Author: Justin

Ode to Yoshi-Gyu

I have been depressed since this weekend when Nam and I walked past a Yoshinoya (ex-purveyor of gyudon, or “beef bowls”) and saw:
A. A notice on the door informing people that gyudon was no longer being served
B. A gaudy yellow banner proclaiming their new product: Karedon (curry bowl)
C. Not a single goddamn customer sitting at the counters, even though it was lunchtime
This particular branch was in Nara but I saw three more on the way and in Osaka later, that were suffering the same fate. I wonder if Yoshinoya will get on the butadon (pork bowl) bandwagon or not. Then again, who cares? I miss my gyudon, even if I’m not eating rice right now. I guess the next best thing to eating it would be to relive eating it, so without further ado, I present:
Cosmic Buddha’s Ten Steps to Nirvana (AKA The One True Way to eat Yoshinoya gyudon):
1. Order a “nami” (regular size). The reason for this is the perfect topping:rice ratio that is not shared with the larger-sized orders. It is also the best value, something I know is very important to students.
2. Order a nama tamago (raw egg). This will likely be brought out before the gyudon, so get it ready. Add some shichimi togarashi (crushed red chili flakes) and shoyu (soy sauce) into the bowl that the egg is served in, then mix for approximately 10 seconds with chopsticks.
3. When the gyudon comes out, dump some beni shoga (red ginger condiment) toward the edge of the bowl.
4. With your chopsticks, make a conical depression in the center of the mounded topping all the way down to the rice.
5. Pour the prepared egg mixture in the depression. Wait 5-10 seconds to allow some absorption into the rice layer.
6. Raise the steaming bowl of beefy goodness to your lips and shovel as much into your maw as humanly possible.
7. Repeat step 5.
Note: If you are an Asian (or in my case, Asian-looking) man, making loud lip-smacking sounds is both encouraged and expected within this context. But then again, if you had to be told that, you probably won’t be comfortable doing it anyway.
8. Slurp down some tea.
9. Repeat steps 5 though 8 until finished with your meal.
10. Make the obligatory Groan and Sigh of Contentment, and if you are over the age of 35, pick your teeth openly and with complete disregard to other customers.

Random Yoshida Links

The links that can be found by ego-Googling are sometimes surprising. I hunted down the site of another Justin Yoshida last month! I left a message in his guestbook, but haven’t gotten word back yet. What do you know? He plays CS, just like me. Heh.
This guy must actually be me, from an alternate universe or something. Maybe the metaphysic membrane between our realities was temporarily ripped and he somehow fell through. It should be interesting if we hook up sometime – he apparently lives in Hawaii so it’s conceivable I might make the effort someday. If he’s not hiding from me, that is. I can be weird sometimes, maybe he thinks I’m a maniac or something. Come to think of it, the thought of another Justin Yoshida is kind of scary. What if he goes aggro and kills a bunch of people or something? It might reflect poorly on me, you know. Twenty years from now when I’m introducing myself to people they might say, “Yoshida… Aren’t you the guy who blew up a tour bus full of Chinese tourists and sold their remains as humuhumunukunukuapuaa pudding at Hanauma Bay?”
Wow. Got lost in dreamland there for a second. Anyway. ego-Googling results. Right. Dozo:
Yoshida Records
Some featured artists: ADELE LIPUMA, SIW MALMKVIST, ZZAJ (this last one is a springoff of ZWAN, I suspect)
Yoshida Auto
These native Osakans will ship cars to Ireland, Mauritus, and Chile for you.
Nami Yoshida, Illustrator
Her first picture book is on sale.

Mac Adept

The manager for the packaging design department came to me with a blank procurement form last year and said, “Fill these out. We need a new Mac; you have 1,000,000 yen to spend on it.” My mind was instantly filled with images of a dual processor G5, Apple Cinema display, striped and mirrored SCSI backup system, Firewire-powered cappuccino maker, etc., you know, The Perfect System. I almost cried. (I say “almost” because this would have been a dream in my Mac maven phase, say five or six years ago.)
Well, I came even closer to crying today when I saw how this new girl, the Designated Mac Operator in the design room was using the Perfect System. She had the 23″ Apple Cinema HD Display (max. resolution 1,920 x 1,200) at the lowest resolution possible, 800 x 500 while laying out pages in PageMaker. I couldn’t believe my eyes even though I watched her 1337 operating skillz for a good 5 minutes over her shoulder. The only possible analogy I can come up with would be sitting two feet from a movie screen; as in TOO CLOSE to a good thing. My man, the folders on the desktop (to mix metaphors) were the size of matchbooks. I later found out that she lowers the resolution instead of using zoom tools in the DTP programs. Amazing.

Salaryman Wept

Found an article from last month that hit close to home:
Competition stiffens to work oneself to death
Let Salaryman tell you something about dedication: Too much can kill, and blind dedication is either for the young, or for well-paid upper management. Even in these two cases, there is only so much you can accomplish before you break down.
With that in mind, keep it real and work your ass off. By playing your cards right, your investment of time and life energy will eventually be returned in the form of work experience and maybe a nice watch (standard-issue salaryman bling-bling).
Ulcers. Yes, it seems everybody has them around here. Like everyone else, I have a horror story. Two years ago, my senior partner on a prototyping project sat up quite suddenly in his seat and handed me a stack of documents. His eyes were bulging as he bent over and proceeded to noisily vomit blood into the wastebasket. Then he slumped over in his chair and the girls in the room started screaming. When the departmental manager left the room to find the nurse on call, homeboy opened his eyes, pointed to the aforementioned stack of papers, and said “tanomu wa” (Get it done.).
Now, this guy is a legend. He is the most dedicatedist motherfucker I have ever met, and a pain in the ass to work for because of his scrupulousness – he put the “ei” in “einaru”, if you know what I mean. And he ended up spewing entrail juice. Coincidence? Hardly. So that is the moral of this story – the most dedicated person in the office always ends up vomiting blood.
The End

Of Lohms and Mindslaves

Lying on my desk is a document entitled:
Lohms vs. Orifice Size
I don’t know who put it there, but apparently I get to make a presentation on it later this morning. in Japanese! Yay!
Welcome to the modern state of technical translation, where a total ignoramus like myself can hop on the Al Gore Expressway and become an expert on any specialized subject matter in a matter of seconds – and before you ask, no, a Lohm is not a penis (but an orifice is, well, an orifice). A Lohm is a Liquid ohm – get it? Ohms are units used to express electrical resistance, so morphazenilinguistically speaking, Lohms are the units used for liquid resistance. This unit of measure, when pronounced by my Japanese colleagues, sounds like “Rohm”, which is an electronics component maker based in Kyoto. (Sorry if you thought I was going to continue in the vein of fluid dynamics; the best I can do for you there is to promise a future update about writing my name in the snow.)
I wrote a slogan for Rohm’s public relations department when I first started my career as a non-gaijin-looking gaijin in a translation company years ago. It didn’t seem like a special job or anything, they just needed a catch line for a “small advertising effort” in English and they faxed over some sentences in Japanese to base it on (BTW they had a G4 fax machine that seemed super fast compared to standard G3 fax machines but often suffered from mysterious transmission failures.). I ended up creating three or four different variations for them to choose between and thought little of what would become of it thereafter. Turns out they ended up using it in their radio and television commercials, which were aired quite frequently on national television. It was also used on company brochures, posters, etc., and somewhat less gloriously, on the back covers of obscure trade magazines with names like “Precision Mounted Chip Design” and “Capacitors Weekly.” I admit, I was proud whenever I saw my words out in the real world. (I feel free to talk about it now because they are no longer using it on their website and the posters in the subway stations are long gone. Also, regardless of what I post below, I think it was a great ad campaign and hope it was a success for Rohm.) In a way, I felt silly on the importance being placed on a simple phrase I thought up at the spur of the moment. Then again, simplicity is often the best option, and it was gratifying to see my words in print and pixel broadcast to millions. Millions and millions of potential clients who might make a decision based on seeds planted in their heads by effective advertising. And if it sounds like it started getting to my head, that’s because it did at the peak of the ad campaign.
Sometimes the commercials would come on when I was watching TV with other people (sometimes clients) and it was a turbo-nitro ego boost when the leggy models in the ads paraded around futuristic space-and-satellite backdrops with my words flowing out of their mouths. People I was with would usually give me props and I would just bask in the glory as everyone came to the realization that, in a way, these girls were actually my mindslaves. Through the looking glass of manga/Kubrickian reality where my reasoning takes vacations after steady consumption of alcohol, the mindslaves on the screen seemed completely powerless to resist. They returned to the screen at regular intervals to convey my thoughts. They awaited further orders. They waited for anything, some kind of sign or command. There they remain to this day. Faithfully waiting.
Wanting!
Needing!
OK, so maybe it got to my head a little bit more than I care to admit, but it was still kinda cool for a salaryman who was just starting out and trying to make his mark on the world. Especially when the cute models were replaced by a fly. Not just any fly. The Fly. According to this Japanese fan site, Rohm chose Jeff Goldblum because his role as a scientist in the movie Jurassic Park (released in Japan shortly after the commercials started airing) perfectly fit the image of the company’s high tech products (and also because he was new to Japandering). As a famous actor later to be known for 13375ki11s with a Powerbook, and used to dealing with the mind games and manipulation that is show biz, would he be impervious to my powers? Heh.
Wanting!
Needing!

ISO 14001 Compliant

This is a warning that I will be archiving posts that I liked on my old blog on this one because I want that tingling feeling on my scalp from feeding the monster that is RSS. Don’t worry, I will recycle in a responsible manner so as not to disturb the natural surroundings. I’ll just filter out all the hate and venom from the posts, and then maybe I’ll screw a tree just to show you that I really do care about baby seals.

Brimful of Asha

I once drank a pinchful of vibhuti, sacred ash, dissolved in a cup of water at the insistence of a crazy white guy I met in Japan who was a follower of Sai Baba. He told me great things about Sai Baba and how he conjured this ash from nothingness.
Now, I am fascinated with India and always have been – it’s high on my “to experience” list – but this one point regarding the ash always gnawed at me. I mean, really, why ash? Why not something useful like powdered milk to feed the hungry masses or graphite powder for lubricating squeaky rickshaw axels? The guy didn’t offer an explanation as to what kind of ash it was but it smelled like sandalwood. Maybe it was the feathery ash of burnt incense ground down to a fine powder. Either way, this guy insisted that I would pretty much feel a warm healing power streaming from my chakras as soon as I downed this cup of ash-water. Well, some did get stuck in my teeth and tasted gritty, kind of like a faceful of sandy water when you play in heavy surf at the beach and get tossed around, but the waves of energy simply did not appear. It was not for lack of effort, I really wanted to feel the rush as described, but it just did not happen.
I think Sai Baba should implement a Quality Plan and get ISO certification if possible. I think I got a bad batch of ash that day.
Update: There may be some image problems to work out, too.

Free Blog Comparison Link (Japanese)

Found this link for a site that compares free Japanese-language blogging services:
Muryo Blog Hikaku (Free Blog Comparison)
My moblog on yapeus is still getting a lot of traffic and links from other Japanese sites, as is the old version of this blog. I never archived the contents of the old blog here like I wanted to and I’ve been thinking of moving some of the posts I liked here one by one… we’ll see. I often find myself wanting to do stuff I never actually get around to doing.