So there was actually one thing that I missed from Sweden, and that thing was candy.
The Japanese had quite a lot of candy, it’s not really that. But almost all their candy tasted very unnatural, it was all chemical tastes and the chocolate wasn’t really to my taste either, and of course you can’t really find real liquorice (you can’t find that in most of the world).

But the one thing I missed the most about Swedish candy was this:

Buying candy by the weight is something I rarely see outside of Sweden, but I love this! You can choose to buy as many pieces as you want from as many different kinds as you want and you only pay for how much all of the candy weighs. This is something I’m having a hard time seeing Japan take on because of their “fear” of unpackaged things and need for sterile cleanliness. But it’s really awesome because you can customize what you buy and you don’t need to buy a whole lot of packages of different things.

I’ve always known about japanese figures and I’ve seen them a bunch of times. But most (read almost all) have some quite significant sexual tendencies, that is — they’re always half-naked.

The thing is that I’ve always thought people bought them for their half-nakedness and the sexual thing about them. But after reading a lot of Danny Choos’ blog about Japan and a bit of how figures play into the Otaku culture I’ve changed my mind.

So it kind of hit me and I’ve really come around to liking figures a lot — maybe not as much as Danny Choo or some other nerds around Akihabara, but I certainly am a nerd and as such it felt very wrong to go home without a proper figure in my bag!

So I went out today to find something cool and I think I hit the jackpot, cool and cheap!

50% off! Its a really good-sized high detail figure, so I’m really happy

Some images when it’s assembled:

And a final image with its proper base (which I think is supposed to look like snow or something) and the other clothes I got with it, plus the book and CD that I really haven’t checked what it is yet.

Today I found the worlds greatest T-shirt store in Harajuku. It’s called Beams and it’s beyond awesome. I didn’t take any pictures inside I’m afraid, but they had the coolest T-shirts I’ve ever seen and the prices were between 2800 and 5000 yen, which is awesomely good. You can barely find a mediocre T-shirt in Sweden for 5000 yen.

This is the bag I got from them, it’s extra big because I was carrying around another bag from UNI QLO and they were kind enough to give me this bigger one so I could put the UNI QLO bag inside it as well.

This is the t-shirt I bought.

Today I went on a bit of a shopping spree, so I came home with 6 t-shirts. (^_^)

Without any delay, here’s a collage of all the T-shirts I’ve bought so far. (The one in the upper right corner is Emmas, the other ones are mine)

They are all awesomely awesome and for a fraction of the price I would pay at home for this quality.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again — Japanese bookstores kick ass!

Here’s why:

There are tons of magazines and literature on every imaginable subject, you could literally walk into a Japanese bookstore and ask to become a master at ___ and the clerk will happily guide you to an entire shelf full of stuff on the subject of ___.

The image above for example are really thick magazines filled with every piece of information you could possibly want about pens, different kinds of pens, fountain pens. They have tests on different kinds of ink, which ink holds the best while moist and so forth. Information about new pens, about antique pens and their ink. It’s insane!

But that’s not it. I found this one magazine which just makes me want to be able to read Japanese that much more!

It’s a magazine about Mad-Science, this specific edition covered atomic, chemical and biological warfare. It shows detailed articles on crazy science and whack plans, it goes through potential biological weapons and weapons used in the past.

Click for larger versions.
As you can see, it covers stuff pretty well, down to chemical compounds and pretty advanced shit about how it affects the brainstem (I assume).

But wait, theres more!

Theres a shelf full of magazines containing every bit of information you could ever want on guns. One of which details everything about every gun ever used in a hollywood movie.

Here’s a shelf full of magazines about watches, everything from latest fashion to one full magazine all about Rolex watches and their every detail.

They even have Match Lectures in magainze format, including a CD with the spoken lectures so you can listen to the lectures and follow along in the magazine.

One thing I really love about Japanese books (not magazines this time) is that they’re really small. Most books you seem to buy in three parts, where the cost of all three books is about equal to the cost of one pocket-book in Sweden (even a little less usually).

They fit perfectly in the hand and don’t weigh anything! There’s no need to carry around the whole book, you don’t read a whole book that fast anyway. You only need one part at a time. Perfect.

As you can see, one can easily waste away quite a few hours in these stores, even if you can’t read Japanese. And if you can, you just want to read everything! I’m starting to understand the whole culture of standing in the store and reading. You couldn’t possibly afford to buy everything you want to read.

I’m quite pleased with the selection of alcoholic drinks in Japan, their beer is really good and they have everything you would have at home.

The kind of drinking I’m not satisfied with in Japan is the kind of “stopping at a vending machine to get a drink when your thirsty” or “getting some nice soda to go with your food” drinking.

Japan doesn’t have Sprite, at all, and Sprite is totally my favorite soda. They have Coke but they use some other kind of sweetener here so it tastes like crap to be honest. So during my visit here I’ve been hunting for a Sprite replacement, someone must have thought of the idea to bring Sprite to Japan.

The closest I’ve gotten so far is this:

It was sprite with some lemony (or something) twist, pretty OK, but quite hard to find.

The most disgusting thing I’ve come across, that basically just tasted like dishwashing liquid was this:

Japanese people have a strange sense of taste
What I find most disturbing is their various Jelly drinks, like these:

The first one – the energy drink equivalent to one riceball tastes just lemon, but had a very strange and not good aftertaste of.. well, rice!
The jelly fanta tasted very good, but it feels just like drinking old milk that is so old that it has started to form lumps in it.

What I do like about the japanese assortment of drinks is this:

They have a huge selection of vitamin water, vitamin drinks, protein water, mineral water and kinds of shizzle like that. It’s pretty awesome, especially when I have a cold like this.

Another quick food/drink related notes:

I didn’t know Coca Cola made bottled water, but apparently they do, and in a couple of other countries. I LOHAS is usually the cheapest water you can buy too! I suppose that’s another good think about the selection, water is always available, but sometimes you want something with taste.

And while I’m whining, this is something that really bothers me:

They individually wrap everything here, this is a single piece of gum from a well-packaged packet of gum. The cheese we buy, every single slice is individually wrapped with plastic. Japan seems very environmentally friendly and you see commercials everywhere with how “green” everything is and they sort all their garbage very carefully, to see that they waste so much packaging material is just weird.

So we recently finished our Asian poses as suggested by Emanuel. Here is the finished (as of pose #28) result:

When we were done we sent them in to the guy who manages asianposes.com to accept his “challenge” in where he challenges people to do these poses and take pictures.

We quite promptly got featured on the page and is currently the top post! You can find the post on asianposes.com here. This was a super fun thing to do so thanks to Emanuel for suggesting it! It’s also totally super awesome to be featured on the asianposes.com page!

If you want to see full resolution images of all the poses they can be found here.

As previously stated, I really want to learn Japanese. To this end i bought a japanese dictionary/translator. It does work very well and I have managed to use it some, but it has pros and cons like everything in life.

The translator itself is very handy, as you can see it has one big screen, which is also a touch screen for easy navigation and selection. The bottom screen is where you write in Kanji to have the translator recognize it. The first catch with this is that it is stroke-sensitive, by which i mean it senses in which direction a stroke is made and in which order they are made. This is then used to select a Kanji, rather than just matching exact looks. The pro with this is that when you actually know the rules for drawing Kanji you don’t have to draw them prettily to make it recognize them. After you’ve drawn one and it selects it wrong, you can bring up options to which the character drawn might be as well. Usually I find the correct character in the alternatives.

Here it is with some scale, a manga book under it and my hand for reference, as well as my moleskine.

As you can see it’s not very big, but big enough to make the buttons and such easy to use. It weighs very little so it’s easy to bring along.

One thing I’ve found in trying to use this is not that all the menus are in Japanese, you get around that pretty quick by using the short English quick-use manual. The biggest problem for me right now is that it’s dictionary and word-translator. Which I of course knew and wanted, but this means when trying to translate for instance the manga, I have to translate character by character without context, making it somewhat difficult to put together into a sentence. I however wanted this to be able to learn words and kanji by themselves, the problem comes from me not knowing enough theory to put it together correctly.

As I said before, the menus are in Japanese and the English manual is short so there is a lot I don’t know about this thing yet.

There is space for microSD, a USB plug for connecting to the computer and headphones – mainly for playing the 70 000 words a native speaker has recorded into the thing. I don’t know what to do with either the SD or the USB.

Therefore, the device is more useful the more Japanese you know.

As you can see, I’ve already pimped it with a cube

Learning Japanese does sometimes seem like an insurmountable task, thousands upon thousands of words to learn and thousands upon thousands of characters to learn. All without coming into natural daily contact with it. I think while living here I could learn to speak the language probably within 6 months, but at home, the only contact I would have with the language outside of myself trying to learn it – would be if I watched anime, which I unfortunately don’t do very much because I can’t seem to find really good ones. I really doubt there are people subtitling normal Japanese TV-shows and putting them online as well, which makes natural contact all the more difficult.

I’m planning on trying to schedule like and hour a day for learning, but it requires huge amounts of discipline. Discipline I don’t actually believe I have, school easily takes a hold of your life and it’s extremely easy and convenient to claim “I don’t have time”.

On the other hand, it would kick ass to be able to speak three languages, and to have the third one be Japanese would just be beyond awesome.

Eftersom vi festade igår kom vi upp ganska sent idag, därför passade vi på att ta en lite lugn dag. Det passade bra att åka till Odaiba igen eftersom Gundam hade sin grand-opening igår!

Han var riktigt mäktig nu när han var klar och alla lampor igång och sånt!

För er som missat det är det en 18 meter hög exoskeletal fighting machine som de byggt i Tokyos hamn. Den är riktigt fetinggrym alltså!

Efter vi hade spanat in honom ett tag stannade vi i hamnen och satt nere vid vattnet ett tag. Jag älskar Odaiba, det är ett skitskönt område, man ser stan och har naturen och vattnet och allting framför sig. Samtidigt har jag lite emot det eftersom det är ganska turistigt, men om man håller sig borta från köpcentret som vi gjorde idag märker man inte av det alls.

Bron här på bilden heter Rainbow Bridge och man förstår nästan varför, det är riktigt vackert upplyst och det brukar ligga ganska mycket båtar med färgglad belysning framför den.

Efter vi hade suttit nere vid vattnet ett tag gick vi och satte oss och tog en öl i en bar som låg precis vid stranden.

Där vi hade denna utsikten:

Efter vi hade suttit här och filosoferat och njutit av livet ett tag…

…så åkte vi hem igen.

Väl hemma så gick vi inom vår lokala supermarket och skulle handla något litet att äta för kvällen och upptäckte en CD spelare som stod och spelade en melodi. Denna snutten (ca 30 sekunder lång) som CD spelaren spelar har den spelat i en konstant loop som hållt på i åtminstone 2 år då jag mycket väl kommer ihåg den från förra resan. Stackars människor som jobbar där…

I övrigt har jag köpt översättaren som jag ville ha! Jag ska lägga upp någon bild på den sen när jag får det. Jag fick lite sponsringspengar så nu klarade jag av att köpa den och fortfarande ha en liten buffert för att handla om det dyker upp något häftigt under den sista tiden här. Den fungerar bra men alla menyer är på Japanska, det finns en engelsk manual men den var bara 2 sidor och gick igenom absolut grundläggande funktionalitet. Det innebär alltså att jag håller på att försöka lära mig den hyffsat. Har påbörjat mitt projekt med att översätta en manga som heter Bakuman.

I really love Japan, and I love a really good club. But I’m having a hard time making the two mix. Granted my experience of Japans club life is that of a “tourist” and I haven’t had a chance to thoroughly investigate it, but by my experience so far, Japanese people don’t like to dance.

The few clubs we’ve been to here have all played only western music. No japanese hip-hop, no japanese pop, no japanese nothing. The clubs in themselves are actually very good, they pay attention to detail in decorating, the sound systems are good, the lighting is good. The DJs are much better than in Sweden. Take this clip from Club Atom in Shibuya as example.

You couldn’t get that kind of music in southern Sweden at all.

What bugs me about the club life here though is that they add chairs and tables everywhere, making the dance floor as small as possible.

Japanese people (I think) are used to bars and pubs, those are everywhere, they have a lot of bars and pubs. But they’re not used to dancing and partying in a western way, they’re not used to a dance floor. So to sort of mix the idea of a club and a bar, they put chairs and tables everywhere inside the club.

Don’t get me wrong, a nice club has places to sit and rest for 5-10 minutes, but you don’t go to a club to sit down.

I say that Japanese club life is in it’s infancy because I think the whole concept is rather new to Japan. I think they need to start playing some Japanese music and ditch the chairs to make people dance!

This video is from the club we went to last night. Club Muse, it was a really cool place and super nice, the bottom floor played the kind of music you hear the first 10 seconds, the last 20 seconds are what made it kind of weird, they had a lot of that stuff and sort of 90s music and several years old American hip hop.

Another thing about clubs here are that they are pretty hard to find and have sort of anonymous entrances. This was the entrance to Muse:

I can’t really decide if the anonymous entrance is good or bad though, anonymous entrance = less tourists. And maybe the really good clubs don’t have a sign at all, which makes it impossible to find without connections. That would explain some things.

Igår var vi i Yokohama under dagen, staden precis bredvid Tokyo.

Jag har egentligen inte så mycket att säga om det mer än att det är en väldigt mysig stad, och det känns som att det är ett sånt ställe som Tokyo-bor åker till när de skall skaffa familj men ändå vill vara nära Tokyo.

Staden ser väldigt fin ut och är väldigt fräsh. Den totalförstördes tydligen totalt under jordbävningen 1923 och sen drabbades den kraftigt av brandbombningar under andra världskriget, så staden är i princip 50 år gammal. Till skillnad från t.ex. Hiroshima har de lyckats bygga upp det som en ny fräsh stad och inte försökt återuppbygga gammal kultur.

Förutom detta var ju Yokohama den första staden i Japan som öppnades för internationell handel, på grund av detta har de ett väldigt stort Chinatown, som numera kommersialiserats och blivit lite turistigt, men kul ändå.

Det var ett ganska stort Chinatown, men de sålde inte så mycket vettigt, dock verkade de ha väldigt bra mat. Det är bud på att åka tillbaka där bara för att äta någon gång. De hade också ett väldigt stort snyggt tempel som är byggt i mer Kinesisk stil än i Japansk.

På vägen hem stannade vi förbi deras Ramen musem. Där de har inrett källaren att se ut som Tokyo på 50-talet. Det såg riktigt häftigt ut och det var här vi åt den skålen Ramen som ni kan se i föregående post. Detaljrikedomen i inredningen här var riktigt noggran, grymt!