Edojin is the journal of Rémi's stay in Japan. He obtained a working holiday visa with a plan to stay in the country for up to a year, moving in October 2009. Everyday, he will explore the culture, meet the people, and learn the language while sharing his experience with the world in writing, photos, and videos. This site is presented by Rémi's personal site, Rémino.
Someone in Japan just came up with a new way to eat chips without you ever touching them, not making your greasy hands greasier.
If only Billy Mays was still with us. I can imagine his loud voice pitching the Potechi no Te, or the Potato Chip Hand:
(Cut to scene in black and white of people having a hard time thinking.)
Did this ever happen to you? You like eating chips, but your hands are full of germs. You wash your hands with soap for hours and hours, but eating those chips will just make your hands greasy, undoing all your hard work.
(Cut to Billy Mays, radiant and smiling.)
Hi! Billy Mays here with another great product. It’s the Potato Chip Hand and it will solve all of your grease problems.
(Billy shows the product with confidence to the camera in his strong left hand. Cut to various scenes showing the usage of the product.)
It’s a short stick that fits in your hand with a little plastic hand at the end. All you have to do, is to reach to a potato chip with your plastic hand, put it around the chip, and press the button on the stick to firmly grab the potato chip. And thanks to the No Touch Table System (NTTS), just put the chip into your mouth with the help of the stick, and it’s done. Enjoying hand-free potato chip snacking has never been easier.
Other similar devices will crush the chips into hundred pieces. But not this one! With its No Broken Clutch System (NBCS), the plastic fingers will put just enough pressure to hold the chip in place, without breaking it.
When you’re done, the Finger Easy Cleaning System (FECS) will make it easy to clean the Potato Chip Hand. Simply tap the button a few times to move the fingers, and you’re done!
The Potato Chip Hand is great for all occasions that requires you to eat potato chips! Plus, it has the Billy Mays warranty.
I don’t know how much it costs, but Billy Mays would probably sell it for $19.99, with a second one free. Besides, he sold the Gopher, which now feels like the big brother of this little plastic stick. I wonder if this tiny back scratcher will take on in Japan. It probably would in North America, where everyone is getting fat on chips.
We just didn’t bother counting them. They are just many of them and we were worried they might go bad before we can eat them all. My girlfriend came up with the perfect solution: drink them.
So, we went out, bought ourselves a juicer and in the next morning, I squeezed a good dozen mandarines to pour two glasses of delicious fresh pulpy mandarine juice. A part of a complete breakfast!
It’s a lot sweeter than what I expected. And although I usually don’t like pulp, I loved the one in our juice.
I wish I could fill a glass for you. We still have many mandarines left. However, packing the juice in a sealed container and having it shipped to your place before it goes bad is probably impossible. This is why you’ll have to enjoy the juicy photos I have for you today! (Please don’t try to print those pictures and squeeze the paper sheets in a juicer. Who knows what may come out.)
Here’s the only thing remotely related to Japan in this post, your Japanese pun of the day:
「蜜柑ジュースは未完です。」 Mikan juusu wa mikan desu. “The mandarin juice isn’t ready.”
(Many people will smack you in Japan for doing a pun. I’ll elaborate on this later. In the meantime, wear a safety helmet when saying one here. You’ve been warned.)
Every week, the Japanese national broadcaster, NHK, airs a news programme tailored for children. That programme is called Shuukan Kodomo News (週刊こどもニュース), literally “Weekly Kids News.”
The weekly show carefully explains current events in simpler terms. Of course, with the omnipresence of kawaii cuteness in Japan, they use adorable signs and personified scale models to help illustrate the news they detail.
It’s effective. With my level of Japanese still too limited to fully understand normal news programmes, I watch Kodomo News when I can. Thanks to their simpler Japanese, I can get a better grasp of what’s going on in the country I now live in. (Although, I do wish to comprehend the news programmes for adults someday. In the meantime, when I need to, I can also switch to the secondary audio programme, or SAP, to listen in English.)
Besides the headlines, the programme also has a few segments involving the youngs viewers. One of them is the question of the week, where one of the kids will show a report to answer a question previously submitted by a member of the audience.
Some of those reports were fun to watch for a computer geek like me. A kid once asked “What is spyware? How do computers get it?” and it was explained with “sweetened” stereotypes of computer users and hackers looking like robbers. Questions relating to computers or the Internet in this bit aren’t uncommon.
This week was no exception. Someone asked “What is Twitter?” A young journalist was glad to go on location at one of Twitter’s partners in Japan and meet with an employee to explain how Twitter works. It was interesting to see the microblogging service so straightforwardly explained to their next generation of potential users.
If you happen to be in Japan and you’re curious to watch Shuukan Kodomo News, you can catch it every Saturday at 6:10 PM on the NHK.
Update (00:05 JST): There’s now a programme running on the NHK, Mezase! Keisha no Hoshi (めざせ！会社の星), introducing Twitter to young business people who which to be successful in their career. What’s with all the Twitter promotion on that channel today?
Every January, teenagers who just turned or will turn 20 soon come together, dressed formally, to celebrate their coming of age.
It’s undoubtedly an important part of their life. Those boys and girls are now grown into adult men and women by the magic of a round number, and puberty. They can now enjoy the richer things of adulthood, including smoking, drinking, voting, and legal responsibility. Remember the day when you turned “legal?” There’s no fanfare like this in Canada, except maybe for high school graduation.
The Coming of Age Day is a national holiday in Japan celebrated in the morning of the second Monday of January, or observed during the preceding weekend in some areas. It is to publicly commemorate the young people’s 20th anniversary. More precisely, it is intended for those who turned 20 during or after April last year and those who will turn 20 before or during March this year.
Many young lads and lasses will meet their peers at the elementary school where they began their childhood education. In Saitama, they all gathered in the Super Arena, near the Saitama Shintoshin station, where my girlfriend and I took a stroll to snap a few shots. Needless to say, it was a big crowd, and I wasn’t the only photographer.
Every girl wear a kimono with a fluffy white shawl and a floral ornament in their hair while every guy wear a suave business suit, ready for what’s next. Some of them tried to break the mold with their idea of a suitable uniform for the event with interesting kimono, unusual business suits, or simply colourful hair. You may believe only Japanese people attend the ceremony, but I did notice one young woman of foreign origin in the crowd.
The celebration was coming to an end when we noticed the Super Arena also houses the John Lennon Museum. The museum commemorating the life of the famous late Beatle approved by his widow Yoko Ono is sadly at the risk of closure. We paid a visit in the two-floor exhibition displaying all the moments of Lennon’s life, starting from his birth in Liverpool, England, to his sudden death in 1980. Surprisingly, the end of the path was the most poignant of the entire journey, in my opinion. If you’re a fan of John Lennon or the Beatles, you have to go see this museum before it closes. There’s also a nice lounge where visitors can listen to any album of the artist’s discography, read books about England, and even play a guitar of the same model John Lennon performed with. The only unfortunate thing about the museum is to be prohibited from taking pictures anywhere else other than the lobby.
After having an early dinner by eating delicious okonomiyaki in a building next to the arena, we went back home and ate a New Year Zenzai. It was a warm soup-like desert made from sweet red bean paste and our kagami mochi, the special “mirror” rice cake that was decorating our TV set since late last month. The food here at home is never wasted.
This was the first article of the year, so I hope 2010 has treated you well so far and that it will do the same for the rest of it.
It’s on a busy Shinkansen train that my girlfriend and I are riding to get to her hometown where we’ll spend a few days with her family and celebrate the new year’s coming. (People are standing up. It’s usual on local trains, but it’s the first time I see this on the bullet train. That makes up for the time I got on an empty one.)
In our perspective, we didn’t think much of the holidays. We’ve been busy settling into our new apartment and to finally enjoy it. We received the furniture we rented and we bought many things for the place. A kotatsu (a small table set in the Japanese style room), a printer/scanner/copier/fax machine (the Japanese like faxing for some reason), a portable heater (Japanese homes do not have central heating, believe it or not), and a toilet seat cover (guess why) are just a few items we purchased during the past few weeks.
If there’s one thing I wish I can change about my move in Japan, it would be to come in January instead. Why did I rush myself getting in the country during such a busy season of the year? When December 25th came, we were so happy to be comfortable at last, we didn’t think much of Christmas. In fact, it was such a minor event for me this time that I’ve never been so late at buying gifts and postcards for my friends and family back home. I bought my presents when the Emperor celebrated his 76th birthday on the 23rd, a national holiday here. And I just mailed them this morning… on the last day of the year.
Christmas isn’t like it is back home, obviously. There are no big parties with the family. We don’t drink and celebrate until the wee hours in the morning. We don’t open dozens of presents the next morning either. My girlfriend and I just did everything at our pace. There was no need to rush. On Christmas Eve, after shopping for more second-hand furniture in a store near our apartment, we stumbled upon an Italian restaurant which, to our surprise, wasn’t busy. Most restaurants on that day are jammed with young couples salivating over a fancy dinner. The only explanation we would come up with as to why it was so vacant was its distance from the closest train station. I suppose 15 minutes is all you need to distance yourself from heavy pedestrian traffic!
There are no illuminations on people’s homes, so the streets are a lot darker than what someone would see in residential areas in Canada. However, in all this darkness, my girlfriend found one house propagating the jovial spirit of the season with cheerful decorations.
The next day, we celebrated Christmas in style by inviting two of our friends over to drink around our new warm and cozy kotatsu. We love our kotatsu so much. One of our guests was a girl I met online around seven years ago, and the other is her boyfriend. They once invited us to their place for dinner while we were staying in Ikebukuro. They made everything by themselves from scratch, from the boules de neige (small sweet balls of cooked dough, French for “snowball”) to the crêpes, made with a special tool helping you make them perfectly round and thin every time. The evening at our place, we all ate and drank to our hearts’ contempt way beyond the time of their last train, so we invited them to stay for the night.
On the day after Christmas, all four of us went to Ikebukuro and ate lunch in an all-you-can-eat restaurant. This month, at that restaurant, the Italian restaurant where we ate dinner on Christmas Eve, and by delivery, I’ve seen many kinds of pizza I never thought could exist. Simply put, they love topping it with corn, or whipped cream for desert.
I’m finish this last post of the year with my first album of photos taken in Japan. With a friend of mine as our guide, we walked around some Christmas illuminations in Hiroshima. The photos were taken in early November this year.
Happy New Year of the Tiger!
Photo: Illuminated Christmas tree in Hiroshima. See the illuminations album for more.
