Yongfook is a web producer and usability consultant based in Tokyo

It is something of a rite of passage in Japan for mothers to make ‘akai gohan’ (red rice) when their daughter begins her menstrual cycle for the first time. The usual practice is then to give this red rice out to friends, relatives, teachers and anyone else who the family really feels would want to know that sometime in the last few days their daughter probably locked herself in the toilet crying, screaming, and crying and screaming.

Red rice is made with red azuki beans and thus is, unsurprisingly, red. This gives it the intended yet unfortunately barefaced connotation of BLOOD, which is a bit like celebrating an elderly relatives’ development of Parkinsons by making a cake in the shape of a motorised wheelchair. This, combined with its mouth-drying starchiness, makes it quite unappetising.

Call me sick, call me male, but since learning this alternative meaning of red rice I have begun to politely refuse it when someone brings it into the staffroom. Of course, people do make red rice just for the hell of it, but whenever it is offered to me I cant help thinking ‘ARRG BLOOD, VAGINA, ARRRG’ and mincing out an excuse about how I’m not very hungry or how by some massive coincidence I ate a whole vat of red rice for breakfast that very same day.

Anyway, enough of this bordering-on-tasteless insensitive chauvinistic pap. Lets talk about cock! No lets not. Lets talk about how coolmungusly astounding my new mobile phone is.

My new mobile phone is coolmungusly astounding. In a spasm of self-confidence in my Japanese skills, I burst into the phone shop a few days ago and proclaimed my desires. Whilst they couldn’t help me with the infinite bag of jelly beans, the back scratcher in the shape of Wolverine or the ability to stop time but move around and ‘mess with things’, they COULD help me with getting my phone upgraded. Cellular phone technology in Japan is hugely in advance of the rest of the world. This model is around 5 months old already, but it has 2 colour screens, 2 cameras, and cost about the same as one of my usual monthly phone bills to upgrade to. Continuing the typically inward-looking idiosyncrasy of the Japanese however, you cannot use Japanese cell phones anywhere in the world except Japan. Bugger.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 1st, 2003 at 10:37 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.