Where To Now?

So. After two fun-packed years in Japan, we're now back in Magherafelt, in the heart of Northern Ireland. I'd originally thought that this would be the end of the blogging, but now I'm not so sure. I may have poked fun at Kobe Port Tower-kun, but is he really that different from Diamond Dan, the Orangeman?

Looking like a cross between Peter Perfect and a much younger Ian Paisley, the blond-quiffed Diamond Dan has been created to soften the face of sectarianism and, according to Orange Order education officer David Scott, "to be a mentor for young people offering advice on a range of matters encompassing the general theme of civic responsibility". A superhero who doesn't drop litter and takes public transport on the off-chance that he might be able to offer his seat to an old lady, Dan overcame strong competition from the likes of Sash Gordon and the Boyne Wonder.

And then I open this week's Mid-Ulster Mail to find this delightful piece of retro-marketing. Forget the Long Tail, forget search engines, forget punctuation in fact - what your business really needs round these parts is leaflets....

Ah.. it's good to be back...

Wise-san's Surfin' Safari

There's only so much 'Hannah Montana' and 'Corey in the House' a man can take, and it's measured in nanoseconds, so I do try to take full advantage of the blazingly fast fibre optic broadband that is commonplace in Japanese homes. Here's my current internet Top Ten, in reverse order. Enjoy...

10. Manbabies.com

Incredibly stupid, somewhat disturbing, but alarmingly addictive. My humble offering has been ignored to date, so here it is. My Photoshop skills suck I'm afraid...

9. The Ladybird Book of the Policeman

Quality stuff. Probably won't mean very much to non-Brits however.


8. It's-Behind-You.com (same as 9. Non-British nationals read on...)

Possibly the most depressing site in the world. Not only for our peculiar fascination with panto, but to see the Ghosts of Christmas Past that are annually exhumed for it.

Britt Ekland was once married to Peter Sellers, but is now doing panto in London (a step up from a few years ago when she was doing panto in Worcester...)

Bobby Crush! (Peterborough) Huggy Bear! (Catford) Stu bloody-crush-a-grape Francis! Sue Pollard… All these washed-up lovey-darlings, and many more, continue to tread the boards when they should have walked the plank long ago.

7. The "Blog" of "Unnecessary" Quotation Marks

And most of the culprits are from the USA. Funny, that.

6. The Perry Bible Fellowship

'Thwack Ye Mole' indeed....

5. The Cremation Society of Great Britain

It sounds morbid, and it probably is, but you just can't knock it for quality data. Who would have thought that the number of deaths in Great Britain hasn't changed appreciably since 1885, although the way we dispose of our loved ones has? Over 70% of all UK funerals are now cremations, compared with just 3% pre-war. There are even international stats - so you can learn that the Italians still shy away from the fire of eternal damnation (less than 10% are cremated), but in space-conscious Japan a whopping 99.73% go up in smoke.

Well, I thought it was interesting...

4. BoingBoing - A Directory of Wonderful Things

Who needs a newspaper anymore when you've got Boing Boing? I don't. Especially as I can't read any of them here.

And now for the Top Three...

3. Puccho

Weird sweets. Even weirder website!

2. An Englishman In Osaka

What this blog would be like if I was better at it. Must try and get to meet the guy before we leave.


1. Photoshop Disasters

Fabulous stuff indeed. Great to see that The Daily Mail is as useless at Photoshop as it is at dispensing any kind of responsible or informed opinion on anything whatsoever.

Shadow pies anyone?

Jessica Wants A Pet

Despite the fact that she appears to be terrified of pretty much every creature - four-legged or feathered - she has so far encountered (see below), Jessica still wants a pet. This debate has been going on for some time with little sign of any conclusion.


I don't much like pets, coming from the novelty-furry-animal-in-a-cage school of childhood pets where lifespan is measured in months and days - or the amount of time you could be bothered with them - rather than years. Gerbils, hamsters, guinea pigs... gnawy, nibbly, rat-type things. The joy of stroking and petting, the scented pine fragrance of fresh wood shavings, all this went out the window when you opened the garage door to a fecal blast of ammonia and you realised you actually had to clean up after the damn things. You did that for a few weeks, got bored of it, and left it to your parents. So I like to think I know a little bit about where 'Jessica having a pet' is heading.

Sarah, on the other hand, is of more rural stock. Sleek, lustrous-coated, protein-bloated red setters bounded across the spacious countryside of her youth, and small furry creatures were strictly for target practice. Sarah would like a dog. A serious dog, not a yappy-type dog. So she wouldn't like this dog - you see a lot of this kind of pampered dog in Japan.


I don't much like dogs either. I'm very uncomfortable with the knowledge that every dog-owner you meet - especially in a place as law-abiding and polite as Japan - will more likely than not have a bag of poo about their person. I saw a man with four Afghan hounds the other day and just shuddered.


Like many things in Japan, dogs certainly don't come cheap (that would be budgies. Ahem..). Forlorn-looking pedigree chums cooped up in glass cubicles go for around 150,000 yen (£725) and upwards. The curious thing about the Baby Dolls pet emporium just down the road is the strange hours they keep, staying open until the early hours of the morning. This does not, I suspect, lend itself to responsible pet procurement. Does the inebriated salaryman lurch out of the snack bar of an evening and think "I know, I'll placate the missus with a cuddly little akita puppy"? Who exactly buys dogs at 1am in the morning except possibly Koreans, for reasons we won't go into here?

But if you just want to test-drive a terrier, or take a Siamese out for a spin, then you can actually rent pets here in Japan. Yappy-type dogs start at around 1,500 yen an hour, and you can rent a proper dog for 20,000 yen (a fraction under a hundred quid) a day. Just hand the beast back just before it evacuates, no need for bags of doggy-do. Just like a car rental - return it with a full tank. In Japan, a dog can be for Christmas, not just for life, it would seem.

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....