Category: Japanese Society/Culture

If I ever wanted to market a new pickled fish rice topping for mass consumption in Japan, I would do two things:
1. Make sure it resembled miniature baby seals, or alternatively, Hamutaro
2. Name it something along the lines of mukashinagara shin-atarashiko (kuromame tappuri no)
That is all.

Every year around this time in Japan the streets are filled with the sounds of Old Men Who Want Your Vote (And Mount Large Loudspeakers on Election Vehicles). Unfortunately they cannot have mine, because I cannot vote. Satan won’t let me (er… also because I’m not Japanese, but Satan is pretty goddamn compelling as well). I feel a bit left out, you see.
So I took some pictures instead.

The election signboard with names and faces of each candidate.

With a slogan like GENKI UP SUMOTO, how can you lose? (for some reason, this slogan makes me envision Fitty rousing up his sleeping crew with a hearty, “GENKI UP, MOTHERFUCKAS!”)

This guy’s channeling Mr. T or something. “I’m gonna MESS YOU UP, sucka!”

The token “former Aum follower/current Scientologist”.
They’re gonna run me out of this city for sure.

Who would have thought that in the land of Nintendogs, airport pet hotels, and 20,000 dollar chihuahuas that:
A. There’s apparently a sizeable market for dog meat (but not heads – an indication it isn’t going into pho dac biet), and
B. Importing dogs for eating into Japan apparently isn’t illegal
This is definitely something to think about during your next visit to all-you-can-eat yakiniku.

Update: The poster above really has nothing to do with the dog remains found dumped in the Tokyo moat. It’s a poster protesting the largest Japanese consumer finance (read: high-rate, collateral-secured loans) company, Aiful… I used the tagline for their commercials as the title for this post because the CM features Qoo-chan, probably the most famous dog in Japan besides Hachiko… Qoo-chan is a chihuahua, and (although it may not be true) people say they were bred by the Aztecs for eating, so…
Yes, today is free-association day.

Here is a partial list of arbeit I have done in Japan:
Teaching English
Ah, the staple of most westerners…I started various English teaching jobs my first year of university, in Tenri. Teaching friends of friends on a private basis was the very first paid work I did in Japan. Luckily, some were nurses from a local hospital and could afford about $40 an hour. Never got enough hours, though. Later, I had a heart surgeon from the same hospital as a student, and he shelled out $90 an hour. Better yet, he paid whether he showed up or not, and he only showed up about 7 times out of 10. I only taught him twice a month, though. I also taught at a cultural center near T’s house for a half year (I rode the 35 minutes there on a 50cc scooter and that was a cold ride in winter), but got fired for not having the gaijin looks – a chronic problem I encountered in finding English teaching jobs, another one being that I hated teaching English.
Roadwork/Construction
I worked construction and with road crews, digging ditches and forming manly man bonds with the gritty working class of Japan all throughout college. I’m not knocking those guys, either – they taught me how to speak thug and fight with a shovel, for which I am eternally grateful. I’m just saying they were doing those shit jobs for a reason – they were, for the most part, alcoholic, gambling losers in a state of self-perpetuating desperation. I think I kept doing this type of work for the cultural experience more than the money – usually around $8 an hour, but as high as $15 on rush gigs (the pay for day laborers in Japan is notoriously low; being a college student in a small town with no jobs didn’t help either. Before you point out that $8 an hour isn’t bad, remember that a dollar probably goes a lot further where you live.)
Errand Boy – Delivery Service
T got a job at a local delivery office of Pelican Bin and hooked me up with one, too. The main problem was that I didn’t yet understand very much Japanese, and the staff had a hard time believing I was a foreigner, again because of my typical Japanese looks – I couldn’t catch a break either way! There was also a problem because the job was boring as shit. Moving boxes from one pile to another and clearing crap out of the path of forklifts all day, followed by faxing daily reports to the home office and making phone inquiries (this is where the lack of Japanese skills screwed me) to make sure the faxes actually got there, at night. Mostly, though the job was just boring as hell. If you ever wonder how a package you sent by a delivery service got damaged, it was probably because a couple of college slackoffs hired for part-time work were playing soccer with it. We quit this job after a few days, without telling anyone – a fact that still bothers me. I guess it was too embarrassing or just a pain in the ass to deal with. What was even more embarassing was going back for my paycheck after quitting like that – walking in the big office and speaking to the manager – no, actually having T speak to the manager while I stood there and wished I wasn’t such a predictably shameful young shithead – but in the end, financial necessity won out. The paycheck was for like a couple hundred bucks, which was a pretty huge amount of money for me at the time.
Automotive Part Factory
This is a job I got through my Kenyan sempai, Jeff. It was at a small factory that made various mechanical parts for Daihatsu cars, located near Tenri Dam. It was pretty much the most consistently dangerous part-time job I ever did in Japan, so the pay was pretty good. Maybe $12 an hour or so, and the owner apparently gave 50 cent raises every six months. We manned machinery that drilled holes or cut shapes into solid metal parts, and I never saw a functioning safety guard on the equipment. In fact, most of the emergency stop buttons were non-functional (I tried), and there were at least a couple injuries involving loss of fingers, etc., every year. The worst part about the factory was the air. All the machines used a green chemical coolant that was sprayed on the bits and blades, and after a while, it started to smell like a broken car transmission mixed with the sweet, cloying scent of apple juice. It was a truly sickening stench, and it killed your sense of smell for a few hours after. Then there were the metal shavings, which got into every nook of your clothing and hair, and probably in your brain, too, if you were stupid enough not to wear a mask. When I developed a chronic, wet cough after working there a few months, I quit.
Lumberyard
My Aussie sempai, John, hooked me and a bunch of other guys at the dorm up with a job at a lumberyard in Sakurai – he was close pals with one of the owners, to whom he also taught English. That area used to be famous for lumberyards, but they are almost all gone now. Anyway, this job was only for the summer, and my main memories of it were: Hot. Fucking hot. Damn fucking hot. The job mostly consisted of stacking loose pieces of wood onto pallets so a forklift could move it to the next stage, but sometimes we got to use the humongous circular saw to cut shit up, which was about the happiest you get in 120 degree heat and 500% humidity. You know, I don’t remember what this job paid at all. It was tough just being out in that yard, though. When one of the guys from the dorm won $700 at pachinko one day, he swore off the lumberyard job forever, and I was sooo jealous.
Convenience Store Clerk
After so many sweaty jobs, I decided I needed a change. An air-conditioned environment sounded nice enough. I worked at a Lawson convenience store owned by an acquaintance for exactly one day. It was a good location for a Lawson since it was right near an entrance to the Nishi Meihan Expressway; it got a lot of business from truckers since there was also a cheap Chinese restaurant in the same lot. After so many sweaty day jobs, it took some practice for me to get the whole automated politespeak thing down, although this wasn’t why I quit. I quit simply because there were huge bags of 10,000 yen bills in the cash drawer, and I couldn’t bear to see them every time I rang up a sale, knowing that it would take me years to make that much money at minimum I-am-a-fucking-nobody wage.
Panasonic Car Stereo Salesman
This job was a total joke, in that I never should have gotten it. It was my second year in Japan, and my Japanese was still very basic. Yet I somehow managed to bullshit a recruiter into hiring me for floor sales at an Autobacs auto goods store on the Hanna-doro, in Nara. The thing is, I would have kicked ass at that job had my Japanese been better. I’m one of the few people I know who can design and install a car stereo system semi-properly, and I’ve kept up with the new products ever since high school. As it was, though, my Japanese was nowhere near the level it takes to bullshit people into buying Autobacs dreck. I quit the first week and told the recruiter he was a dumbass.
SHARP Cafeteria Worker
I’ve worked food preparation in Japan – at a company cafeteria. I mostly took this job because Nam was working it already, and as we had just started dating, I really wanted to spend all my time with her. She would sneak out of her Tenrikyo dormitory and ride a bike to the meeting place where a van would pick her and a bunch of other foreign students up and take them to the SHARP factory adjacent to the highway to Nagoya. After I started the job, I would pick everybody up instead since I had a microvan (an ancient Kei van with a 550cc engine). The job consisted of prepping meals for about a thousand workers who ate in three shifts, and cleaning up. They used these giant steel rice cookers mounted on axles so one person could upend them for cleaning. You could cook two full sacks of rice (40 kgs uncooked) in one of those pots at once. I think this was the only kitchen job I’ve ever worked where I never saw anyone spit in the food, or use food that was dropped on the ground. The old guys in charge, and their wives, ran a tight ship. Even though we worked the graveyard shift (maybe 1 to 5 in the morning), the pay wasn’t very good.
Car Counting for the City
This was the ultimate lax job for a student living in our decrepit dorms, and when I was in my third year, my turn came up. The job was to record traffic at certain intersections for city planning purposes, and the tools involved were clickety-clickety hand counters, a city-issued pencil, and a clipboard. There were detailed instructions for marking the different car classifications per license plate code, and we did fairly well at this about half the time. The thing is, it got pretty old after a few hours, and we mostly made up numbers after that. I’d like to think that this had an adverse affect on traffic signal timing or road repair rates, anything to validate the data we collected, but I tend to think it was just a typical waste of tax money. At least, at that time, it wasn’t a waste of mine!
Love Hotel Sheet-Changer
The border of Tenri and Koriyama on route 24, on either side of the highway overpass, demarcates a kind of sin city – aside from the convenience stores and gasoline stations that line all national roads in Japan, the only storefront businesses are love hotels and pachinko parlors – shitloads of both. I worked at one called Cats with a bunch of Korean (and later, Chinese) guys who I went to school with. The job called for doing hotel maid duties at a superfast pace. I’d like to say I did this job only for the cultural experience, but I was broke as hell at the time. In all, I continued doing it for a year, before I led the legendary Christmas revolution (to be explained later). The question people always ask when they hear I worked at a love hotel is, “are there really hidden cameras in the rooms?” The answer is, “only in some of the seedy hotels that are owned by gangsters or Koreans” (read: All). The other question I am always asked is, “What’s the weirdest thing you ever saw working there?” That’s a harder question, because over the course of one year cleaning other people’s love nests, you see some pretty weird shit. Also, you have to quantify “weird.” The sickest shit I ever saw was a room used by shit-players. They were kind enough to restrict most of their play to the bathroom, but the shit streaks left on the dessert plates and spoons also suggested they were shit-eaters. Hey, to each his own, I guess. You get pretty numb to people’s perversities doing a job like that, and luckily, that wasn’t a room I had to clean (by the way, if you think they closed that room down for proper disinfection, you just don’t understand the love hotel business model). The funniest shit I ever saw was this old guy, maybe in his seventies, who pulled up in a Bentley with 4 hot chicks, demanded to talk with the manager, and worked out a deal for all five of them to use the room for a few hours (usually there is a limit to 2 people per room and an extra person will cost more, but nobody comes in with four other people). Holy shit! We wondered if the old guy could actually get it on, but there was no way to find out because when we walked by the door, all we could hear was the karaoke machine turned way up, but no singing. Another funny/gross time was when this totally normal-looking mid-aged couple forgot two tackle boxes full of hardcore sex toys when they left. The wife later called the hotel whe we were on a break to ask about the “boxes” they had forgotten, and the old lady that worked the switchboard gave her a hard time, making her describe exactly what kind of things were in the boxes in great detail. When the old lady hung up the phone, she yelled “stupid ho,” and we all laughed our asses off. In the end, though, we were all fed up with the inhumanly long shifts over the holidays as well as the horribly shitty pay (and that’s saying a fucking lot for a bunch of Koreans and Chinese), so I led a revolt against the scary Korean mafia-ish owner, and we demanded a raise. He threatened us with painful death (“Do you know who you’re fucking with?”), and slapped one of the Korean guys, Kim, across the face. We all jumped in and beat the owner to a bloody pulp, then gang-raped him bulgogi style. Nah, just kidding. We quit on the spot and keyed his big black Benz on the way home.
Interpreter/Fetch Boy
I did this job for a company that was illegally bringing American carpenters over on tourist visas to build prefab homes in the Daianji area of Nara. It was my senior year in college, and as other job prospects at the time were quite grim, I was interested in possibly working for this firm after graduation, as well. They paid the first decent wage besides English teaching (which I’d completely abandoned at that point) that I saw in Japan. I interpreted instructions from the bosses at the Japanese construction company to these carpenters from Oregon, and translated mostly complaints in the other direction. Of course, this company was doomed to fail from the start, and the entire operation disappeared in the space of a week, taking two months of my pay with them. Ouch. I needed that fucking money. Graduation was coming up, I was flat broke, and I had no job prospects. However, I got a hold of the company manager’s house phone number in Oregon, and laid the biggest guilt trip on him over the course of a few months. I kept calling and calling and calling. And you know what? THE MONEY CAME THROUGH. Five large, baby. By that time I had found a job, started working, and had even drawn my first paycheck, but boy did that make me feel good. That was the first time someone tried to fuck me out of a paycheck… It happened once more, but I got paid that time as well. What the fuck is wrong with people these days? EVEN IF YOUR COMPANY GOES BANKRUPT, YOU HAVE A MORAL OBLIGATION TO PAY SALARIES (a previous boss claimed otherwise!).
Bartender
My bartending stint was the longest part-time job I had in Japan. I think I did it for almost three years. Good times, they were. Lotsa crazy stories, too, in fact, too many to recount here. The name of the bar was Rumours, it’s still running and located on Sanjo-dori in the center of Nara, and since my pal Nara Bill quit as manager there, the owner has run it into the ground by placing, respectively, dumbshits, fuckheads, and otherwise business-challenged family members in charge. Alas, it was once the best (the only!) gaijin bar in Nara, but it is no longer even worthy of that moniker.
Working at a variety of jobs while learning Japanese was extremely valuable, culture-wise as well as language-wise. You know what? Maybe I’ll sell papaya salad at a roadside stand for a while to start my new studies of Thai.

It occurs to me that I haven’t gone on a manly-man food binge for a while. Manly-man food. You know, the kind you eat straight from the pan. The kind that smears on your shirt cuz you can’t be bothered to use a napkin. The kind that makes for good belching sessions, preferably in direct competition with other manly-men.
The epitome of a manly-man meal in Japan is two orders of gyoza and a draft beer at Osho. Osho is a nationwide chain of Chinese-ish greasy spoons, famous for their gyoza. In all truth, their food is strictly average at best, but their gyoza might rate a 7.5/10 stars at a really good branch, which is more than adequate for the 2 in the morning, after-a-long-night type of situation for which manly-man food was presumably created.
If you walk into an Osho, sit at the counter, ignore the baby cockroaches and the sticky floor, and order biru to yakigyoza nininmae, everyone will know you are a fucking man. The cooks will gladly fill your manly order. Bitches will bask in your radiating man-osity. )Obviously, I haven’t done this in a while, because now I’m fantasizing about it.)
Nam is going back to Thailand for a month this Thursday, and I’ll be spending the holidays with my bro and assorted homies. I’m sure somebody will help me remedy my currently gyoza/beer deficient lifestyle.

It’s fucking cold in here.
(read about Warm Biz here)
And to the asshole who claims that “there’s no minus-element” – my pregnant coworker, who is shivering even in 6 layers of clothes, wishes you a warm gangraping with slimy alien tentacles! Please take the predicted 0.03% increase of the annual gross domestic product and stick it up your ass, to keep your head company!
Brrrrrr..

Look what’s on my desk today:

It’s inspiring me! I can just feel the heavenly little molecules of fermented 100% blue agave goodness inside the bottle, inside this can. Yes, that’s right, it’s a whole liter of Cazadores, straight from Jalisco.
Normally, we can’t even get this stuff in Japan. Yet there it was, laying on the table today at my company’s charity bazaar (somebody on a trip to our Tijuana plant must have brought it back and donated it to the bazaar)… I love charity! So I bought it! And now, it sits proudly on my desk, for all to see… Er, to see my support for charity, that is.
I have a big bottle of tequila on my desk at work, and nobody cares!
I love Japan!
Banzai!!
Banzai!!
Kanpai!!!

While I was at work today, some cops came around the house claiming they were making rounds and asking about “a Nikkei (= of JP ancestry) man, Justin Yoshida.”
Coincidence?
I think fucking not. They made my wife show her alien ID card and student ID. I hope she told them that she isn’t Peruvian, so to FUCK OFF, but I know better.
Those twats are LUCKY that I wasn’t home… You don’t come after all Nikkeis to check if they are really are or not, just because a case involving one is all over the news. Fucking idiots.

I am extremely proud to announce that I ate an entire soboro donburi exclusively with chopsticks today. In its most basic form, this is a bowl of loose rice topped with scrambled eggs (flavored with a bit of dashi) and a bit of ground meat. It is a staple of cafeterias and bento shops everywhere, and I kind of consider it to be the Japanese equivalent of a sloppy joe – you eat it a lot when you’re a kid, then kind of forget about it, then when you rediscover it as an adult you realize how wonderful it is because of its simplicity and hey isn’t simplicity a good thing in itself and… I digress. The loose consistency of a soboro-don in our company cafeteria is such that almost everyone eats it with a spoon, since if you use chopsticks, you end up scooping it into your mouth anyway.
Of course, I automatically chose chopsticks, because well, let’s face it, there are certain standards to adhere to, no? If you start eating donburi with a spoon, pretty soon you’re sucking tofu with a straw because it’s easier, and eating shabu shabu with barbeque tongs because it’s faster. I ask you, what the fuck happened to tradition, heathen? A splintery pair of wooden sticks was good enough for your samurai/geisha/farmboy ancestors, and they’re good enough for you, too.
I have a certain complex about proper table manners and utensil usage because I look Japanese and therefore feel a deeper obligation than usual to have my shit together at the table. Reprazentin’ the gaijin set, ya know? Plus, people who can’t use chopsticks properly just look fucking retarded in public (since that’s the only place they ever use them, I guess), so I actually took the time to learn how to use them properly after I came to Japan (this saves me money on flyswatters ala the Miyagi Method, as well).
So now that you’re thinking about what a chopstick Nazi I am (I just realized “Chopstick Nazis” is the coolest synonym for “Yellow Axis” I’ve ever heard), I’d actually like to point to my good pal Molly, a blond, blue-eyed, card-carrying Gaijin-san, who, during our Tenri days, was famous for eating the university cafeteria’s curry rice with chopsticks. Now that’s HARDCORE. Curry fucking rice. That shit was pretty runny, too, if I remember correctly.
Anyway, the absolute antithesis of a Chopstick Nazi, without a doubt, was the head of the Japanese Studies Department where we studied. Besides being a generally unpleasant and stupid asshole (and I would love to say that to his face except that he’s now dead on top of being a stupid asshole – LOL!), Professor Uehara (nicknames: “Stumpy,” “Fuckhead,” and “Twat”), who I just positively adored, was a real – how to say? – banana. A Twinkie… You know, yellow on the outside with a creamy white filling… This guy, while on one hand exhibiting every feature of a dirty old Japanese man (including, uh, Japanese citizenship), was in such dire of need of proving to everyone that he was American at heart, that he ate soba noodles with a fork.
///////
The donburi I ate for lunch, incidentally, was delicious.

Summary: Koizumi is the FUCKING MAN! ALL HAIL KOIZUMI! BANZAI!!! BANZAI!!!
It must be nice winning an election and watching the stock market rise like this. Plus, let’s face it, the Richard Gere look-alike thing was a fucking masterstroke. Interesting fact: Did you know that before the plastic surgery, Koizumi was a dead ringer for Pat Morita?

Daniel-san, you must concentrate!
Unfortunately, Japanese politics are a prime example of “the more things change the more they stay the same.” For instance: Post office privatization. If you’re waiting to see how this is going to directly affect your life in Japan, tell me how it turns out a couple decades from now, okay? Seriously… People who are predicting the change in interest rates for savings accounts at this point in time ARE FUCKING DELUSIONAL OR HAVE A SERIOUSLY KICK-ASS CRYSTAL BALL +7 CHARISMA. Okay?
(Note from Editor: Compulsory “Japanese erection” joke deleted.)