You know when you go on holiday to some exotic clime and you think, “Oh I’ll buy a little something for the office from here. You know, just to be nice.” You do this and everyone in your office appreciates the kind gesture. What happens is Japan is, “Oh, I better not forget to buy something for the office or they will regard me as scum.”

Yes, in Japan buying a little something for the office is basically expected of you. You not only have to buy them when you go on a big holiday but also if you go on a weekend trip somewhere. I dunno about you but when I worked in an office I definitely did not expect random snacks every time someone went on a weekend trip to Margate.

These little gifts, known in Japanese as omiyage, can be just about any small foodstuff. Generally sweets, chocolates, cakes or jelly but can also include stuff like sake and cheese. Omiyage is what I blame for there being no Japanese version of Mars Celebrations, but that is another story.

Omiyage is also another example of not being able to trust anything your Japanese-English dictionary says. The usual translation for omiyage is generally souvenir. Don’t trust that definition for a second. The always useful Dictionary.com defines souvenir as:

“A usually small and relatively inexpensive article given, kept, or purchased as a reminder of a place visited, an occasion,etc.;memento.”

Sure, omiyage is generally small but souvenirs are supposed to be a reminder of a place visited. Many times the place that you have just visited may hold no special meaning for the person receiving the omiyage or, at least, none that you are aware of. This is it just something that you must give to co-workers/family/friends, simply because that is what people do.

The best meaning for omiyage I can think up is:

 ”A small gift (usually food) that you must give people after you have been on a trip, otherwise they will think you are rude.”

Omiyage is so ubiquitous that shops dedicated to the selling of it are at just about any location of vague interest. Anywhere even just a little bit touristy has these things all over the place. Worse is that in the many shinkansen stations and airports dotted around Japan there are now omiyage shops which specialise in goods from other regions. So, say a couple who live in Tokyo visit Kyoto for a weekend, they no longer have to bother with the difficult process of thinking of others while there. They can just buy some random stuff from Kyoto at Tokyo train station when they return. Even madder there are now companies that have “Omiyage catalogues” which deliver this stuff to your door. So you don’t even have to take the time to go to a shop.

To me omiyage seems to be a thing that people are expected to do rather than stuff given out of the goodness of their heart, which is kind of sad. But perhaps this culture of gift giving has lead to the BEST THING EVER MADE™.

I recently went on a trip to Yamanashi, the prefecture where Mount Fuji is. We went for a drive up to the base of the mountain and there I found something incredible, Mount Fuji shaped melon bread. Anyone who knows me will be aware that I think freshly made, bakery melon bread is the greatest of all Japanese food. Shaping it in such a cool Japanese way just perfects it. Not only that it was, hand on heart, perhaps the greatest melon bread I have ever tasted. Having sampled it for myself I realised that I had to share its greatness with others. So, I am telling you about it dear readers and I also bought a couple to share with my house-mates.

THAT was done out of the goodness of my heart, as they are British folk no omyiage is expected but this find is something that I just had to give them a chance to try.

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.

This past week it has been snowing on and off in Tokyo. I don’t know about you but when I see that white stuff start falling from the sky my mind races back to the snow-days of my youth. Times such as sledging on the slope next to the Beech Tree pub with its worryingly large ditch and bramble bushes at the bottom. I also remember the random blizzard during my university days, when my friends and I drove around Bournemouth with a sheet of perspex attempting to find a decent hill.

The perspex sledge was a complete failure but we made the best of the situation by having a huge free-for-all snowball fight. Free-for-all really is the way to describe a snowball fight, in Japan though, they have done what only the Japanese could do, they have organised it. They have given a snowball fight rules.

Yukigassen is the most wonderful sport I have ever heard of, invented in 1988 as a marketing scheme for the Mount Showa-Shinzan resort in Hokkaido. They wanted to drum up more business so they made up this game. The rules are not difficult and could be described as a mixture of paintball and dodgeball. Teams consist of 7 people and the object is to knock out the players of the opposing team by hitting them with snowballs. The team with the most amount of players at the end of a 3 minute set is the winner, win 2 sets and you’ve won the match. It’s not that simple however, each of the games is played on a special court.

In this court there are two flags, if you can get your opponent’s flag without being hit you win the set. There are also barriers (which I prefer to call forts) for each team to hide behind. The court is 40m x 10m and delightfully there is a smaller 32m x 8m court design for the kiddies, this is truly a game for all ages. The teams consist of 4 forwards, attempting to grab the flag, and 3 backs, who guard and supply the forwards with snowballs.

Speaking of snowballs, they are made 30 at a time in special snowball makers. I would have loved one of those as a child but at 73,000 yen each they were (and still are) just a tad out of my price range. Each team gets 90 balls for each set, but only after the judges have scrutinised them first, of course.

This sport has already spread to the typical winter sports locations, official tournaments have been held in places such as Sweden, Finland and Canada. As for the Japanese tournament, it is held every February and regularly attracts crowds of around 25,000 people.

Regrettably for me, I will have to wait another year if I am to meet Blacky, the competition’s unfortunately named mascot. This year’s tournament is on the same day that UFC comes to Japan, an event I’ve already bought tickets for. As much as I want to see some highly trained athletes kicking and punching each other, I would rather go see some amateurs throw snowballs.

The fact that this sport exists warms my heart during this cold winter and I leave you not only with a smile on my face but also with a clip of Yukigassen in action.

Take a tour of the High Wycombe Heritage Trail, see such wonderful sights as scaffolding, Primark and ‘The Shambles’.

I’m fairly late in the day with this but back in the Spring huge earthquakes were not the only thing to attract Japanese people and the news’ attention. On 1st April Ueno Zoo reopened and for the first time made it’s panda enclosure open to the public.

The pandas had arrived from China on 21st February meaning that they not only got here just in time for the Tohoku earthquake but as they had previously lived in the China Giant Panda Protection and Research Centre in Sichuan, they also experienced the 2008 quake which happened there.

These two quake veterans, named Li Li and Shin Shin, where thought to have been spooked by the quake but are happy as Larry now. Ueno Zoo did not have any pandas in it’s park for a period of 3 years before these new arrivals and when I visited the park back in June 2008, I was greeted with an unfortunate sign explaining the situation.

Picture the scene, I arrived at the zoo, paid my way, went through the ticket gate and entered a narrow tunnel which lead to the park. The tunnel was filled with lovely pictures of pandas frolicking and making sweet faces while eating their bamboo, I was just about to experience cuteness overload when I spied the sign. It contained Japanese text which I couldn’t read at all at the time, under that was what I assume to be the English translation, which read:

“There are no pandas in the park, they are dead”

That was an instant downer, after all those cute pictures I could almost have cried and it really highlighted to me the importance of having a native speaker of that language to advise you when you translate something. Technically there was nothing wrong with the translation but it was just so blunt about the death of the previous panda tenants that it became odd.

With that in mind, lots of posters started popping up around Tokyo advertising the new pandas so I thought I would have a go translating one for myself before someone from the park does it and makes me cry again. This poster is by JR and photographed by Jesse at Jesse-san in Japan.

行こうよ！
Ikou yo!
Lets Go!

列車で上野へ
Ressha de Ueno e
By train to Ueno

リーリーとシンシンが待ってるよ！
rii rii to shin shin ga matteru yo!
Li Li and Shin Shin are waiting.

This poster is fairly simple Japanese, the only issue I have is with the よ (yo) at the end of two of the sentences. よ, when used by itself at the end of a sentence is used to emphasise things. It has a light friendly tone and one common use is to give information that you think is new to the listener (especially when you think the listener needs that information).

In English we don’t have an equivalent particle so you have to get a bit creative when translating. This is certainly the case with the last sentence, it’s letting you know Li Li and Shin Shin are there so I decided to remove the exclamation mark, I think it makes this sentence seem a bit manic in English. I didn’t replace the mark with anything else though, perhaps I should have.

Sometimes よ just shows the speaker asserting themselves more strongly than if they made the statement without よ, the first sentence does not giving any new information so I felt that the exclamation mark was good there, because I reckon that whoever is speaking is really excited about going.

However, the question I really need to ask is, just who are the pandas in the picture? They can’t be Li Li and Shin Shin, they are waiting in the park while these pandas appear to be running for the train. Are Japan Railways, the makers of this poster, implying that pandas roam free, wearing clothes and travelling on trains?