Last Set of Photos from Japan 2010: Random Stuff

I’ve put up the last set of photos from our recent vacation in Japan. It’s a collection of photos of odd bits of Engrish, food, fashion, and other things which didn’t really fit in anywhere else. Just for the fun of it I’ll provide a guided tour here. All of these photos are hosted on flickr so you can click them to find larger versions.

Food

It’s probably obvious by now that I love the food in Japan, even if it isn’t really Japanese as such. Here’s a shot of Mister Donut, Kyoto-style:

This is the display case of a restaurant in Kyoto that serves desserts made almost entirely of berries and other fruit:

Those are replicas made of wax (I think) but they look pretty much like the real thing. Here I am enjoying some take-out gyoza and other delicacies:

That’s my favorite kind of bottled green tea, by the way. It doesn’t taste anything like wool. And yes, the humidity in Japan makes my hair go berzerk.

As far as I can tell–since I can’t read Japanese–this is a can of banana juice:

No, I couldn’t quite bring myself to try it. There seemed to be an unusual interest in bananas this year. We saw several TV commercials about bananas, and Vie De France, the purveyors of the wondrous Special Curry Donut, have some sort of banana-based beverage on their menu now. I think Dole is trying to break into the previously untapped Japanese market.

I love the enthusiasm expressed on this can:

Okay, if something says “Oreo” on it in big letters, and it’s a candy bar, and it’s made in Japan, it must be good, right?

Actually they were kind of disappointing. They didn’t really seem to have much to do with Oreos, other than being sweet and having some crunchy bits in them.

Engrish (particularly on signs)

If you’re old enough to remember that 7-Up used to be called the Un-cola, this will make you think a bit:

Imagine what this place would smell like if they didn’t have showers:

If you want to add a little adventure to your dining experience, go here:

If you can’t find your way to your table through the labyrinth, a mysterious figure clad in black will escort you, or maybe behead you or poison you with tiny darts.

This one I couldn’t quite figure out. At first I thought the one on the left meant No People With Three Legs, but then I figured out that it’s telling you to not stamp out your cigarettes on the street. The one on the right eludes me, however:

If you car isn’t sufficiently full of tecno[sic], take it here:

The next two are of the same poster in a train station. Parts of it are about being considerate if you’re smoking in public, but other parts are less obvious and even somewhat surreal:

If there’s an emergency, press the button–but no, we’re not going to tell you where it is:

If you’re going to abandon your dog, you’ll have to do it somewhere else:

Do you have a usual place for your medals? I don’t.

The next two are from the covers of program guides for pay-per-view television in hotels:

No, we didn’t watch any. The rest of the programs were printed entirely in Japanese and, like, we didn’t want to get the wrong core work.

Okay, yes, I have a juvenile sense of humor, but try telling me that you wouldn’t titter if you found this sign:

Fashion

I was tempted to crop this photo way down to draw the viewer’s attention to the subject at the center, but I didn’t so that you could see the pretty cherry blossoms on the left:

If you do click on it to see the larger version, you filthy pervert, check out the matching handbags. Now check out these boots:

Characters

Noppon, the Tokyo Tower mascot, is always popular with the ladies:

Well, at least he’s popular with the younger ones; the woman on the right doesn’t look quite so thrilled as the others. (That’s another nice pair of boot in that photo, too.) Tracie was thrilled to hold hands with this fellow:

This might bear a little explanation. He’s the official mascot of Nara’s 1300th anniversary. Nara was the first capital city of Japan, and is home to both some important Buddhist temples, one of which houses a huge statue of Buddha, and a number of sacred deer. (You can see my blog post about our visit there here.) As a result, the mascot for the celebration of the 1300th anniversary is a figure of a young buddha with deer antlers. Yes, really. There was some controversy about this choice, but apparently not enough controversy to prevent him from popping up in places like the JR ticket office in Kyoto Station, as shown above, or suspended from trapeezes in another part of the station:

Origami as a Cultural Bridge

This is possibly my favorite photo from the trip:

The woman is the proprietor of a small shop in Matsue. I wish I could remember her name. She came to our aid as a translator at the request of the proprietor of a neighboring shop whose English wasn’t quite up to the task of answering Tracie’s questions about the fabrics that she sold. Eventually it came up that I sell Japanese paper and do origami. This revelation generated a good deal of excitement and in the end I was given a package of paper, a little box full of small, square folded objects, and (at my request) a lesson on how to fold them. They’re thick squares folded from two sheets of paper and they’re used for a children’s game which is very much the same as the game played in the West with marbles. In the photo above she’s showing me how to fold them while we kneel at a couple of chairs in the hallway outside the shops. It was one of those rare, special moments in which two strangers from opposite sides of the world suddenly discover that they have something in common to share.

Thanks for reading my blog entries and looking at the pictures. I hope you enjoyed them!