Random pic of the day:
This has got to be the smallest can of corn in the world. But convenient; a coworker and I made beef donburi (we actually had to buy two of these). It was damn good, especially for meals I've cooked.

Sunday I went out to a beach in Kobe with Audrey, Karen, Ben, and a couple of Audrey's coworkers. It was a great day, though the beach was really crowded and not too sandy. There were no women over 30 and, as Ben took great pleasure in noting, only one wearing a one-piece swimsuit. The oldest woman I saw was running from the beach when we got there at noon, wielding an umbrella as if the sun would make her melt. Of course there were plenty of oddballs, like this guy in a wet suit who spent his time paddling around the swimmers like he was on patrol. Or this other guy, who waded in dragging his girlfriend (daughter?) but couldn't leave his cigarette behind on the shore. The girlfriend/daughter was grimacing like she was wading into raw sewage. Ah, Japan...

I managed to get a sunburn across a nice swath of my back, the spot I couldn't reach when the peer pressure mounted to go jump in the sea. I guess it slipped my mind... but it's been killing me all week.

We then headed back to Kobe, and chilled in Meriken Park (hint: read the name a few times and you'll figure out what country this is supposed to be), a nice oceanside, well, park. We met up with Carter in Nankin-machi, the fabled two blocks that make up what's supposedly the largest Chinatown in Japan, and had some pretty decent Chinese food. The restaurant owner was so excited to speak to us in English, and proudly thanked us in like 11 different languages.

The night, needless to say, ended with karaoke, before Ben and Karen had to go back to Okayama...

My much-promised 360-degree tour of my apartment is on hold for now until I can find either 47 MB of Web space or a way to make the file smaller. If you have some space you're not using (Stanfordites: like maybe some of your 100 MB Leland quota) and would be willing to host it for me for the summer, let me know; I'd much appreciate it...

I'd like to say you never see anything like this in Tokyo...


More Smith-sans

Revelation of the day: Eggs go well with rice. Throw an egg in while the pot's still hot enough and, zaa! instant fried rice.

Saturday I slept in, relatively speaking. But when I awoke the sun was so shining and I was so excited I...did laundry. Yes, sadly enough, the first thought that went through my mind was, "I can dry my clothes today!" Amazing what living on your own will do to you. The crappy Sterling Quad driers never looked so good.

With my underwear proudly hung outside to dry, I set off for the mountains of Kurama Valley, on the northern fringe of Kyoto. Naturally, the first mountain we saw had a cell phone tower right on the peak. Never have I goten such great cell phone reception as when I've been in Japan. Getting an American wireless will be such a let-down...

The mountain was breathtaking, while not that hard a climb. It had some nice views of the valley, and lots of shrines along the way. A nice way to spend a sunny afternoon.

The evening found us at a hamburger restaurant called Bikkuri Donkey. The name, literally, means Surprise Donkey so I was a little concerned about what kind of meat goes in those burgers. But it turned out to be a great meal: they serve you a slab of ground beef (no bun) with odd toppings like eggs (as seen on their huge menu). The furai poteto (fries) were also excellent. It was even more American wannabe than McDonald's--there was a whole lot of...crazy crap on the walls". What American burger restaurant would be complete without an Oregon license plate or a speed limit sign?

It's times like these that make us re-evaluate what's really important in college basketball. It's not whether our players are good students, or whether they're committing to stay at a school longer than a year, or even whether they have clean police records. We've lost sight of what's truly important: are we winning?

"But if every basketball player in America in college that had a gun gave up his eligibility, we'd have fewer players."
--Baylor men's basketball coach Dave Bliss, quoted in the Mercury News

Quite possibly the best Swedish film of the year. Or the decade. Easily the best Swedish movie I've ever seen...

Friday was a fun day. After only half a day of work, I Kintetsued it back to good old Kyoto for our SCTI reunion meeting. We shared horror stories about our internships--making me thankful my job was working out. But I can only listen to people whine about how antisocial and serious their workplaces are for so long; it seems a standard feature of the Japanese workplace: the very same people who'll go out drinking with you every week after work are dead silent and intensely focused on their jobs during the day. The interns near me and my gaijin boss are much more conversational, fortunately. After some awkward mingling with company higher-ups (though free food can break through any ice it seems), we ran off to Osaka.

Having seen big American shows like the ones in Detroit and New York in person, my first Japanese fireworks show left me mildly impressed.

We emerged from the subway station to the sound of explosions and the sight of bright lights in the sky. It looked like the city was being bombed at first, because we couldn't see the actual fireworks, only their reflections off the clouds. (Especially because hordes of people were already starting to leave.) But despite our running, the sound stopped before we could get a clear view of it. I thought we'd missed it.

Rather than blow up all their explosives in ten minutes like Americans tend to do, it turns out they'd been setting off little bursts every five minutes or so for the past hour. I kind of liked it being spread out--making it easier for people like us to arrive late. But it was also fairly uncoordinated--they felt the need to set off most all of them four or five at a time, so it was hard to really get into the groove of any individual explosion. Plus they were shooting them off from both sides of the park at the same time, giving us whiplash from looking back and forth so quickly. Ah well.

The ride back on the Loop Line was more packed than any train I'd been on since the Tokyo Loop Line. There's something comforting about not having any room to fall over-- each time the train jostles you your neighbor just shoves you back up. And yet there's also something to be said for, say, breathing, or being able to see the stop names out the window. Even Kintetsu was packed--a rarity since Nara's hardly a hot destination...

Proof that there are legislatures even more dysfunctional than America's:

Ever wonder what would happen if the next phase of the War On The Axis of Evil were, say, Iran? So that's what he means by "regime change"...


And tomorrow's forecast: 75% "hard to dry". Just in case the rainclouds weren't a big enough hint...

So this is why I can't find any places to go dancing in Japan. Sadly, this robot can waltz better than most Japanese people.

And for Harry Potter fans who want an invisibility cloak, your wait is over.

I'm really beginning to distrust the weather forecasts here. The past two days it was said to be rainy and stormy, but not a drop fell.

So I didn't end up going to Tokyo on my three-day weekend. A long story with a simple moral: on three-day weekends, you must buy bus tickets more than eight hours in advance.

So I went to Osaka on Sunday. The plan was to spend the day at the Osaka Aquarium hiding from the big thunderstorm, but when we met at the station and saw the sun shining, we decided to ditch those plans and went to Amerika-mura (America Village) instead. It was...an experience.

As soon as you cross the border the streets become filled with graffiti. Most of it appeared to be professionally done, to achieve that American effect. As you walk down the streets you're assaulted by American rap music emanating from stores hawking clothes ranging from authentic brand-name gear to authentic random American stuff (want an Al's Trucking shirt from Biloxi, Mississippi?) to quasi-authentic American stuff (like an orange-and-blue "California University" jersey) to your garden-variety Engrish.

Of course, there are varying degrees of legitimacy too--we found one street vendor selling incredibly cheap jeans that still had stuff in the pockets. Sketchy...

We had lunch in Triangle Park, a little enclave of the village intended to look, I guess, like your basic New York park. Trees, concrete, lots of pidgeons, and bird crap. We went to a restaurant calling itself a Coney Island--it didn't even have gyros! But Tim was able to get a sort of coney dog and I managed to get a shrimp dog. Ahh, God bless America...

We managed to go a few hours before we ended up back at Den-Den Town. Somehow that place seems to have its own curious gravity, luring us each time we're in Namba with the promise of cheap electronics. I was proud of myself--I only caved on a pack of 50 good CD-Rs ($13). (Come on, I can already fill up half of them with Simpsons, Naruto, and movies I've downloaded from our apartment--to say nothing of the Kenshin Karen asked for. Telling people I have a broadband collection was dangerous--now I'm getting requests from all the way from Tokyo...)

So I saw my first yakuza (Japanese gangster) yesterday, at a travel agency in Kyoto. He looked like an average guy, except for the telltale tattoo on his arm. Just your average guy, though whether he was getting plane tickets for pleasure or to go knock off someone's family I didn't exactly ask...

If you're wondering what the current state-of-the-art is in Japanese technology (and I'm sure you are), Takara is coming out with a cat meow translator that supposedly can interpret a cat's meow and translate it into Japanese. Starting next month they'll be selling these things in English versions in the US too...

Cool Things About Japan:
1. 100-yen ($0.85) stores that actually sell useful stuff, like umbrellas, candy, drinks, school supplies, and even underwear
2. Karaoke, the cheapest way to spend the whole night someplace, and the cheapest non-alcoholic nomihodai--all you can drink.
3. Free tissues at every train station! I even got some for opening a bank account at UFJ.
4. Trains that go everywhere, and a wide variety of options—from karaoke to capsule hotels to manga cafes to sleeping by the (surprisingly safe) river—for when it’s too late to take them.
5. Food food food! And lots of great cheap restaurants where you can get gyuudon (beef over rice) for $3, or lots of good gyoza or all-you-can-eat naan for under $10.
6. Seven-flavor days at Haagen-Dazs. Which are every Thursday. Seven scoops, seven flavors, around $3. Oh yeah…
7. Engrish everywhere. One of my summer projects will be submitting this stuff to engrish.com and putting it up on my Website. Unlike Taiwanese Engrish, Japanese Engrish usually makes sense, but just doesn’t quite seem to fit. This is why I bring a camera with me whenever I go shopping.
8. Vending machines everywhere. With 120 yen ($1) in hand you’re usually never far from a soda, juice, iced tea, Pocari Sweat (see Engrish above), iced coffee, or even hot coffee. Some even sell ice cream for 110 yen, and these are precious.
9. Konbini (convenience stores) everywhere. Cheap food, 100-yen ice cream, and their ready-made lunches, which they will happily microwave for you, ain’t your standard 7-Eleven fare. Ironically, there are a ton of 7-Elevens here, but no Slurpees
10. People handing out free DSL modems and Internet access on every corner...

To the 4% of you out there using Mac OS X: if you're having trouble with the video clips on the left, you can actually get Windows Media Player for Mac OS X. Oxymoronic I know.

I found a nifty cookbook at a bookstore in northern Kyoto that even I might be able to use. It's all recipes sized for one or two people--and there are tons of pictures detailing every step of every recipe. The only catch? It's all in Japanese. But after spending half an hour decoding the ingredients list with my trusty kanji dictionary, and a little searching in the supa, I succeeded in making some good udon with pork--more by following the pictures than the directions.

I finally got to Ginkakuji, a beautiful temple complex in northeastern Kyoto. Nick, his visiting friend Emily, and I took the road less traveled (ok, well, more like frequently traveled) Philosopher's Path the Sunday before last. It was beautiful, though I think not as visually stunning as the pictures I've seen of the similarly named Kinkakuji. A soft rain started to fall when we got there, but we didn't think much of it as we explored the temple grounds. When we left though, that soft rain turned into what the Japanese call zaa zaa, a downpour. Within minutes my clothes--and shoes--were soaked. We eventually gave up on the bus and hailed a taxi. Naturally, by the time we got out of Kyoto the rain stopped. Kyoto and Nara weather can sometimes be as different as San Francisco and San Jose.

So I lied. I'm at work waiting for a simulation to finish and I'm bored. So while two computers silently breed a race of genius killer agents, I go back to the blog. I've moved out of Kyoto, into the little town of Kizu, just across the border from Nara Prefecture. Nara's really proud of their deer; they're like the prefecture mascot. The banks, the buses, they all have little deer on them.

As if karma is paying me back for the hour-and-a-half commutes to the backwaters of Kyoto, I now live a few minutes' walk from an express train stop, in a huge apartment I'm sharing with Nick. Pictures and hopefully a QTVR file are coming along with our Internet connection. Yes, along with free tissues, people are handing out free broadband on (almost) every street corner in Japan, so we're getting three free months of Yahoo! Broadband starting sometime this week. (Coincidentally, we're also leaving before then. How convenient.)

We moved in on Friday the 4th, then I went back to Kyoto to "celebrate [my] country's independence by blowing up a small part of [another country]". The konbinis were well stocked with fireworks; somehow the 4th had become a sort of unofficial holiday even for the locals. The banks of the Kamo River were filled with people, not all of them gaijin, all setting off fireworks.

I'd made a note of what time the last train left, and even what time my last connecting train left from Tambabashi. So I thought I'd be OK, and maybe the power of being able to stay out past 10 went to my head. Because what I didn't notice was that the last train from Tambabashi actually doesn't go all the way to my stop; it ends at Shin-Tanabe. Luckily, a cottage industry has sprung up around people who similarly screw up, so I found a manga cafe where I could spend the night for US$12. It was pretty nice; unlimited Internet access, soft drinks, and of course, manga, till 6 AM. Had I not spent the previous night clubbing and karaokeing all night it might have been appealing, but I found a nice reclining chair to sleep in. They expect this; they even play tranquilizing music to help.

Status update: No blog updates for a few more days since I don't have a net connection at home. (Yet.) Check back in a week, eta by the 15th or so...

Only in Japan:
New cellphones used in 'digital shoplifting'

After Panasonic we went to Korea Town in Osaka (no, it has no Japanese name; they just call it "Korea Town"). I never thought we'd be having bi bim bab and drinking beer with a Stanford professor but I guess anything's possible. Afterward we went to this ice cream shop next door that specialized in these huge sundaes. They have a thing for corn flakes for some reason, I guess because they're so expensive in Japan. Note the US flag--engorging yourself with ice cream is apparently another American pastime.

Sunday was yet another rainy day so our plans for Frisbee with Ritsumeikan students quickly turned into—what else? karaoke. So in addition to Yangu Men, the Japanese version of YMCA, we discovered the Japanese version of the Aladdin song A Whole New World. Just amazing.

Thursday night we went to a Hanshin Tigers game in Osaka. It was interesting, to say the least. I never thought I would say this about a team called the Tigers, but they’re ranked top in the nation. And baseball is Japan’s favorite sport. But every game is like the American World Series or even a college game—there are tons of fans, tons of enthusiasm, and tons of cheering. This game against the Hiroshima Carps was sold out, and expected to be a slaughter like their 7-0 meeting last night.

The game is more or less exactly the same as an American game—right down to the English words for strike, pitcher, etc. (though these were banned and swapped with weird Japanese substitutes during WWII). But the diamond is much smaller, and the outfield much bigger. So home runs are a much bigger event—and each and every time a ball’s struck into the stands an announcement is made to “pay attention to flying balls”.

The fans are much more active than during any American game I’ve seen. (Maybe it’s just because the only American games I’ve seen were Detroit games, but still…) They come armed with noisemakers and little bats to clap together. They start chanting for every single ball pitched. Each player of every team has his own personalized cheer song the fans learn and sing from the stands, led by official Tigers prompters. (Think AxeComm, but more annoying.) We were in the Carps (read: cheap) section so there were these pumped up guys screaming chants and playing trumpets and drums to rile up the twenty or so Carps fans who were actually there. One spastic (and possibly drunk) Carps fan made a point of coming up front and repeatedly giving us all the finger each time they scored.

Random photo of the day: Monkeys! Sorry, couldn't resist. From a "monkey park" in Arashiyama we went to last month.