j-log: Everyday Japan

Krispy Kreme is Coming to Japan

From today's Nihon Keizai Shimbun I learned that Krispy Kreme has finally found a Japan franchisee!

(Do not assume from this that I regularly read anything so highfalutin as the Nihon Keizai Shimbun. I make no such pretensions. I simply happened to glance over the shoulder of the guy sitting next to me on the train when I briefly woke from my doze this morning.)

Here's a translation of nearly the full article.

Lotte and turn-around specialists Revamp (Tokyo, Minato-ku) have reached an agreement with major U.S. doughnut vendor Krispy Kreme ("KKD," North Carolina) to enter into a franchise agreement and to open donut stores in Japan beginning this winter. Combining Lotte's food-production technology and Revamp's management know-how, they plan to open thirty to fifty stores within five years.

. . . .

KKD uses specialized machines in its stores to provide fresh, hot doughnuts which are so light that they give a feeling that they melt in your mouth and which are its "main seller." There are nearly thirty flavors and in the U.S. they sell for an average of eighty cents. The Japan price will be around 100 yen, about the same level as that of Mr. Donut, Japan's largest doughnut chain, operated by Duskin.

(Sidebar: Apart from the U.S., KKD has opened stores under franchise agreements with local businesses in Canada, the U.K., Australia, Mexico, and Korea. Japan will be the sixth country in which it has opened foreign stores. Its sales in the U.S. are 80 billion yen.)

Lotte and Revamp will obtain recipes and specialized machines from KKD, and will pay royalties to KKD. Cafe spaces will be established inside the stores where coffee and similar products will be sold.

Initially, one or two stores in the Tokyo area will be opened this year. Thereafter, there will be an expansion to train station buildings and shopping centers ("SCs") in major cities nationwide. It is planned that this will occur in conjunction with the Lotteria hamburger chain, which Lotte and Revamp are rebuilding together, and that some Lotteria stores may be set aside as KKDs, while the establishment of joint store with Lotteria in SCs is also being studied.

After Lotteria, this will be Lotte's second experience with a restaurant chain in Japan. Lotte has already launched KKD in Korea, but has decided to work together with Revamp, which has considerable knowledge of the consumer market in Japan.

You may have heard of Lotte because of their baseball team, the Chiba Lotte Marines, or because of their candy products, like Green Gum. Lotteria (whose name comes from combining the words "Lotte" and "cafeteria") serves some pretty lifeless hamburgers and stands out in my mind mostly for their endless attempts to make their soggy french fries more interesting. For years, they would try to sell you a "shaking bag" full of flavored powder. The idea was that you would put your fries in it and shake them around to add the flavor to them. I seem to remember that the flavors included things like wasabi, pickled plum, and curry. Now their new thing is "dip potato" flavored dips for your fries. The flavors include cream onion, honey mustard, and barbecue.

Chocolate-Covered Squid

I will eat just about anything when traveling. I consider it part of the cultural experience. In Japan I've had sea urchins, poisonous blowfish, miscellaneous body parts with suckers attached, and sashimi carved from a living fish who quivered and stared me in the face while I ate. In France I had horse steaks, steak tartare and cervelle d'agneau au beurre noir (lamb's brains with black butter). Life's too short to be picky. But even I have to draw the line somewhere.

A couple of weeks ago I found chocolate-covered squid for sale at a highway rest stop. Now, Japanese people eat squid in many different forms, and I like it well enough when it's fresh, although it can be a bit, er, fragrant. (It's best to eat fresh squid only if everyone around you also eats fresh squid.) Dried squid is also a common snack, especially when people are drinking beer. It serves the same function that peanuts at a bar might serve in the United States. (Although drinkers here eat peanuts too.)

The product pictured above, therefore, is chocolate-covered dried squid. You might think that this is where I would draw the line for degustatory adventurism. But no, I tried it and I liked it. It was a bit stringy, a bit cheesy and even (as the package proclaims) "Sweet Dainty." No, I didn't reach the limits of my enthusiasm until a couple of weeks later, when I found these boxes in a local discount store:

Scottish Castle in Takayamamura

On the same trip when we visited the German Village, we also went to visit Lockheart Castle, located outside the village of Takayamamura in rural Gunma Prefecture. The castle was constructed in Scotland and then transported to Japan and rebuilt here.

The following is a translation of a portion of the official web site: "The history of the Lockheart family stretches back 670 years to the time when they were made knights by Robert Bruce, the hero of Scotland's independence from England, and the name has continued in Scotland since then. Lockheart Castle was built about fifty kilometers south of Edinburgh in 1829, when England, during the industrial revolution, was accumulating the wealth of the world and was the most prosperous country in history."

"In 1988, with the approval of then-General Secretary of the Soviet Union Gorbachev, thirty containers were transported along the Trans-Siberian Railway and arrived safely in Japan in December of that year. Then, after three years of work and the involvement of 15,000 construction workers [!] and the resolution of many difficulties, the Marble Village was created on April 6, 1993. This is the first time that a European castle has been moved to our country and rebuilt, and it represents the fulfillment of a dream for actor Masahiko Tsugawa and for Yoshiaki Hirai."

The "Marble Village" referred to on the official web site is essentially a collection of shops selling things made of stone, like stone turtles, stone eggs, and so forth. Masahiko Tsugawa is a famous Japanese film actor who is familar to many Western audiences because of his roles in many films of Juzo Itami, such as "A Taxing Woman" and "Tanpopo." It seems that he found the castle in a dilapidated state and had the idea to bring it back to Japan. Yoshiaki Hirai is the president of the company that owns the castle.

Lockheart Castle is, of course, another artifact of the Japanese asset price bubble of the 1980s. Like the German Village, the site is quite isolated, and also like the German Village the expense incurred to create this tourist attraction seems entirely out of proportion to the likelihood that any large numbers of people will actually visit it. It does make a great wedding venue, although I imagine that most of the weddings are of local couples (I can't imagine a Tokyo couple dragging their co-workers and bosses to a place this far away). In short, it is a reminder of those years when Japan was literally (if ephemerally) rich enough to buy the rest of the world and everything in it. This is one piece of the world that will be a part of Japan forever.

Click for photos of our trip there!

Fake Cherry Blossoms

It's finally Spring again, and the way you find out about Spring while going about your business here - in the midst of this concrete, steel and plastic mess that is the most populous metropolis on Earth - is from all the fake cherry blossoms that begin sprouting this time of year in the subway, in stores, from lampposts, and even inside vending machines. Here are some photos of nature's latest bounty. (Note: I've also posted previously on the real thing.)

Update (April 5): I've added some more photos from last weekend! See below.

At the subway ticket gates:

German Village

Last weekend we went on a bus tour to Gunma Prefecture, a large and relatively rural area north of Tokyo. The proximate cause for the trip was a decision to go strawberry-picking, which led us to sort through the sheaf of bus-tour advertisements that arrive with each Sunday newspaper. (Yes, you can indeed go strawberry-picking in March, if you do it in a greenhouse.) However, in the end we settled on a bus tour that not only took us strawberry-picking, but also took us to some of Gunma Prefecture's more noted historical and cultural sites. One of these was the Kronenberg German Village.

The genesis of German Village lies in the unexpected and extraordinary success of Tokyo Disneyland in the mid-eighties, which unfortunately came just as Japan was entering the asset-price bubble of the late eighties. As excess cash sloshed through the Japanese financial system, banks, companies and local governments ran out of productive places to invest it. The result was a series of spectacularly disastrous real estate deals. Overseas, these took the form of trophy acquisitions, such as when Mitsui Real Estate paid $610 million for the Exxon Building (with an asking price of $375 million) solely in order to get a listing in the Guinness Book of World Records for the highest price ever paid for a building.

In Japan itself, one of the most common boondoggles involved trying to duplicate the success of Disneyland by building a theme park. Thus, in Japan you can now visit Huis Ten Bosch (a mock-Dutch village) in Kyushu, Spain Island in Mie Prefecture, the Seagaia complex in Miyazaki (with its own artificial beach), and Mitsui Greenland, home of UltramanLand. Regrettably, the designers of these parks seem to have overlooked one of the principal reasons for Disneyland's success, which is that it lies on Tokyo Bay itself, right in the middle of the world's most populous metropolitan area. These other parks are all hopelessly remote from any center of population and are accordingly now either bankrupt or close to it. They have also proven a severe burden to the local governments that sponsored them (sometimes quite generously) in the eighties in the hope that they would attract tourism to declining rural areas.

I don't know anything about German Village's own specific financial history, but I can tell you that it could use a good coat of paint, and that it seems very dependent upon the tour buses who deposit their passengers in the parking lot for a two-hour-visit (including all-you-can-eat buffet and sausage-making lesson). Also, our four-year-old would really have liked it much better if we hadn't had to get on the bus exactly at 2 p.m., which is just when the "3-D Realistic Dinosaur World" show started. I wonder if the dinosaurs wore lederhosen?

For more pictures of German Village, click here! Next time, I'll have more pictures from our bus trip, including some from a genuine Scottish castle!

Office Move

We've found out that our offices are going to move. For the last nine years (since the founding of the firm, at which I was present) we have been in an older building which used to be attached to a hotel. The hotel was a long-time client, but went bankrupt a few years ago as a result of the collapse of the 1980s Japan asset-bubble, after years of trying to fend off the banks.

The new owners of the land decided to demolish the hotel, and it's gone. The attached office building has continued to exist only because Japanese law makes it very difficult to terminate a lease. Essentially, a tenant has a permanent right to continue renting its space unless it violates its lease (such as by not paying rent, for example). Generally a landlord's only option (short of enlisting help from the criminal underworld) is to pay the tenants to agree to move out. In our building, negotiations over the tenants' departure have been going on for some time, but have taken longer than usual because our building contains several law firms, about which the new owner has apparently complained bitterly and often during the course of the talks.

But now everything finally has been agreed, and we will be moving at the end of April. Also, we will be entering into an office-sharing arrangement with another firm of approximately the same size, with the expectation that after time the two firms will merge.

New Baby

Our daughter was born at 3:21 p.m. on November 9 after about three hours of labor. She weighed 2876 grams and was 48.5 centimeters long.

Rumi, after her own intense review of the videotaped sonograms provided by the hospital, was convinced that the baby would be a boy, and so we only had a boy's name agreed upon. After the baby was born, we took about a week to decide on a name. We chose May (明). Among other things, this name has the advantage of being recognizable and pronounceable in both English and Japanese. However, Rumi and I didn't realize how old our brains are getting, and how likely we were (already!) to call our son, Jay, "May" and to call May "Jay." So far I hold the record with three mistakes in two minutes. Pictures of the baby here!

Sports Festival

Every autumn, schoolchildren throughout Japan spend hours and hours practicing for their annual Sports Festival (undo-kai, or 運動会) at which parents are treated to the spectacle of their children dancing, marching, and singing in unison, and also running in races and other nominally competitive events. This year Jay participated in his first Sports Festival as a student, although we've actually been going every year since he was two, because the school encourages future pupils to come and watch (and even to participate, in exchange for handsome presents of toys and other gifts).

My use of the phrase "Sports Festival" as a translation may be a bit misleading, because it might give the impression that this event was something like the track and field events we used to have at my old middle school, where brawny kids in tattered sweats heaved the shot-put and ran so fast that they puked. The Sports Festival that we attended last weekend was a highly orchestrated affair at which there were as many group dances as races, and at which the children wore colorful costumes even for the competitive events. There were no first- or second-place ribbons, either—all competition was between groups, not individuals, although each child did receive a medal saying that he or she had "tried very hard" (ganbarimashita). Of course, this seems natural for a school at which the ages of the pupils range from 4 to 7.

Click here for lots of photos!

iTunes Japan Customer Outrage is Message for Greedy Record Labels

After recent reports on how the international record labels are scheming to try to jack up the prices for songs that Apple sells on its iTunes Music Store, it was interesting to see how an apparent pricing experiment at the Japan iTunes Music Store seemed to have failed miserably this week.

Last week, the Japan iTunes Music Store began prominently featuring the newest release by Ken Matsudaira in the banners at the top of its main page. Ken Matsudaira (popularly known as "MatsuKen") is the flamboyant, luminous and gender-blending former TV samurai star who last year made a roaring middle-age comeback with his MatsuKen Samba II ("Dance, Señorita! Samba, Viva Samba! MatsuKen Samba! Olé!"). Imagine Liberace without the piano, dancing in a gold-lamé kimono, and you get the idea.

Coin Sneaker Laundry

Here's an interesting gadget I saw at our corner laundromat: the Coin Sneaker Laundry, with a dedicated washing machine below for laundering your shoes, and a special dryer above. The dryer appears to be a modified microwave oven. I suppose that in addition to being kinda funky, this gadget also benefits the laundromat by discouraging people from washing and drying their shoes in the regular machines, which I suspect would totally disgust most people in Japan, seeing as how everyone considers shoes to be such dirty objects here.

Incidentally, we only go to the laundromat on those rare occasions when several consecutive days of rain have prevented us from drying our clothes outside. At those times we go to the laundromat to use the clothes dryers there (and there are always lots of other people there doing the same thing). It seems to be rather uncommon for Japanese people to dry their clothes in clothes dryers otherwise. My electricity bill went down by about half when Rumi moved into my bachelor pad and we started hanging up our clothes instead of using the machine.

Still One Thing to Admire In American High Schools

On almost any given day, it's not hard to find article after article after article in the U.S. press about how American high school students are falling behind students from all over the world (and especially behind students from East Asian countries like Japan, South Korea and Singapore) in math, science, reading and other vital subjects. These articles usually include a clarion call for reform of the U.S. educational system, although perhaps the constant alarm bells have faded into the background for some of us, since we've been reading these predictions of doom for more than twenty years now (i.e., at least since the landmark "A Nation at Risk" report in 1983, which I remember in particular because it formed the basis for the national high school debate resolution in that year).

So it's nice to see that the Japanese still find something to admire in the U.S. educational system. It seems many Japanese believe that Americans know a lot about how to get rich. The Japanese also suspect that Americans may develop a lot of these skills in school. This helps to explain the current popularity of a book entitled, "Economics as Studied by American High School Students, From Basic Principles to Practical Application," which was prominently featured in newspaper reviews last month and which currently ranks 81st in sales of all books on Amazon Japan, which ain't bad for a business book.

Thirsty Thor

OK, I'd love to apologize for making two posts in a row about Silly English in Japan, especially after such a long absence, but these Silly English posts are cheap and easy shots, which is about all I feel up to at the moment, following my ten-month vector through the vacuum of space after falling off the face of the Earth in January. The long treatises on society and culture will have to continue to wait. So no, you won't hear me say "I'm Thor'ry."

For today's anglocentric and exploitative episode, we find ourselves in a Japanese "Family Restaurant" (or famiresu) which means that it is the sort of place where we can bring our lovely children / mewling brats without having to feel self-conscious about the stares of other diners. This is the kind of restaurant where you are most likely to find a set of "all-you-can-drink" soda fountains, which seem to have become fairly common over the past ten years or so. ("All-you-can-eat" establishments are much less common here than in America, as you can see for yourself by inspecting the rear ends of American tourists in Ginza.) Although Japanese has perfectly good words for the expressions "all-you-can-eat" and "all-you-can-drink" (tabehodai and nomihodai, respectively), it seems that decades ago some show-off with a Japanese-to-English dictionary also decided to confect a foreign loan word that means exactly the same thing. That word is baikingu (バイキング), which is supposed to be a transliteration of "Viking" but sounds like "biking" because the Japanese language lacks the "v" sound.

The genesis of this expression appears to be the Swedish smörgåsbord, which apparently also involves eating a lot and paying only a little. However, I somehow find it difficult to imagine the Vikings setting up long wooden tables full of pies, salads and meatballs on their dragon-headed longboats before disembarking to rape and pillage Wessex and Mercia. Yet in the Japanese equation, smorgasbord = Scandinavia = Vikings, so there you have it. At least this particular Silly English phrase has a rational explanation.

OK, OK, I can't resist. So, a famous Viking explorer returns home from a voyage and finds his name missing from the town register. His wife insists on complaining to the mayor who deeply apologizes, saying, "I'm so terribly sorry, I must have taken Leif off my census."

Every Day A Learning Experience

One of the great things about living in a foreign country is that even after so many years, I am still learning new vocabulary words every day. Sometimes, er, even in my native tounge.

Incidentally, in Tokyo you can always tell it's autumn because that's when the fake autumn leaves come out.

Christmas at UltramanLand

This year we decided to stay in Japan during the end-of-year holidays, but we didn't have a clear idea of where we wanted to go. We had, however, known for some time of the existence of an Ultraman theme park in Kyushu known as UltramanLand, and given Jay's present obsession with the Ultra Heroes and Ultra Monsters, it seemed that we might as well go to Kyushu, since we had never been there before. We accordingly planned a nine-day trip, with three nights at UltramanLand and five nights in Nagasaki. I've posted a bunch of photos of UltramanLand here. (I may eventually post photos of the Nagasaki portion of the trip too, but then again I may not, because after all, temples and museums are not nearly as interesting as aliens and robots stomping on Tokyo.)

iChat Christmas

Last year, our present to Grandma and Grandpa was an iSight for their Powerbook. So this year, since we couldn't be together for Christmas, we all crowded upstairs, next to the Christmas tree, to open presents in an iChat videoconference.

I'm sure that this sort of thing will seem pretty mundane a few years from now, but at the moment there still seem to be lots of people who are amazed when they see it for the first time. We use iChat quite a lot, both to talk to Grandma and Grandpa (although Jay seems to be a bit shy at times these days) and to talk to Rumi's sister and her husband in Tennessee.

I also have a camera at the office so I can call home via videochat, but please, don't tell my boss. (I wonder if he suspects anything when he hears me talking in my office even though none of the office's phone extensions is in use. Ah, well, perhaps he just supposes that I talk to myself.)

As you may have heard, you can videoconference for as long as you want at no extra cost (i.e., apart from the cost of your broadband connection). With Apple's iChat AV, the connection is initiated via text chat software (using AOL Instant Messenger protocol and screen names) so that if you want to talk to someone, you can easily see whether they're on-line. We've also found iChat and the iSight to be remarkably easy to use. You essentially just plug the camera in and you're ready to go. There was no software to download and no drivers to install. Neither we nor my parents had any problem at all configuring the system.

Of course, there is the occasional technical glitch, such as the fact that Rumi is going to kill me if she ever finds out that I've posted a picture of her in her bathrobe on the internet.

Perhaps next year we can all be together in person. Until then, happy Chrismahanukwanzakah to all!

"Il Tabasco, per favore"

On Saturday at our local "Grazie Gardens" restaurant, as Jay dug into his alfredo with his little fork, I screwed the distinctive red cap off the Tabasco bottle and thumped it several times, spraying hot pepper sauce all over my marinara. The first forkful left me gasping, of course (the desired effect), but I'd been sure to have plenty of ice water on hand, and so after the initial shock I was able to soldier on and finish my food.

The Tokyo area boasts an incredibly diverse selection of restaurants serving foods from all over the world. Indeed, overall, Tokyo may very well have the best food in the world, in light of the demanding clientele (the Japanese accept nothing but the very best) and its particular specialty (by which I mean that for starters, the Japanese cuisine is better than anywhere else). But of course this doesn't necessarily mean that all those foreign restaurants are 100% authentic.

Consider, for example, that every single Italian restaurant seems to have a bottle of Tabasco sauce sitting on every table. I have no idea why. The Japanese certainly seem to grasp every other aspect of Italian culture. I took this photo at a 100% Authentic Italian Restaurant complete with red-checked tablecloths, Chianti-bottle candlesticks, and Connie Francis playing on the sound system. (Seriously. It was "Never on Sunday.") So why was every table graced with the little red-and-green bottles hailing from the Estado de Tabasco, which was in Mexico, the last time I checked?

Ah, but who cares? It sure tastes good. Splattered all over your pizza or your spaghetti, it'll clear your head and make you remember that you ate great Italian food, and for a good while, too. Without Tabasco, you may wolf down your pasta without paying much attention; with Tabasco, you are compelled to savor each bite (especially during the lengthy recovery period following each swallow).

But I do still wish that the ethnic restaurants in Tokyo tried to be more authentic, because I really miss getting my fortune cookie when we eat Chinese food.

O-mikoshi

The other day we participated in the autumn ritual of carrying an o-mikoshi (often translated as "portable shrine") to and from a local Shinto temple. Traditionally, the o-mikoshi was carried from house to house and from shop to shop to spread good fortune. Some of the famous festivals have become so enormous that thousands of people gather around the o-mikoshi, and sometimes there are even fights over who gets to carry it.

The carrying of the o-mikoshi from house to house doesn't seem to occur much any more (at least it's never happened to our house) but the yearly trip to the shrine is quite popular as a kids' event. Although the kids' o-mikoshi is not a real one (it's just made of plastic bottles and colorful paper), forty or fifty kids come each year, and the real o-mikoshi, carried by adults, has become just a supporting player. Indeed, this year there were hardly enough adults to carry the real o-mikoshi, and the adults had to take several rest breaks along the way, because the thing is actually quite heavy.

At the shrine, the kids had a drink and then went into the shrine building to hear some chanting and a short talk from the priest. I didn't understand the chanting, but the talk was mostly about being good and doing what your parents tell you. Then we picked up the o-mikoshi again and headed back home. I've posted all the pictures here.

Microsoft Hires Ultraman

What's the connection between (a) Microsoft, the lumbering software behemoth that spews slime, filth and corruption, and (b) Japan's famed Ultra Heroes, who hail from the M78 nebula and who have long defended peace and justice on earth, mostly (in a series of weekly half-hour TV shows beginning in 1966) by beating the crap out of lumbering behemoths that spew slime, filth and corruption?

Alas, Ultraman has become a shill for Microsoft. The monsters have won.

This print advertisement has recently appeared throughout Japan on commuter trains, in newspapers, and in magazines. I noticed it a few days ago in our household's copy of the Mainichi Shimbun newspaper. I also found a copy of it printed on a sheet inserted in the box containing my latest purchase from Amazon Japan.

Mall Monkey

Every once in a while I see something that just makes me grin because I don't imagine I'd ever see anything like it back home. Like performing monkeys outside the "Toys R Us" at the mall. Last weekend the rain came down in torrents, and so instead of going to the park like we usually do, Jay and I went to the huge shopping mall at Sunshine City in Ikebukuro. (This kid has simply got to get his exercise somehow, or he will keep on running and shouting until 2 a.m.) Naturally, about half of Tokyo's 30 million other inhabitants had exactly the same idea. It's common to see performing monkeys on crowded sidewalks, but I'd never yet seen one actually inside the mall before. The monkey helped to create a real carnival-type atmosphere at Sunshine City. I imagine that back home the licensing requirements, health inspectors, liability insurance requirements, and PETA activists would make this sort of thing impossible. If anyone's ever seen anything like this in the U.S., let me know.

(Oh, and you trivia buffs out there might be interested to know that the Sunshine City entertainment and shopping center, which includes not only a "Toys R Us" but also an aquarium, a zoo, an exhibition center, 60 restaurants, and 200 shops including other international chain stores such as "Gap Kids" and "The Body Shop," happens to be built upon the former site of Sugamo Prison, where Japan's wartime prime minister Hideki Tojo and six other "Class A" war criminals were executed in 1948. Cheerio!)