The best thing to do if you are learning Japanese is go to Japan. This may seem obvious but sometimes I seem to forget. There is Japanese all around me and I just spend my time out and about with headphones on, not really paying attention to anyone or to all of the signs hanging up other than to look at the picture or lazily read the English.

So in an effort to be more proactive I’m going to start reporting the interesting looking Japanese sentences I see out and about.

Case in point, I saw this ad for K-pop band Big Bang in the middle of Shibuya.

Looking at the picture of the boys, all I could think of was that one of them looked completely out of place. When I pointed this out to my friend he told me the meaning of the letters down the side. After he told me, I wondered why I didn’t just try to translate it myself rather than simply looking at the picture and sniggering. Upon actually reading the Japanese I realised it was indeed a very simple sentence and that the only part I didn’t know was one small word.

One check of my dictionary later I can break it down for you.

BIG BANGの
Big Bang no
of Big Bang

ニセモノに
nisemono ni
for impostor

ご注意
gochui
be careful

ください
kudasai
please

So that poster says “Please be careful about the impostors of Big Bang“. Or in more natural English, “Please watch out for Big Bang’s impostors.”

I guess that bloke in the middle isn’t part of the band then. That’s a shame, he was the coolest looking one of the lot of them.

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.

Living in Tokyo, as I do, I find that there are not many places where you can just stop and think. To have a good thinking area you need something to look at which inspires you. So far I have found two such places.

The more obvious one is the Zen Garden at Ryoanji Temple, Kyoto. This garden is one of the most famous Zen dry gardens in Japan and is a place that tourists flock to.

The tourist leaflet said something along the lines of:

Most visitors to the garden will agree that it seems to have a mysterious and almost hypnotic effect upon those who first sit upon the abbot’s veranda and contemplate what might be called the complex simplicity of its design. One need not interpret the work in order to experience the remarkable serenity it seems to generate, yet much has been written about the “meaning” of the garden, including the speculation that it represents islands in a sea, or a tigress leading her cubs across a river….. blah, blah, blah.

This may be true but when I went there and sat on the veranda I found it odd that the rocks couldn’t really provoke a response in me. Well, it did incite a small bet asking quite how many big rocks there were. I was wrong, but in my defence my view was obscured by other big rocks.

So as far as musing goes that garden was a huge disappointment, one place that isn’t though is the polar opposite, Starbucks in Shibuya, Tokyo. Shibuya is one of the busiest places in the world. If you google “Busiest pedestrian crossing in the world” you will find Hachiko crossing in Shibuya. If you google “Busiest Starbucks in the world” you will find the Shibuya branch of Starbucks.

It’s busy, but buy a coffee (hot chocolate in my case, I don’t like coffee) and a banana muffin and get a window seat on the first floor (which is difficult, because it’s so busy) overlooking Hachiko crossing. If you are there at dusk you will see the crossing in all its glory and then your pupils may well dilate and you will begin to cogitate….

Where did all those people come from?
Where are they going?
Are they enjoying themselves?
Are they going to be doing the same thing tomorrow?
What am I doing here?
Why am I here?
Am I enjoying myself?
Why is my hot chocolate in a takeaway paper cup and not a nice mug?