Yongfook is a web producer and usability consultant based in Tokyo

My washing machine is largely idiot proof - you just press a button, it weighs the load and adjusts its programme accordingly. There are other buttons, but I ignore them as they have scary looking kanji next to them (they probably say “press here to not frick up clothes”).

For every up there is a down though, and the trade off for this ease of use is that clothes come out fantastically knotted up. Comically so. You know the monster in “the Thing” that was just a sort of horrific, twisted mish mash of different things? Your clothes look like that, but cleaner and nicer smelling. It has become the test of a thorough wash - if I can pick all my clothes up by just lifting one collar of one shirt, then I know the clothes are well knotted and have been tossed around a lot.

More TV madness. I may have to revoke my previous statement and say that only “some” Japanese TV is utter bollocks. I watched a gameshow last night that was absolute genius and wished it went on for longer than it did. They had a chick in a bikini sitting on a beach, leaning forward offering her cleavage. Then they had some guy try to run up to her and put flowers in between her boobs - the catch being that he was tied to a post by a length of strong elastic. It’s the kind of show that would get rejected outright in the BBC boardroom, even though all the board members secretly want to see it. Last night and this morning, the headline news on most news shows was that a seal was spotted swimming in Tokyo river. I don’t know what the significance of this was, to warrant so much coverage. Maybe it was a magic seal.

The kyoikuinkai (board of education) gets a lot of visits from people leaving their business cards (like spam email, except more archaic). These frequent the working day and henceforth pepper the otherwise totally silent office with choruses of “yoshhhh” and “(mumble)masssss” . Today a man walked in with his flies wide open. I wanted to laugh, but didn’t know the Japanese for “HA HA”.

Random Thought - you have to love a country where the word ‘ama’ means both ‘nun’ and ‘cunt’.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 9th, 2002 at 1:17 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.