Sakura season

Personally, I don't get the excitement the Sakura season generates. Blooming Cherry Blossoms, while the flowers are nice and pink, it doesn't quite excite me as the Japanese folk. They're out snapping pictures of everything that bloody blooms, 'kawai' poses abound as young girls stand infront of pink trees... Planet Japan.

I took a few snaps myself, right outside our apartment, apparently it's quite a destination for the Sakura hunters. A long row of cherry blossoms line the road adjacent to our place. I guess spring is here, though you couldn't tell by the weather today, rain and sleet, temperature nose diving to the single digits... nippy, indeed.

Hey Sherrine, only because you asked...

If you wear pink, you'd be well camouflaged...

Last one...

Inlaws in town...

Nicole with her Grandfather

Nicole with her Grandmother

My parents-in-law, including sister-in-law and brother-in-law and their 2 boys were in town last week. It was certainly good to see all of them, the apartment was buzzing hive of activity with an extra 2 kids and four adults. Mei was busy cooking and entertaining them. I hope they had a good time in Tokyo, even with the chilly weather and the odd rainy day.

Random Pics

Lunch at Gonpachi, rumour has it, Quentin Tarentino liked the layout so much, he built the Kill Bill fight scene set based on Gonpachi. I do know George Walker Bush had lunch here with Junichiro Koizumi...

Some weird store in Azabu Juban, or what Bush said after he bit into a grilled chicken heart...

Something stinks...

First Shinkansen Ride!

Last wednesday I had to head down south to Kyoto for a day's meeting with our Suntory client. We took the Nozomi Shinkansen which is the express bullet train (the least number of stops), it sped us down to Kyoto in less then 2 and a half hours.



Of course once your onboard, you don't notice the speed at which you're travelling, it felt rather like a normal train. When you actually see the train from a distance you realise it is zipping by at 300 kph! The 700 series train, on which we were on, tops out at 300kph, one thing you do notice, when it is on a curve, the curve is banked, so the train actually tilts sideways! Simple physics will tell you the inclined curve is needed to keep the train on the track... whatever, it's really cool.



Less cool were the seats, sitting in economy while 'first class' is only a few thousand yen more was rather upsetting. The seats rank down there with Singapore Airlines economy seats 10 years ago, but with slightly more leg room. Since the ride was short, the journey was bearable, even with the odd japanese salaryman noisly enjoying his bento box lunch, slurping up his udon and fermented squid guts.

The Suntory office is in Yamazaki, a wonderfully old, mist-covered, little village on the outskirts of Kyoto, set against a beautiful hill covered in luscious green bamboo, dripping with rain. We sat in the Suntory board room overlooking this amazing vista (think: 'crouching tiger hidden dragon'... yeah baby) and had our bento box lunch... thankfully, no squid guts.

The meeting dragged on till 3pm, when it ended we took a taxi back to the Yamazaki station and a slow train back into Kyoto. While the weather was rainy and grey it gave that little village a wonderful atmosphere, I felt like I was in a time warp, half expecting to see ronin samurai roaming the misty cobbled streets.

Heading back to Tokyo was rather more enjoyable, I had an empty seat next to me, so I stretched out and plugged in my iPod, looked out the window on the same grey, dreary, rainy evening and soul searched to the crooning of Bob Seger, Dan Fogelberg and later on the Eagles.

Next thing I knew it was 7pm, I was getting off the train at rainy Shinagawa, into a cab and home... all in a day's work.

View from the conference room

Looking out the conference room window today... felt slight tremors in the distance, wondered what it was.


SHIT!

Prima Online

5 days.

That's all it took for Prima foods to process my internet order and deliver via Fedex, door-to-door. 5 Days.

Went trolling on the web last week and found Prima foods online. They had a wonderful assortment of Singapore Food mixes and sauces, all at Singapore prices. I thought I would give it a shot and see if an order from Japan would get through Japanese customs. Like I said it took 5 days for them to process a $120 order. Singapore efficiency.

In Tokyo, it's taken 1 month to hook up the cable, 3 weeks to get an Alien registration card and still no news, after 3 weeks, on finding my car. Is it any wonder they lost the war...

Singaporeans may be crass, they may complain a lot, lack sophistication, but damn, they're efficient.

Shibuya

Infamous crossing at Shibuya... if you can see it

Small critters have to act cute to avoid getting trampled

Dangerous crossing for small critters

Planet Japan Pics

Who is freely and why would I want to bring him home?


Not even if it was stewed...

Japanese language lessons

Last week I started my japanese langauage lessons, kindly paid for by the company. Want to feel like a child again? Need that fountain of youth? Elixer of Life? Learn japanese with Suzie Suzuki and The Tokyo Rose, my two teachers, they'll make you feel like a bumbling 8 year old school boy all over again.

Suzie Suzuki teaches me on Tuesdays and The Tokyo Rose on Thursdays. Clearly evil twins seperated at birth, both are old enough to have experienced the great Tokyo quake of 1923. Overly made-up, with badly dyed hair, they take pleasure in the tag-team torture of unwitting students. Obviously they have an innate hate for gaijins wanting to learn their language, making them memorise irrelevant words and phrases more suitable for use in the days of Feudal Japan then the present.

Arriving promptly at 945am, Tuesdays and Thursdays, on their broomsticks (or whatever household cleaning implement Japanese witches use), they both insist on being greeted properly. I believe I am taught to say 'All hail the might high priestess of hell' each time I see them. This follows with me having to count out my worksheets and books and lay them out in an orderly fashion, God help you if you put your vocabulary book BEFORE your work book. Next up, one hour of hellish anguish known to reduce grown men into weeping infants. The evil twins were both educated and brought up by the Kempetai, the Japanese secret police feared by all during the Second World War, trained in both physical and mental torture they are clearly frustrated that, these days, only mental torture can be applied to students.

At lesson's end, one sheet of homework and a long list of words are given, students must correctly complete their homework and memorise all the words given by the next lesson. Just as quickly as they had arrived, they leave, almost in a puff of smoke, off to torture the next student and dish out a generous helping of pain.

Perhaps their teaching methods work, because last night I dreamed in Japanese... problem was, I couldn't understand it.

So if you're feeling old, feeling like life is wasting away, give me a call. I have the perfect cure to make you feel like an 8 year old again.

Cable TV

Think buying a car is tough here in Japan? Try subscribing to cable TV... It has taken almost a month to get the cable box delivered to our home. Our housing agent told us to just give Sky Perfect TV a call and we would have cable... yeah, right.

Last month I called Sky Perfect TV, surprisingly they had an english speaking operator who was kind enough to send me the application forms for cable TV. Managed to fill them up and submit the forms, only to be told later that at Gotenyama House, where we live, it's not Sky Perfect TV that services the apartment, it's Sky Perfect TV Hikari.

Fine.

Called up Hikari, which doesn't have an english operator, so I had to leave my number and wait for them to call back. Several phone calls and a week later I get the Hikari application forms... in japanese. Undeterred, I had my secretary fill them out. Only to find out after she faxed it to them, that these were old forms. Industrious and helpful, if a bit slow, she managed to get a new set of forms, filled them out and faxed it to Hikari.

So last Saturday promptly at 9am, I get the cable set-top box delivered to the apartment. Only to find all the instructions in Japanese and even if it were in english, one would need a Phd from MIT to plug the damn set in...

So, I called Hikari again, left a message, waited for a call from an english operator, who arranged for an english speaking technician to call me yesterday night.

Received the call at 7.30pm, following his instructions I started plugging wires and cables into the cursed set-top box. Sweat streaming from my brow wondering why they don't invent robots to do this... Turned on the telly, went through the menu-setup (all in Japanese), just as we were about to finish the installation procedure...

the technician said: 'excuse me sir, its coming to 8pm'
'thanks, but I've had dinner so do I scroll up to line 4 or line 5?'

the technican said: ''I have to end the phone call at 8pm'
'why we're almost there... line 4 or 5?'

the technician said: 'We stop work at 8pm'
'dude, we're almost there, frickin line 4 or 5?'

the technician said: 'I will call again tomorrow at 730pm'
'are you mental? seriously 5 more minutes'

the techncian said: 'all our phonelines cut off at 8pm'
'If you hang up, I'm gonna cut off your bal..'

click.

Trying to buy a car... (part 1)

...isn't easy on Planet Japan.

Well, another weekend taking the train to nowhere. Mei, Nicole and I are in agreement... we need a car. While Tokyo is easy enough to get around using public transport, it's not very convenient, especially if you live 15 minutes walk from the station. It's hard to buy groceries in bulk, or any large items and you really are restricted to going places where there's a train stop. Enough is enough, time to get a car.

Through a colleague's recommendation I went to see the guys at Autodirect. I'm used to buying cars the old fashioned way, head down to the dealership, check out the car I like, test drive, put a down payment, get financing, etc.

Ahh, but this is Planet Japan, things are done differently. Before even going down to the dealership I was advised to head on over to the Singapore embassy to get a 'signature certificate'. I believe this document is to prove that your signature is real? Anyhoo... got the certificate. Went down to the dealership, which doesn't actually have any cars... ok, I lied, it had 2 second hand Porsches. That's it. No car lot, nothing to see. On Planet Japan you tell the dealer what car you want and he then looks for it... okie.

But before he looks for it, he needs to get financing approval. This involves a world war two interrogation (without the physical toture), irrelevant questions like 'how many kids do you have?' and 'how old?'. I presume they need to know incase my 5 year old wants to take the car out for a late night supper run...

Sigh, you can see where this is going... nowhere fast.

Interrogation done, financing approved, power of attorney signed, now one needs to prove that they have a parking lot to park your car. This step involves the police (men in black), thankfully the dealer said he will deal with it... I don't want to know, nor care how he does it.

And this is as far as I have gotten... the easy part. The pain awaits and I can only ask for your prayers.