had a must-miss with its Fish McDippers.

Speaking of McDonalds, I am well aware that the Gaijin Curse is not limited to Japan. I’m sure that most people are aware of the McRib sandwich, a limited-time product whose insane fans have been the subject of a Simpsons episode. This episode saw Homer tour the USA with a group of “Ribheads” as Krusty Burger tested the Ribwich in various markets across the country.

I have understood the nature of the Gaijin Curse for years. So what inspired today’s post? It seems that the worst Gaijin Curse yet is going to befall our adopted country. That’s right. This is bad. Far worse than the disappearance of any of the flavours of Kit Kat or Haagen-Dazs. Worse than the Naan Dogs, the Ume McNuggets, the fabric softener that smells like Snuggle, or the Ice Coffee ice cream balls. Prepare yourselves, ladies and gentlemen: Mr. Donut is going to take away the Danish Ring. This cannot be allowed to happen! They are going to keep those stupid Triangle Donuts. They are keeping the Pon de Matcha which I swear to God tastes like hay. They are keeping the stupid flavourless and substance-less Rich Donuts, but they are getting rid of by far the greatest donut that has ever been sold.

It must be stopped! How can we do it?! Mr. Donut must be held accountable! I am mad as hell and I am not going to take it anymore!

Or, maybe I’ll just find a different kind of donut instead.

If I had to come up with a marketing buzzword to describe Japanese people, “thinking outside the box” would not be one of the first terms on my list.  ”Because we’ve never done it like that before” is considered a perfectly valid excuse for not doing something in a new improved way.

Even so, some bright employee of Ooedo Nerima Station in Tokyo had an interesting solution to the problem that the fancy LED clock had been broken for several months: