A few news stories from Japan:

Last night was Halloween, and Halloween in Tokyo means the Yamanote Line. Or at least it used to. Every year for about two decades, there would be something akin to a flash party, where foreigners and their Japanese friends would all agree to ride the Yamanote line and party in costume as it made the last few rounds of its loop line for the night. Here’s a quick documentary on the phenomenon:

However, over the years, the partying has, according to some, gotten more and more out of hand–lots of drinking and obnoxious behavior, which has caused a good deal of concern among the Japanese citizenry. Some foreign revelers reportedly used it as an excuse to harass Japanese traingoers, and Japanese in general were intimidated and generally put off by the whole affair. More and more it became a moving display of drunken debauchery. However, many foreign participants beg to differ, saying that it’s a good-natured party mostly populated by Japanese, and most Japanese traingoers don’t mind–and even join in.

Still, Japanese police take the situation seriously. More and more, over the years, police populate the train stations and the trains themselves. Reports this year are mixed–some say that foreigners with costumes were politely ushered onto the trains by police, others say they were blocked. Whatever the case, it seems that this year’s party was muted at best–not many revelers came on the trains. In part, this may have been from the bad reputation the party has gotten–and in part, it may have been due to threats.

You see, the Halloween Train Party has become something of a symbol among Japanese nationalists, who apparently vastly outnumbered the foreigners this year. A mob of more than a hundred nationalists, many supporting hostile and racist signs, reportedly gathered at Shinjuku Station. There were scattered reports of harassment by these people against random foreigners, and it seems that the police had to focus more on the nationalists. Some nationalists reportedly rode the trains armed with video cameras, hoping to document how foul these foreigners are, reportedly with little or no success.

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In other news, the government is looking to increase speed limits on some non-turnpike roads to as high as 80 KPH. The story is relatively vague except to say that the limit could be raised to 80 for roads “not used by pedestrians, bicycles or motorcycles or those that meet other safety requirements.” I went “mentei” (license probation after receiving too many citations) after living in the suburbs close to the boonies out in Tama, not because I drove unsafely, but because the long straightaways with no intersection or pedestrian traffic were rated for 40 KPH speed limits–ridiculously low, and capitalized on by cops as a revenue stream for ticketing. As I noted here, Japanese traffic ops are notorious for issuing tickets not for safety concerns, but just because they can–likely for monetary reasons. Unsafe intersections are almost never observed by traffic cops. In my last two years in the sticks, I got many traffic citations; in the two years after moving to Ikebukuro, I got none–despite no change in my driving habits. Police simply don’t set up speed traps or other ticket traps very often in mid-town.

Apparently this is real: The Windows 7 Whopper:

There’s a Burger King at Sunshine City, a few blocks from where I live. I’ll have to check that out. Not that I will actually order one of these abominations–the four-patty “Mega Mac” was bad enough. How many thousands of calories could be in this thing?

Don’t be fooled by the price: at’s 1450 yen (about $16). The “777” yen ($8.50) price is for the first 30 customers of the day. A promotion which, on second thought, might actually last all day.

Stuff you buy in Japan is more expensive than it is in the U.S. I know that’s old news, and what everyone expects, but it’s something which has both changed and stayed the same over the years.

People got the impression of Japan being expensive back in the 80’s, when Japan was flush. Back then, it was simply over-reported. You had all those stories about $50 musk melons: foreign journalists, wanting to show the greatest contrast possible, went to the priciest shops and found the most outstanding un-bargain they could find. As true as it was that Japan was more expensive, it wasn’t that much more expensive. Most people here didn’t go around buying $50 musk melons.

But things were expensive, and one reason was that people could afford it–and Japan had its own market pretty much tied up. I recall back in 1989, when I lived in Tachikawa, I saw something very new at a discount supermarket called “Topos”: Budweiser and Heineken beers went on sale at a price lower than native beers. After a week, the prices were back up. I asked the manager, and he was surprisingly frank: he told me that the domestic distributors had complained, and so he had to jack up prices of foreign beers again. There was a lot of that kind of thing in Japan at the time.

In the 90’s, however, things changed. The bubble burst, people became less able to spend so much money, and trade deals began knocking down more and more of the walls that had insulated Japan. 100-yen shops began popping up; I do not recall having seen these in Japan previously, but they caught on and today there are two or three in almost every city neighborhood. Prices have dropped, and a lot more foreign goods have made it into the Japanese market. Not nearly as many as you see in other countries, perhaps, but a lot more than there were in Japan twenty years ago.

But one thing has remained true: prices are higher in Japan than they are in the U.S., pretty much as a general rule. And that includes products made in Japan.

I became aware of this back in the early 80’s, when I first visited Japan. I was eager to buy a Nikon camera, and had priced them in the U.S. However, I held off buying one, as I expected they’d be cheaper in Japan. Not so: the same camera, made in Japan, cost more in Tokyo than it did Stateside.

And it is still true today. Price the Canon VIXIA HF200 HD video recorder, for example: at Amazon.com in the U.S., it’s $593. Same camera in Japan at Amazon.co.jp: $872. At Yodobashi Camera, a popular discount camera retailer, the equivalent model is $1,150.

People Stateside bemoan movie ticket prices that exceed $10. In Japan, the standard price at the door is $20. But if you are smart, you’ll buy an advanced ticket for the bargain price of $14.50, and if your budget is really tight, you’ll go to a first-day-of-the-month bargain show for just $11.10 (but those shows tend to be very crowded). Ironically, popcorn does cost less in the theater, but it’s a rare exception to the price rule–movie theater concessions in the U.S. are horrifically over-priced.

Another cost for movies which is higher in Japan: DVDs. The 2-Disc DVD for Star Trek (2009) in the U.S. is $23; in Japan, it’s $33. The fourth season of Bones costs $38.50 in the U.S.; in Japan, it’s $163–more than four times as much.

Why did this come up for me? Because I just bought airline tickets home for Christmas. Called the local travel agency, No. 1 Travel (which has eaten up most of its competitors in this town), and was told that my regular airline, United (frequent flier miles do kind of lock you in) did not have any open seats coming back to Japan for the whole last two weeks of December. And even if they did, the ticket price would be ¥75,000 ($833). But they didn’t, because they said that such a low price for tickets on United were a “special” fare and thus were very limited; I could only fly United if I paid more than a thousand dollars per ticket. So instead I asked them to hold for me the next best thing, tickets on Northwest, also priced at ¥75,000, thinking that I would not find a better price.

So then I went on Sidestep.com, a web site recommended by a co-worker, and typed in the same flight I had asked for. The cheapest fare came up: United, for $760–you could buy direct from their site. Hmm. No problem with the return flight, plenty of seats. I called up United in Japan, figuring that I could just buy from them here. They said, sure; again, no problem with seats on the return flight–but the price is ¥75,000. I told them about the price listed on the site, and they said that that was the U.S. dollar price, and they could not charge me that from within Japan. OK. So I went back online and bought the tickets with my U.S.-based credit card. For tickets for me and Sachi, I saved $146. I even saved myself a few trips to the local travel agency shop.

The DVD and airplane tickets are excellent examples of how the prices should be no different: neither represent much difference in actual production costs. The airline tickets should have been exactly the same.

Instead, it appears that people in Japan still pay a tax for being in Japan; the practice of over-pricing persists. Why is a different question. I’m no economist, so I can only guess. Japan has suffered from a bad economy for a long time, so affluence can’t be the reason. Taxes are a possibility, but if it were, then the over-pricing should be consistent. This is not so: some cameras cost only 10 or 20% more than the U.S. price, while some cost much, much more than American counterparts. Macs, for instance, are usually 10 ~ 20% more expensive here, on a consistent basis, while other electronic items, like video cameras, cost a great deal more. Because the over-pricing is neither universal nor consistent, it seems unlikely that taxes alone account for all of the differential.

If I had to guess, I would say that in some cases, the products are overpriced simply because they can be–the sellers simply believe that people here will pay a higher price. It may also be that the practice of subsidizing cheaper prices overseas by over-charging in Japan continues in some places.

If anyone out there has a clearer understanding of this, I’d love to hear about it.

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As a side note, I remember when my airline ticket purchase would have been a no-go: back in the 80’s, you were required to buy airline tickets from within Japan, where they were more than just $70 more expensive at the time. The common end-run around that was a ticket called yobiyose (Japanese for “to summon”), where you bought a ticket which went from, say, Hong Kong to Tokyo to S.F. and then back to Tokyo. Because the ticket started outside Japan, you could avoid the massive Japan tax, and you just discarded the first leg. That was, of course, frowned upon by the airlines. At some point the market relaxed and this is no longer a problem.

One more side note: I bought most of my DVDs from the U.S. because of the significant price difference, but now have a problem: Sachi is not as satisfied watching them without Japanese subtitles. Oops. And I have to have a region-free DVD player to watch them to boot.

Interestingly, Blu-ray regions are arranged so that U.S. and Japan are in the same region–but, of course, the Blu-rays sold in the U.S. never have Japanese subtitles. Spanish, French, even Arabic are common, but never Japanese. Gee, I wonder why.

If you’ve ever been to Tokyo, or at least seen the movie Mothra, then you probably know about Tokyo Tower, a fixture in the city for the past fifty-one years. Built in 1958, at a height of 332.5 meters, it has been perhaps the city’s most famous landmark. Go almost anywhere in the southern half of the city, and it’ll probably be visible–a big, red-and-white tower in the heart of the city.

Tokyo Tower was built as a broadcasting platform, at first for newfangled TV transmissions, and a few years later for radio as well. The problem is that Japan is now switching over to HDTV (called Hi-Vision here), and Tokyo Tower is not tall enough for sending terrestrial digital signals.

As a result, it was figured that a new tower would have to be built. I’d heard about it a few times over the past several years–a big ol’ tower raised in the relatively low-level area around Asakusa, due east of Ueno and north-east of Akihabara, about 1.5 km distant from each.

The new tower is slated to finish construction in December of 2011, opening in Spring of 2012, and is going to reach 610 meters in height, not quite double the old Tokyo Tower. But it won’t be called “New Tokyo Tower” officially. Instead, it has the doubtful monicker “Sky Tree,” a somewhat Japanese-sounding English name. I’m gonna call it “New Tokyo Tower” myself.

I had thought that it would take a while longer before construction was visible–they broke ground about 6 months ago–but when I looked out my window today, I happened to notice a new building on the horizon. Not every day that hap–um, well, actually, in Tokyo, it is about every day that happens, now that I think about it. But this building will be bigger than most. Here’s what I can see now:

According to the tower’s home page, it is currently at 153 meters; sounds about right.

By copying and photoshopping an artist’s rendering of the tower over the images I took, you can get an idea of what it’ll look like:

From our balcony, without the zoom magnification, at about 8.7 km (5.4 miles) distant, it would look like this:

So, naturally, buy 2011, some other building will have cropped up right in the way. Not that we’ll be here to be annoyed by it–we’ll probably move out of our current place by next year sometime, the intent being to buy a place and pay into the equity instead of just bleeding rent.

One other observation about the tower: it is situated almost perfectly for observing fireworks. I imagine that it’ll be booked for years in advance for engagements viewing the Sumida Fireworks show, the most famous in Tokyo, which go on just a few hundred meters away. Wouldn’t be surprised in the tower were already booked for three years from now, and maybe a few years beyond that.

In a way, that is. Officially, Sachi and I were married on March 17th, 2008. But that was just a legal matter, doing the paperwork at city hall. What we consider our “real” wedding was… well, again, more than one occasion. We got married on September 20th last year in the United States, and then again on September 27th in Japan. So it’s kind of hard to tell when out actual anniversary is. In one way, I have three times the burden of the usual husband, having to remember three dates instead of just one. On the other hand, if I forget one, I have two more chances.

Today we kept the celebration modest (next week’s will be more elaborate); we went to a very nice local restaurant, one we went to once before, but only once as it opened just a few months ago. It’s just a few hundred feet away from our apartment building in Ikebukuro. It’s a great little plane, called “Danoi,” which we were told is Italian for “home” (though I could not confirm that with online dictionaries). It’s a very nice little Italian restaurant tucked back on a side street nearby, and we really like the place. The chief waiter is a Nepalese gentleman named Sabin who speaks Japanese and English very well, and we were served by a charming waitress named Keiko tonight.

The restaurant first serves you bread; tonight it was with butter, olive oil, and a cheese sauce, and was delicious. We ordered pizza first; though it’s not on the menu, we asked for Prosciutto pizza like we did last time, and they obliged us. Next we had a delicious pork dish (gently cooked, with tomato topped by cheese), a nice Caesar salad, and finished with salmon and broccoli pasta.

At one point I mentioned it was our anniversary, and so they gave us dessert for free; we got Tiramisu and chocolate cake (it was more like fudge!), which were both delicious.

A few more images of Sachi and I, alone, and with Sabin and Keiko.

We’d include the URL for the restaurant, but as the place is new, the web site isn’t up yet. If you’re interested in knowing where it is, comment (fill in your email address) and note the request and that you don’t want the comment published, and I will send you more info on how to get there.

Over the summer, Sachi and I have again been subjected to neighbors smoking. With reasonable temperatures out there, we like to leave the balcony window open and get some fresh air into the apartment. The problem is, the wind comes in from the north, and the neighbor immediately to our north frequently comes out onto his balcony to smoke. Closing our balcony door when he starts is no solution; by then, the stink has permeated our apartment, and it’s too late. We’d ask him to stop, but we’re pretty sure that he wouldn’t.

And when you think about it, what he’s doing is kind of asinine. The reason he goes out onto his balcony to smoke is so he does not stink up his apartment. So instead, he stinks up ours. How nice.

It’s time for Aki Matsuri, or Fall Festivals in Japan. I have noticed the lanterns going up around shrines, and this afternoon a couple of omikoshi (portable shrines) were carried along the streets by a few groups of kids with their families and community volunteers. I can still hear the double whistle-blows coming from a distance as the groups continue to cover the neighborhood streets. Think of it as kind of a Japanese version of street caroling.

For a taste of Japanese street revelry, play the sound file (hopefully you can see it) while checking out the photos I took from the 21st floor as they passed by on the street below.

A 4.5 hit about 30 miles due east of us a few minutes ago. Shook the building for a minute. We could tell it was local because it was more of a bouncing quake than a swaying one. Nothing big.

Wow.

The LDP, Japan’s dominant political party for most of the past 65 years, has just gotten it’s butt kicked, hard. With 30% of the contests still undecided, the Democratic Party has won 52% of the seats in the all-important Lower House of Parliament (or about 70% of seats decided so far). If they keep this rate up, they could be looking at about 65% of all seats in the house, giving them firm control of government.

This has been pretty clear in coming, but still, it’s quite a pasting.

Party (Japanese Name)	Seats Won
Democratic Party (Minshu-to)	251
Liberal Democratic Party (LDP / Jimin-to)	61
Clean Governance Party (Komei-to)	11
Communist Party (Kyosan-to)	2
Social Democratic Party (Shakai Minshu-to)	2
People’s New Party (Kokumin Shin-to	3
Independent / Other	10
Not yet decided	140

For those unfamiliar with the Japan Democrats, they are not analogous with the American Democrats; they are more liberal than the LDP, but I do not get the sense that they are flaming liberals or anything. They campaigned on some points similar to the Obama campaign, such as transparency, fiscal responsibility, and generally overthrowing the corrupt bastards in power. They are also free-market, promise to decentralize government and put a good deal of power back into the hands of the people (local governments, from what I can tell). They ran on human rights, pacifism, and a focus on good international relations.

Whether any of this will translate into actual change… we’ll see.

Sachi and I were woken up just after 5am this morning by a quake just as strong as the one two days ago. Not much to report specifically aside from the usual shaking and swaying–and then we went back to sleep. (It was five in the morning!)

According to the news, this one was 6.5–a touch weaker than before–but had an epicenter much closer to the coast, this time just off Izu Peninsula. And unlike before, the magnitude of the quake was felt much more strongly near the center. In Tokyo, the strength felt was 4 on the Japanese scale of 7, but nearer the epicenter, the strength was a “low” 6–enough to throw items off shelves. Several dozen people were hurt, none reported killed so far.

Two large quakes in such a short time are certain to stoke speculation that a third, and much bigger one, is on its way. Wheee. Let’s hope, however, that these largish temblors are serving to release tension in the fault lines, and are doing the reverse of what people may fear.

Quake in Tokyo, 7:56 pm. Sizable.

Wow, that was probably the strongest earthquake we’ve felt in our Ikebukuro apartment, and the strongest temblor I recall for quite a long time. It may have been magnified by the fact that we’re fairly high up in a tall building, but still, that was sizable.

News reports mark it as being centered in the Pacific, just south of Shizuoka Prefecture, maybe only 30km off the coast–but it was pretty big, at a magnitude of 6.5 to 7.0 on the Richter scale. On the Japanese scale of 1 to 7, Central Tokyo was marked as a “4.” A 2 is barely noticeable, and a 3 is easily felt and relatively common.

But if that was a 4, I don’t want to feel a 6. Even a 5 would be pretty scary. This 4 was bad enough.

Update: The Bosai site is saying that there was a quake at 7:55 200 km south of the 7:56 quake which measured 7.5 on the Richter scale!

Now more sites are identifying the more southern epicenter.

Otherwise, the quake info looks strange–locations close to the quake felt is less strongly than many places 1-200 km more distant. Looking at the strength as felt on the ground, one would think that the quake was centered north-east of Tokyo.

I have heard this idea tossed around for some time in Japan–to increase the national sales tax from 5% to 20% and so do away with some other taxes. To me, this sounds like a foolish idea–it is essentially a way to tax the poor and give the rich a relative break, and could be a huge brake on spending in general. As I recall, the last times they raised the sales tax–from nothing to 3%, and then up to 5%–the economy did very poorly. Of course, other things happened at those times that make it uncertain as to how much of a bad effect the sales tax increases alone had, but it seems almost intuitive.

I do recall that before Japan had the sales tax, there were other taxes, like luxury taxes, that were aimed at the rich–and these taxes disappeared, the sales tax taking their place. To me, the sales tax in Japan has always seemed a way to make taxes in Japan less progressive. And it helps to remember that there are no exceptions for the sales tax–you pay the tax for food, for example, unlike in the United States.

However, my understanding of this issue and how it works is spotty at best. So could somebody explain to me how a 20% national sales tax is not a bad idea?

These are a great little snack: Mini Castella. “Castella” are a kind of pound cake, and sometimes you will see stalls along the street which make small balls, slightly smaller than golf-ball size versions of these, called mini castella.

In the basement of the Ikebukuro Mitsukoshi Department Store, they have a mini castella stand which produces a variety–cheese pudding filled, chocolate filled, maple flavored, and a few more, but the all-around favorite is the Caramel Flake, which is a castella filled with a good dollop of caramel cream with crunchy flakes. Yum. And not too expensive–each one is two bites, and you get 32 for about $10. (Well, not expensive for Japan, at least.)

I got these when Sachi’s friends came to visit, and they quickly disappeared.

March is a full month for us, with Sachiko’s Birthday, White Day, and our wedding anniversary. Sachiko’s birthday is what I decided to splurge on this year. Being as excited not about cleaning as much as she is about having a clean house, anything which can help in that direction is a sure-fire bet to make Sachiko happy. Sachi will always perk up at commercials with cleaning devices, and so this seemed the perfect choice:

The Roomba. What I didn’t expect was how expensive it would be. In the U.S., a similar model is about $350–already quite a bundle. But then you have to factor in the Japan appliance tax: almost any electronic appliance in Japan will end up costing about 30-50% more than the exact same item costs in the United States–especially if it is built in Japan. So the base unit was expensive–but the higher models cost a lot more for very little extra. For an extra $200 you can get a Roomba that auto-docks to a base station (so you don’t have to plug in the power charger), and for another $200 on top of that, there’s a model which you can program to clean on a schedule in addition to auto-docking. I didn’t feel that $400 was worth it just so we could avoid plugging in a cable and deciding when it would clean stuff, and so went with the base model.

Sachi was thrilled with the basic model. We charged it up and just watched it go. The robot would seem to constrain itself to small areas at first, but eventually would cover the whole room. I am not sure, but I got the impression that it learned the layout more or less, as it seemed to figure out how to navigate through the narrow areas better, cleaning more effectively under chairs and so forth as time went on.

Previously, Sachi would cover the entire apartment with her mop-brush thingy, complaining about my “cotton balls” (little balls of material often from socks) and “poodle hair” as well as the copious amounts of dust that seem to result from my presence. Now, she just starts the Roomba and instead relaxes for a good part of the morning–now working more on her blog (which I’ll get to soon).

New Rule: if you use an ATM, especially if there is only one terminal and a line of people waiting, you don’t get to do more than ten transactions.

I see this a lot in Japan: people who come to ATM machines with a fat envelope, and it turns out they have about 20 passbooks. They then monopolize the machine for a good 15 minutes, sometimes even longer, doing transaction after transaction after transaction. I don’t know if these people simply have a ton of accounts, or if they are deputized to carry out the banking business for a large group of people. (Does this happen in the U.S. as well? I never saw it.)

I got caught behind one of these people today. Just a few hours before I have to leave for a flight, and I have to waste a quarter of an hour for this guy to do his business. Meanwhile, a long line of people are forming behind me. After we reached the 15-minute mark, I asked him–extremely politely, though my irritation might not make that sound likely–when he might be finished. He completely ignored me.

Whatever the case, these people should not be allowed in ATM lines. If they have that much business to do, they should either go to a proper bank or at least find an ATM kiosk which has multiple machines.

Every year for her birthday, I take Sachi to a fancy restaurant (Sachi reciprocates on my birthday exactly three months later). This time I chose a place in Ebisu, where Sachi used to work (she worked in Ebisu, not at the restaurant). It’s called the Cardenas Charcoal Grill, and is really, really good.

The place is about 4 or 5 minute’s walk from JR Ebisu Station. You go down to the basement level, but the ceilings are so high you figure that it reaches up to the 1st floor that way. Fearing cigarette smoke, I had asked for a private room, but when we got there, the room was just a cramped side room kept way too hot by an air conditioner in the ceiling. We opted for the main dining area and did not regret it–it was virtually smoke-free (the smokers were in another area, I gathered) and far more pleasant.

We started off with two beers and a nice Caesar Salad, which was tasty though not phenomenal. Around this time they brought the bread, which also was not fantastic–but they served it with a whipped butter with maple flavoring, which was fantastic. Then we got a small plate of fois gras with pita bread, which was very tasty if you can get past the animal-cruelty part.

Alas, the lighting was very low and our iPhones not all that great at low-light photography–but you can get the idea from these snapshots.

Then we got a less politically-incorrect plate, a chicken-and-avocado tortilla roll with fresh salsa. It was dominated with vegetables to the point that I didn’t really taste or even see the chicken or avocado, but we didn’t mind, it had a very rich yet light flavor and was very good.

About this time we got a decanter of a Chilean Pinot Noir (Pinot is my personal favorite) which was excellent, and I had a nice Sangria on the side (which had a wonderful flavor accented surprisingly well by a bit of mint).

But then came the main course: I had a U.S. sirloin steak, Sachi the “Platinum Pork,” and both were, as I often put such things, “pure evil.” Both came with a serving of bacon-and-something mashed potatoes. Mine was topped by a slab of butter, Sachi’s pork was accompanied by a sole spare rib (Sachi passed on it and I devoured it). Both were as good as they sound.

Finally, it being Sachi’s birthday, we finished it off with a plate of small cakes lit with a candle and two sparklers. There were maybe eight small cake pieces and two medium daubs of ice cream (vanilla and strawberry ice). The best cakes were a rich chocolate almost-brownie and a very soft cheesecake.

The total damage came to about ¥16,000 (about $160), which was not bad considering that the decanter of wine alone cost about ¥3400 and the dessert plate was about ¥2000. For the rest to cost only about $50 a person was pretty impressive; I would have expected it to cost more. If you’re willing to spend that amount but not be bled dry for a very nice dinner, try this place out.

Got Sachi her birthday present this Saturday (more on that later), but the only place in town that had what I wanted to get her was Bic Camera. Bic is usually OK, but not their main Ikebukuro store. They have three or four branches around the station, but their main shop is a nightmare to get around. The escalators (only wide enough for one person) only go up, and after going to the 2nd floor, you have to walk halfway across the place to get to the escalators going up to the 3rd floor. The elevators are worse–just two small cars, always overloaded, and it takes forever for them to go anywhere.

I was disheartened to discover that what I wanted to get was on the 6th floor, but I had time, so I didn’t sweat it. But after I bought it, they could not give me the box or even bring it up for me–no, I had to go all the way down to the basement to pick it up. (Even though they had it sitting there, they took five minutes to discuss whether or not to hand it to me.) The I wanted it gift-wrapped. No problem! All you have to do is go up to the 7th floor. The 7th floor?!? Who the hell puts item pickup in the basement and gift-wrapping on the 7th floor? The 7th floor doesn’t even have anything worth gift-wrapping–that counter was among the toilet fixtures. So, in a building that it already really inconvenient to run around in, I had to go up to the 6th floor, down to the basement, back up to the 7th floor, and then down and out. Just to buy a single item.

If you need anything in Ikebukuro, stay the heck away from Bic, the place is a narrow, crowded nightmare to navigate. Labi, right next door, has wide, dual up-and-down escalators and several large, fast elevators, and the place has wide places to walk. They just didn’t have what I wanted, else I would have gone there instead.

The local Subway Sandwich shop had a renovation recently, and when they re-opened, they still didn’t have a toasting oven. But they did have what is pictured above: they walled off one side of the restaurant and made it the smoking area. Completely sealed it off, glass walls and door.

This is rare if not unheard-of in Japan. If a restaurant has a no-smoking section, then it is almost always a corner of the room, and if you’re lucky then there is an air conditioning unit in the ceiling which generally blows the smoky air away from your direction. But usually you are simply in a smoking room where the smokers don’t sit right next to you. At best, if the restaurant has more than one room, one might be a no-smoking room–but don’t bet on it. Starbucks really brought something new to Japan with the whole no-smoking-period policy.

For this Subway shop to have a walled-off room like this was really a surprise.

So, naturally, they usually have the door propped open.

In a recent survey, the iPhone was voted the best smartphone in Japan. Because this was not a scientific survey, one has to take it less than faithfully; however, the fact that the iPhone won the survey by such a wide margin says quite a bit.

This despite all the naysaying about how and why the iPhone would fail. It was probably not even related to the iPhone getting emoji, or the add-on One-seg TV viewer, or having phone-strap capability by adding a rubber sleeve/cover. The fact is simply that the phone is way cool. I do not mean that flippantly; I have seen people in my school, for example, using a variety of cell phones and they never get mentioned; however, whenever I am using my iPhone, it always draws attention. Everyone knows about the phone and is curious about it. Not to mention that I’m starting to see it more and more (another tenant in my building, passers-by on the street) which is not too common with the plethora of cell phone models out there.

Probably the main reason why the iPhone has not completely dominated the market is because it is linked to SoftBank; had DoCoMo been the carrier, it would likely be far more popular.

Today, Sachi finished the training and study she’s been pursuing for a while now, and received her certificate: she is officially a Master of Gendai Reiki Ho. Congratulations, Sachi!