Have you ever thought about the front of lift doors? Those imposing grey portals are, in a way, a waste of space. This is not communist Russia, it’s nice to have an injection of colour instead of boring grey. Tower Records is one of many shops that have started to put adverts on their elevator doors.

Most are inoffensive enough, at the moment there is a nice one advertising the 70th anniversary of Puffin Books and a little while ago, there was one showing Unit-01 from Evangelion destroying Shibuya Tower Records. Which is an interesting way to advertise a DVD (and Blu-ray!) disc.

Yesterday, while waiting around for friends in Shibuya (which seems to be something I have to do a lot) I popped into Tower Records and was greeted with this:

Here the guy is saying something along the lines of “Do you want me to stop?” while I think the girl is saying “When will you stop?”. Then at the bottom it states in English “How long does a kiss take?”

Hmm….

Move along 1 lift and you can see this:

Here the guy seems to be saying “But I dare not stop.”, while the English at the bottom says “But I don’t let you stop”.

Hmmmm……

CONTEXT PLEASE TOWER RECORDS!

No wonder manga gets such a bad press sometimes in foreign countries with stuff like this plastered all over lift doors. I’m sure to those who know the story and characters presented here this is all sweet, innocent, lovely and bunny rabbits or whatever but to me it looks like someone being sexually assaulted in a lift.

Which is not what I want to see while shopping on a Sunday afternoon.

I hate Starbucks, I really do. I have never had a satisfying drink or any tasty food in there. Ok, I don’t like coffee but their other drink selections have always been somewhat lacking. In Japan though, Starbucks is not the only coffee shop on the block. They have a Japanese rival in the shape of Doutor.

While Starbucks’ hot chocolate is sickly, Doutor’s is sweet. While Starbucks’ tea is like hot toilet water, Doutor’s tastes like the leaves have been grown on the premises and picked that morning. While Starbucks’ sandwiches are crusty and hard, Doutor’s are soft and wonderful. Doutor also sells croque-monsieurs which gives them an instant win.

However….

They seem determined to lose my custom. I was parcial to their sandwiches, which had the glamourous names, Milano Sandwich B and Milano Sandwich C. However about 6 months ago the C sandwich was changed to something half as appetising. I was disappointed but the B sandwich was still there to help me come to terms with my loss.

Until today that is…. And my poor B sandwich has been replaced with a “thing” made of lesser ingredients. Gah, all I have to eat there now is their croque-monsieurs and I can make better ones than they can.

Here is an open letter to Doutor:

Dear Mr Doutor,

I don’t care if customer surveys said your new sandwiches are better. Don’t mess with perfection. You had it, but now you have lost it.

Hugs,

Me

P.S. Please make it so your name in Romaji doesn’t look like it has a completely different pronunciation to the katakana. It is stupid and confusing.

Now I’m off to make a croque-monsieur for my dinner……

I’m sure everyone reading this will know about the phenomena of Engrish and have seen some pictures. Living here is hard to ignore it but I never seem to run into the more extreme examples that you seem to see around the shoes web.

Now, I’m no language snob, as long as the message is there and understandable, the language has done it’s job. I’m not going to point out every little error someone makes, especially when my Japanese is so bad. When you run into things like this sign though, you just have to despair.

For those who don’t know AEON is a chain of English schools here in Japan which, as far as I’m aware have a fairly good reputation. God knows how it can keep that reputation when it has a bloody English error in it’s slogan. I was actually offered an interview with this company back when I was still in England. I knew something was up when they told me that there would be no more interviews in London but suggested that I go to one in New York.

New York!

Sure, that’s not out of my way at all! Who can afford to go to New York just for an interview?

Imagine though that I had got over the pure oddity of travelling all the way to New York for a job interview for a job based in Japan and made a holiday out of it. How sick would one feel, after the stress of the interview and the money spent on air fares to America and Japan, to be confronted with the words HEARTFUL ENGLISH as you begin your first day of teaching the language?

I won’t write the words to describe how I would have felt here, mainly because it would be pretty STOMACHFUL ENGLISH.

For a country so obsessed with recycling, the amount of packaging used here is ridiculous. Today I bought a bottle of wonderful Calpis and it was put in a plastic bag. I looked at him, he looked at me, we both smiled, he said “Wakarimashita!” and took the bottle out of the bag. Only to precede to get some sticky tape with Family Mart written on it and stuck it on the bottle. Obviously one piece of sticky tape won’t really matter but how much plastic is used up in this nation in a day by this process alone?

I bought a ticket to a concert a little while ago, first it was printed out, placed in an envelope, sealed in plastic and then finally put in a bag. Hell, food as well, all vegetables are singularly vacuum packed and each biscuit is individually wrapped inside the main packet.

No wonder this country is so militant about recycling. They produce mountains of pointless waste.

Here, like other countries, saying your products are eco-friendly is very popular with housewives who want to do their bit for the environment.

When I first bought McDonald’s in Japan I was shocked to find that after the food was put in the take away paper bag, the drink was placed a different paper bag and both were planted in a plastic bag. Now however, in a wave of glory, they stopped putting things in plastic bags and have embossed the words ‘This is ECO Style’ on the side of their paper bags.

Well done for blazing a trail for the environment there McDonald’s. Saving the world by finally doing the same thing you have always done every-bloody-where else. Whoopie-do.

Japan is currently in the midst of a terrible crisis. Nothing to do with the current global financial problems, oh no, it’s a much greater and immediate issue.

There are no bananas.

Anywhere.

Japan’s banana shortage is a result of the latest fad in Japan, The Morning Banana Diet. Apparently this diet originated in some chat rooms on the internet where some people reported that it led to outstanding weight loss without the need to exercise. Word spread quickly and there are books everywhere about it.

The diet itself is amazingly simple and is as follows:

1) Eat two bananas for breakfast.
2) Only drink water.
3) Go to bed early (!?).

Seriously, that’s it! Which ever bright spark came up with the idea that if you eat less for breakfast, you will lose weight deserves a commendation from Captain Obvious. It blatantly expects you not to pig out during other meals but why bananas? Hell, the website that I got the rules from even states that you can substitute other fruit. So if the originator of this diet had a penchant for cantaloupe then the price of that probably would have increased ten fold.

So as the result of a whim of an individual, this whole country has literally gone bananas and I’m getting frustrated because I can’t find any.

Even if I did find some, I wouldn’t be able to bloody afford them.