Short version: information gathered from a variety of hanko shops (particularly Inkan Honpo, Hankoman, Hobundo, Hanko2510, and Shoyu-net calligraphy shop).

I’m quite happy with the quality of the seals I ordered from Inkan Honpo’s site, and their online preview not only gives you a pretty good idea how things will look in the different fonts, but also lets you set your own line breaks to improve the layout a bit. Their Illustrator templates for custom rubber seals are also simple and clear.

Long version:

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This is a hakama, most commonly seen today on martial artists and miko:

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For future reference, when you have a bunch of stuff shipped from Amazon Japan to the nearest Lawson convenience store, you need to enter two numbers at the kiosk, the 12-digit delivery confirmation number and the last 7 digits of the order number. The error page was a little kanji-heavy for me, and the girl at the counter didn’t know, either, so I had to make an extra trip.

Fortunately, convenience store locations are… convenient, and it was only a block from the hotel, across Karasuma. With a 30-day free trial of Prime (and business-class tickets that allow multiple heavy suitcases for free on the trip home), it was definitely worth doing. In fact, I just placed another order.

Sadly, it only works for items sold directly by Amazon, so the Marketplace dealer we ordered the snake booze from is shipping to the hotel, and I had to carefully parse their address and paste it into Amazon’s form. In a few days, we’ll see if it worked.

(by the way, blogging is painful because I’m running a VNC session over a VPN to my Mac at home, but I thought one sakura picture needed to be posted)

Dude, she’s 13; could you hold off on the “abducted into the sex trade” photos for a few years?

Hunting for interesting excursions in the general vicinity of Kyoto, a small marker on Google Maps caught my eye: ポンポン山. Now why, I thought, would a mountain, even a small one, have a katakana name? The Japanese Wikipedia entry says that the sound of footsteps is generally accepted as the answer, but also that the name only dates back to the Meiji era, and before that it had the more prosaic name Kamoseyama.

Note that searching for ポンポン山 will find many pictures of the sign at the summit announcing its height of 678.9 meters, but also pictures of large-breasted women (“pom-pom mountains”). Honestly, these days I’d be disappointed if a search in Japanese didn’t include pictures of large-breasted women, because Japan.

I…, I…, I have no words.

(below the fold, to protect the weak of heart)

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Most of my Japanese spam email is of the form “join our web site to meet women for sex”, with the details of the pitch varying between lonely housewives, runaway schoolgirls, and independent young women whose strict upbringing has left them hungry for affection. This one stood out in the crowd:

Subject: おまんこ写メ＆メアド送信♪丸見えだから閲覧注意かも(笑)

Bluntly translated, it says “I’m sending you my email address and a picture of my pussy; everything is visible, so be careful where you view it (lol)”.

(the email does not, in fact, contain any pictures, just an invitation from “Hitomi, a 31-year-old office-lady” to click on a carefully-anonymized link (randomstring.info/randomstring), which no doubt goes to one of the usual members-only sites)

After our fruitless search for Habu-shu on the last trip, my sister and I were seriously contemplating a short jaunt to Okinawa to buy the stuff (and see a bit of Okinawa for a day or two, but really, snake-booze run). Yesterday morning, as we were chatting about the other major change to our trip, I whimsically searched Amazon Japan for ハブ酒.

By golly, you can get all sorts of the stuff shipped anywhere in the country, from tiny 50ml bottles up to 5-liter jugs (with a correspondingly large snake inside). We could still choose to take a jaunt to Okinawa, but it’s no longer the least-frustration method of acquiring the goods.

The reason we may not go is the other change to the trip: Interplanet Janet has flown so much on United that she’s graduated to an even higher class of membership, which granted her free business-class tickets for our parents. Now we are four; fear our shopping prowess!

To ice the cake, a few hours after we conferenced with them and went over the basics, we discovered that a new room block had opened up in the hotel we liked so much last trip, the Citadines Kyoto. The place we originally booked was only three blocks away, so we knew the area, but everything about the Citadines worked for us: quality service, comfortable room with free internet and a kitchenette, major subway line 50 feet away, dry cleaners and grocery store a block away, 7-11 across the street, all sorts of shopping, food, temples, and shrines within walking distance, etc, etc. Also less expensive than the other hotel.

I think the first night we’re there, we’ll take the folks down to the House of Grilled Meat. One of the nice things about learning to read kanji is that when you see a large neon sign reading 焼肉屋, you know that you need to investigate. An all-you-can-eat yakiniku joint with touchscreen ordering and a grill in the middle of the table is a Very Good Thing to find.