Yesterday, I had a chance to visit the Kokuyo live office in Kasumigaseki. Kokuyo is one of the largest stationary manufacturers in Japan. They also produce office furniture and more recently began consulting for how to improve office environment and productivity. Their head office doubles as a show room displaying some of their “open office” concepts in a real working setting. It was an very eye opening tour and afterwards they gave me some nice stationary items.

1. First is a Campus Notebook paracuruno that is beveled two ways at the edges to make it easier to flip through 2. Mekurin rings are a more fashionable alternative to those ugly rubber thimble things OLs use when they need to count cash or flip through thousands of pages 3. Punyo Punyo Pins are pins that have a rubber ring around the pin part which prevents you from pricking your finger when you pick up a bunch 4. Tamahocchi is an egg shape stapler with a rubber grip bottom that keeps it stable on your desk 5. Kadokeshipuchi is a small eraser that will always have a shape edge somewhere in case you need to do some precision erasing 6. A pen designed as part of the WILL (nothing really special about this)

Japan has lots of cool stationary stuff that make fun and practical souvenir alternatives. I think when I first came to Tokyo I spent a good part of my time looking at all the neat pens and stationary supplies they have. Make sure to check out the art/stationary supply shop Sekaido or the stationary floor at Tokyu Hands the next time you visit.

Somebody shoot me now!!! The ugly shoes are making their way into mainstream Japanese culture! I don’t care how comfortable these shoes are. Crocs are hideous. It’s ok for kids to wear these, I guess, but I saw a guy in a suit wearing them. I’m mean, c’mon people!! Now they have a very well designed shop in Venusfort in Odaiba and I’m afraid there were lots of people buying them. Anyways, it got me thinking about what the next footwear trend could be and decided that the common “uwabaki” 上履き could be exported overseas and become the NEXT BIG THING.

Uwabaki have already been immortalized in The Fast and Furious 3: Tokyo Drift. When that American guy arrives for his first day at a Japanese high school the teacher is yelling at him to wear his uwabaki.

They are basically cloth shoes with a rubber sole that students have to wear in school. When you arrive at school you take off your outside shoes and slip on some uwabaki. Not sure if the teachers have to wear them though. I’m never been inside a Japanese high school to find out. Can anyone tell me?

So which would you prefer? Crocs or Uwabaki? Both are ugly but uwabaki have that whole school-girl-in-sailor-uniform fetish thing attached to it so it scores more points with me.

If you follow any other Japan related blogs I’m sure you’ve heard that Billy Blanks was in Japan to promote his exercise DVD set Billy’s Bootcamp. They’ve been around on ShopJapan for quite a while but the phenomena has reached the proverbial tipping point and become a full blown craze. Perfect timing for his arrival. This week, I’ve overheard four different conversations about Billy’s Bootcamp in the office and several more while passing people in the street. Tonight, while I walked 300 metres from the convenience store to my house, I heard the DVDs being played from the windows of a couple homes. I’m not exaggerating! Absolutely insane. This means that I’ll just have to do get those DVDs and see for myself.

Another item that’s been popping up on them “Isn’t Japan wacky” RSS feeds last week was the Cucumber flavor Pepsi drink. Now, I’ve looked in practically every conbini in Tokyo for this drink and have not been able to find it. Does it actually exist? I’ve asked all my friends about it and no one has heard of it. This is another good example of how Japan related blogs tend to over exaggerate the popularity of something in Japan. There’s weird stuff in Japan, that’s true, but for the most part these things are relatively obscure and you have to go out of your way to find them.

Finally, only slightly Japan related is that Dramatic Look Prairie Dog clip on YouTube. It was originally from a Japanese variety show with Mini Morning Musume. I don’t regularly browse Youtube and only found out about it from Sean’s post. But he’s right, for some reason I can’t stop watching this video. And I wasted an hour the other day watching all the different versions of it. In particular, I like this one and this one and this Kill Bill Remix one and finally this utterly silly one.

The company I work for is finally moving early next year. We’re gonna have a super cool new office on the top floors of one of the new high rises popping up in central Tokyo. I hope I can get a seat with a view of Mt. Fuji. That would be my dream come true, for sure! Anyway, I was one of a dozen people picked to visit some swanky furniture shops to look at chairs and furniture. It was really good to get out of the office despite it raining all afternoon. We visited several shops at the Tokyo Design Centre including Herman Miller. They gave us a tour of their comfy office which doubles as their showroom. The Aeron Chair (above left) is one of the most popular chairs amongst finance people. I’ve visited a few trading floors and the first thing I always notice are the Aeron chairs everyone has. We tested out dozens of candidates for our office chair and all were very nice. The chair I use at the office right now is so crap even a bar stool would be better.

On the chair tour we visited the Wilkhahn shop in the Axis Building in Roppongi where I saw this fine leather chair (left) that costs over $4000. Wait, where have we seen it before? Can you guess? Yes, it’s from Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith. Yoda is sitting on this chair at the end when they’re discussing what to do with Luke and Leia. Very cool. But even more space-age is the Cruise & Atlas seen at the Okamura showroom. I’ve seen pictures of this workstation before and thought it would be extremely uncomfortable sitting in a recline position. But I tried it out and it’s incredibly comfortable and natural feeling that now I want to get one for myself. Oh, there are just too many things I want now.

Went to put something into these coin lockers yesterday only to find the locker extremely cold. Upon closer inspection I realized it was a refrigerated coin locker. Coin lockers are everywhere in Japan but it’s the first time for me to see these. It’s good to know that you can keep your ice cream or frozen vegetables safe while you go about doing other things in the department store. Next we’ll be seeing heated coin lockers to keep your food warm.

Umai-bo うまい棒 (delicious stick) is the Japanese equivalent of a cheeto except they’re bigger, individually wrapped and come in Japanese style flavors like corn soup and seaweed. My eating habits have been pretty bad the last few weeks and then today, to make matters worse, one of our clients sends us a couple of huge boxes of umai-bo. Each box contains 600 umai-bo!! The packages are customized to promote their new website service selling International Index Funds.

We gave them out to people thorought the company but there were just too many!! And the expiry date is April 4th so I had to eat a whole bunch of them before they went bad.

Since I got hay fever a few years ago february and march have been pretty miserable months. In case you didn’t know, in Japan hay fever is a national disease. Half the population is allergic to some kind of pollen. While not as bad this year compared to last year, I’ve been waking up to itchy eyes and constant sneezing. The other day when the sun was shining through the window I could see just how dirty the air in my house was. All kinds of crud dancing around in the air and falling on my PS3. There’s nothing worse than dust on shiny black plastic. So I decided that I would finally go out and get an air purifier. Maybe two.

After my usual rigorous Internet research, I decided to get the Daikin Flash Streamer Hikari Kurieru. The long meaningless name tries to make up for the fact that it’s big and ugly compared to all the “ergonomic-looking” ones. But Daikin is a specialist in this area and has a good reputation. And they have a cool character, Pichon-kun, who lives inside the air-purifier and fights the pollen and fleas and mold germs. So I went to BicCamera after work and saw the price of the one I wanted was ¥39,000. That’s pretty darn expensive for a plastic box with a fan and some filters. And I saw it online for only ¥24,900. Even minus the 10% bic points it would still be way more expensive then buying online. I told the guy about the cheaper place and he went to check it out on kakaku.com. Most retail shops will give you a discount if you can prove that it’s cheaper somewhere else. He came back and said that that online shop (It’s Akibaoo, also a brick & mortar store in Akiba) is a wholesale shop and not a retail store like BicCamera so they were not considered competition and therefore could not give me a discount. Well, ¥15,000 is too big of a difference and it made me begin to question the merit of buying any kind of electronics at a big store like Bic if you could just buy it online at wholesale. So I left and when I got home I ordered 2 of them, one for upstairs and another for downstairs. I’m still skeptical about whether these things actually make a difference. Can someone who’s used one tell me if I’ve wasted my money or not? Anyway, we’ll see.

Completely unrelated. On the way home I stopped by Shimokitazawa and was walking around with no particular objective. I ended up at the antique toy shop 2Chome3Banchi located at the end of the shopping street. The owner asked me what I collected and I answered nothing in particular. He said “check out these erasers” and handed me a little bag with Q-Taro and Dorompa. Incredible!! I was amazed that of all the toys in the shop he would hand me these ones. How did he know I collected Q-Taros? They were only ¥500 so I bought them. Not because I wanted them but because of the significance of what this coincidence represented in the universe. I believe there are no coincidences.

I was enjoying that moment of cosmic connectedness until he started lecturing me on how he thought buying stuff on the Internet was stupid and that anyone who doesn’t enjoy discussing toys with the seller in person was not worth selling a toy to etc etc. Yeah, whatever..

More completely unrelated. If you have a GR Digital I suggest you do the firmware update that came out at the end of last year. Version 2.21. I skipped the previous one because I heard some bad things, but this latest firmware update fixed the macro focusing problem when you try to focus on something white, like the Q-Taro eraser above, and also included the ability to take photos at 3:2 ratio which is good cause you can fit more photos onto your SD Card.

It’s a bizarre obsession really. I have never seen so many kewpies in one place before. What is it about these cherubs that appeal to the Japanese so much? Oh, I have a piece of movie trivia for you. In Mad Max, the first movie where no one can understand Mel Gibson’s accent, there’s a scene where a kewpie doll appears for a brief moment. Can you name the scene?

Coloured lighting must be getting cheaper to produce. I have been noticing more and more rainbow colors around Tokyo. It’s as if suddenly they can use any color, and unable to choose one from many, they choose all. In the above photo, couples enjoy a moody moment in Lumine 2, south exit of Shinjuku station. A nice, cheap date spot. Has it always been like this but I just never noticed?

In a remote part of Tokyo Station where no one goes, more rainbow lighting that seems to serve no purpose. Perhaps they dim the other lights after closing time to give the homeless a nightclub feel.

This is the biggest dog I’ve ever seen in Tokyo. It may be a regular size in some countries but it’s rare to see such a big one in this city. Since most Tokyoites live in small houses and there are few places for dogs to run free it can be difficult for a big dog to live happily. Most dogs you’ll see will be tiny ones, Miniature Dachshunds being the favorite, followed by Chihuahuas and a variety of other furry lap dog breeds I’m don’t know the names of.

Dogs in Japan are very Japanese. Let me explain. In Canada, if you were walking down the street and there was a dog, the dog would stop and give you a death stare. If you made a sudden movement the dog would usually run right at you barking and going for your throat. When I was a kid I was traumatized by many big mean dogs that owners would let loose in the street. In Japan, however, you’ll hardly ever see an dog running free, but on the few occasions where I’ve encountered them, the dogs don’t even notice me. They look straight ahead and keep walking along their path as if I wasn’t even there. This is very similar to most Japanese who have a tendency not to acknowledge others on the street and generally avoid eye contact. Japanese dogs also seem to bark less and appear to be more well-behaved. This appears less true of cats though. I guess cats are less influenced by people.

Over the weekend, I caught the all-night screening of Flags of our Fathers. The film itself was very good although I was expecting to be moved in the same way when I first saw Saving Private Ryan. I guess since watching Band of Brothers and all those other post Ryan war films I’ve become de-sensitized to this style of depicting brutal combat. I haven’t read the book which the film was based on but was really looking forward to seeing this film. I’ve been somewhat obsessed with the Pacific war since I was a kid. The events on the day leading up to the Flag raising were depicted in a matter-of-fact subtle manner without any theatrical background music or sound effects. The camera angle and composition of the shot was exactly as Joe Rosenthal had framed the photo before cropping out the first flag being lowered. For anyone who has seen the series of photos or the film of the flag raising, you would be in awe at how Eastwood accurately and tastefully captured that moment. The simplicity of the event undermining all the over blown propaganda that followed it. I’m looking forward to seeing Letters from Iwo Jima (above) which is the Japanese side of Iwo Jima also directed by Eastwood.

I’ve had more than the usual number of bills to pay this month which means I can’t venture too far from home else I end up spending more than I should. So on weekends I walk around the immediate neighborhood looking for action. A cheap alternative. Unfortunately there was not much happening at this closed real estate agent, but there were lots of cats in boxes. I counted 5 including one in the back. Looking closely you’ll notice there’s a ladder by the window so that the cats can come and go as they please. If you’re looking for an apartment where you can keep pets I have a feeling this real estate agency will be able to help you.