Yongfook is a web producer and usability consultant based in Tokyo

You know that its not going to be your day when 2 of Japan’s notoriously efficient and flawlessly punctual trains are late, making you miss your shinkansen (bullet train). For some reason or another, 2 of the trains we took on the ’slow’ leg of our journey - that being from where we live in Kumamoto, to the shinkansen terminal in Fukuoka - stopped on the track for a very long period of time. During this time the conductor apologised profusely several times over the intercom, probably whilst bowing and / or twisting his nipples. Thus we had to take a later shinkansen, and were a bit late to the conference.

Kobe has hobos. From now on this is how I am going to define cities in Japan. A real city will have at least a few hobos. Out in the boonie fake cities, hobos are either ritually culled every few months, or are hunted for their delicious meat. In Kobe, I saw about 3 hobos, all of whom were sleeping, one in particular had chosen an extremely busy pedestrian footpath near a subway entrance, to simply splay himself out on the floor at with a weird gnarled pose like he had been frozen then tipped over. Or he could have been dead.

Kobe has people giving out flyers. This is another ‘real city’ trait. People are always stuffing things into your hands as the bar business in a big city such as Kobe is like a manic race to stay alive. Bars in Japan are NOT easy to find and usually reside on the 6th floor of some building that looks like it would be better suited as a prison for animals, not a hub of drinking tomfoolery. For this reason, constant advertising is required. Japanese flyer distributors are usually quite passive about their task, but gaijin’s are terrible - ESPECIALLY if they see other gaijin’s who look a bit lost, like the fricking annoying Spanish guy we ran into one night:

“Hey guys! Do you like beer? Where are you going? My bar is this way. Do you like salsa? Hey are you American? So where are you going? Hey, my bar is this way. Can you dance salsa?”

“We are just going to get something to eat actually”

“Que?”

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 29th, 2003 at 10:45 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.