やった！
「iPhone」について
2008年6月4日 – ソフトバンクモバイル株式会社この度、ソフトバンクモバイル株式会社は、今年中に日本国内において「iPhone」を発売することにつきまして、アップル社と契約を締結したことを発表いたします。
SOFTBANK MOBILE Corp. today announced it has signed an agreement with Apple® to bring the iPhone™ to Japan later this year.
Why am I so happy? Because my corporate phone is a Softbank, so I should legally be able to change my crappy Sharp phone whose battery cannot hold more than 10min of conversation anymore for a snazzy 3G iPhone and still have my company pay for it. :)
Found this video on Digg, looks like Yoyogi Park. This guy is a million times more impressive than all those stupid jugglers and beanbag fanatics you find in such parks.
Yes, there’s only one crowd I despise more than beanbaggers, it’s the drum players. That’s probably the main reason why I never hang out at Yoyogi Park…
Taken from the Korean Air lounge at Narita Airport on my way to Thailand earlier this month.
More cool Dental Health info from my Japanese health insurance society. Coming back from Golden Week vacation, I find the following letter on my desk at work:
Information for Dental Checkup and Treatment:
Announcing the “Let’s leave 20 teeth at age 80” campaign
Aren’t your decayed teeth or pyorrhea getting worse while you are unaware ofr them? Health Insurance society has been sending application forms of dental checkup to the insured persons in numeric order of Insurance Card.
This time your insurance card number is in range of an applicable object: you are entitled to a complete dental checkup including teeth, gum and supporting bone X-rays at 10% of the medical care cost.
This is actually a pretty good deal, apart from the goofy tag-name for the campaign, and I’ve signed up for a long overdue checkup on the cheap.
3rd year in Japan and each year I was on a busines trip somewhere for early April: the time of the 花見 parties. This time I was home and got to drink myself silly on a tarp under the cherry blossoms.
On the border of the 目黒川, I got to take some nice photos with the president of the 写真倶楽部.
2 weeks ago I went to Hiroshima for the weekend with my girlfriend. We had dinner (and innumerable drinks) with a friend of hers on Saturday night in the 本通 area at what must be the restaurant with the most perfect レバー焼き鳥 I’ve ever tasted.
Anyways, I received as omiyage the following which made me laugh a lot:
It’s a set of senbei rice-crackers inscribed with examples of 広島弁, the local Hiroshima dialect. Whenever we’re in Hiroshima, my girlfriend reverts to her roots and drops the Tokyo accent she acquired, especially when she’s with her high-school friends. I’m usually totally lost…
Shamelessly stolen from Japan Probe, but it’s too mind-blowing not to spread the word about it.
Last Saturday in the early afternoon, we had a huge dust storm all over the 関東 area. It started out as a very nice day, sunny 15°C, I went for grocery shopping in just a light sweater. Then around 2PM, the sky suddenly became dark, great gusts of wind started whistling around the corners of our building, we could see the road signs and city lights shaking in the street and parked bicycles being blown away. The sky became dark yellowish / light brown as the huge dust cloud passed over us. Then it was over in 15 minutes.
I couldn’t take a good photo as my girlfriend wouldn’t let me open the windows or open the door to go outside (we just cleaned up the apartment, so letting all this dust come in was definitely not a good idea), so I got this photo of the event from surround’s photostream on Flickr.
Apparently, these dust storms happen often in the Kanto plain at the turn of spring. This huge plain all around Tokyo is heavily farmed and parched fields, from the very dry winters we have here, go up in dust with the strong winds marking the coming of spring.
Walked around 表参道 yesterday visiting interior design shops, looking for cool lamps.
Nice shops to check out:
The results for the 日本語能力試験, more commonly known as JLPT 2008, should be getting in everyone’s mailbox in the imminently and it shows:
Visits to my blog post of receiving the results last year have been spiking in the past week.
Good news: a colleague of mine got it in the mail this morning before coming to work, so most people in Japan should have it tonight or tomorrow.
Bad news: the people at the JLPT organization are mail nazis (not delivering the papers if your name is not on your mailbox, imposing crazy processes to let them know you changed address) and since I moved just before taking the test there is a pretty good chance that I will never receive the damn results.
Today, February 3rd, is the day of Setsubun in Japan. As we live in a new place, my girlfriends mother told her we had to start on the right foot and follow the good old traditions to bring us luck.
On this day, which marks the turning point between winter and spring, you have to kick the 鬼 or demons out your house and bring the 福 or good fortune in. This is done by having someone dress up as an 鬼 and throwing 福豆 at them while chanting 「鬼は外！福は内！」 which is a whole bunch of fun.
Then you put a 厄よけ out your door to ward off any evil spirits that would like to come back in. It’s some sort of mistletoe-like bouquet on which you stick fish heads, the smell of which is supposed to scare demons.
Last July I wrote about a popular Japanese webservice that built an image of your brain out of your name. Everyone at work and on TV was talking about it. The concept was even copied overseas (replacing the kanjis with emoticons).
This weekend I saw on TV another of those websites that you know everyone will talk about. Its name is 住所パワー which aims at calculating your “Address Power” from the number and proximity of restaurants, schools, train stations, etc.
My address, even though I live out in the relative boondocks, 20 minutes from 池袋 – the closest station on the Yamanote line – into 埼玉県, scored a nice 3,321 points and is ranked A-class.
Here are the results by criterion, with the number of shop and the distance to the closest one (I added the translations). I probably owe my good score to being extremely close to the station and across the street from a supermarket on one side and a mall on the other.
Note that the number of Love Hotels and 風俗 – basically any kind of shop/bar/club/salon related to the sex industry – comes as a criterion, although they probably need a broader databases because there are at least 2 dozen hostess bars/キャバクラ in a 200m circle around my place that should have gotten me a lot more points…
January sees its share of administrative tasks for the new year that just started. So I received some new forms from my office’s executive assistant and as usual the English information sheet is of great help:
Special Tax Credit
Inform of special tax credit (deduction of housing loan) system like house loan etc. of residence tax. It comes to be able to deduct the amount of a special deduction like the house loan etc. that were not able to be deducted from the income tax is able to deduct from the residence tax in 2008 fiscal year.
Okay… As usual I’m going to stamp the paper with my hanko and give it back praying that I have not signed over my soul to the devil…
I just received the new Health Insurance Bulletin from my company and we have a new installment of my favorite healthy advice series about dental hygiene:
A tip about teeth
Winter is here.
Do your teeth feel sensitive when you bite into something cold?
It might be a gapalong the line between your teeth and gums.
This happens when you brush your teeth with a strong scrubbing motion from left to right.
Brushing this way can wear down your teeth.
Try visiting your dental clinic to ask which method of brushing is best suited to your teeth, before they become damaged.
Japanese people must really have weak dentitions, seeing as most of the toothbrushes you find in the stores here are softer than mohair, I really doubt you could damage your gums with that. Not as funny as the last one where they we’re looking to cash in on any opportunity to remove my teeth…
