I’ve seen worse…

Lessons Learned

Culled from the blur of the last two weeks. Likely to be updated with pictures and additional commentary.

• The reason there are frequent TV ads for Tadashii Kanji Kakitori-kun is because there’s a new release that includes all 1945 Jouyou kanji, including readings and meanings. Buy it if you have any interest in learning to read and write Japanese.
• There’s surprisingly little anime on television.
• Hotels don’t get the interesting TV channels.
• Except for porn, with free previews. The first thing we saw on TV was a large-breasted woman squirting milk.
• Much later, we found an iron-chef-style show best described as “real chefs with goofy assistants inventing novel dishes”.
• 1-yen coins are indeed the correct tool for opening the battery compartment in older Japanese cameras.
• Hello Kitty is everywhere. Everywhere.
• So are schoolgirls in short skirts. Every day of the week. Mostly cute as buttons. Their legs looked cold.
• Hello!Project isn’t quite everywhere, but random channel-surfing turned up Tsunku (hosting a catty-woman game show?), Tsuji (new mother announcement), Gal Sone (out-eating a sumo family), and a few others. And the abruptly-retired Maki Goto is still quite visible on a large Guess ad at the airport.
• The downside of putting a lot of effort into learning to speak Japanese quickly and smoothly is that people respond at full speed. I really need a private conversation tutor.
• Needing to use your Japanese dramatically improves your memory.
• Haibane Renmei saved my friend from an allergic reaction.
• When entering a comic book shop, the prominent sign reading “BL” means “wrong store”.
• Any knowledge of Japanese helps. Being able to read hiragana and katakana helps a lot. Any ability with kanji is icing on the cake.
• The easiest-to-understand person that I conversed with in Japanese was a little old lady in a Kyoto incense shop.
• Strict censorship laws did not prevent me from finding an explicit hardcore Hanaukyou Maid Tai doujin collection. At a major retailer in Akihabara. Accidentally. Which had futanari Catholic school girls as the backup story.
• Beautiful young women in kimonos are not everywhere. Except in Kyoto on weekends.
• Opening a metal bottle of Pepsi Nex does not in fact summon a maiko, despite early evidence to the contrary. It only works when you’re using the vending machine outside of the Gion post office.
• People in Kyoto are, on the whole, friendlier than those in Tokyo.
• Shibuya may be home to Japan’s fashion victims, but the extensive public transportation network makes them visible everywhere.
• A Suica or Pasmo card is the single most useful thing to have if you’re going to be in Tokyo for a few days.
• Shinagawa has little to offer except the easy ability to go elsewhere. [update: that is, the area around Shinagawa Station, which isn’t really in Shinagawa-ku]
• Tonki really does have great tonkatsu. And you want to get there when they open at 4pm.
• Junsei has excellent kaiseki.
• JALPAK does great work for a great price.
• Habits acquired in a country where coins are chump change result in overstuffed pockets in a country with $5 coins.
• The morning JAL flight from Osaka to Narita leaves you with an eight-hour layover before your flight home to San Francisco. This time is best spent around Narita-san, particularly Shinshou-ji.
• On the way there, you’ll pass a small restaurant that serves fresh unagi, grilled over a wood fire. That’s fresh as in “they were still swimming a few minutes ago”.
• I should have bought a second bag of Maiko-san no Ochobo-guchi. Now I’m going to have to hope they’re available somewhere in San Jose or San Francisco.
• In addition to the popular maid cafes, Akihabara now has both nun cafes and little-sister cafes. [Update: Nun cafe, Little-sister cafe]
• There’s a lot of used porn on the market. Used. Porn.
• Aya Matsuura’s first DVD single collection does not include the most entertaining of her early videos, Momoiro no Kataomoi, so I didn’t buy it. [Update: Ah, there’s a different DVD that does include the song.]
• The Hozugawa river trip is worth it. Sadly, I couldn’t keep up with the guide’s rapid-fire running commentary, but he was apparently hilarious. I did at least catch the joke about the 7-11 main office.
• 富士山が見えたんです。

Kyoto Muzak

There are some nice restaurants in the Kintetsu mall near Kyoto Station. While perusing the menu outside of one of them, the muzak system turned up a familiar-sounding tune. I just couldn’t place it. Dave didn’t recognize it at all, and then it hit the refrain, and was revealed to be this.

The next time we went by that place, they’d cranked the silliness higher, with a muzak version of this.

There’s a perfectly good reason why the Japanese cowboy is para-para dancing. If you were hanging out with these Shibuya gals, wouldn’t you?

Sake to me

When purchasing sake in a Japanese grocery store, read the label carefully, if you have any ability to read Japanese at all. If, for instance, the English label on the shelf reads “nigori”, check the Japanese label to make sure that it isn’t actually namazake (生酒).

Why? Because while most good sake should be served slightly chilled, namazake must be kept in the fridge right up until the moment you’re ready to drink it. It’s not pasteurized, and if it gets warm for even a few hours, the live yeasts turn it into basically-undrinkable carbonated mush.

Akihabara

[Update: link added for the back of the map]

One thing I couldn’t find online before the trip was a good map of places to go in Akihabara. The ones I did find were either inaccurate, incomplete, not to scale, required local knowledge, and/or were drawn with complete disregard for the Western notion that North should either be at the top or clearly marked.

The time I spent marking things up in Google Earth did help me find a few places, but it doesn’t produce useful printouts, so I couldn’t bring it with me as PDFs.

Fortunately, less than ten seconds after we stepped out of the station, a pretty girl in a maid costume handed me this (3MB JPEG). The back side of it has more ads and a sorted list of shops and their block numbers.

This is apparently produced by the folks at Akiba Guide.

[Update: Oh, yes, North is to the right, and in Google Maps the area looks like this.]

[Update: just for fun, I dropped this map into Google Earth, and it’s very well-scaled. There’s some distortion around the south edge, most likely to get everything to fit, but most of the map overlays so well that you can easily locate individual shops.

Also, someone has made a set of Google Maps pushpins that covers some of the highlights of Akihabara in English. There are also two decent ones (1, 2) if you can read some Japanese. The first one is a collection of maid cafes, the other is more general.]

Don’t fear the Washlet

…just be sure to check its aim.

…and I do mean everywhere

Okay, admittedly Oowakudani is a popular tourist destination for both natives and foreigners, but come on. What’s she doing here?

Mt. Fuji

This late in the year, tour operators don’t make any promises about how high up Fuji you’ll be able to go, or how well you’ll be able to see it from a distance. Ice on the roads kept us from getting past the third station, but visibility was clear all day long.

See?

I will live until I die

Well, that’s what they said at Oowakudani: “eat one, and you’ll live an extra seven years; eat two, and you’ll live an extra fourteen years; eat three, and you’ll live until you die”. Perhaps I should have stopped at two.

This little guy, on the other hand, won’t add anything to your lifespan.

…but it did have a nice view

The Shinagawa Prince hotel is…okay, with short, stiff beds (one crunchy pillow each), extremely small rooms, and over-priced restaurants. It does have a decent convenience store, and the 24-hour pizza/pasta place is reasonably priced and turns into a breakfast shop in the morning. Its real virtue is location: a short walk from Shinagawa Station, from which you can go pretty much anywhere in the country.

And, if your room is on the north side, the view is worthwhile.

Purification and Refreshment

星をかった日

One of the highlights of a visit to the Studio Ghibli Museum in Mitaka is the chance to see an original short animated film produced to their high standards. Currently, it’s Hoshi wo katta hi, a story that becomes only slightly less incomprehensible if you can pick out some of the Japanese dialog.

If you go there while it’s still running, there are two things you should know. First, it’s based on the surrealist paintings of Naohisa Inoue, specifically his Iblard fantasy world. It doesn’t make a lot of sense because it’s, well, surreal.

Second, in the final scene (spoiler warning):

The perfect ginger candy

We bought them in the Gion district in Kyoto. A little bag of ginger candies wrapped up in a label that read 「まいこさんのおちょぼ口」 (for the kana-impaired, that’s “Maiko-san no Ochobo-guchi”). It means “the maiko’s [apprentice geisha] tiny mouth”. They’re darn tasty, and the farther away we got from Gion, the more I wanted to go back and fill my suitcase with them. I didn’t.

But surely I can find them in Japantown in San Jose or San Francisco, or at least order them online! Or maybe not. It turns out that “Maiko-san no ochoboguchi” is a cliché, and 99% of the references you’ll find online are of the form “even a maiko’s tiny mouth could eat this”. Which is of course why they were called that in the first place.

This means that even explaining what I’m looking for will require visual aids. Better snap a photo of them before they’re all gone:

I’ll try to find them locally, but realistically, my best shot is finding someone who’ll be in Kyoto and giving them a copy of the photo and detailed instructions on how to find the shop. It looks like this, and it’s about a block and a half west of the main entrance to Yasaka Shrine, on the south side of the street [Google Maps].

What does autumn taste like?

According to a stand at Kyoto Station, it tastes like this ekiben:

Did someone mention Kyoto Station?

Cute girls in kimonos

Okay, only one, and she’s a very little girl, but you have to start somewhere…

Retirement homes with style

I’d want to add indoor plumbing, a good HVAC system, and do something to keep away the tourists, but yeah, I can see why one of the Ashikaga Shoguns thought that Kyoto’s Golden Pavilion would make a nice little retirement shack. Even 600+ years later, it’s got a nice view.

Mind you, it’s impossible to do something original with one of the most-photographed objects in Japan, but this wasn’t a serious-photography trip. I was a tourist, and I did what tourists do. :-)

The novelty of bread

The Japanese still haven’t really figured out bread. They’re good at pastry, but rice is the grain that goes with meals, so breads tend to be snack foods, such as the ubiquitous melonpan, whose name comes from the melon-ish shape rather than the contents.

Speaking of shape, care to guess what kamelonpan looks like?

First thought that came to mind…

“Hey, I can see Google Earth from here!”

He ain’t so tough

Fake but accurate

These are “tourist maiko”, women dressed up as apprentice geisha to provide some local color. There was another pair walking around with a man who was holding up a multi-lingual sign reading “these are not real maiko”, and I believe they were members of a tour group who had paid for a makeover (among other things, they were a good fifteen years too old to be the real thing). These two were just strolling along the canal nearby.

The only real maiko we spotted was off-duty in a regular kimono, coming out of the Gion post office.

Clouds over Fuji

Kawaii Tours, Inc.

I don’t know what company operates this tour bus, but I think I’ll give them my business next time.

Local color

Our 8-hour layover on the way home gave us time to take the train into Narita-san and see Shinshou-ji. Allegedly there was a temple fair going on, but it just looked like a few extra souvenir stands. The temple complex itself was much more interesting.

Hello, Buddha

The world’s largest bronze buddha lives in the world’s largest wooden building, Toudai-ji. He’s an imposing fellow:

In modern Japan, though, you’ve got to be cute to survive:

Make a wish

絵馬 (ema) are small wooden plaques purchased at shrines. You buy one, write down a wish (health, fame, fortune, romance, entry into a good school, etc), and hope that the gods will grant it. Eventually they all get burned up as offerings.

Tofu: you can run but you can’t hide

I’m not sure why this little guy is trying to escape. The food at Junsei is excellent.

Fast, Wide, Ninja

A big problem with temples and shrines is that they’re generally pretty dark inside. In many cases, even an up-to-the-minute digicam that has optical anti-shake and can shoot at the equivalent of ISO 1600 film speed isn’t good enough to get a sharp picture. And even when the picture’s sharp, there’s so much noise that it looks like crap. Flash is useless unless you brought along a pro rig that has an external battery pack, and tripods are usually forbidden. So, what to do?

I got a few decent indoor shots with my pocket digicam (a Canon IXY 2000IS purchased in Akihabara; domestically, it’s known as the PowerShot SD950 IS), but it was a crap shoot. If we hadn’t been with a group, I’d have taken several shots of everything and braced myself against something, but there wasn’t enough time.

Fortunately, I had my Sony a100 DSLR along, with a 50mm f/1.4 lens. It made the above shot easy, and the below shot possible:

The first picture was shot at ISO 1600, 1/80th second, f/2. When zoomed to the equivalent focal length, the little Canon can shoot at f/4, which would have yielded a 1/20th second exposure. Not too bad, with anti-shake.

The second one was much harder: 1/8th second, f/1.4, right at the edge of the Sony’s anti-shake ability. The little Canon would have needed a full one-second exposure, which means a tripod. Even then, there were so many people walking around on the wooden floor that the vibration might have introduced some fuzziness. The Canon has an ISO 3200 mode that doubles the speed but cuts the resolution to 1600x1200, but half a second is still too long for hand-held, even with anti-shake.

You can extend your range by bracing the camera against a sturdy object, using a monopod, or finding someplace that you can set up a mini-tripod, but the most important things to have are fast exposures, wide-aperture lenses, and Noise Ninja; these pictures were a lot grainier before I turned NN loose on them.

I had brought a mini-tripod with me, but rarely had a chance to use it. Next trip, I’ll bring along my REI collapsible carbon fiber walking staff and a Bogen mini-ballhead, which makes a better monopod than most of the ones you’ll find in camera shops. It’s a bit shorter than I’d like, especially when used properly as the third leg of your human tripod, but it doesn’t scream “camera stand” when you’re entering a no-tripod zone.

And, to be honest, there are places where I wouldn’t mind having a walking staff…

紅葉

For Will’s benefit, here’s where I was when I took the picture. Take the train from Kyoto to Arashiyama, then head south to the river. Or go a few more stops to Kameoka, and ask for directions to the Hozugawa Kudari boat ride, which drops you off at that spot in Arashiyama.

Christmas Wishes

It’s Christmas Eve, so as a present to myself, I’ve finally posted a “babe” picture from my trip to Japan. I didn’t take pictures of most of the good-looking women I saw, mostly because I saw them under circumstances where whipping out the camera would have been rude. As it is, my best shots are of the two Malaysian tourists who were with us on the trip to Fuji; they have pictures of me, too (shudder).

“Rebuilding-fund donations accepted here”

More or less. I had to infer the meaning of some of the words that aren’t in Edict or my other J-E dictionaries.

Here’s a transcription of the text:

第六十次式年遷宮の
ご奉賛のお願い

当社では、平成二十七年に
六十回日のご社殿修理工事
を執り行います。
伝統文化の継承である式年
（二十年ごと）の造替（修理）
工事に皆様のご寄進をお願
しておりますので、お近くの
援与所にお申し出ください。

春日大社

I’ll do a full translation when my lingering cold stops lingering.

Stairs at Shinshou-ji

Teenspotting

Everywhere:

Not everywhere:

Just wanted to make that clear.

Going up?

When I took this picture, I was just trying to capture the cable cars that got us up to Oowakudani. Now I kind of wish they weren’t in the frame…

Smoke gets in your eyes…

Koi Pirates Deer

Okay, I couldn’t really think of any way to tie these pictures together.

Palace School Station

Another set of random pictures from the trip.

Failsafe Fuji

[Update: Just spotted an older version of the same scene on Google Earth. The pretty picture replaced real information.]

“Hello, and welcome to the third station. We know you all paid for the chance to see Mt. Fuji, but just in case the weather didn’t cooperate, here’s what you should be able to see from here. More pictures are available in the gift shop, along with snacks, film, and batteries.”

Avoiding confusion

One of the first pictures I took with the new camera was a view from the tracks at Shinbashi Station. Unfortunately, the context was sufficiently involved that nobody I showed it to got the joke. When I take the print to my Japanese conversation teacher tonight, though, she’ll get a good laugh out of it.

Why? Because a number of the younger Japanese women associated with the department are into Esute, which is a style of beauty parlor in Japan. They love to talk about this stuff, but students who Google “esute” in English will find a lot of sites that are about something very different: massage parlors for men.

It turns out that the sex trade was looking for another euphemism a while back, to compete with “soaplands”, “fashion massage”, “delivery health services”, and the rest, and since massage was one of the services offered at women’s esute parlors, they adopted the name.

As a result, potential customers have to make sure they know what kind of esute a particular shop offers. Both of them will have pictures of fashionable young women out front, and attractive young women working inside. So, when I looked up from the tracks and saw a big sign reading “Otoko no Esute”, I knew what Dandy House was offering.

Noise Ninja

I finally got around to making a proper noise profile of my little Canon camera, so here’s a quick sample of how well Noise Ninja cleans up an ISO 1600 image. Note that this is just using the default settings; it’s capable of more aggressive noise reduction, but that can eliminate too much detail in some images.

Before:

After:

Big Hell

Oowakudani is the source of the sulfurous waters piped down to the Hakone hot springs resorts. It’s also a popular destination in its own right, due to the terrific views (1, 2, 3, 4 ) and novel cuisine.

The current name for the place translates as “great boiling valley” (大湧谷). This was an early example of tourist marketing, since until they heard that the Shogun was going to come up and take a look, the locals just called it “the big hell”.

Two-car garage, Kyoto-style

Google Vacation

I didn’t geotag my vacation photos before importing them into Aperture, and it turns out that it treats those fields as read-only, so that the only way to add that data after the fact is by hacking the underlying SQLite database. What I’ll do is export a bunch of small thumbnail images, tag them with HoudahGeo, and then knock together a small script to insert the tags into Aperture’s database.

Meanwhile, here’s a sample (8MB KMZ file) containing most of the images I’ve posted so far, along with some new ones, exported for Google Earth. You can load KMZ files into Google Maps, but the built-in image links don’t work.

Tonari no Totoro no Kippu Uriba

This is the entrance to the Ghibli Museum in Mitaka.

The false entrance, that is. The real one’s over here:

Sadly, not only can’t you buy a ticket from Totoro, you can’t get one at the real entrance, either. Domestically, they’re only available at Lawsons convenience stores, and they sell out weeks or even months in advance. There’s a block reserved for foreign tourists, fortunately, but you have to order them through specific travel agencies.

Pennies For Heaven

This is one of the doors leading into Meiji Jingu.

When praying at a shrine, you throw a coin into the offering box and clap, to get the attention of the kami. On New Years Day, half of Tokyo comes to Meiji Shrine to pray, and the crowd is so thick that most people can’t reach the offering boxes. So they throw their coins towards the shrine.

Some throw with more enthusiasm than skill, so the surfaces facing the courtyard are pockmarked as high as you can see.

Ninomaru Palace, Kyoto

With a name like 二の丸, it deserves two pictures. Sadly, neither of them really show off the actual palace. I’m still sorting through the shots to find one I like. Meanwhile:

[Note: the carving is completely different when viewed from the other side, but photography was forbidden inside, so I can’t show you.]

Fine dining

Junsei is a traditional resturant chain in Kyoto, with three locations. The main one (near Nanzen-ji) is built around a traditional garden that is listed as a historical site. Translation: show up well before your reservation so you have time to look around. You’ll have a decent view from your private dining room, but it’s worth a closer look.

Petty Pewter Gods

Actually, I don’t know what this statue at Shinshou-ji is supposed to be, or what it’s made of. I like it, though, which is more than I can say for the Glen Cook novel I used as the title (or pretty much any of his novels since then).

Oasis with a moat

One way to keep a public park clean, safe, and beautiful in the middle of a major city with a homeless problem is to surround it with a moat and post armed guards at the entrances. The Imperial Palace East Garden is open to the public, but it’s not a commons, and therefore not subject to the tragedy thereof.

Hozugawa Kudari

Apparently the only thing that’s better than being poled down the Hozu River in late autumn is being there when the cherry blossoms are blooming.

Giving Light

The heavily-wooded path leading up to the Shinto shrine Kasuga Taisha is lined with stone lanterns, each engraved with the name of the donor. Some of them have been there for centuries, but new ones keep arriving. I’d love to be there when they’re all lit.

Gion Ishi

Like the sign by the front door says, this interesting-looking building in the Gion District of Kyoto is all about rocks (石). The first floor sells crystals and polished stones at prices ranging from reasonable to insane. We never got upstairs, but apparently there’s another floor for custom-carved stones, an excellent tea shop, and an ishiyaki (stone grill) restaurant.

The single most expensive item I purchased during the trip came from here, and I’m not forgetting about the digital camera. Some time when I can set up my lights, I’ll try to get a decent picture of it.

Tonkatsu Tonki

Most guidebooks will tell you that Tonki has the best tonkatsu in Tokyo. After eating there, I’m willing to believe them.

The trick is finding the place. These pictures are descriptive rather than scenic, so they go below the fold:

Backstreet Girls

Just to be clear, the web site listed in this picture of a Gion nightclub is Not Safe For Work.

Autumn-colored canal in Kyoto

I was playing with the new version of Aperture today, flipping through the pictures from my Japan trip, and noticed something unusual. See if you can spot it.