How many countries in the world have infomercials on TV for whale bacon?

-1 Japan

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Last year I bought Beth a bike for Christmas–a Surly Long Haul Trucker (in green). Why did buy Beth that? It was because she wants to go on rides and tours with me, so I figured it would be prudent to start getting her set up and used to riding.

But there was also a secondary reason… I wanted that bike for myself. This don’t mean I was buying it in her name but going to gank it later; what it means is that I wanted to buy a bike but my current bike at the time, a Trek 7.3 FX was working relatively well and I couldn’t justify buying a new bike for myself, but I could certainly justify buying it for Beth.

Fast forward a few months and my desire to get a LHT increased to the point where I made an agreement with myself that I would buy it but only after selling my Trek. Fortunately for me, a week or two later I had found a buyer and had the cash in my pocket.

Buying the complete version of the Long Haul Trucker (versus buying the frame and selecting components yourself) costs $1,095 if you buy it in the USA or you can buy it in Japan for the equivalent of $1,600 US. I wasn’t a fan of that $500 extra for buying the bike from a store here, so I just ordered it online from the States and accepted the $250 in shipping.

Two weeks later it was sitting in many pieces in my living room and a few days later I had it fully assembled in time to take it on its inaugural voyage to Takizakura (lit. “Waterfall Cherry Tree”), a 1,000+ year-old cherry tree about 60 km southeast of Fukushima city.

Takizakura is the tree on the right. Ignore the people.

Though really, it felt more like I was going to see a huge crowd of people that a tree happened to get in the way of. The line of cars to get to the tree was at least 5 km long from the direction I came from, though luckily being on a bike allows you to ignore all of that and pass the gridlocked cars quite easily.

And that’s the story of getting a brand new bike and taking its first trip to see a tree that’s been around since… well, from a European standpoint, since the middle of the Middle Ages.

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For a few months now I’ve been taking a pannier with me to the grocery store, as using the store’s disposable plastic bags is extremely wasteful. At the checkout lane there are little cards that you put in your basket that say you’ll be using your own bag so that the checkout lady (yes, always a lady) doesn’t give you any bags. I really only see about 5% of the people in the store with their own bags.

About 2/3rds of the time, the checkout lady would take the card out of my basket, scan my items, then give me bags, which I would then give back. Using the cards ended up being a pretty futile gesture. Some of this I can chalk up to her just forgetting, but sometimes it… wasn’t. For example, the best conversation I had went like this:

Lady: *puts bags in my basket after taking the ‘no bag’ card out of my basket*
Me: “It’s ok, I don’t need those. I put the ‘no bag’ card in my basket.”
Lady: “But that’s for people who have their own bag.”
Me: “I don’t need the bags. I have my own.”
Lady: ……
Me: *points to bag hanging from my shoulder* “I’m going to put them in this bag.”
Lady: …… *takes back bags*

So today I was happy to see that as of today the new prefecture-wide policy of having supermarkets charge three yen (about three cents) per bag has gone into effect. Now that previous number of 5% of people bringing their own bags suddenly flipped to about 95%. Apparently that three yen makes a huge, even surprising, difference in how much it’s worth for people to use their own bags.

Even better, where the old ‘no bag’ cards used to be, new ‘please give me a bag, I’ll pay for it’ cards are in their place. There shall be no more bags given when I explicitly ask for none!

Yeah, it’s not very exciting, but my life is made up of these small little victories, and other (hopefully) small little defeats.

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My original plan for Golden Week this year was to take my bike on a bus up north to Aormori, ride a loop Lake Towada then head back to Fukushima. That would have been 550 km over five days.

Unfortunately, while out cycling on Wednesday my right knee got a sudden sharp pain that flares up whenever I start to do any sort of serious cycling. No worries though, I decided to modify my plan and shorten my trip down to about 120 km, but instead of cycling I’ll be walking.

The new plan has me going from the station about 30 km southwest of the lake, walking to the lake and doing an almost loop, then heading to a different city’s train station about 40 km to the southeast of the lake.

I’ll see how this goes.

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Here’s some information on the days of the week that those with a cursory knowledge of Japanese may find interesting.

Now, these are the days of the week in Japanese (literal translation of kanji in parenthesis):
月曜日 (Day of the Moon) = Monday
火曜日 (Day of Fire) = Tuesday
水曜日 (Day of Water) = Wednesday
木曜日 (Day of Wood) = Thursday
金曜日 (Day of Gold) = Friday
土曜日 (Day of Dirt) = Saturday
日曜日 (Day of the Sun) = Sunday

Long after I learned the days of the week, I learned the names of the planets in the Solar System (literal translation of the kanji in parenthesis):
水星 (Water Planet) = Mercury
金星 (Gold Planet) = Venus
地球 = Earth
火星 (Fire Planet) = Mars
木星 (Wood Planet) = Jupiter
土星 (Dirt Planet) = Saturn
天王星 (Heavenly King Planet) = Uranus
海王星 (Water King Planet) = Neptune

This means that if you take the English names of the days and match them up with their planetary origins, you’ll have the Japanese names of the days.
Monday = Moon Day = 月曜日
Tuesday = Mars day = 火曜日
Wednesday = Mercury Day = 水曜日
Thursday = Jupiter Day = 木曜日
Friday = Venus Day = 金曜日
Saturday = Saturn Day = 土曜日
Sunday = Sun Day = 日曜日

Once I realized that the days’ names in English and their Japanese counterparts have the same root meaning, it created an, “Oooooohhh!” kind of moment.

Anyway, there’s quite a bit of history behind all of this. If you feel so compelled as to read about it, here’s a section on Wikipedia I came across that’s a good start for further reading.

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FYI, the title and content of this post will make more sense for people who’ve studied Japanese for at least a week.

The title of this post is the current advertising slogan for Calpis. Long ago I came to terms with the amusing connotation of the beverage’s name in English, however this new slogan made me chuckle all over again.

Before I explain, here’s the commercial in question:

For those who still don’t get why I find this funny, the slogan is the aforementioned, 「カラダにピース」.
My native-English brain interprets this as either, “There’s piss on my body,” or “I’m going to piss on my body.”

That’s obviously not what they’re going for, but whatever… Clapis still tastes good whether there’s piss on my body or not.

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You’re not going to see post YouTube stuff here that I didn’t have a hand in somehow, but this video is too amazingly awesome to not post.

Last year I went to a sumo tournament at the Ryogoku Kokugikan. After that and watching sumo on TV quite a bit makes this that much more awesome.

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