I’m sure that many odd things have been seen through the windows of trains. Houses usually pass by so fast but often odd things can be seen from the corner of the your eye and your imagination fills in the rest. One such thing happened to me and caused me to doubt my sanity back when I first came to Japan.

On the ever crowded Odakyu Line, between Tsurukawa and Tamagawagakuen-mae, though the throng of people, I spied a strange house that looked like it was straight out of the film Laputa: Castle in the Sky. In that movie, the titular flying castle had a very interesting look. It was all overgrown and organic looking buildings. Not the kind of thing you expect to see in your usual Japanese town.

It took me about 2 years to believe it was actually there, any local I asked about it refused to admit the thing’s existance. As though it was some sort of conspiracy. Not only did it look like something out of a film but also like some sort of future house. You know, the houses they used to talk about on Tomorrow’s World. The ones that either had too many windows or none at all, or maybe they looked like a tree or some sort of cave.

The one you can spy from the train tracks is more the later. It looks like some big concreate dome with some sort of weird crow’s nest at the top. The design is all curvy and windowless, with little port holes at the bottom.

There is a university close by, so I assumed it was some sort of mad lecturer’s experiment. The other day, however, I finally walked up and took a closer look at it and found that this may not be the case. It appears to be inhabited like any other regular house.

So I have to ask you…. Why is it there? What does it do? Are people actually living there? Why are their barely any windows? What is going on?

Please internet, help me solve this mystery.

What’s the last thing you expect to find on a train platform? For me it is perhaps a canned bread vending machine. Japan never disappoints though and the other day I spied that very thing as I was just about to get on the train. That night I spend most of my time imagining what bread in a can could possibly taste like.

The next day I returned to the machine and found that the bread was available in three flavours. Strawberry, maple syrup and chocolate. My eyes were then drawn down the machine to a sign that showed a rather happy looking can.

“Freshly baked, fluffy steaming hot bread!”, the sign exclaimed. “Packed into a can just like that.”

Despite the rather odd serving suggestion given by the photo at the top of the vending machine, I figured I would take the plunge. However I found that the coin slot was covered by another sign telling me these delicacies were no longer available. Heart broken, I continued on my merry way to where ever I was going.

Trying hard to forget about my brush with such an odd foodstuff, I decided to head to Akihabara for some geeky shopping one weekend. While browsing through the wonderfully named Super Potato retro game shop, instead of finding some rare and interesting videogame, I found some bread in a can right next to the cash register. I did not expect to find it there but should have realised that things will always crop up in the most unusual of places (much like mushrooms).

Upon returning home I opened up the can to be greeted with a rather unusual message, “DO NOT EAT”, it said in block capitals. This was just the oxygen absorber though so I thrust it aside, took the bread out of the can and gave the bread a taste.

However fresh this bread may have once been, it certainly wasn’t anymore. The blurb had promised fluffy bread but it was fluffy in a fake candy floss kind of way rather than a freshly baked way. Bizarrely the whole thing tasted of old, slightly spoiled yogurt. While it was fluffy, it somehow also had a soggy texture to it, as though the yogurt had been spilt on it at some point. A theory that had legs considering the bread also had something that resembled strawberry seeds all over it.

Doing a bit of research on the bread in a can phenomenon I found that the original idea for this was as food to keep stored in case of natural disasters. Whoever came up with that idea must have read Terry Pratchett’s Discworld at some point. These books describe Dwarf Bread, the ultimate emergency food. The bread never goes stale but is so disgusting that a traveller can go for miles, just knowing there’s dwarf bread in their pack. A traveller will eat just about anything rather than dwarf bread. Including their own foot, or even pumpkins.

Despite the high novelty factor of this thing, I should have heeded the advice of the oxygen absorber I found upon opening. This bread was truly disgusting.

It’s not often I miss English food. Given that my mother wasn’t British, I never really grew up eating standard English meals. As a result the food I like most is usually readily available here. Occasionally I do miss things I can’t get in Japan. After a particularly vicious bout of tonsillitis I found myself craving Heinz tomato soup only to find a distinct lack of it in my local supermarket. There were lashings and lashings of corn soup but the tomato soup was conspicuous by its absence. Also, there only seemed to have canned soup of the condensed variety on the shelves. This caused a great deal of confusion when I came to prepare it, not having tried to decipher the instructions beforehand.

It’s not just soup though, enter a branch of Mr Donut, the most popular doughnut repository in Japan, and you will notice a vast amount of ringed doughnuts and no hole-less doughnuts at all. This didn’t affect me for a long while but one day I went into a bakery and saw a vast amount of doughnuts that looked as though they were deep-fried.

This seemed quite exciting to me, by this point in my Japan adventure I had realised food that I was used to in the UK can have a completely different version here. Japanese curry is different from curry sold in the UK, for example, which in turn is different from that which is sold in India. Well, I assume that is the case, I’ve never been to India. Anyway, I took this deep-fried bun to the register, paid my money, bit into it and got a shock.

I had discovered that Japanese curry is not only a different taste but it is often found inside deep-fried doughnuts. Known as curry bread, these buns are never referred to as doughnuts at all. That would just be silly.

This terrible tale put me off eating any kind of filled doughnut until I could read the little sign next to them that told me what is inside. Once I could, I began to discover something shocking. I began to realise that there are no jam doughnuts in Japan. Raspberry, strawberry, blackcurrant nor even gooseberry varieties are available. Instead the Japanese prefer beans inside their doughnuts.

Not just any bean though, azuki bean. Azuki is a sweet bean and the paste inside the doughnuts is further sweetened by adding tons of sugar.

Happily I have found one regular flavour of filled doughnut while here. It may not be my favourite but it has its fans.

Lovely. Yellow. Custard.

We use emoticons all the time and by now instinctively know what they mean. Japanese people however, use a whole different set of them which they call emoji. Quite what some of these emoji mean is hard to work out, so to get a grip on my (￣^￣)ゞfrom my
☆*:.｡. o(≧▽≦)o .｡.:*☆ I turned to Google and found a few interesting things.

What Japan Thinks is a website that I have looked at from time to time which shows the results of various opinion polls conducted in Japan translated into English. In a old post from almost 6 years ago the site lists the 30 most popular emoji of the time. Some of the meanings are pretty obvious, such as (＾▽＾) meaning laughing, but many take some explaining. How we are supposed to discern joyful from ( ・ω・) I’ve no idea.

The question that ran across my lips while looking a these things however was, “Just what face are these emoticons supposed to represent?” You know, it’s not hard to visualise what face :p represents but U^ェ^U , that’s a whole different kettle of fish. The Google search I mentioned before threw up something that may help me, an iOS app called Twikao.

Twikao is an app which takes a picture of your face and then generates a emoji using facial recognition. Armed with this I am going to try to recreate some of the emoji I found in the What Japan Thinks post using my face and see if I can’t get a one to one match.

The challenge begins now!

1- （＾_＾）v Laughing

VERDICT: FAIL, the generated emoji is way too happy (and far less tired looking).

2- (>_<)> Troubled

VERDICT: Hmm, missing (what I think is) the arm but capturing the bags under my eyes beautifully.

3- （　ﾟ Дﾟ）Shocked

VERDICT: Looks pretty shocked to me but the mouth is all wrong. Dunno were it got that sweat drop from.

4- (*￣m￣) Dissatisfied

VERDICT: MEGA FAIL! Despite pulling my best dissatisfied face, I got a happy Wolverine.

5-（*´▽｀*） Infatuation

VERDICT: Gah! This is what I was looking for from number 3. FAIL. FAIL. FAIL.

I’m not sure what has been learnt here, other than the lighting in my room is very yellow.

Traffic lights are pretty much the same all over the world as far as I am aware. Three lights, red for stop, yellow denotes slow down and green for go. Everyone seems to have come to a consensus on this. Except of course Japan, ask anyone here the colours of a traffic signal and you will get a different response, red, yellow and blue.

If you cast your eyes to the set of lights at the top of this post you will clearly see that it is not the case. They are proudly displaying a colour that can only be described as green. It seems the reason for this is that historically green was simply considered a shade of blue in Japan. That however is not important, I wish to show you something which affects every traffic sign in this country.

Hats.

Have a look the pedestrian stop sign on Japanese traffic lights.

If that is not particularly clear here is the little green man.

Your eyes are not deceiving you, they are both wearing hats. I seems that in Japan every silhouette pictured on a traffic signal is showing off some kind of head gear. Quite why this is I’ve no idea. Perhaps hat manufacturers sponsor the Japanese road network, I’ve always noticed that people wear hats more commonly here, maybe it is because of the ever so subtle advertising. Just look at these examples…

In the UK there is a thing called the Green Cross Code, a set of guidelines for road safety that goes a bit like this: “Stop, Look, Listen, Live”. I guess the Japanese version is as follows: “Stop, Look, Buy a hat, Live”.