Cafe Colorado

Cafe Colorado is a coffee chain; it's not very cheap (520 yen for a cappuccino!) but I quite like their food, and there's nowhere else in my area with good coffee.

My local Cafe Colorado is quite funny; although it's a chain cafe, the staff always act like it's their own personal kitchen, and they're not very used to having guests. That is to say, if you order something, there's a lot of very slow-paced clattering of cups and quite a long wait. Most of the time when I go there, the proprietress is sitting at the counter with one of her customers, yakking away. The average age of the clientele seems to be about 65.

Anyway, these are all reasons for me to like it more, not less. Sometimes one wearies of faceless corporate chains (which is not to say I don't go to Starbucks almost every day, and sometimes twice a day ^_^).

Today I went to Cafe Colorado, and unusually, one half of the cafe was completely empty. I soon realised why: they had a little plastic container with crickets in it; I think it was their own pets which they had stowed into the corner. If you didn't know, crickets do not make a pleasant sound. These ones were very shrill indeed. I moved seats twice to get away from them.

Earthquake!

Small earthquakes are quite common here; I've experienced quite a few. But this morning I was woken just after 5am by the strongest quake I've felt. The windows were rattling; I sat up and moved into the middle of the room, in case stuff started falling on the ground. I wasn't scared, but I thought 'this one could be serious'. The ground was trembling strongly and the building was swaying.

Apparently it was a magnitude 6.5 quake. Not much damage occurred; the quake was stronger in Shizuoka and Aichi, a little west of here.

We also felt quite a significant quake on Sunday, apparently 6.9. That one didn't feel so strong to me, possibly because it didn't wake me out of a sleep! Or perhaps I was further from the epicentre. 

I find small earthquakes rather exciting, but that doesn't mean I want a strong one! The earthquake is all over the news today.

Top Three Views

The famous 'top 3 scenic places' in Japan are supposedly Miyajima, in Hiroshima, Matsushima, in Miyagi, and Amanohashidate in Kyoto. Of these, I have only been to Miyajima, and it was lovely, but I wouldn't say the best.

Of course, the brilliance of a view depends on a lot of things; time of year, the sun's position in the sky, whether it's cloudy or clear, etc. I have been fortunate to see many very beautiful sights. But here are my personal top three.

3. Omuroyama. This is a not-very-famous mountain near the Jogasaki coast on Izu peninsula. I went during Golden Week. The mountain has a ropeway to the top, and the whole mountain was covered in grass. There were wildflowers everywhere; the sky was blue; and from the top we could see far in every direction. We faintly saw Mt Fuji from one side, and the top of the mountain was a great, grassy basin.

2. Sunflower field in Yamanashi prefecture. This was near the 'Heidi's village' miniature theme park. Thousands of sunflowers, against a backdrop of mountains half-shadowed in mist, with rays of sunlight playing over them.

1. Yuzawa Gala ski resort. This ski resort is in Niigata prefecture. We took a gondola to the ski run, and sat in a cafe and had a cappuccino. This is the view we saw:

This is a high-brow blog

Sorry, this is not one of my more genteel posts. Rather, this post is about poo.

In Japan, there is a stylized, even cute way of drawing turds. If you don't believe me, just put 'Japan poo' in Google Images and look.

I knew about this from long ago - a Japanese friend in high school drew them occasionally when doodling pictures - and didn't think much of it.

This week I was in my local department store and I saw poo-shaped cookies.

Yes, they were little cookies shaped like cute little smiling poos. It wasn't even a joke of 'eww, look how gross it is to eat something that looks like a poo'. It was just a cute design choice.

Seeing them, I remembered a conversation between two 40-something friends at an izakaya:

Y: Did you use to draw poo?

S: Yes, of course. I think every boy does so. 

H: Yes, they always had to have steam coming from them.

S: That's right. They look better with steam.

Welcome to Japan.

Sounds of the morning

On a clear morning, the neighbourhood comes alive to two sounds.

The first is the garbage trucks. Like Australian ice cream trucks, these play a merry tune as they drive through the neighbourhoods. Come buy some garbage! Delicious garbage! The hard garbage trucks play pre-recorded announcements over loudspeakers, telling everyone what they can pick up.

The second, the sound of futons being beaten. Housewives all over will air their household's futons by putting them on the balcony. If you are a good Japanese housewife, you will have clips to securely attach the futon to the balustrade. A good Japanese housewife will also have a special futon beater, for the purpose of getting the dust and grime out of the futon.

As for me, I'm usually out there whacking my futon with a beat-up copy of 'Japanese for Busy People II'.

Yokohama port opening

Today I did get the chance to see the giant robot spider in Minato Mirai. (That link will take you to Kirai Net, a very interesting blog about Japan. I wasn't able to take any pictures of it, so you can see the spider there.) And I didn't have to pay the 2400 yen admission fee, either; I just watched it from the World Porters bridge.

So, right now they are having the 150th anniversary of the Yokohama Port Opening. This is a several-month-long expo being held in Yokohama, especially around the Minato Mirai area. If you live in Yokohama you could not fail to be aware of this. It seems a lot of advertising has gone into it. Their official website is here.

The spider was pretty cool - it did a kind of elegant dance, extending and setting down its legs - but frankly, the port opening celebrations seemed rather underwhelming to me. I think they were too ambitious in expecting lots of people to pay to see them; they should have tried making all the attractions free and tried to recoup their money some other way.

After such a huge amount of publicity and seeing posters, newspaper articles, fliers, decorated trains, etc, I did expect a certain amount of... well, *something*. But I guess to be fair, it was a Monday and no scheduled big events were on at the time. This event is running for a long time, so I accept that it can't be all fireworks and balloons every day.

I did poke around the 'international food hall' (which seemed like any food court with cheap food ordered from one of those ticket vending machines) and the 'Open Country, Open Port' display, which seemed to be a bunch of merchandise from local department stores. 

Amusingly, there were all these posters with tons of information about how the port opening introduced internationalisation to Japan, and the various foreign influences, and so on. That's really the whole point of this anniversary event. But there was not even a *sentence* of info in English, or any other language but Japanese.

(Now that I think about it, even in the 'international food court', the food dish titles were *only in katakana*! No Roman characters, so if you can't read Japanese characters, you can't order your food. Welcome to internationalisation!)

Okay, I'm dissing the event a bit too much for someone who didn't actually go into any of the paid displays. From what I've read, nothing in them was in English, so I wouldn't bother. But from the outside it seemed the thrust of the festival was to a) sell Tanemaru goods and b) put up Tanemaru 'port opening festival' posters and flags over every square inch of Yokohama.

In the interests of absolute veracity, I suppose I should confess that I myself bought a Tanemaru hair-tie... hahaha...

(Note: I wrote this over a month ago. However, the displays and buildings are still there and will continue until September 27.)

Peace and tranquility in Sakuragicho

As is my habit, I went down to the harbour today. Unfortunately, nobody had told me it was 'Celebrate Antisocial Behaviour Day'. I've never been shouted at so much in one day.

There were high school students collecting money (which apparently required them to shout through a megaphone), some group of massage therapists (also, bizarrely, using megaphones), a gauntlet of environmental activists, two religious types reading loudly from books, and of course, the usual political party trucks spewing platitudes from loudspeakers.

I sat on Kishamichi bridge and watched fish jumping in the water, and there was an environmentalist shouting "konnichiwa! konnichiwa! konnichiwa! konnichiwa!" on loop a few metres away. I went toward World Porters and there were Yokohama Port Opening Expo staff shouting at us where we could buy tickets.

I went to Bubby's (and they are still fuckin fresh and delicious). Previously it's always been too windy to sit outside, but today the weather was perfect. The first time I've been able to sit in the fresh air. So I happily settled down with my cappuccino and pie.

Then a van pulled up across the square and four high school students stood on its roof. Out came the megaphone. My heart sank. They bellowed speeches for a full 35 minutes. I sat there with my fingers in my ears, glaring at them, wishing the police would rush in and haul them off. 

I knew that wouldn't happen, as 'disturbing the peace' doesn't seem to be an offense here. So I amended my fantasy and longed for someone to throw something large and heavy at them, and maybe knock them off the truck. 

Well, okay, maybe that was a bit harsh. I didn't want them to come to real physical harm (and really, whichever adults encouraged them to be so obnoxious in a public place should be the ones punished). I wished for a huge rainstorm to come up - perhaps one small but powerful raincloud directly over their heads - and wash them out.

Unfortunately none of my amiable wishes came true. I suppose I should have capitulated and done the logical thing, and gone back inside. But there are so few cafes or restaurants around here where one can sit outside! Why should they force me back into the sterile air-conditioning?! So I stubbornly sat there and muttered insults to myself.

Now I'm home again, sitting in my own room, and my neighbour is doing some kind of home DIY involving loud drilling.

Perhaps tomorrow will be better.