Japan - Odds and Ends

One of the things we loved about Japan was the crazy signs. Sometimes we wanted to ask who they got to translate for them.

Yes, we tried some sweat. It wasn’t too bad. Kind of like a clear form of Gatorade.




Ever had “brend” coffee?



On the side of a water heater / kettle:



On the door of a public restroom – that had glass all around it and that you could see into!









Do you really want to shop here?







And our all-time favorite. This was in a menu at a noodle house:



And the Japanese have a huge sweet tooth. I’ve never been anywhere that I noticed so many chocolatiers, café’s and bakeries. And while they had some “low end” stuff like green tea, ginger, or even wasabi Kit-Kats most of the sweets were high-end gourmet type stuff.

This is a terrible photo, but it’s one of the chocolate shops in the Ginza district of Tokyo. Note the lighting, woodwork, and money that was put into this place and this was not unusual. Don’t go in there expecting to buy a $5 box of chocolates either. You might spend $5 on a piece of chocolate.



And these places were all over the place!! Department stores, airports, subways, you name it. All in all, I originally estimated an average of 1.5 chocolate shops per block in Tokyo. I now think that figure was too low.
I asked one guy why there were so many sweets and he said that the Japanese like to drink really strong green tea with the sweets so the tastes offset each other. I tried the tea and couldn’t drink it, but I don’t like tea. My g/f tried it and didn’t like it and she likes green tea. She said it tasted like “grass.” I thought she said it tasted like “ass” but as far I was concerned it was the same thing.





We also tried our hand at Pachinko, which is very big in Japan. It’s the equivalent of a Vegas slot machine and the places that have them are large and very noisy and crowded. We quickly found out that we sucked at it and decided we were better off trying out other things.



Other oddities…

Giant golden sperm:



Seriously, WTF?



Air fresheners?



And we never figured this one out even though it was quite popular:



A very frustrating Japanese keyboard…





And of course, Japanese money (not to scale):




What else…

The crows were huge and laughed at you with a “HA! HA!” type call instead of a “craw! Craw!” type call. I guess it’s the way they do it in Japan.

We only saw one begger in the entire two weeks we were there even though we saw plenty of poor or homeless people.

Cell phone charms were all the rage. People would be carrying $300 tiny little cell phones and have 5lbs of crap hanging off of them.