Where's my Wealth?

It’s tough to save money in Japan. My wife introduced me to an iPhone app called Wealth Watchers. It’s like Weight Watchers but in reverse, because you’re trying to keep money instead of lose chub. I think she showed it to me to try and ascertain just how much money I spend on digital comics. But that comes out of a different account, a-hah ha ha ha!

The idea behind Wealth Watchers is that you firstly establish your consistent monthly costs, eg. ‘Housing’, ‘transport’, ‘insurance’, etc. In other words, the boring stuff. From there you proceed to record every instance of your spending, along with a short description of what you spent it on. Again these all fall under broad sub-headings like ‘entertainment’,’transportation’ (Again? What am I, Jason Statham?) and ‘Dining & Groceries’.

I spend way more on transportation than this guy.

The first clue I had that this app and I would not be best friends was that there was no category called ‘music’. Where was I supposed to record all the awesome concerts that I will one day go to? What about all the cool Japanese CDs I will find, not to mention my ongoing iTunes habit? What about the Y60,000 I spent on a Yamaha acoustic/electric guitar?

I created a music category, and told my Wealth Watchers app that I was ashamed of it.

But I was committed to enter my spending for at least a month, despite the glaring oversights in spending categorization. I mean, I could still learn some useful financial info about myself, right? Or would this exercise reveal a darker financial secret, lurking just beneath the depths of… my wallet. I have stared into the dark financial abyss of my soul and I don’t know what stared back at me, but its name sounded like a sneeze, it had tentacles and it called me ‘son’.

GNAAARRR!!! Don't forget to buy coffee.

Here is a startling insight into my finances, courtesy of the app that chipped away at my sanity until all that was left was…

Date   Pay Type       Amount              Notes               

21/10   Cash                Y293                Coffee. Hey, this could be fun! I wonder what else I will buy?

21/10   Cash                Y15,080           Meat, yeah!

22/10   Cash                Y500                Coffee. I love you.

22/10   Cash                Y1400              All my lunches for October at one school. Probably the equivalent of a week’s worth of coffee.

22/10   Cash                Y1,000             Booze. Goes great with meat!

23/10   Cash                Y747                Bunkasai lunch and... more coffee.

23/10   Cash                Y320                Big Mac. I ate you standing up and you were so good. Do you remember? You probably don’t remember.

23/10   …Cash            Y3,000             Nijikai karaoke. Ouch, 3000 yen? Were we at an airport?!

24/10   Cash                Y2,805             Lunch at IKEA for 2. I had no coffee. It was a bit weird.

25/10   Cash                Y353                Coffee & snacks.

26/10   Seriously. Cash.   Y478            Coffee & snacks.

27/10   Come on.         Y100                Coffee. And I can sense you judging me, Wealth Watchers. Just so you know.

27/10   Cash                Y150                More coffee! But this one came out of a special magical machine at Tokyu Hands. There’s nothing wrong with the amount of coffee I drink. What would you know?

28/10   EFTPOS. Just kidding, it was cash! Y270. It was coffee. Is that what you wanted to hear? It was coffee, ok?

29/10   Cash! It’s a cash society! I paid with cash!    It was 270 yen. God, you’re such a bitch sometimes, Wealth Watchers.

30/10   Fuck you, Wealth Watchers. You don’t even know what it’s like to be human.

30/10   Cash                Y6100              A gun and one bullet. And a can of coffee.

Okay, so my dark secret was that when it’s recorded every day the amount of coffee I consume terrifies me. Maybe that’s not so bad. I’m pretty sure Wealth Watchers has the power to distort whatever you spend money no to make it look like you’re off the wagon and out of control. As an experiment, try changing the word coffee to any of the following: ‘crystal meth’, ‘puppies’, ‘rice’, ‘baby food’. Do any of them make me seem less financially unhinged? No. That’s the power of Wealth Watchers! 

You can download it for free! Which is great because then you don’t have to add it to your list of expenses under the ‘severe depressing influences’ category.

Psychological WarHair

I view haircuts as a kind of psychological warfare.

My goal when I get a haircut is to have just enough hair removed that people don’t know whether I’ve even had a haircut or not. They then start to question their very grip on reality and I win. What do I win? Not telling. Psychological warfare.

But sometimes a maverick barber steps to my head and ruins all my plans. Barbers are living monuments to my necessity to learn Japanese.

A couple of days ago I strolled into the barbershop and was ushered straight to the cutting chair. Bad sign, I thought to myself. No time to kick back and read the combination of golf and porn that passes for men’s magazines around these parts.

Nevertheless, I took the chair. The barber made a pinching motion and said “little?”

“Yes,” I agreed in perfectly Japanese-accented English. “Just a little would be great.”

Let the Wild Ride Begin.

What happened next can only be described as hair rape. I didn’t want it, but by Christ I was going to take it.

See, what I had failed to understand when the barber pinched his fingers together was that he was indicating how much hair he intended to leave on my head. My head is now cold. I look like I just joined the armed forces. But Japan doesn’t even have armed forces, so I look like I just joined a kumi taiso group (the next closest thing). My hair now looks less like psychological warfare and more like actual warfare.

I guess my katakana English just wasn’t good enough. But because I am a paranoiac, I must also consider the possibility that he understood me perfectly and did what he did as some kind of… Psychological warfare?

Well played, sneaky barber. Well played. This round goes to you.

Pirish Night

Disclaimer for the Irish: this post has big words that you may misconstrue as insulting. No I won’t tell you what misconstrue means. Anyway, it’s all rather complimentary, ok? No need to ask anyone about it, just take my word for it.

Glossary: janken is the Japanese term for the ‘paper, rock, scissors’ game .

A Brief History of Irish Pirates

One thing I have always wondered about pirates: who thought it would be a good idea to combine heavy drinking with the high seas?

There’s only one type of people I know who are A) foolish enough to completely discount the ravaging effects of seasickness and B) do it for the love of drink. Those people are the Irish.

It’s true that you don’t hear a lot about the Irish as highly desirable recruits for the pirate lifestyle. In all fairness, your average Irish pirate spends most of each day a-pirating sleeping off last night’s bender in the crow’s nest.

The most famous recorded tale of an Irish pirate is that of “Bleary” O’Leary, said to have the alcohol tolerance of a bull elephant and the mental wherewithal of a broiled barnacle. Rumour has it that his breath alone caused the mysterious death of thirteen of his ship’s parrots before the Captain caught on and had him banned from bunking below decks. He met his ignoble end during a robbery at the hands of his own pistol, too drunk to realise that pistols don’t have hands and, more importantly, that he was holding his gun the wrong way around. On the matter of O’Leary’s death, the Captain was quoted as saying, “Thank Christ. Them parrots is bloody expensive.”

Phew!

As you can see, the link between pirates and the Irish is tenuous at best. So you can imagine my consternation when I was invited to a Pirish Night, ‘Pirish’ being a portmanteau of the words ‘Pirate’ and ‘Irish’. My secondary concern of how you can possibly hope to survive a party in honour of a people who celebrate the news they are pregnant with an open bar paled in comparison to my main concern. I asked the host what the hell an Irish pirate actually wears and was instructed to ‘wear our own interpretation’. That’s like telling a bull to go fetch its own China. Oh, I’ll interpret it, I thought. I will interpret the shit out of this bitch.

No one ever became a Pirate overnight

In the process of creating the ultimate Pirish day extravaganza, I was going to need a few things:

A crew

A flag

A costume

I immediately struck the flag off my list because I got invited to this thing the night before and it seemed like it would be hard work. So I needed an extra-awesome crew and costume! If I was in an actual pirate crew, my wife would be the cook. So she’s in. Pirate crews also usually have some kind of cute animal crew member, so we called in the Randy the randy monkey (Randy). The crew was assembled!

Finding a costume of any kind should have been easy, because Japanese people dress in one of two ways: 1) like a salaryman, and 2) like an insane clown. But where they find their demented outfits is a mystery. So we went to a 100 yen shop and loaded up on piratical goodies. It was agreed that the idea of an Irish pirate crew was ridiculous. A ship entirely crewed by the Irish would have run aground six minutes into its maiden voyage. So we chose to emulate a nation that was renowned for their quality pirates. The Chinese! This had everything to do with the Chinese reputation for incredible piracy, and nothing to do with the fact that happy coats came in a variety of bawdy colours at this particular store. Next was weaponry. Historically, Chinese pirates used firecrackers and Irish pirates used their own singing when committing dastardly high seas crimes, but both of those things were currently out of stock at our 100 yen store. So we got a sword with an extendable handle and a bazooka that fired confetti. Much of a muchness. Since we had such kickass weapons we were obviously going to be extremely infamous extremely quickly. We needed masks to protect our beautiful faces and our identities. We also needed armour to protect us from envious sneak attacks, mutinies, ninjas and suchlike. I threw a Somalian influence in on that one, opting for a white golf glove and matching white shin guard. I felt massively fortified, but everyone just said I looked like a Michael Jackson video. We’ll see who’s laughing when they get mutinied in the shin!

We topped the whole pirate crew ensemble off with three plastic rods with janken gestures on the end of them. With a janken rod each, the janken pirate crew was ready for action!

I was scissors.

No one ever sees it coming.

The Irish Pirate Party of the Century!

Then we went to the party. We forgot the confetti bazooka, but just passed that off as being terribly Irish of us. Then we went home, because my 40 inch widescreen isn’t gonna watch itself.

In retrospect, perhaps the most Irish thing I did in this whole adventure was to completely forget to write and publish this blog until a month after it happened!

I wonder what next year’s Pirish Day will bring?

In honour of my most fervently Irish reader.

Who is so drunk right now.

Japanising Reality TV

The premise: 20 contestants – all executives or creators of reality tv shows – travel to a secluded island for the chance to win $1 million dollars and marry a millionaire and have a recording contract for one poorly-received album. BUT! There’s a twist: it’s all a sham, and what they’re actually competing for is the chance to not be shot in the face in each show’s ‘revolver ceremony’. BUT! DOUBLE TWIST! At the end of the show all contestants still get shot in the face. And the TV viewership wins.

Ever since my friend Meggy and I created this, the ultimate reality TV show premise, I have known that making reality TV shows is both my destiny and the first step in the eventual destruction of all mankind. But you can’t climb to the top of the mountain without stopping at a few base camps first. The world is not ready for ‘Headshot Island’ just yet. So I’m going to start smaller by adapting reality TV for the Japanese audience.

I’m not positing anything revolutionary here, because a country that already has ideas for reality TV like ‘give a chimpanzee a Bulldog and some overalls’ already have their finger on the pulse of what makes great television.

What?

I’m not even suggesting anything original, because that never works. Instead, I’m just going to take existing popular reality TV shows and Japanise them. Hold onto your overalls, monkey!

The Amazing Race (To Get a Seat on the Morning Train)

The premise: Contestants will take part in a madcap race to... get a seat on the morning train. I guess that was pretty self-explanatory.

Why it will be a hit: It will allow the Japanese people to showcase the incredible bursts of speed that they are capable over a 20 metre distance. I honestly don’t know why more Japanese people aren’t winning the short range track events at the Olympic Games. I think it’s because they’re confused about there not being a chair to sit in at the end. You know that saying about getting between a lioness and her cubs? It’s the exact same thing as getting between a Japanese person and an empty train seat: however it all shakes out, someone is losing an eye.

Welcome to Japanese Shangri-La, a train with all empty seats!

(Monthly Pay) Survivor

 The premise: Give foreigners a massive stack of yen, a currency that seems a lot like Monopoly money, and challenge them to still have some left at the end of the month.

I'm rich bi-aatch! Ahahahahahahahaha!
(7 mins later) ...Holy God. Why did I spend 16,000 yen on a lollipop making machine?!

Why it will be a hit: The only thing people love to see more than people succeed on reality TV is watching people fail. Watch as contestants hilariously overspend within hours of receiving their pay. Then continue to watch, because after that shit gets real. Watch as their human survival instinct kicks in. Watch as they stop going out, then stop eating, then finally – Gasp! - stop drinking.

Extreme Japanese Makeover, Gyaru Edition

My wife and I once watched a young Japanese lady absolutely decimate herself while riding home on the midnight train. She was one of that special breed of Japanese ladies who apply the gyaru ‘more is better’ philosophy to things like hair and makeup. Basically, a gyaru girl is the closest you can come to having sex with a poodle without being in serious legal trouble. This girl on the train was wearing so much makeup, and had so much hair piled atop her head that she could have been an 80-year-old man under it all. And if that’s not an attractive image then I don’t know what is. In the end, she fell for the oldest trick in the book. You know how every sweater has that one thread that sends the whole house of cards tumbling down? That thread is like your jersey's cyanide pill final solution. This girl had a hair that was just like that, and she couldn't stop fucking with it. If she had just left that damn hair alone, her whole bees nest follicle party wouldn't have come tumbling down like a cow on stairs. It was the only safe way to watch a train wreck happen while on a train.

Anyway, we’re here to talk about reality TV. Don’t get me off topic!

The premise: 16 young, aspiring pretty girls come to Japan and get caked with makeup by Japanese face-ruining experts. We then cut the newly slathered and wigged ladies loose on the streets of major Metropolitan areas. The last one to be mistaken for a prostitute is eliminated!

Why it will succeed: Seriously, these girls go all out. I mean, did you somehow skip that last picture? I’ve seen toddlers who have gotten into Mum’s makeup by accident do a better job. 700 years of woman’s magazines have thrived on showing other women sucking at putting on makeup for the amusement of the average, bitchy woman, and this show would be just as successful.

Bring on the moneys.

A Lifetime of Tiny Ear Punches

The closest place to our apartment where you can buy food is the Coop.

Fact: This is about 83 times bigger than the Coop near our place.

That’s what it’s called, the Coop. Not as in ‘chicken coop,’ although that would make as much sense because you can get eggs there. Rather, it appears to be short for ‘cooperative’, because you can buy some kind of shares in it if you want. I choose to contribute by giving them most of my money in exchange for vegetables and milk instead. Interestingly, because of the way their language is structured the Japanese don’t enunciate each syllable. Instead they treat the double O like a long vowel, so you end up with a drawn out cooooope.

But that’s not even close to the weirdest thing about the Coop.

The weirdest thing about the Coop is the music. The word ‘purgatory’ was invented to describe the Coop’s choice of music. On a never-ending, interminable hellish loop the same 40 seconds tune plays, forever. Actually tune might be being too generous. I think they are actually playing the chorus of every Daft Punk song simultaneously and backwards. If you listen really hard at 0:27 you can kind of hear John Lennon whispering that Paul is dead and it was this song that killed him.

"Because I'm Jesus, Paul. That's why."

Before the end of my very first visit to the Coop I hated that song, the person who wrote it, the people who played it for recording, and the world that would allow such behaviour to continue despite the 1989 UN Convention against Ear Torture that was enacted to try and pre-empt Daft Punk and failed spectacularly.

But I was only in there for 10 minutes! What happens to the people who work there every single day?!

Let’s look at this from another perspective: I used to work for an electronics retailer. My job was to convince people to spend more money than they had planned to on stuff they probably didn’t need. So Christmas is a natural fit, right? So natural, in fact, that they would break out the Christmas carols in the middle of November. That’s 8.75% of the working year spent listening to the same CD of Christmas Carols. Hamburgers are fantastic, but if you eat them every day they’ll kill you. The same is true of Christmas Carrols. I used to like Christmas Carols. But the human ear is only designed to handle Christmas Carols in small doses. For the years that I worked at this place, by the time Christmas actually arrived my Christmas spirit was so shriveled and embittered that I had a hard time even mustering up enough Christmas spirit to eat 4kg of ham. And now whenever I meet somebody named Carol I have an urgent desire to stab myself in the ears.

Me, circa November 17th.

So that’s an example of what six weeks of musical torture can do to a human being. I just want to point out one more time that there are people who work in the Coop for their job and that this song has nothing to do with Christmas, except when it’s Christmas – then it becomes their Christmas song.

Let’s say you work for the Coop for 10 years. By my calculations, you have heard the Coop song 68 billion times and you hate the entire world. It’s a fair assumption. But here’s where it gets really trippy. Most Coop employees are some of the most cheerful individuals I have ever met. How is this even possible? Occam’s razor suggests the simplest explanation is usually the correct one. So: brainwashing.

I suspect that through a combination of musical science and maybe drug-laced rice, ex-ninjas are retrenched to work for the Coop. The Coop song keeps these employees docile and helps them complete their work in a timely and efficient manner (they have 40 seconds to complete each task). If the song should ever stop for any reason, Coop staff will probably tweak out and snap the necks of every customer in the store. I think the urge lies dormant just beneath the surface even now. One of the employees at our local Coop thought my wife looked tired and indicated that she could do with a massage. By demonstrating on me. Now the word massage can have different connotations depending on how much of pervert you are, so let me be clear: when I say massage I mean Spetznaz Death Grip Shoulder Grapple. There was no happy ending. There was an only an unhappy ending, preceeded by an unhappy start and an unhappy middle. This guy massaged me to within an inch of my life. It took him 1.7 seconds. I think he orchestrated the whole thing just to send me a message.

Well, message received, buddy. I will continue to shop at your store out of fear for my life. But I am wearing my iPod every time. I just don’t trust that song.

Your Questions Answered, with BigMrJosh: Mascots?

I called my Dad a few days back and he asked me, “What’s the deal with the Japanese and all their cute mascots?”
It’s a good question that I don’t really know the answer to. But if you think not knowing the answer is going to stop me from answering anyway then, frankly, you must be new to this blog.
Nice of you to drop by.


Cute Sells
Girls love cute stuff. They are literally unable to resist saying ‘aww’ when they see a puppy sleeping, a kitten playing or a baby dribbling. It’s not their fault; it’s simply a result of having such a high sugar, spice and all things nice content in their bodies. They’re a slave for cute.

This picture alone is enough to explode the brain of a normal woman.

Boys are more complicated. Show them any of the above examples and their first thought is probably to wonder how it would look either on fire or shot from a cannon.
But that’s not to say boys don’t like cute things. They do. That’s why boys like girls. Have you ever seen an un-cute girl? Who are they for?!
Some guys try to be staunch and they’re all like, “I don’t like cute stuff ‘cause I’m a man, yo!” (I think staunch guys say yo. I don’t know why anyone says yo.)
Listen, staunch guys: I think it’s been pretty well established that I am one of the manliest men on the planet. I’m so manly that when other women see my wife their thighs stop working out of sympathy. But that doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate a turtle with a magnifying glass telling me to break glass in case of emergency.
Stop fronting, yo.

Unemplyoment is for nations full of pussies.
Japan wants everyone to have a job, or at least pretend they do. And obviously in a country with such a huge demand for mascots there must be a similarly huge demand for… mascoteers? Mascot Facilitation Engineers? I don’t know what they’re called but we needs ‘em!
To become a Mascoteer (A word I have decided I'm in love with), you must undertake a grueling course of study at one of the seven institutions created around Japan specifically to train accredited Mascoteers. (Tee hee)

Here is your syllabus:

MCTR101  Drawing Animals

MCTR204  Drawing Hats

MCT311  Putting it all together.

Employment Panda says 'No!' to unemployment!

The Power of Mascots
Let’s face it, if the Japanese spent half as much time making robots that could use knives as they did making squirrels who can tell you to go to the dentist, my Japanese language would be a lot better than it is now. That’s because I would have been speaking it since birth.
Before I got here I thought knife-bots were one of Japan’s primary industries, thanks to Astro Boy and Mega Man. As it is now though, Japan is mostly responsible for assembling your cars and creating all the world's awesome cartoons and video games. There are two reasons why Japan has yet to crush the rest of the world under the robot heel of their robot justice (and, spoiler: neither is because they can’t.)

First Reason: Too Obvious.
Everyone pretty much expects robots, and that’s exactly why Japan won’t do it. If you challenge a Japanese person to a knife fight, they will bring a maid’s outfit and a baseball bat made up to look like Doraemon. That’s thinking outside the square. If you type rules into google translate and change it to Japanese it gives you the kanji for surprise attack.

Even their mascots defy explanation. This is KenKen.

Hi.

What do you think KenKen is the mascot for? After-School care? Nappies? A fruity snack? WRONG!
KenKen is the mascot for giving blood. What does an undersized possum have to do with giving blood? A more salient question would be what does KenKen want with your blood? What does a fat cow want with lush, green grass? KenKen wants your blood to slake his ancient thirst. KenKen lives in the shadows and is responsible for the deaths of 16,000 infants. KENKEN. MUST. FEED.
Pray he never finds you.

*Burp*

Second Reason: The Threat Factor.
Ever since World War 2, the Japanese haven’t been allowed to do anything that seems like it could be even remotely threatening. This is the nation who gave the world ninjas, samurais, kamikaze bombers and tsunamis. This is the country whose rich sports day traditions developed from the original idea of having students stand back to back and then try to punch each other in the face. The T part of a Japanese person’s DNA stands for threatening, and their whole genetic makeup is entirely T because it kicked the shit out of A,D and G until they ran away.
So when you tell the hardest nation on the planet to not be threatening, they pull the ultimate mindfuck on you: they take it insanely far in the other direction. Hence you get pink rabbits advertising gasoline. And do you know what? It’s terrifying.