This in the news today:

[A] 38-year-old woman, who was in the sixth month of her pregnancy, was being driven to a hospital near the western city of Osaka after she suffered from stomach cramps and bleeding, according to Kyodo News agency and other local media.

Nine hospitals closer to her home in Nara prefecture (state), over 40 kilometers (25 miles) away, had earlier refused to admit her, saying they were full, the reports said.

Her water broke two hours into the journey. Ten minutes later, the ambulance collided with a minivan.

There is just so much wrong with this story, but it reinforces my apprehension about ever needing an ambulance in Japan. Honestly, unless I feel it’s necessary, I will seriously consider hailing a taxi instead, especially if there is nothing that can be fixed before getting to the hospital in any case. At least taxis drive aggressively. Ambulances here tend to be rather slow and over-cautious.

So, why did the ambulance in question get into the accident? It’s possible that the driver was panicked by the patient being in such dire straits, with so many hospitals refusing service and the only accepting one so far away. But there’s even money on the bet that it wasn’t the ambulance driver’s fault.

Here in Japan, I have noticed an alarming disregard for emergency vehicles by drivers. Every time I see a fire truck or ambulance approach an intersection with sirens blaring and lights blazing, I stop immediately–and am always shocked by how many people don’t stop. Just a few weeks ago, I was at an intersection near Tokyo Dome, and an ambulance was clearly, audibly and visibly, approaching from the cross street. I had stopped early, but most traffic continued until the ambulance came to a stop at the intersection, shouting pleas over their loudspeaker for traffic to clear. Despite this, a car simply ran through the intersection, making the ambulance wait… and then, to my shock, a city bus drove through after the car as if nothing unusual was going on. No way the bus driver did not see the ambulance. This was egregious, even for Tokyo. And yet, I shouldn’t be shocked, as I see this kind of thing all too often.

That’s why I have the feeling that the minivan driver was at least partly at fault: I can so easily imagine the driver simply deciding that where he was going at 5:10 am was more important than some ambulance.

So what happened to the poor woman then?

After the accident occurred, the hospital in Takatsuki refused to admit the woman, with one official telling ambulance workers, “Treatment is difficult as the woman has already had a miscarriage. We also have an emergency operation.”

Another two hospitals refused admission and after another request the initial hospital in Takatsuki decided to admit her.

Well, this is interesting. Hadn’t heard of this before. Apparently, there is a growing number of people who are homeless, but still making just enough money to get by–but not enough to get an apartment, apparently, or at least they prefer not to have one. So instead, they spend their nights at Internet cafes, which provide shower facilities and even sell clean underwear. Honest–unless this is a huge hoax that someone put over on the news services. Supposedly, the Japanese government has found 5,400 people who do this, regularly.

The story I found claims that the “refugees” spend ¥3000 for a 5-hour stay (with a meal provided) and get a shower for ¥200 extra. However, I find that pricing to be suspect; 30 days in a month, ¥3000 yen/day, that’s ¥90,000 per month. While an Internet cafe might be nice, one can rent an apartment for much cheaper than that, if you’re willing to settle for less-than-luxurious conditions.

Either the prices most of these people pay are much cheaper (and I’m guessing that you can find much better than ¥3000 for 5 hours if you look hard enough–I found a cafe that was ¥400/hour for a two-person booth, and I am sure that many drop their prices for the late night customers), or the people in question simply prefer things to be taken care of for them, not to mention having a nice space provided–some of the Internet cafes offer good surroundings.

It is also a good alternative to a hotel. I remember staying in a capsule hotel once, and it was horrible; it was essentially a watering hole for drunk businessmen who were either snoring loudly, watching TV loudly, or were congregating in the corridors and chatting all night. Nor was it really that cheap; an Internet cafe would be cheaper, and likely a lot less noisy.

I’m getting better at cooking, I think. Or at least in presentation. As I am at home most of the day during my August vacation, and Sachi has to work most days, I am cooking most of the dinners. My repertoire is still limited, but I’m getting more of a feel for things. Tonight’s dinner, shown in the image below: stir-fry chicken with onions and green peppers, with garlic, onion, and pimenton spices, served on a bed of lettuce, shaved onions and carrots, with sliced spring onions (“negi”) on top. The side dish is fried potatoes: dice the potatoes and boil for 6-10 minutes, then fry in a pan with a little extra virgin olive oil and apply spices to taste. With beer and toasted bread rolls, delicious. And a relatively simple meal.

As we sat down to eat, we were treated to constant lightning flashes. Though a thunderstorm seemed to rage nearby, we heard little thunder; instead, there were repeated flashes every five or ten seconds, many bright, but none with an accompanying boom. Reminiscent of my mother commenting that when they heard thunderstorms when she was a kid, they said “God’s bowling tonight,” Sachi tonight commented, “God is taking a lot of pictures now.”

Sometimes, living with Sachi, I pick up a good expression in Japanese, here and there. One that I got a while back was when we were watching the movie Mr. and Mrs. Smith. As they went through that long battle scene through their house, Sachi kept saying, “arienai!” (“有り得ない!”)* Sachi asked me how to say that in English; at the time, the best I could come up with was “That’s impossible!”

Tonight, we watched The Princess Bride, a very nice movie, one of Rob Reiner’s earlier directing jobs (Reiner is a very dependably good director). As we were watching it, I was explaining a lot of the vocabulary to Sachi (the DVD I have didn’t have subtitles, neither Japanese nor English). And one of the oft-repeated words in the film appealed to me as the perfect translation for “arienai”: “inconceivable!”

*I tried to write the Japanese for this, but have just discovered that Japanese won’t print here… bug #17 that I have to try to fix…. Fixed it. Configuration file problem.

About a month and a half ago, I wrote an entry about the garbage handling in the new building we live in, and noted that the recycled garbage room’s door was strangely locked. Not only do you have to wave your room key over a sensor to get into the room, you have to wave a key over another sensor to get out of the room. This struck me as strange, but I accepted it as okay because before you could get into the room, you had to have a key anyway; I also figured that you could get out of the room via the garage entrance. I figured the double-lock system was to keep people from getting into the building from the garage area via the recycled garbage room.

Well, it turns out that this system is pretty dumb. First of all, the building’s security is kind of a joke. People are constantly entering the building without a key, simply by following in people who open the doors legitimately. When Sachi and I held a housewarming party last month, more than half the guests got past the “locked” front entrance. If someone wants to get in, all they have to do is stand outside pretending to fiddle with their cell phone; when they see someone approach the entrance (from the inside or out), they just pretend to finish text messaging or whatever and then walk to the front door as the other person is passing through. No one questions this. So really, there is no reason to have extra protection elsewhere. The whole “autolock” security thing is weak as tissue paper. Not that I am worried about security; there are cameras and stuff that help prevent crime, each apartment’s door is securely locked, and it’s not like crime is rampant in Japan, anyway.

But the garbage room double-lock is dumb for another reason as well: people can and do get locked into the garbage room. Last week, as I was taking out the trash, I heard a banging on the door to the recycled garbage room. I opened it up, and there was a poor cleaning lady. Somehow she had gotten in, probably as a tenant entered with their key–but when she was finished, she realized that she didn’t have her key! She said that she had been locked in there for fully twenty minutes! Apparently, I was the first person to come along. Sure enough, when I checked, the doors to the garage were locked from the inside, in addition to the door leading to the interior hallway. All the doors were locked from the inside, and there is no intercom in the room.

Walking to the station the other day, a brief question-and-answer Sachi and I shared reminded me of an interesting linguistic difference between English and Japanese. Wanting to know which route we should take, I asked, “Do we go straight ahead, or turn left?” Sachi answered, “Yes.” I laughed, but I understood: we turn left.

I have encountered this before in Japan: when asking a binary “A or B” question, the answer “Yes” means the latter is correct. To an English speaker, however, that sounds like a joke answer–as if both were the correct reply. However, I have yet to probe this deeply; for example, I have never heard “No” to mean the former of the two choices as being correct. Nor am I sure of how strong a linguistic certainty this is; I don’t seem to get much agreement from Japanese speakers that this is the way Japanese people answer such a query, though I have witnessed it many, many times.

In contrast, there is a much more established difference between the two languages, concerning the answering of negative yes/no questions. Positive questions (such as “Do you have a problem?”) are answered the same way in English and Japanese; however, negative questions (e.g., “You don’t have a problem?”) are answered differently.

In English, we answer “yes” or “no” based upon the positive or negative status of the answer; for example, if you do have a problem, you answer “Yes,” because the answer is that you do (positive) have a problem. If you don’t (negative), then you answer “No.” The positive or negative sense of the answer always matches the “Yes” or “No” reply.

In Japanese, however, the answer depends on the truth of the question; in other words, if the assumption of the question is true, then the answer is “Yes,” even if the question is negative. Ergo, the question, “You don’t have a problem?” is answered “Yes, I don’t”–“Yes” because the question was true. If the question is not true, the answer is “no,” as if to say, “no, you’re wrong,” even if the answer is stated in the positive–as in, “no, I do have a problem.” Kind of like the old song, “Yes, we have no bananas today.”

The same structure is used in Chinese, and, I suspect, most far-eastern languages. I remember a story told in a movie a few decades back (“Chan Is Missing“), where a Chinese man is stopped by a traffic cop in San Francisco. The cop holds that the Chinese guy ran a stop sign; the Chinese man insists that he did not. Eventually, the cop asks, “You didn’t stop at the sign, did you?” And the Chinese man answers, “No!” Of course, he meant, “No, I did stop!” but the American cop took that to be an admission that he didn’t stop, and so wrote him the ticket with greater confidence.

I always try to teach this difference to my students. When I ask them if they have any questions, they usually answer “no.” So I add, “Ah, so you have no questions? Then they answer “Yes.” So I come back at them with, “So you do have a question!” To which they answer, “No!”…. and that can go on for as many as three or four cycles until they catch on. By the end of a semester, nobody gets caught by that little trick, and they are all aware of the difference. It’s a funny little instructional gag that everybody enjoys. But it effectively demonstrates the trouble you can get into by making assumptions based upon your own language’s patterns when speaking a different language. In this case, I tell my students that it is safer to give a full answer rather than just a simple “yes” or “no”; to answer “Yes, I have no questions” is more clear than the simple “Yes” if you don’t correct for the language pattern difference.

Another slightly different example of language assumptions is with the Japanese phrase “muzukashii.” That word, literally, means “difficult,” but used in certain circumstances, means “no way in hell can we do that.” It is more polite to covey the idea subtly; instead of refusing a customer’s request, a shopkeeper will instead say it is “difficult” to do it. Japanese people instantly recognize this contextual clue and stop asking for the thing. Westerners, however, think that it is simply a matter of effort, and so keep asking how the task can be accomplished, and are confused and frustrated when the Japanese person keeps talking about how difficult it will be. “Yes, yes, I know it’ll be difficult–you’ve told me three times already! But can you do it??”

While this seems entertaining in itself as a quirk of translation, I should at some point do a post about how such mistakes so commonly occur between people speaking the same language, but assume a particular word means something very different. Like “atheist” and “agnostic,” for example–but in situations a lot less clear-cut than even that.

And I mean “Cool!” in two respects: first, that something great has happened; and second, in regards to the temperature of the apartment. The air conditioner repair guy came back this morning and fixed not just the machine he was supposed to, but also the one the moving company installed.

As mentioned before, the main machine leaked its freon and nitrogen gas reserves–as it turns out, a fitting had been left loose, and the gases had all escaped long before we moved in. He sealed the fitting and charged up the gases, and for the first time, the air conditioner actually works. And now that it does, I can note that it works really well. Sachi and I thought that the building makers had simply skimped and bought a really bad air conditioner. Had we thought to complain earlier, we could have avoided a lot of hot days in the living/dining/kitchen area.

While he was running some sort of vacuum test on the main unit, he took a look at Sachi’s air conditioner, the one that had been installed tilted to the right. He was not in any way responsible for that one, but just as a courtesy, he spent about twenty minutes working on it. It turns out that not only was the wall unit installed at an angle, but the tubing was done extremely poorly–the tubes inside the wrapped bundle leading outside were arranged such that the drainage tube had a notable upward slant, even though the whole bundle was level. Water was pooling inside the unit, and as a result, led to the entire inside of the machine being “sweaty.” Eventually it all dripped out onto the floor. So he unwrapped the bundle, reset the tubes.. and after five or six hours of running at full power, not a single drop has come out. Seems like that unit is fixed as well.

One of these days, the apartment will be perfect. We’ve still got the bath/laundry stink to deal with (likely due to evaporation in the pipes caused by the 24-hour bath-drying utility, which we can’t shut off), and those little flying insects are still massively infesting the apartment–likely breeding in the soil in Sachi’s potted plants. We have to re-pot the plants and then make sure that the bugs left flying around don’t get a chance to re-lay their eggs.

Sachi and I finally told the building’s office people that our main room’s air conditioner not working. Can’t say they don’t respond fast–before the day was out, they had a couple of guys come in and check out the unit.

While one of the guys was outside checking the troubled unit, I asked the other guy to come and take a look at our bedroom’s A/C unit, which has been steadily dripping water. That’s Sachi’s old unit, which the moving company (remember those great guys?) installed in the new place. As he walked in the room, he immediately saw the problem–the unit was tilted, ever so slightly, to the right, and away from the drainage tube, which is also tilted to as to bring the draining water, or some of it, back into the room. One of the guys tried to tilt it back the other way, but the thing keeps dripping; we’ll probably have to call the original installers back in to do the job properly.

Meanwhile, the two repair guys are looking at the main unit, the one in the living room, which comes with the apartment. That hasn’t worked since day one, and once spilled huge amounts of water out when we had our housewarming party. As it turns out, they guys found that there was no gas in the conditioning units. No freon, no N₂.

Now wonder it didn’t work. The guys said they were puzzled as to how the gas could have escaped. They claimed that all units are tested to see if they have the 1 kg or so of gases installed… but if a leak is so rare, then there was probably just an oversight to put the gases into the units, at least just in our place. One of 400 or so apartments in the building, you gotta figure at least a few will have problems like this.

I figure another month or two, and the shakedown might be over, and we might have a fully-functioning apartment.

Just one last note on the whole moving process that I have neglected to mention until now. It has to do with the variety of levels of service you can get. Sachi and I both used movers to move stuff from our old apartments and bring them to the new place. To get a bit of a discount, we used the same company to do both jobs–to varying results. Sachi’s movers were cheerful and helpful from start to finish. My movers, despite being from the same company, were far from that. The lead guy was, if anything, sullen. As if he resented having to do the move. Granted, I did kind of push them on cramming stuff into the truck, and I did have them move a ton of stuff downstairs to the Sodai-gomi area–but all that was part of the contracted service, and it happened near the end of the loading time, when the team’s attitude had already been long expressed.

But there were lots of small details which kind of caught my attention. One was when one of the movers damaged the new apartment. He was hauling in part of a bookcase when he hit a doorway with it–denting the door frame and chipping off an edge of the bookcase. Rather loudly, too. Knowing this could cost us from our deposit when we move out, we asked that the moving company’s insurance take care of it. Last we heard–quite some time ago–the moving guy claimed that the company didn’t carry such insurance and that if we pressed it, he (the moving guy who did the damage) would have to pay for it out of his own pocket.

This is unacceptable on at least a few different levels. First of all, any moving company worth its salt would have either insurance or some system that could handle such damage. It’s not like this is an unexpected occurrence, after all–this has to be the #1 or #2 problem in the service part of the process. If the movers cause damage, they should be prepared to take care of it, seamlessly and without fuss for the client. But worse than that is to have the mover himself tell the client that he’ll be punished financially if we press them on it. That’s unprofessional to the point of scoundrel behavior–like they’re going cheap on us and playing on our guilt. Either we pay for damage we didn’t cause, or make this poor slob who probably gets paid a pittance shell out more than he can afford for us.

But it wasn’t just how the company itself dealt with the issue, it’s also about how sloppily the work was done. Case in point: when they moved my washer-dryer to the new place, they had to disassemble it. The dryer sits upon a brace that is attached to the back of the washing machine; it is attached to the framework with four bolts and nuts. Without them, the dryer would only loosely sit atop the frame, and would quickly nudge itself off and fall to the floor if operated.

After the movers finished up in the old place and I was getting ready to shut it down, I noticed the four nuts and bolts sitting on the floor near where the washer and dryer had been; they had left them behind. I picked them up and gave them to the chief mover, who did not apologize for having made such an oversight.

When they moved the stuff into the new place, they did not put the washer and dryer back together again, because the drainage tube was on the wrong side. Another bad point about the company: movers should be aware of basic installation of such stuff, washer-dryers in particular. Instead, they left us with the washer in the nook designed for the machine, and the dryer sitting on the floor nearby. What’s worse, the chief mover completely forgot about the nuts and bolts–again. He left the job with them in his pocket. That left us unable to put it back together, even if we did manage to switch the drainage tube in the way the movers should have done themselves.

We called the company the next day, and they said they’d send the parts to us as soon as they could. We expected them to arrive the next day by express mail or takkyubin, seeing as how we could not do our laundry without them. Instead, we got them more than a week later. Even by regular mail, it couldn’t have taken more than two days, usually just one–meaning that these guys took about a week before they sent them to us, with the brief note below:

By this time, it was meaningless anyway. As I described in a post about a month ago, our problem was solved by the Internet guy. That is, the guy who came to set up our fiber-optic Internet connection for the phone company. On his way out, he noticed that our dryer, which still sat on the floor (which is probably why he noticed it) was a model that required a part to be replaced due to a recall. I then asked him if he knew about washing machines, and he said he did–and the telephone company guy then proceeded, in just a few minutes, to switch the direction of the drainage tube. I then asked him what we should do about the missing nuts and bolts–and he simply opened up his small tool case and produced exactly the nuts and bolts we needed. Like magic. As if every Internet installation guy of course carries a set of nuts and bolts to fasten a drying machine to a washing machine frame.

That’s what really put the movers to shame: when the phone company guy can do the mover’s expected work ten times better. Yes, I know the phone company guy was unrealistically helpful and prepared, but still, that’s exactly the kind of work the movers should have been prepared for–instead of not doing their expected work and losing the same essential parts twice in one evening and then taking a week to return them.

Yeah, I know… whine, whine, moan, moan. I’ll shut up now, and maybe try to get back to political issues and and social commentary.

I almost missed the milestone: today is my fourth anniversary of non-stop blogging. 1,461 days (365 x 4 plus a leap year day) since August 2, 2003. That was a photo post on my college’s graduation day (we’re holding it on the 4th this year, keeping it on a Saturday). I noted the first anniversary, the second, the third, and then today is the fourth. Makes me wonder what’s be happening when I reach year five.

Today, I kept busy with a meeting at work (we’re getting moving on switching our internal email system to GMail, specifically Google Apps for Education), grading tests, and doing shopping outside. Tonight, there seems to be an O-bon Dance festival at Sunshine City–I can hear the music from here (150 KB mp3 audio), and you can see a bit of the setup between the buildings from our balcony.

That’s the Prince Hotel on the left, the NTT Building on the right, the Sunshine 60 Tower behind the NTT Building, and Shinjuku skyscrapers above in the middle. The O-bon festival is below and center. Closer up, it looks like this:

A very standard O-bon setup–you can see similar photos I took a few years back in Inagi. There’s always a square platform in the middle, lanterns and lights strung out from that central area, people dancing around it, a wider circle of spectators beyond that.

Later, Sachi came home and we went to what is now our usual yakitori place–not the mom & pop place, but the bigger restaurant around the corner. The one where there’s an old guy who comes in every night and monopolizes the waitress’ time with idle chat. Before we left, a group of seven or eight older men came in wearing garb that told us they were with the O-bon festival themselves. It seemed like they had gotten an early start on the drinking, and were ready to get soused. So after a few made bombastic and half-drunk attempts to speak English to me, we finished and left, with a friendly “goodbye!” to the O-bon guys.

Big chink in the apartment armor: our neighbors on both sides smoke. Furthermore, they like smoking on the veranda (one mentioned something about the building being no-smoking, so maybe they have no choice but to smoke outside). We noticed this a few times before from the neighbors on the south side, but the neighbors on the other side just came in today–and twice in one hour I got a huge dose of cigarette smoke in my living room.

The problem: we keep our balcony doors/windows open quite often to ventilate and to cool the place down. If someone smokes out there, their smoke is drawn directly into our place via the wind, and suddenly it’s as if a smoker has entered the room. Worse, closing the doors and windows won’t help–it’ll just trap the smoke inside, which means that we have to experience the whole cigarette or series of cigarettes.

I am semi-allergic to cigarette smoke. I don’t know if it’s an actual medical condition or just a psychosomatic quirk, but the results are the same: when I am in the presence of cigarette smoke, my throat gets sore, I get nauseous, I get headaches, and generally feel like crap. Keep it up and I am prone to catch colds.

Which means that if our neighbors smoke on their balconies and we can’t do anything about it, I am royally screwed here. I will have to have Sachi find out more; I tried talking to the smoking neighbor as politely as I could, and she was polite back, but she used vocabulary I could not figure out. We’ll also have to talk to the administrative office downstairs.

I sure as hell hope that we can figure something out….

No, that guy is not injured, nor is he a mugging victim. Just another reminder that we’re not living in the suburbs anymore. He’s just another salaryman who had too much to drink, and so took about an hour’s nap on the sidewalk in front of our building. Below you can see a passerby checking up on him.

I noticed him when I came home; the guy was still awake, but in the exact same position you see below. He was, in fact, checking his cell phone. Charming. I suppose it’s better than sleeping completely in the gutter–only his feet are over the curb.

How long could someone be like this in any major American city and still have his wallet, cellphone, and watch when he woke up? You can be pretty sure this guy woke up with everything still in his pockets, and then did the chidori-ashi (chicken-walk) all the way home.

Yet another discount barber place. Cut only for ¥1100, cut and shampoo for ¥1700. Choices, choices.

Speaking of choices… this line of more than a dozen vending machines lines the wall of a building on the way from the station to our place. Mostly drink machines, but there are two automated photo booths and one ice cream vending machine in that line-up.

And finally, some Engrish T-shirt finds:

On that second one, on the right, above the “67,” it says, “To remember it and not to repent.” Heathens. Below is the last, and hardest to read at this size:

Click for a larger version, or read this transcript:

Just got a flier in the mailbox for a pizza place (the one starting with “D”). Just wanted to make an observation.

First they had “extra cheese” on pizzas. Then they escalated to injecting cheese into the edge of the crust. Then they enlarged the crust so they could shove even more cheese into it, essentially creating a cheese-filled danish at the end of each piece. Now, it seems that they are getting even closer to dropping the pretense of there being pizza involved as opposed to finding new “delivery systems” for melted cheese. Hence, the “Quatro Cheese Melt”:

I mean, seriously. Why not just hand people a bucket of melted cheese and be done with it? Who’s being fooled into thinking that this is a food dish rather than just the equivalent to putting a bowl of cheese into the microwave and then eating it by scooping it out with your hand? Anyone?

But they do pay attention to the non-cheese portion:

Interesting flavors. They include “meat,” “ethnic” (which I assume is some form of salsa), “spicy,” and “white sauce.” I presume that the “white sauce” is a clever way of saying “even more cheese.”

But hey. Fake Japanese Elvis Guy gives it the thumbs-up, so what can I say? Better hurry and order now, though–you’ll only be able to gorge on these things for another five weeks.

This new apartment has a lot of new-fangled gadgetry in it, being a modern, all-electric dwelling. Even the toilet seat is electronic, with controls for a heated seat as well as bidet and washlet (though that feature is actually common in Japan). The living room floor is heated from below; the bath room has advanced ventilation to allow for drying clothes 24/7; there’s a color intercom with the building entrance, audio-only with the front door, and emergency call buttons in the bath and toilet rooms. The intercom also alerts you when a parcel has been delivered for you and is waiting in a locker downstairs. There’s even a garbage disposal in the sink, something I never heard of in Japan before. That along with fiber-optic to the wall, ethernet ports connecting the various rooms, and a 60-amp breaker to allow for all of that–though we did actually manage to trip a breaker circuit in the kitchen during the housewarming party (we ran two microwaves in the kitchen at once).

The finishing touch is the induction-heating (IH) stove. I had never even heard of that before, but I guess it must be catching on in Japan, as I am seeing a lot of pots and pans made for IH in stores now. Though, of course, that’s likely because (a) I’m looking for it now, and know what “IH” means, and (b) it might be a bigger seller in central areas like we’re in. All I know is that, despite initial worries as to how well it would work, I like it, a lot.

Until now, I had just used “gas konro,” or gas-fueled stoves, with grill burners–a very common item in Japan. The disadvantages are clear, however–mostly in that such stoves collect grease and gunk like there’s no tomorrow. Forget about keeping them all that clean. They also take up a chunk of counter space, which is at a huge premium in Japan–most kitchens have maybe a few square feet of countertop on which you can prepare meals.

The IH stove is a joy in comparison. First, it’s flat and glass-smooth; if you spill something, just wipe it off. Cleaning is a breeze. And when not in use, it serves just fine as extra counter space–you just have to overcome your natural aversion to putting any items you feel like on a stovetop. Once you do, you find that you have tons of counter space–a luxury in this country.

Operation is simple, though we had trouble figuring it out. You switch on the power, pop out the control panel, and push a button for the right “burner” you want to activate. The button pops out and acts as a dial to control the temperature of the stove. We haven’t figured out those other buttons yet.

In order for the stove to work, there needs to be a pot or pan made of an IH stove–in effect, conductive-metal bottom, made flat enough to trip the sensor. Without that, nothing happens–no heat.

My worry was that such a stove probably would offer only feeble heat–but I was dead wrong on that count. It actually heats a pot or pan a lot faster than a simple flame burner does. Lights on the stovetop show the temperature setting:

The readings are in Celsius; it goes from 140˚ up. I love the scale: 180, 190, 200… Tempura!

Another light shows which burners are hot–and they do get physically hot, and take time to cool off afterwards–another lamp indicates that cooling-off is still in progress, so don’t touch.

The down side: we had to toss a half dozen otherwise-good pots and pans… and I still haven’t found a good pot for cooking popcorn. I found a nice steel pot, but it’s the silver-in-and-out type which gets nasty black stains if you try cooking popcorn in it. I need an IH pot with a nice, teflon-coated interior.

And we should start using that toaster underneath–we’ve neglected it, using the toaster function in the microwaves instead. I bet it’ll work right nicely.

While Sachi was out shopping, I took an hour and twenty minutes to do a bit of a bike ride around the area. I went up through and around Otsuka, down to Koishikawa Park and then back. I took a lot of side streets and got a lot of exercising with the grades and sometimes hills along the way; a good workout in lieu of the exercise machines on our balcony.

Just as I started, I stopped by a local shop called Suzumura to photograph it. The yakitori place that Sachi and I used before, and tried to go to again last week, had been closed. But this being Ikebukuro, we had only to look around to see a few more restaurants worth trying. We were about to cross the street to try an Indian place, when Sachi spotted this one. It’s one of those tucked-away, hole-in-the-wall kind of places run by a mama-san and papa-san, one that’s been there for decades, only has a few seats, and usually some old people around the neighborhood, or oyaji, tend to frequent. We tried it out, and they had great yakitori there as well.

From there, I turned around and headed east. less than a kilometer out, I turned left and hooked around Otsuka Station. I just wanted to check out the area to see what I could see, but there wasn’t much there, at least at first glance. I had seen a barber shop around there that had haircuts for about ¥1400 (didn’t spot it today, though), and I do need a haircut soon. Any place with prices that low tends to be a men’s barber shop–we don’t want to be fussed over for two hundred bucks, we want a cheap haircut, in and out, lowest price possible. There’s a ¥2200 shop around the corner from where we live, and I saw a ¥1000 place on Meiji Blvd. (though that’s low enough to make even me wonder).

Near that area, I spotted a bento shop:

I was about to go on by, when I looked closer at the sign, and it brought back a memory.

In Japan, the “Italian” gesture the woman is almost making here has no meaning, and an almost identical gesture is used to indicate strength, apparently for women at least as much as for men. When I was working in a movie theater back in the S.F. Bay Area just after starting college, we had a projectionist named Kazuko, from Japan. Kazuko was a petite young woman, very quiet and soft-spoken, kind and polite. But it is her size which is relevant here. When a new movie came in (which was several times a week, as we were a rep house), the cans holding the prints were almost half as big as she was. Well, not quite, but it seemed that way. Kazuko would have to practically drag those things up to the projection booth.

One day, the manager (an American guy) noticed Kazuko struggling with a new movie, and suggested that she get one of the strong young men who worked there to help her. Wanting to express strength, Kazuko took up the pose you see the Bento Lady showing in the image above (though Kazuko’s gesture was much closer to the traditional western one)… and shocked the manager in so doing.

Anyway, I kept riding down to my objective for the day: a park which looked nice on the map. I found it, but also discovered something that was not on the map: an admission fee. There’s another nice-looking park nearby listed on the map which is shown to cost ¥300 for admission, but this one looked free. Not so. It cost ¥330. However, from the peek I got, it looked nice enough to visit–with Sachi, sometime soon.

On the way home, I noticed again a restaurant that had caught my eye before. I have to hand it to them, they went out on a limb to name this place, and I do like it:

Whether that’s a literary allusion, or it’s simply how the proprietor felt when opening the business, I don’t know. Maybe we’ll eat there someday and ask them.

As my knee was beginning to get the better of me, I pedaled on back home, and rested for a while with Sachi, who had returned from department-store shopping (which she knew I wouldn’t be enthusiastic about, as much as I gamely hang in when we go shopping together otherwise). We both sat out on the balcony and read books, snacked, and I got a bit of work done on my computer (the WiFi reaches out there just fine).

After that, we came back in and had dinner while watching Lost. Not a bad day, for a Lazy Sunday.

Well, that was quite an adventure. Sachi and I held a housewarming party last night, and it was pretty successful. Almost everyone who we expected to come made it to the party, for a total of 15 people at one point (including Sachi and me). Sachi and I overstocked on food and drinks, even not counting the good amount of goodies brought by guests; we still have quite the stockpile left in the fridge, despite the many courses served throughout the evening. We started with snacks–chips, pineapple & ham, pretzels, bread, and bagels. Sachi added salads and fried chicken, after which I broke out the salmon casserole. At one point, I microwaved some mozzarella on Nan bread. Then Sachi made her famous niku-negi tofu, with some cold noodles and rice on the side. Later, I cooked some filet steaks for anyone who was interested, and Sachi cooked some pasta. At the end, there was a bit of ice cream and other snacks. For the last few courses, people were beginning to wonder aloud about their waistlines; it was quite a bit of food over the evening.

The party was also successful in terms of how the evening was spent. We didn’t have any games or other novelties, but we didn’t need them. Oh, I showed some people how to use the Simsponize-Me web site (hat tip to Sean), as we used Simpsonized versions of Sachi and me on the web site giving directions to the party. But other than that, it was just good food and good company. Everyone enjoyed the view from the balcony (despite the limited visibility due to cloudy weather), and there was animated conversation from one end of the party to the other (it lasted about 6 or 7 hours). Put a lot of good people in the same room, that’s what you’ll get, I guess.

I think another reason why it went as well as it did was because of the location. The last time I held a party was in Inagi, and so everyone had to travel quite a distance to get there–not just by train, but by foot or taxi as well. A lot of people declined, understandably. This time, centrally located, most everyone made it, some even on foot, several by bicycle. Most of the people I work with, as it turns out, live in central Tokyo; for quite a long time, I was the main holdout.

After the party, Sachi and I discovered a problem with the apartment: the water from the air conditioner that was supplied with the apartment. We were aware that the machine had such a problem, but last night, after about 10 hours of continuous use, we discovered the extent. The thing had poured probably the equivalent of a cup of water to the floor and the TV and speaker below it. Fortunately, none of it was on to open circuitry, but still, it’s not good. Beyond that, it’s not acceptable as a device. The machine is woefully weak for cooling the big room, and if it pours water out when failing to meet its main purpose, that just won’t fly. Sachi and I will be talking to the building people about this.

Despite that small glitch (not in the party, either–just an apartment flaw), the evening was an unqualified success, and we had a great time (as we hope everyone who visited did as well). We were able to clean up in about an hour after the party, and just relaxed for an hour or two, drinking a bit more wine and enjoying the evening.

Something new I noticed: Diet Coke has suddenly appeared on all the menus of fast food places in Japan. For a long time, I wanted to get a diet drink at these places, but none of them had it, except for Subway (Diet Pepsi). Now, I eat at hardly any fast food joints except for Subway, but I have noticed they all seem to sport diet colas now. Last week, when shopping with Sachi in Sunshine City, I needed a fast drink, and noticed it for the first time. Since then, I noticed it at KFC as well. Interesting…

In preparation for our housewarming party tomorrow, I went to Costco early this afternoon. One of the down points about moving away from Inagi was leaving behind easy access to a Costco; the Tama-Sakai store was less than a 20-minute scooter ride away. And since Costco keeps prices low in part by setting up in way-out-of-the-way locales, that means that Ikebukuro is quite a distance away from any one of them. A cost of living centrally.

Now, just last week, a new Costco opened up in Kawasaki. Like other Costcos, it’s in a hard-to-get-to location, but it is the closest one to central Tokyo yet. It’s just across the southern border of Tokyo in Kawasaki City. The address is 3-1-4 Ikegami-Shinmachi, Kawasaki City, Kanagawa. You can Google-Map it here. It’s about a 1-km. walk (perhaps 20 min.) from the closest station, Sangyo Doro Station–and that station is not on a line directly to or from Tokyo. It’s on the Keikyu Daishi Line. The best way to get there from Tokyo is to go to Shinagawa Station and transfer to the Keikyu Main Line; go to Keikyu Kawasaki, and transfer to the Daishi Line.

Now, as the crow flies, the new Costco is just 23 km. from where I am now; the old Tama-Sakai store is 35 km. However, to get to the new Kawasaki store, I have to go through the heart of Tokyo, and that’s never easy. It took me an hour to get there, and an hour to get back, taking different routes each way. By train, it would be almost an hour on the trains alone; add 12 minutes from home to the station, and 20-25 min. from the station to Costco, and we’re talking an easy 90 minutes here.
To get to the old Costco from here would actually be more or less equivalent in terms of travel time. Maybe a bit longer by scooter, but almost identical travel times by train. This despite the Tama Sakai Costco being a lot farther out. Count on Costco to find even more and more inconvenient places to locate…

Now, if you own a car and you don’t mind paying tolls, then you’re in luck; the new Costco is right along an expressway; if I were to take that route, it would likely be a very short trip, certainly less than half an hour door-to-door.

However, if Costco is too far away, and you’re just looking for foodstuffs, you might want to try Niku no Hanamasa. Before now, I liked the shop, but was not too impressed. The reason: I only saw the Shinjuku-Kabukicho store, which does not have all that much great stuff. I simply assumed that they were all like that. But when I checked out the Ikebukuro store this week, I found out that this was not the case.

The Ikebukuro store beats the Kabukicho store all to hell. There is tons more in terms of selection, loads and loads of beef, but also generic but good foods of all types. They have very good wine for very cheap. Good dried fruits. Low-fat yogurt ice cream, which is pretty good. Some imported foods. And so forth and so on.

One surprising thing: their beef is cheaper than Costco’s. I got some Filet steaks from both places; the quality was about the same, but Costco charges ¥600 per 100g for American filets, while Hanamasa charges ¥400 per 100g for Aussie filets. The difference in taste is inconsequential enough to make Hanamasa far more desirable on that count.

Of course, Hanamasa doesn’t have all the great stuff you’ll find at Costco, even as far as food is concerned. But if you’re jonesing for some cheap food, especially meat, Niku no Hanamasa could be a good source for you. Find a store near you.

There is a particularly perilous hall down on the first floor of Sunshine City, just across the street from Seiyu. I say perilous because it threatens my waistline as well as my wallet. A line of pricey stores which sell very attractive foods.

Begin with the market-like shop called “Seijo Ishii Select.” It’s a small market with mostly imported or otherwise high-class foods, kind of like the Draeger’s supermarket back home in the S.F. Bay Area. I was surprised that they had relatively cheap cheddar cheese–just ¥300 for a medium-sized block–when other local shops like Daimaru Peacock charged twice as much for less. We also got a very nice cheesecake for just ¥300, very delicious–but they just told us that the product has now been discontinued. A shame and a relief. I tried some large (six-inch) pretzels for ¥500 yen; aside from being expensive, they were not very good at all. But there is loads of stuff I would have gorged on before I started losing weight, which I can only be sorely tempted by now.

Next is a string of bakeries, featuring mostly cakes, Japanese-style. These are usually ¥300 to ¥500 for a small wedge maybe three inches wide and four inches long. The shops’ names seem to be “Boutique Mont-Blanc,” “Grass Tiara” (no typo, it seems), and “Mariage.” Note that they are all “Patisseries,” as if they have some connection to France or something.

This string is topped off by a bakery–bread-themed, not cake-themed–called “Maison Kayser.” Again with the French. This place seems to have both a store front with a constant line of customers as well as a small cafe.

Across from Kayser is a wine shop and a meats shop. The wine shop seems decent though maybe 30-50% pricier than usual shops–though they do seem to have a much better selection in general, and good shop attendants as well.

Top off the line of shops with one more, on the corner across from Kayser:

It’s called “Rosenheim,” and seems to be a small branch of a shop that sells various meat products, in particular sausages and sliced meats. Like Seijo Ishii, they sell prosciutto and even Spanish Chorizo–but small amounts for very large prices. A 100-gram package with only half a dozen thin slices can set you back as much as a thousand yen (about $8). Still, Rosenheim sells a homemade “chorizo” sausage which, like 99% of “chorizo” sold in Japan, has no resemblance to Spanish chorizo–but Rosenheim’s version is still very good, with a very smooth, spicy flavor.

In short, the more I stay away from this row of shops, the better…

In the wake of Krispy Kreme’s insane success, Burger King has returned to Japan, and their second shop set up business in the basement of Sunshine City last month. A very good location–they are the first shop people see coming in through the underground passage starting at Tokyu Hands. Their success does not seem to come close to rivaling Krispy Kreme’s, but they had pretty long lines; the McDonald’s down the way had nobody in line, despite a steady supply of customers.

The location might explain some of it, but likely it’s the “new thing” effect that Krispy Kreme totally made off with that has helped out Burger King. The chain was previously here in Japan for several years, but lost out to McDonald’s in a price war.

In the meantime, McDonald’s, feeling the heat from places like Starbucks, has decided to start their own brand of McCafe at the end of August, offering low-cost alternatives to Starbucks. What, a McFrappuchino for ¥250?