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?

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。

Shame we have to let the users move into the building tomorrow morning.

Uh-huh, yeah, sure:

From: News@InsideApple.Apple.com
Subject: Leopard. Easy to install. Just say go.

So advanced, it practically installs itself.
...

The Yurikamome line is short, and its elevated train cars are completely automated. And the announcements at each station are voiced by anime voice actors. First column, first row: Masumi Asano. First column, second row: Maria Yamamoto. Fourth column, third row: Mikako Takahashi.

As we were discussing preparations for our upcoming trip to Japan, friend Dave remarked, “of course, you’ll have to teach me a few things to say in Japanese”. He is a long-time anime fan, so he’s got some basics, but just in case, I’ve prepared a refresher course. Evil laugh.

[downsampled quite a bit and converted to mono, to compensate slightly for the fact that it’s copyrighted music. Artist: Minimoni]

When you switch between open applications by clicking their icon on the dock or using Command-Tab, Spaces switches you to the space where that application has an open window.

If that application has windows open in more than one space, it alternates between them. So, if spaces 1 and 3 contain open Finder windows, and spaces 2 and 4 contain open Terminal windows, switching back and forth between the two will show you all four spaces in a consistent, predictable order.

Except when it doesn’t. Currently, I’ve got a set of windows Spaced out where repeatedly pressing Command-Tab takes me on a very peculiar tour: 1, 5, 2, 4, 1, 5, 1, 5, 1, 4, 2, 4, 1, 4, 2, 5, 1, 5, 1, 5, 2, 5, 1, 5, 1, 5, 1, 5, 2, 5, 1, 4, …

Wish list for Spaces:

• visual indication of current space (background color, etc)
• named spaces (#3 is less useful than "build monkeys")
• ability to isolate desktop icons to a single space
• consistent switching

[Update: I killed it! I added a second Terminal window to one of my spaces and started rapidly hitting Command-Tab to see if it changed the behavior, and after a few cycles, Spaces went kablooie. I lost Spaces, Dashboard, Dock, Exposé, and Command-Tab. Fortunately I landed in a space that had a Terminal window, because “Force Quit” doesn’t include an option to restart the Dock (which is the parent app for all of the above).]