2.27

japan trip wrap-up

places visited

restaurants

one of my unstated goals was to eat at as many different japanese chain restaurants as possible. here are all the ones i got to:

accomodations

business hotel chains stayed at:

absolutely nobody asked, but here's an annotated map of every place i stayed:

misc. notes

daiso seems to have recently created a spin-off store called "Standard Products"... i went into one and it is an absolutely shameless rip-off of MUJI, down to the graphic design on the posters and interior style of the store. they have cheaper (but shittier) copies of almost every iconic muji product, they even went so far as to make tiny versions of backpacks and tote bags like MUJI has been doing lately...

noticing that the cheap business hotels i stay at are invariably described as "unfussy" or "unpretentious" by google maps

amusing how hard some businesses in japan are working to cut down on staffing needs, like at matsunoya now you pick up your food from a counter up front instead of having wait staff bring it to you, then at the same time in other places there's a lot of make-work like how every japanese construction site seems required to employ at least two guys with batons to “safely direct traffic” who basically stand around doing nothing most of the time and could probably be replaced with some cones or something

in tokyo many of the menial service jobs (e.g. convenience store cashier, fast food restaurant chef/waiter) are now noticeably staffed by immigrants... kinda funny having interactions with cashiers where you’re both speaking horribly-accented japanese, keeping up the pretense... very different from a couple years ago, but finally bringing japan in line with other first-world countries where it’s been the norm for a while now...

imagining a guy who visits japan because he's really into pachinko

fun fact: japan has two separate power grids running at different frequencies, a western one at 60hz and an eastern one at 50hz. i remembered this after seeing a big label on top of the microwave in my room at hotel r9 the yard saying that it could only be operated at 60hz, including a detailed map showing the exact dilineation of the grids. the grids are connected at four substations that can convert between the frequencies with limited capacity, this is why the 2011 triple disaster caused blackouts in the kanto area, they couldn't pull very much additional power from the other half of the country that was doing fine

japanese parents cracking open canned highballs on the shinkansen sunday at 11am

at the terminus of any rail line five guys will immmediately hop out and take pictures of the front of the train. standing with two other guys on the platform at the scenic inaka station, as the approaching one-car train slowly takes the curve right before the station the first guy is ready with his camera... the second guy stands still but you can feel the tension, he's trembling, he can barely resist... and then his hand darts to his phone and he takes a quick guilty snap.

rode on a "rapid" train that skipped only 4 out of 20 stations. guess this is why you should take the "special rapid"

something i've noticed is that many japanese stores don't just play generic top 40 hits playlists, instead they play ambient BGM music like they're a location in a video game... a bookstore i went to was playing some banging chiptune tracks that could have been from old pokemon games, then at hard-off they were actually playing pokemon bgms...

caption below a scroll in the national museum: “These legendary Chinese sages were admired for rejecting authority and conventional notions of success. Because of his wisdom, the sage on the left was asked to become emperor of China. However, hearing this proposal offended him and he promptly washed his ears in a river. Seeing this, the other sage led his ox away, saying the river was now too polluted for even an animal to drink from.”

japan appears to have such an insatiable thirst for cute characters that even their world-leading domestic supply can't produce enough to meet demand, so they've taken to importing them from the US and europe: snoopy, moomin, miffy, pingu, krtek. i wonder what proportion of japanese fans buying that snoopy merch have ever seen a peanuts strip, or even know the origin of snoopy... but to their credit, the japanese have produced multiple moomin anime, and built a theme park in hanno

the pokemon center mega tokyo seems to be gradually taking over its floor in the sunshine city mall, it now has multiple satellite stores including a café, event spaces for TCG and the like, some kind of outlet store (?), a place to meet the characters... amazingly, it's taken them up until this year in order to finally open up a kinda low-effort pokemon theme park, such an unbelievable amount of money left on the table there for so long, they should have gotten in on it over 25 years ago during the first great pokemon boom, what were they thinking? honestly they're constantly passing up easy wins and making baffling decisions, like deciding to base the first live-action hollywood blockbuster for the franchise on a random not even particularly well-received spin-off game (detective pikachu). but none of it matters because the franchise has so much inertia and the fanbase has no standards so they'll continue printing money no matter what missteps they make, like a country with massive oil reserves or big tech companies with their ads businesses.

idol performance in the sunshine city atrium, older japanese guy (fifties maybe) in the very back by me knows every word and is dancing more enthusiastically than even the girls on stage. meanwhile, the fake fans in the audience are just standing there filming the show on their phones

"oshikatsu" seems to have become very mainstream the past couple years, many stores have prominent displays of strange oshikatsu-specific supplies/gear like clear bags to stuff plushies into, even MUJI came out with their own take on it...

"...although [JA Zenchu] could promote activities that would make Japan’s rice growers more competitive on the global market by advocating for programs to make rice growing more efficient and modernized, it continues to maintain rice growing as a performative, cultural activity. The maintenance of rice growing as a lifestyle however does very little to help individual rice growers or to encourage rice growing as a primary occupation."

pulling out the laptop and working on the local train is pretty comfy... it's like being in one of those "Japan Cozy Countryside Ambiance 4k Ultra HD HDR Binaural Audio" youtube videos people sometimes put on in the background

uncategorized photos

abandoned back street cigarette vending machine. "Nice day, Nice smoking. たばこは心の日曜日"
ironically, i watched almost no anime in japan because the airbnb had no tv. one night i got drunk and tried to sign up for the abema.tv streaming service in order to watch the new episodes of summer pockets, but it was no use, they wouldn't accept my foreign credit card. eventually i got my fix after finding a cheap hidamari sketch dvd boxset at bookoff, luckily i'd insisted on getting a new laptop with a disc drive...
most buildings in japan's urban sprawl are unremarkable, but every so often you stumble upon a banger
utsunomiya recently became the first japanese city in 75 years to open a new tram line. i stayed in that hotel on the corner, it had an impressive atrium.
a side street in ikebukuro offers a striking view of sunshine 60
the real ones are doing the gacha to assemble a rack of tiny pro networking equipment
chiba suspended monorail tracks
overgrown back alley shrine in beppu
the PL tower is adjacent to a golf course, from some angles it looms over the fairways like this
a sole BOSS coffee BLACK can washed up on the shore of a secluded beach in matsushima, one of the famous "three views" of japan
this building by the main station in koriyama appears to be harboring some kind of giant ORB up top
"oh i'm gonna get real artsy-fartsy with this one" i thought to myself as i crawled under a tree to get this shot of the bridge framed by branches. a couple minutes later as i was crossing the bridge, i passed by a lady using her phone to take a photo from it directly into the sun, it's astonishing to me that people these days are constantly taking photos with their phones without having even managed to figure out the basics

takeaways for next time

COMING EVENTUALLY

番外編１: "the only soulful white boy in jinhae-gu"

番外編２: "shanghaied"