It's A Thin Line...

The Japanese bought an astonishing 273 million digital cameras in 2007 - that's more than two cameras per head of population - so scenes like this are commonplace at the many amateur festivals and events that take place in the parks and shopping centres across Japan every week.

But you have to ask yourself where the pursuit of photographic perfection ends and just being a bit of a perv takes over...

Mother's Day

May 11th is Mother's Day in Japan and boy, are we spoilt for choice when it comes to gift ideas.

For instance, how can mum fail to be thrilled by the prospect of packing off the little poppets to school with a Happy Meal? We're talking about brightening up that bento box by literally putting a grin on their onigiri. Taking twee to a new culinary dimension, those nice people at Nico make all this possible, and more.

Or how about this? An alarm clock that proves that time stands still for no-one. Hit the snooze button and get back to catching those zzzzs. But 10 minutes later the little sod does a runner and you have to chase it around the room to turn it off. By which time you're wide awake of course, or extremely irritated...

I kid you not: http://www.arktrading.jp/nanda/animation.htm.

Or maybe a range of animal cookware?


Zany Guccho Yuzo - singer, dancer, impersonator and variety artiste - has turned his hand to cookery for national TV station NHK and devised a range of wacky kitchen utensils.

And how cool is this! A Vacuum Tube iPod Amplifier Kit! Ah... er, ahem... that would maybe be more of a Father's Day item...

Sado Island

Many years ago, there was an old chap who ran a noodle shop. He lived by himself, with just a cat for company. He loved this cat just as if it were a real child. But times were not good for noodles (astonishing enough, in a country where there are still a gazillion ramen-ya - or maybe his noodles were just rank bad). In order to repay the kindness shown by her master, the cat transformed herself into a young female singer. She called herself Okei and sang Okei Bushi (Okei's song) in a mournful tone. You can hear it for yourself here (just select track 5. Sado Okesa). Instantly, her sweet voice (sic) became famous and the noodle shop was raking it in.

Most Japanese are familiar with the legend of Okei and "Sado Okesa" has become a traditional folk song, although some might say that it still sounds more like the cat singing.

So why the convoluted introduction? Well it's Golden Week, and we've just visited Sado Island - the home of that lucky old noodle vendor and his moggy. Sado is a fair old schlep from Kobe. It's in the Sea of Japan, north-west of Niigata, over 300 miles away.

We're not getting any younger, so what better way to acquaint ourselves with a life of elasticated-waist slacks, coach trips and set meals than a package tour? We were on the island barely 48 hours, yet we whizzed around a dozen local sights, stayed in a couple of reasonably modern ryokan hotels and were served most of the creatures that live in the sea. Here are the highlights of our lightning tour of Sadogashima:

Tarai-bune
The tarai-bune is a traditional Japanese fishing boat (or, more accurately, tub-boat) used for catching seaweed, abalone and other mollusks. And tourists. It's paddled around the harbour by ladies in traditional costume, looking ever so slightly Welsh.

Sake Brewery

An interesting new take on the working-brewery-as-tourist-attraction experience - you get the hard sell first (what awards they've won, how great their sake is etc) followed by the chance to taste a few molecules of sake - and purchase whole bottles of it of course - followed by making your own way out the back of the building past people working. Work that was very probably sake-related, but was never really made that explicit. Bit of an anti-climax really.

Ibis Sanctuary

The ibis - or toki, to give it its Japanese name - was once seen all over Japan but is now sadly extinct in the wild. Thankfully the Chinese had a few left that they hadn't eaten, and donated a pair for procreation in captivity on Sado Island. Now the Sado Japanese Crested Ibis Conservation Center has nearly 100 toki, and they are preparing to release some of them into the wild this year. Maybe understandably they were a bit over-protective though, and you could just about make out some birds in a cage, across a field, from behind glass. Although they did provide binoculars, which was very thoughtful of them.

Sado Kinzan
Sado Island is most famous for its gold mine, which only closed in 1989 after nearly 400 years production. One of the tunnels has been opened for exhibition and the whole experience - featuring animated miners depicting the various mining tasks - is really well done, even if the "Please do not touch the robots" signs do rather spoil the ambience a little.

And there were temples - there's always temples - and lighthouses, and glass-bottomed boats tracing the craggy coastline. And fish. Lots and lots of fish. They even bottle fish on Sado island...

FOOTNOTE: while researching Sado Island I came across a quite astonishing website, which photographically does the island far more justice than I ever could - check it out here.

Hello Sweetie!

Forget the Ideal Home Exhibition. Forget the Motor Show. We've got Kasihaku 2008, otherwise known as the National Confectionary Exposition. Now in its 25th year, literally hundreds of thousands of sweets enthusiasts descend on Himeji for this "showcase for sweets and desserts from all across Japan" (sayeth the blurb).

It's not Japanese if it doesn't have a jingle, and it's not a jingle if it's not stupefying inane and repetitive. This year it's the imaginatively titled "We Love Sweets", sung by the delicious 6-piece girl band 'Milky Hat'. In fact, you can listen to it here.

And you can even download the musical score.

You would have thought that something as cravenly cavity-creating as Sweets Expo would be frowned upon, but not a bit of it. The Japanese vie for top dog status with us Brits for having the worst teeth in the world and I guess they take the view so what the hell!

There appear to be numerous different explanations for the fact that the Japanese have dodgy choppers. No fluoride in the water supply, tight-fisted parents not willing to splash the cash for cosmetic dentistry, even dark tales of sadistic dentists who eschew all forms of modern anaesthetic. My favourite is the theory that Japanese jawbones have gradually got smaller over the last 2,000 years, but their teeth have not, resulting in dental overcrowding to match the housing conditions.

The Japanese seem to have always had a bit of a thing about teeth. Revealing them was thought to be like showing the white of your bones. So tooth blackening - known as ohagura - was commonplace for many years, but it all proved to be a bit of a turn-off for Johnny Foreigner when he turned up in the mid-19th century and the practice was outlawed in the Meiji era.

Now we have tooth greening, courtesy of the JSRD - the implausibly-named Japan Society for the Recycling of Dentures - who are setting up denture deposit boxes in Fukuoka, a city in the south of Japan.

But this is all a massive digression to hide the fact that we saw absolutely nought at Kasihaku 2008 because the queue to get into every one of the pavilions was at least 90 minutes long! But we did manage to catch a show, even if it was a dubious mixture of Minipops and cosplay.

Wow, how dodgy were the Minipops? Maybe Japan isn't such a strange place after all....

Normal Service Is Resumed...

Due to entirely unforseen circumstances - namely the explosion of my appendix - this blog has been completely neglected of late. Gomenasai. But my fortnight's incarceration in a high-tech Kobe hospital did give me the opportunity for reflection...

• It doesn't matter how bored you get, or how many drugs they give you, sudoku is lamer than Shergar.
• Emperor Hirohito may have been divine, but he was a very dull bloke. Herbert P. Bix's Pulitzer Prize-winning Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan is almost as mind-numbingly boring as sudoku. I'd read all the other English books I own - I bought this in a moment of craven fecklessness.
• Sudoku isn't even bloody Japanese - it was invented in 1979 by an American architect.
• Old men snore. Horribly. It's like sleeping in a cave full of raptors.
• I heartily recommend the Kaisei Hospital Diet: removal of vestigial organ followed by a week of intravenous fluids prior to as much chopped carrots, seaweed and glutinous rice as you can eat, or keep down.
• Minimally invasive surgery has some way to go in Japan - they made an incision you could post letters through.

But my recuperation is now complete, the weather is improving and we'll have this blog back on its feet in no time...

Bad Choices

Forget Bump of Chicken, and say hello to Kobe's very own Permanent Fish, already red hot favourites for this year's daft name competition, and we're only 13 days in.

Seen belting out a version of 'Hound Dog' outside Sogo department store recently, this serious-looking 5-piece boy band have been putting in some much-needed practice since their truly woeful debut on YouTube last year with possibly the world's worst rendition of Uptown Girl.

At the same time, my equally woeful Japanese spared me from a guest appearance on Radio Osaka FM 851's LOVEFLAP. We could see the eager journalist trying to make eye contact with us as we made our exit from the New Year's hatsumoude celebrations at the Ikuta shrine. He wasn't put off when we protested that our Japanese was not up to the task (the DJ apparently could speak a little English) but he did yield to the unbending logic that the good citizens of Osaka probably don't want to hear interviews in English. I asked him where the ridiculous name came from. "Well, you know us Japanese", he said " we like to borrow English names". "Yes, but you borrow all the wrong ones", I replied. The lad smiled politely. They know of no other way of smiling in these parts.

That brought to mind some other inappropriate choices of English that have brightened up our days wandering around Kobe. Like the Floor Guide in the Comme Ca Ism department store...

And we thought this place was a massage parlour, but on reflection I'm not so sure. Maybe it was just auto-suggestion...

Coin-op Chrimbo

Well, we can't say we weren't forewarned. Last year we were surprised to see so many Christmas decorations around Kobe, and equally gobsmacked by their total absence come the morning of the 26th. This year we went to Tokyo Disneyland and just managed to squeeze in a few hours of Christmas before Santa-san's little salary-elves removed the whole lot, literally overnight. This meant partially restocking all the shops, removing a whole bunch of Mickey Mouse Christmas tableaux, plus a ton of tinsel and a 40ft Christmas tree (below). All between the hours of 10pm when the park closed on the 25th, and 9am the next day, when it was business as usual. Nifty work indeed.
The main emphasis in Japan is on the New Year - Christmas is only really of commercial interest, feeding the national gift fetish. It's literally just another day at the office. New Year is the only time when things really do shut down, and there's not an awful lot for the geijin to do - Japanese friends are with their families and all the museums and public buildings are closed for the week. So, three cheers for Namco Land... it's a coin-op crimbo!

Sarah is a dab-hand at the tippy-tippy and pokey-pokey games. Normally these involve manipulating some kind of crane or hook in the X-Y axis and tipping or snaring the prize and dropping it into the win-chute. This is all something of an alien concept for a Brit, as we are conditioned to believe that anything even remotely similar to this must, by default, be some kind of pikey swizz. But in Japan things are a good deal more honest and it's actually possible to win stuff - just take a look at the impressive haul that Sarah managed to assemble in less an hour...
Speaking of pikey swizzes, there's a curious role-reversal when it comes to the kind of fairground side stalls that seem to be a feature of the many festivals here. The stall owners don't need to bend the barrels of the guns - the Japanese are such terrible shots that is doesn't seem to matter. In fact it's the punters that are given to cheating - the scene below is not uncommon at a number of festivals we've visited, and the guy still doesn't hit the miniature bottle of no-name brandy or the packet of 20 Caster Super Mild (which, ironically, cost at lot less than the 500 yen you pay for your 5 corks).

But back to Namco Land. Jessica and I opted to play a cross between Crompton's Cakewalk and Monopoly, on the grounds that we could figure out the rules relatively easily. You roll medals down a chute to throw the dice and, well, play Monopoly.

We did pretty well, amassing a small bucketful of medals in the same amount of time that Sarah took to rape the tippy-tippy machines. Turning this small bucketful of medals into anything other than a small bucketful of medals proved our undoing, however. The pimply youth on the help desk patiently (using diagrams) explained the process for stashing the medals - when weighed, we had 450 - which involved an eight-digit password of my choice and electronically fingerprinting both my index fingers. So, this was our Namco swag (although we do still have 450 medals in the virtual Bank of Namco, and Jessica's going to have to cut my hand off to get them...).