Tokyo Banana Will Eat Your Memories. Or Perhaps Your Whole Town!

During Silver Week, we had a nice visit from some friends of Masako’s who live in the Tokyo area.  As Japanese are wont to do, they brought a little gift with them… a box of little sponge cakes, rather like Twinkies except much better, filled with tasty and fruity banana creme.  Very yummy.

Then I examined the wrapper more closely, and learned just how badass these little cakes were…

“People gather to TOKYO from here and there with memories of their home.  And then, TOKYO gets everyone’s home town.  TOKYO BANANA.”

Good grief, it’s worse than I thought.  I knew Tokyo was a big, bad city… a veritable Godzilla among the tiny hamlets and sleepy villages of the Japanese countryside… but I had no idea it was ACTIVELY CONSUMING everyone’s home town!  Imagine the pure-hearted, apple-cheeked waifs dreaming of big city success who go there, only to have TOKYO GET their home town, actively ripping the cherished past from their unsuspecting brains!

Or perhaps it is literal… Perhaps TOKYO detaches itself from its Kanto Plain bedrock and goes on an active rampage, swallowing towns whole, adding their populations to its already burgeoning numbers… AAAAAHHHHH!

Luckily, I seem to remember my home town just fine after consuming three of four of these yummies.  Maybe because my home town is sufficiently large.  Or because there is an ocean between it and TOKYO.  Or maybe because I didn’t go to Tokyo recenly enough for it to GET my memories.

You can bet that if I go there again, though, my psychic shields will be at full strength!  No more messing around!

TOKYO BANANA!!!!!!!!!

More to come…

Ghost of a Building

With limited building space in Japanese cities, this sort of thing is rather common.

Seen in the vicinity of Osu Kannon, Nagoya:

Here you can see where a traditional peaked-roof house has been torn down right next to its neighbor, which you can see is one more example of the lovely Soviet Bloc copycat architecture that sadly dominates the Japanese cityscape.  Now an hourly parking lot, the only evidence of the house’s existence is the eidolon it left on its pal.

The wooden spacers that kept the two buildings apart by about four inches also remain.  Those windows on the remaining building that would have opened directly into the side of the one that got torn down?  Must have been a lovely view…

More to come!

I’m hoping it does windows, too

This has been endlessly blogged about, written about, and generally overkilled in the media, so I just wanted to go on record and show everyone that it does, indeed, exist and is not an urban myth or exaggeration:

Yes, folks, that is a 6,300 yen cantaloupe, which, using exchange rates current at the time of writing, comes out to $69.04.  So who the heck would pay a hair under seventy bucks for a melon?

It’s a gift fruit, so the prestige is in the fact that it’s perfect, has been babied during its growth, has never hit the dirt, and because the people getting it know how much they paid for it.  I personally would rather get a king-size box of chocolate truffles or something, but hey.

So the idea is to have something that has a function (in this case, it is edible) that is an expensive gift because the fact that its expensiveness is the reason it is impressive, and thus makes a good gift, etc.  Circular logic is a fun thing.  Thus, my plan is to introduce other gift ideas to the Japanese market… things that are useful, but can be expensively and impressively crafted to make good gifts.  I’m thinking of a gold-plated clothespin or a mink dishcloth for starters.

The thing is, these are by no means the most expensive gift fruits I’ve seen, either… I’ve seen melons twice as expensive as these…

I also want to point out that you can go to any farm market in Japan, or a stand on the roadside, and get a perfectly yummy melon (albeit one that has a dirty or irregular exterior) for about four or five bucks… still a little pricey, but not as much as dinner for two at a pretty good restaurant (or dinner for a dozen at Denny’s).

More to come!

Photo by Jen (my sister!)

Wood Rocks. So Does Human.

I see a lot of this kind of thing…

This sign is for a construction firm.  I think what they are trying to say is, “We love working with wood, and we love working with people”.  Unfortunately, this is not a workable contraction of said sentiment.

More to come…

Photo by Meg (my sister!)

9-9-9!

Oh, the numerololologicality of it all!
Just wanted to get a silly little post in to commemorate triple-9 day. Back with more real posts soon.

“We are never more true to ourselves than when we are inconsistent.” -Oscar Wilde-