Men in boxes and Women in Bubbles

AM


Least: At about 9:40am, it finally dawned on me just what I find so irritating about cooking shows on Japanese TV. It wasn't the awful stunned-mullet oishis, the whispering, the overuse of corn, or the cruelty to sea animals. I registered my strongest jolt at the sight of close-ups showing food being held, eaten or prodded by utensils. The extreme close-up shows the quivering and the pointless moving about of food in pans. I can't answer why it annoys me but, now that I've finally identified it, TV cooking shows may be unwatchable.



Most: At nearly 11:40am, I read a BBC News article about the horrors of the economic situation in Japan. In the shops it is pretty clear that things are not going well. Many shops are lowering prices to try an attract customers. In many larger shops, I have seen how the salesmen are sweating on their next sale - sometimes there seems to be more salesmen than customers. Just up the road hundreds of homeless men are sleeping in cardboard boxes or scavenging for aluminium cans while the Tezukayama locals are driving around in Mercedes'. The article warned thayt Japan could be on the brink of another big fall - luckily my company seems to attract the very wealthy - the rich tend to stay rich and the mirage at work will continue.

PM

Least: At close to 5:40pm, I recieved a chirpy phone call from headquarters. Within a minute, I was heartlity agreeing to do an early shift tomorrow morning in Kusatsu. When the caller said it was 'four stops from Kyoto' I had little idea that the school is four stops passed Kyoto. After this call, every new minute was just another step closer to getting up early to travel to an unfamiliar school, filled with unfamiliar staff and students. It made the rest of the pm far less interesting.

Most: At about 8:15pm, I was bored enought to be telling the staff at work about the be-tattooed crown at Freestyle Outro'6. I was mildly astonished to find that they were shocked at the thought of a thousand Japanese people with tatoos gathering in the one place. This was particularly surprising because one of the two staff claims to be into punk music and often speaks of her big nights on the tiles. It's hard to believe that the crowd down near the docks last Saturday night was so radical as to be invisible to the nearly mainstream. I'm not sure whether these shocked colleagues are far more conservative than I thought, or they're just living in a 1950s bubble of bubblegum music and culture.