Russian Roulette Sushi

Sure we can play with food. Russian Roulette Sushi: here's how it goes!

 Each member of the group receives one piece of sushi. One of the pieces of sushi is filled with wasabi. That person gets knocked out of the game. Next round has one less piece of sushi, and one less player, until it gets narrowed down to a one-on-one, and ultimately, a winner.

 Our competitors today are:

- Takuya, an acquaintance of Ken's

- Kenichi, a party-mate of Aala's

- Nozomi, Ken's step-sister

- Aala

- Ken

- Myself

 And so we order the first round!

On round one, Aala takes the bullet! 

 Eating his sushi slowly, he opts for a slow and painful experience. Not the way to go, buddy. Of course we made him eat the whole thing.

And it's a double elimination! Ken bails at this point, fearing he may puke if he gets the payload!  

Round two!

 Down goes Kenichi!

 Unable to breathe, he buries his face in a handkerchief and waits for the agony to pass him by. 

Round three!
 Nozomi takes the burn. She actually handles it quite well!
 Inside information coming from Ken has it that she actually frequently does wasabi-eating contests with her in-laws. She had training!

And that narrows it down to the final two: myself and Takuya. It's a showdown. We requested to put the maximum amount of wasabi possible on the final bullet-sushi. 

Press the play button to watch the outcome!

Milestone: Month 9

It's time for a Milestone! You can compare to my other milestones by clicking on the Milestone label.

Month 9: Summary

Status:

Job: Children's Fitness Teacher / Afterschool Program Elementary Teacher
Financial status:  Good

Location:


City: Tokyo
Ward: Chuo-ku
Train station: Kayabacho
Residing in: My apartment, Hermit Fortress


Cast of Characters:


Major Characters:
Ken "the Frog" Tanaka
Erika Mochizuki (and Maxine!)
Aala Kansali of Tunisia

Minor Characters:
(This section's been cleaned up!)
Fumi, the ex-hostess
Etsumi (It's-Me) Sugeno
Lisa Fukumoto Fang
Kuniaki "Forest" Mori

Retired Characters:
Sofie Monrad of Denmark
Julian "Shank" Einschenk of Germany
Anton "Foxboy" Jermaine of England
Rodrigue Zapha of France
Clement Sanchez of France


Top Five Highlights:
(since last time)

- Hakone
- Restaurant Lock-Up
- Lake Town
- Getting my Own Apartment
- The Life Safety Seminar


Still to Come:

- Planking Across Tokyo
- Gundam Cafe
- Studio Ghibli Museum
- Camping in a Ghost Town
- Tsukiji Fish Auction

Silly Inventions 1 : Necomimi

The innovation of the Japanese is a well-known thing; maybe to the point of stereotyping. Here's a new column. Just because I can't get around how great/awful/ridiculous some things I see here are. Alright. Here's the first.

#1: Necomimi

It's a terrible day indeed when something from weaboo-space tries to inch its way into the world of grown men and women. Unfortunately, it does occasionally happen, and here we are; it's Necomimi.
How does this qualify as an invention?

These are more than just a cat-ear headband. The necomimi has a node that goes onto the forehead and a sensor that is placed on the temple when worn. The idea is that, by picking up on brainwaves, the ears move in order to simulate the appropriate emotion. Put simply, the ears go down when you're thoughtful, or sad. They perk up when you're stimulated. They spin if you're excited or restless.

 These'll run you down around 150$. You're basically paying that much to let everyone around you know how sad or aroused you are. It's kind of creepy, and I'm not exactly sure what kind of niche market they're trying to hit with this thing. Don't get me wrong, the tech is actually kind of impressive, and the idea is, well, innovative, if nothing else.

 They had a kiosk, so I obviously had to try them; and sure as hell, they did start spinning just because I guess I was kind of anxious to see if they would work. But I couldn't get them to do much else. Whether this means the product isn't so accurate or that it can't be cheated is up to you to decide, but my verdict on necomimi is a no-buy. Come on. Who needs this thing. It's dorky.

The Life Safety Seminar

How to do the robot?

 Japan is prone to disaster. Cheeks open and all. Let's think about it. The country's sitting on a bunch of tectonic plates, most of them undersea. On top of the resulting vulnerability to earthquakes, tsunami are a serious source of worry. The big cities are clustered with thousands of small houses packed together in impossibly small spaces; fires could be catastrophic if allowed to spread. In reason of all this, Japanese schools drill safety measures to children at a very young age.

And for the rest of us, there's the Life Safety museum in Ikebukuro. Aala and I venture in.

 The museum, located on the 4th floor of the local fire station, is free of charge and tours people through different scenarios. It's genuinely educational, and, frankly, a little fun! Let's take the tour, shall we?

Listening for instructions.

Being free and all, the tours fill up pretty quickly, so it's best to go in with a reservation if you want a specific time. If not, you can just walk in and they'll put you in a time slot that makes everyone happy. Yippee! Oh, and no, you can't go in without a tour.

 The first part of our tour was the seminar room about earthquakes. Educative, but not exactly fun. There's very little talk, and most of it is a video compilation of the 2011 Tohoku earthquake. And the video is subtitled, so hurray for gaijin-friendliness. Super interesting though. Mad points for that. Educational videos rarely are.

 It starts getting fun from here though. The second part of our tour was on how to deal with fires. Each person is given a fire extinguisher and made to shoot at a fake fire on a screen. It's so...satisfying!

 The third part is a smoke-room simulation. Each person gets to navigate a series of rooms filling up with thick black smoke. It's actually steam, but the simulation is quite realistic. Aala and I, much to the amusement of the Japanese people taking the tour with us, crawled through this one like soldiers. I even crawled back into my seat like a soldier. I would make the Navy proud. Unfortunately, I don't have pictures of this part, since it's kind of difficult to take one through artificial smoke and all.

 But the last part takes the cake! There's also an earthquake simulator. Within it, one can experience a magnitude 7.0 earthquake. Man, it shakes hard. To think the March 2011 one, a 9.0, was 1024 times more powerful that the one in this video. How were people, like, not sent flying into orbit?

And that concluded our tour. What have we learned today? Things seem so much nicer when they are free!

It's Aala!

I would've introduced Aala earlier, but he moved out of Japan. Until recently. Now Aala's back in Japan. You may recognize him from the Yamanote Walk with Sofie and Ken.

 Aala's a frenchman from Tunisia. He has somewhat of a large base of readers on the internet, from his blog, Gaijin Japan, and hopes to one day live off it. He's already making a thousand bucks a month off it, so he totally eventually could. He's going to be living in Japan for the next few years, and his work basically requires him to seek out adventure, so he's sure to be on the blog every now and then. 

Lake Town

Here's Koshigaya's Aeon Lake Town. Japan's biggest shopping center just won't fit in cramped-ass Tokyo, so it's way out here in the middle of bum-fuck nowhere, one hour away from the city. It's not even in the Tokyo prefecture. Hard to miss it, though. The place is 200,000 square meters large  and its own train station.
Speaking only in numbers, Lake Town houses 200 different stores and is the 28th biggest shopping center in the world. It's not exactly the closest to the top, but hell if it isn't big.

Accompanying me are Ken, Erika, and her daughter Maxine. Also, there's Andrew! He's Erika's 15 year old brother. For the sake of introductions, if someone took baby Maxine, made her ten times bigger and gave her the gift of speech, then the resulting life form would probably be a lot like Andrew.
 Here's a picture with both Andrew and Erika looking particularly like goblins. Maybe it runs in the family?

Chilling in a home hardware store.

Back to Koshigaya Lake Town, the mall is split into four sections: Water, Forest, Wind and the Outlet section, which is completely outdoors. The three hours we spent there took us through a little less than half of the place. Today being a national holiday, though, it was impossible to buy anything: lines stretched out even out of the doors of certain stores. As much as I also would've loved to buy some furnishing for my crib, the distance home was also a cumbersome obstacle. 

My highlight? Maybe just watching Maxine play around with the other kids in this lego-themed shop. The name of the shop itself, "clickbrick" looked alarmingly like "dickbrick" due to the poor choice of font for the shop's logo. But this is Japan, so who cares! Hurrah!
 But yeah, in conclusion, Laketown is like a big dog. It's big.

Minus One

The Yamanote 4 - now dissolved!

Sofie's returning to Denmark. After a night at a Japanese pub and some karaoke, it was time to say goodbye to our Dane and dissolve the Yamanote 4 - the four of us who've walked the Yamanote Line together a few months back.

 

 Hopefully this isn't goodbye!

Social Camouflage

See it?

I'm doing quite well with money this month, so I decided it might be time to do a little more shopping for clothes. Clothes don't come cheap in Tokyo, but there is a way to find affordable clothes. Today I went out to get a few t-shirts.

 Japan is quirky shirt central. The country has no rivals. No competitors. It seems to me in the textile industry, the main export is weird. Partly because a lot of these shirts have English sentences written on them that don't make sense. But even then, there are shirts with such things as shit on a stick being mass produced and sold to the youth.

As far as I know, the main hot spot to catch such products is in Harajuku, on Takeshita-dori street. If you're a reader from my hometown of Montreal, call it the "Mont-Royal Street" of Tokyo, if you will. The place is thriving with local small businesses selling their own unique (or sometimes frequently seen) weird clothing and accessories. It doesn't take long to catch a glimpse of something that'll make you smile for all the wrong reasons.

 Thing is, people buy them! People buy this stuff for a decent sum, which isn't something I can see happening back home, where most of what people wear is pretty tame in comparison. But here, it could be that it's considered cute, or trendy, to wear something that beams no sense whatsoever.

 This of course, only holds true for young people. You won't find middle-aged men wearing the stuff on display in hipsterific-Harajuku.

As for myself?
 Yeah, whatever. I caved, too. Where else in the world could you find something like this?

I Babysat

Yeah, I know, it doesn't have much to do with Japan. But I thought I'd share anyway. As if I wasn't spending enough time around kids lately, I briefly babysat Erika's kid, Maxine. And it was totally chill! She was all giddy and giggly and altogether...baby-like, whatever. Ken was there, not that it took two people to babysit a one-and-a-half year old child, but it was all we could do to give a hand to friend.

 Erika has it tough. Between doing paperwork to get governmental service, a part-time job, and coming home to her child, it's hard to find time to catch a break.

 Mind you, Erika's only 22. I think it does take a lot of strength to give up everything a 22 year-old would rather be doing, and dedicate the time to a child. And Maxine, she's sweet, but she's not exactly easy. She's got just as much fire as her mother. Maxine does what she wants. If she wants to be acknowledged while you're watching television, she'll stand between you and it, and start throwing shit on the ground. And don't get me started about shit on the ground. Put that aside, for a sec, though, and all things considered, I don't have a doubt that she will have a bright and interesting future, given Erika's effort.