Yongfook is a web producer and usability consultant based in Tokyo

Food shopping in Japan is a fantastic source of entertainment - not just because of the funny ‘engrish’ on certain goods. Much humour can be gained merely from the fact that you don’t have any idea what the frick stuff is. Thankfully for the first few shopping trips my supervisor came along, he even helped me pick out some ‘instant’ zaru soba, one of my favorite Japanese dishes (cold noodles - delicious in summer), though he proclaimed that the instant variety was “mama oishi” (not very nice).

One of the other virtues of shopping in Japan is the existence of ‘hyaku-en’ shops (100 yen shop). The name speaks for itself really, it’s a shop where everything they sell is 100 yen - around 50p. However, these are a far cry from their inbred, squalid £1-shop English brethren, in that they don’t sell junk. Well, some junk, but there is a big hyaku-en shop near my house which is like a supermarket - selling meats (chicken breast, fish etc), vegetables, fruits and a whole range of packet noodles, drinks, Japanese seasonings, crisps and other snacks - all for 100 yen. EVEN CANS OF BEER. Life = sorted.

The conbini (convenience store) is open 24 hours and sells a variety of msg-laden cup noodles and frozen detritus, as well as the ubiquitous Manga porn, which is about as prevelant in Japan as the Japanese are. The hon-ya (bookshop) near me sells a large amount of books (no English section), magazines and also j-pop cd’s. I cant say that I am totally enamoured with j-pop, but give it a year and maybe I will find some of it tolerable.

Today I got my inkan, which is a persons name stamp. It is used in Japan to sign official documents, in place of a signature - such as when you want to open a bank account or get a mobile phone. So basically it’s the kind of important thing I tend to lose. Gaijin (foreigner) inkan’s are usually made with the katakana phonetic alphabet, which is used in Japan for the naming of anything foreign (people, food, brand names etc). However, my supervisor (and everyone in the village, really) has been very welcoming to me, so he chose some kanji (the Chinese iconographic method of writing in Japan) symbols to represent my name. There are two symbols that together read “Jon” and mean “healthy sound” - stemming from my violin and guitar playing. Maybe they will give me a new name when they hear my karaoke ability.

Then we went to open a bank account. Now, Japanese people tend to carry a lot of cash on them, so they thought it was very strange when I wanted to deposit most of my cash (about 100′000 yen - £500) into the bank - to the Japanese, this was a normal amount to carry around in your wallet. After the bank, we went to get a keitai denwa (mobile phone). Now here is one aspect of contemporary Japan that I absolutely love - mobile phones in Japan are fricking amazing. All of them have colour screens, polyphonic ringtones (no more “beepy beep beep”), games written in Java (hence its possible to play 3D games) and many of the new models have camera’s. Cheap too - the latest models (bursting with pointless functions) are around £100 with contract. To my chagrin, gaijin cannot own a keitai denwa until we have received our Alien Registration card, which I will be getting at the end of August. So until then I have to make do without colour phone goodness - hence until that time I’ve been given a whole load of keitai brochures to wank over and make a choice.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 2nd, 2002 at 12:58 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.