Will Miss #401 - the blue lights

I live along a Japan Railway (JR) line that is famous for attracting suicidal jumpers. The line is named the Chuo line, and foreigners waggishly call it the "Chuocide" line because it so frequently is disrupted by those intent on offing themselves. JR obviously would rather this not happen, but rather than do what many subways have done and put up walls with electronic gates that disallow

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Will Miss #400 - east meets west xmas cards

Click for a bigger picture of Santas carrying a mikoshi in front of a temple. 


I realize that sending Christmas cards is a dying custom, but I still love them. Living in Japan affords me the chance to buy and receive unique designs that mix and match Japanese culture with traditional western Christmas imagery. Seeing this marriage between east and west, particularly when Santa is involved,

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Will Miss #399 - chinsukou

There are a lot of efforts in Japan to simulate Christmas, but most of it comes off as simply copying images without any of the concurrent spirit. Strangely enough, the thing that really tastes like Christmas to me are chinsukou cookies. They smell like what mom was baking for the holidays when I was growing up and taste like heaven. There are many things that are like them made in other

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Will Miss #398 - moai replicas

I'm not sure why, but Japan loves it some moai. If you don't know what they are, they're the Easter Island heads. Like the Statue of Liberty replicas, moai seem to show up in the oddest places for no reason other than people seem to think they are neat. In Kyushu, there are replicas of them. There are fan magazines devoted to them and many novelty items sold with a moai theme. I'm not sure

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Will Miss #397 - shops that serve tea

My husband and I were walking around Nishi-Ogikubo, one of many little stops that have little of note to offer that we decided to explore, and I decided to peruse a Japanese sweets shop. I found myself waiting to buy a couple of small bean cakes behind a woman who apparently needed a remedial class in how to purchase goods from a shop. In the few minutes that we twiddled our thumbs, one of

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Will Miss #396 - Rilakkuma

I appreciate simplicity. In fact, one of the reasons I set up this blog as a form of short form expression is that I want to try to minimize my verbiage. Sometimes things are better when you take things away from them. In Japan, nothing illustrates this better than some of their cuter cartoon characters like the mouthless cat. While I am sick of "Hello Kitty", because I can never escape her

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Will Miss #395 - elevator girls

She turned her back because I was taking her picture.

Back when I first came to Japan, every department store had an elevator operator who pushed the buttons for you with her immaculate white gloved hands. She was polite and carried out her work as if she were shepherding small children safely to school through perilous lands rather than helping middle-aged housewives spend their husband's

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Will Miss #394 - respect for and modesty about intelligence

I've talked to quite a few Japanese folks about intelligence and there are two major differences between them and most Americans. First, they want their politicians to be smart and very preferably smarter than they perceive themselves to be. There isn't a thread of anti-intellectualism in political discourse in this country. Second, most Japanese people don't believe they are smarter than

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Will Miss #393 - "akapantsu"

I'm not a big subscriber to the "weird Japan" mentality. One of the reasons I don't get so into it is that so much of it is clearly manufactured to be novel (e.g., maid cafes) and is little different than similarly generated oddness in other cultures which links not to human nature, but calculated commercial interests. However, when the weirdness manifests as a small component of a larger "

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Will Miss #392 - dads do the time if they do the crime

Many moons ago, I had an American co-worker with a Japanese boyfriend who was looking at a visa that was soon to expire and no full-time job to gain sponsorship from. The boyfriend wasn't ready to get married so a spouse visa looked rather out of bounds. Fortunately for her, she got pregnant. Voila, problem solved! Most Japanese men will marry a woman if she gets pregnant and wants to keep

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Will Miss #391 - amashoku

Back in my early days in Japan, there were few foods that I liked and trusted not to present me with a filling of sweetened beans. At that time, I was pretty squeamish about any of "that Japanese stuff". One of the easily enjoyable and reliable treats is/was amashoku, a half-cookie/half cake sort of baked good which is lightly sweet and has enough dryness to give it a pleasant cookie texture

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Will Miss #390 - food fads

Bagna Cauda on display, the big fad of 2011.

All countries have fads, and I'm sure many have food fads, though Japan's seem to occur with greater intensity and frequency than I recall experiencing back home. Many of them get started by a T.V. program which highlights a particular dish, restaurant or food. Sometimes it is impossible to trace, but once the ball gets rolling, everyone jumps on

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Will Miss #389 - civilized behavior in theaters

Since I haven't been to an American movie theater in over two decades, I had forgotten how badly behaved that some people can be. Often the absence of a bad experience does not register as a necessarily good one. I hadn't thought about how people do extremely rude things in movie theaters in the U.S. until I saw some FaceBook updates about people who talked loudly, kicked the back of seats,

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Will Miss #387 - tuning out incidental conversations

If you've ever sat in a coffee shop next to someone really noisy and had trouble tuning out the details of their personal life, you can understand where I'm coming from with this. I'll be the first to admit that my Japanese skill pretty much blows and that I have to pay attention to what is being said to understand. It's not the sort of thing which effortlessly enters my consciousness, but

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Will Miss #386 - learning (deeply) about Japanese business

OK, no matter how much I understand about Japanese business, I don't know why this video shop is named "Slum."

If you have ever gone into a video rental shop in Japan, you may note that there are often more foreign titles than domestic ones. What fairly obvious conclusion would you reach? If you're like most people (including myself), you would conclude that foreign titles are more popular

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Will Miss #385 - (relative) economic parity

I've said before that Japan conducts a sort of "soft socialism", but it's not necessarily rooted in the redistribution of wealth. There is, however, relative economic parity in Japan with a large middle class, few rich people, and few poor people. This is accomplished by not offering presidents and CEOs obscenely lavish salaries and keeping the bottom income bracket a little further from the

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Will Miss #384 - watching the engineers

I don't know what it's like to run a train in America, especially in a metropolis like New York in which there is a large and complex system servicing a wide area. I can say that standing behind the engineer and watching how he operates when you get on a Japan Railway train is a pretty fascinating experience. He is sitting in there alone, but follows a very rigid routine of gesturing and

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Will Miss #383 - Yebisu beer (by proxy)

The Yebisu beer museum in Ebisu.

I'm a creature that fascinates most Japanese folks because I don't drink and have never drunk alcohol of any kind. When I say this, they respond with surprise and then get a strange look on their faces. That look, I'm pretty sure, relates to whatever reason they've conjured up for my avoidance of what can be seen as a magic elixir of relaxation and a lubricant

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Will Miss #382 - not taking impersonal things personally

He's probably not even a KISS fan.

One of the drawbacks about people who live in cultures with a great emphasis on individuality is that the people who comprise that culture often don't know who they are or what they define themselves by. This results in people defining themselves by trivial matters such as the soda brands they drink, the sports teams they follow, political party, choice of

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Will Miss #381 - Tsurukame

Back home, we used to go to a discount store called "Big Lots". At that time, it was an awesomely awful store that sold strange food (often from developing countries or eastern Europe) near or past its expiration date, fashion that was so utterly unfashionable that those who had any sense of taste wouldn't buy it at any price, and items which were so dubious in their utility or appearance that

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