New Computer

I basically use my computer all day everyday so I seem to burn through them pretty quickly. Over the last few months my silver G4 Powerbook started to whine and eventually the CD drive died. Actually, it somehow simultaneously lost the ability to read CDs and to eject them at the same time. The only way to get the CDs out was with a credit card. Credit card insertion, however, seemed to have no effect on the machine's ability to read the disks.

For awhile I toyed with the idea of getting a Japanese Mac. I went down to the Apple Store a few times and tired them out. Everything was fine except one or two keys were in different places and I couldn't for the life of me find the open quote mark. (Maybe this explains why Japanese people so often enclose their quotes in English with two closing marks.) Eventually, however, I decided to special order a Mac with a US keyboard. This time, contrary to my usual practice, I didn't buy the top of the line model. My old Mac already did everything I needed and the current mid-range models blows it away.


It was a typical Japanese affair. They delivered the computer to the front door of my apartment a few days later and I handed them a huge wad of cash.

The transition between computers was painless. There's a special function for updating from your old Mac and I used this. It imported my home directory and all my applications, preferences, everything. In less than an hour I had my work environment exactly as I wanted it and everything now worked twice as fast and looked a bit better. This was the fastest computer upgrade of my life.

Below is new style of vending machines that are popping up at some of the bigger stations. The label in blue reads "Natural Disaster Response Style Vending Machine" (saigai-taiougata-jidouhanbaiki, 災害対応型自動販売機). The red line above this informs you that in the event of a natural disaster the contents will be free. It does so in a sort of cryptic style of Kanji abbreviation which is perfectly intelligible when you look at it, but if you just said it to someone they would have no idea what you meant.

Strange Signs

When I first moved to Japan, I was collecting passages of strange English, but this was too large a project and it quickly got boring. Now, I'm just taking pictures of weird signs I see around town.

You see these ominous signs on a lot of the public ashtrays around town in front of the convenience stores and whatnot. Notice how the smoke has morphed into a "stalker." The English is neither a literal nor literary translation but it gets the point across.


The other day I was in a ramen shop and they had these large vessels full of ice water on each table. The vessel itself was called a "Double cock keeper." On the side of each of the Double cock keepers was a device called a "Peacock." As the label says, the Peacock can be folded out as a stand for paper cups. In this shop, however, as usual everyone got their own cup, so we could serve ourselves all the ice water we wanted straight from the Double cock keeper with no need for the Peacock.


In Osaka, by law one has to separate one's recycling and bring out the right stuff on the right day. Since, most apartments are fairly small, you can buy all kinds of bins to help make this easier. Here's one that they sell at the Loft, which can apparently be put to other uses as well. What do you put?


This bed linen is also found at Loft, a great chain with huge store fronts at every major train station.. Loft clearly loves English, but somehow can't find room in it's budget to hire any of the poor English teachers to take a quick look over its ad copy. Nevertheless, for all my mocking, this is now my bed linen brand of choice. For one thing, I like the simplicity of the branding, and for another, I don't want there to be any more confusion of about the type of space I prefer to be sleeping in.



A friend of mine recently moved into Juso (十三), a notoriously sleazy neighborhood full of love hotels, pink shops, hostess bars, and Chinese massage girls working nearly every street corner. Here's the awning of a nearby love hotel. I'm not really sure what to make of it and I welcome any comments. The business about condoms is fairly straight forward, but what is A.A.A. in this context? As for injunction to get into a train, there was no locomotive theme to the hotel, so I don't know if it's some prison lingo or just totally off the hook.


This final sign is a common notice in the train stations around town. It tells you, in case you were in doubt about such things, that it is, indeed, a crime to molest people on the train. Actually, the first line is in Osaka-ben and then the rest is in standard Japanese. The word chikan (痴漢) can mean a molester in general, but in the context of a train station it means a groper. The sign reads something like "Molestation, No Way!" (chican akan!, チカン/アカン) "Molestation is a crime!" (chican wa hanzai desu, 痴漢は犯罪です！).

My Birthday

The cake that Mom and Pop sent me arrived on Friday, and I ate it with some friends on Saturday afternoon, in a heat that was so intense the pieces melted as we were holding them. As usual, somehow I was grumpy all day on my Birthday.

In the evening, I went to a restaurant in Umeda that's famous for its view. You can see why from this picture. The food was delicious and we ate it as the sun went down and the city began to light up. I finally began to cheer up as we ate.


Here you can see the top of the JR Osaka station, Yodobashi Camera (a gigantic electronics store), the Umeda Sky Building, and various industrial plants and skyscrapers. In the background, you see the Yodagawa and Juso.

Taishou Ward

Taishou Ward (大正区) is kind of like an industrial wasteland down near the ports except that there are actually a lot of residences there as well. I guess because the factories and dock yards are so ugly, you see a lot more people growing flowers on their verandas and on the sidewalks in front of their houses than in other areas of town.


Here's a big crane that separates piles of metal based on a set of criteria that is not always evident to the untrained eye. This is kind of representative of Taishou Ward, but the thing to remember is that Osaka is actually a huge industrial city and the bright lights and bling of the downtown areas are supplied by these outer Wards. The bentos that millions of people eat every day for lunch are prepared every morning in suburbs like Taishou.


The Ward is actually a collection of islands and peninsulas and there are free pedestrian ferries that you can use to cross the channels. Over the weekend, some friends and I wend on a ride around the Ward basing our route on the ferry terminals.


A few of the ferry routs are longer, but most of them just cut across a narrow channel.


In order to build the freeway bridges over the channels high enough for the big ships, they have these crazy circular ramps so the vehicles can ascend at a gradual slope.


This one near the ferry terminal has a baseball field in the middle of it. There was no game when I took the picture, but at other times I have seen little league games here, with the kids playing, the dads yelling and the cars driving around in circles. (The sign asks you to please refrain from crossing through the middle of the grounds.)


There are these nets to protect pedestrians from getting hit by fly balls that are tipped back over the home plate, but nothing at all to protect the cars from fly balls or home runs. Actually, it's kind satisfying to think of hitting a home run as knocking a ball into a freeway.


Osaka was one of the first ports opened for trade with foreign countries and the ports and loading docks of south Osaka are still a major thoroughfare for imports. This green bridge like thing is apparently a storm gate that can be lowered in case of a hurricane to prevent the high waters from sending waves deep into the city.

Another Riot in Kamagasaki

Officially, Kamagasaki (釜ヶ崎) doesn't exist anymore , Kamagasakand you wont find the name on a current map of Osaka, but that's what the locals still call the large slum in the northeast corner of Nishinari-ku (西成区).


Kamagasaki has traditionally been a day labor's neighborhood and the local hotels have average nightly rates of 1,500円, but the population is aging and even at this price many of them can't afford a room and sleep in the streets. The area is famous in Japan as the largest slum in the country, with high homelessness rates and a long history of intermittent rioting.

A couple weeks ago, a day laborer was picked up by police detectives in one of the local shoutengai, taken to the police station, beaten in the face and hung upside down from ropes. When he was released the next day with no charges, he went and told his friends what had happened. In response, about 300 workers surrounded the police station and demanded that the police chief apologize and that the defectives be fired.

This lead to four or five days of rioting. The other night, a friend and I decided to ride down and check it out. It was raining pretty hard that night, and the riots had quieted down.


I took these shots while I was riding, so they're pretty shaky. A few of the pictures that I thought would be the best didn't come out, because I wasn't actually looking at the view finder while I rode.


After we rode through Kamgasaki we headed back to Shinsekai, where Biliken, the god of things-as-they-ought-to-be, is always watching with his malevolent grin.

Not too sweet...

Here's some Japanese junk food that I picked up at the local convenience store. The stock in the convenience stores here is seasonal and for some reason dark chocolate is not as well stocked in the spring as in the winter. I was looking for dark chocolate so a was reading all the packages to see what they had.


These chocolate almonds aren't dark but they were still pretty good. I bought them because they have a great tag line. It's ad-speak so it's a bit tricky to translate but it basically says, "Not too sweet is too awesome" (ama-suginakute uma-sugiru, 甘すぎなくてうますぎる). Can you imagine trying to move candy with that line in North America?

May Critical Mass

It's hard for people in Osaka to understand what Critical Mass is, or why we do it, or that it's even a thing. Jon had the idea to make a flag and this helped a bit.

He brought a flag and some supplies and before the ride they drew something up with a bike rider and I put an old school crest on it and we gave it to one of the messengers to carry.

Probably everyone still had no idea what the Mass was or why we do it, but we had the flag so they knew it was a thing. Even the cabbies kept their distance a bit and didn't lay on the horn as much. They were probably thinking, "Woa... Those guys have a flag, I guess something must be going on."



Actually, I really have no idea what the cabbies were thinking but it was the funnest Mass yet, so the flag is doing something right.