New Years

Tonight is New years eve. New Years is perhaps the biggest holiday in Japan. The traditional activities are a little bit different than in Canada. Usually people stay home, eat lots of food, and watch the Kohaku singing contest on NHK (I’m watching it as we speak). Today lots of traditional New Years decorations popped up around our house. Like this one at our front door.

Also my mother in law made a nice looking Ikebana (flower arrangement) display.

Also another traditional decoration is this paper and the plastic looking snowman lump of mochi (sticky rice).

Also we ate a delicious assortment of Chinese dishes, brought from Sendai Hotel where my father in law works.

It was really yummy. We had to give food to the gods as well. Tomorrow we’ll eat soba which is a tradition as well. Well back to the festivities.

Sexist Chocolate

Here’s and interesting fun fact, chocolate can be sexist in Japan!! Just kidding. A very small amount people might be offended if they saw this product in Canada.

There are various chocolate products in Japan that say they are for men, like Toppo here and Men’s Pocky. Turns out that “For Men” just simply means dark chocolate. I guess Japanese chocolate makers think women don’t like dark chocolate. I just use it as an excuse not to share with my wife, saying “Sorry, this is for men only.”

Golgo 13 Awesomeness

I spotted this really amazing Golgo 13 figure in a magazine that I bought recently. The detail is pretty amazing, right down to his disassembled M16 in his suit case.

Judging from how good it looks it’s probably super expensive, so I’ll just look at the ad instead of buying it.

Curry Dip

My wife bought me this interesting snack. It’s Doritos, but they’re packaged in a Pizza-La pizza box.

It also comes with a curry flavored dip.

The dip was delicious, but not nearly enough for the amount of chips they give you. I even tried to use it very sparingly, but it still wasn’t enough.

Mysterious Musings

It seems that tissue boxes in Japan are a good source of strange English. I noticed another one in our house.

The brand being “New Little MARRY”. Marry dispenses her unique insight all over the box. Such as this.

Or this.

Or this frustrated sounding comment.

I would very much like to meet the people who come up with all of these slogans I see everywhere. It’s fascinating.

Christmas Goodies

Here’s the detailed post of what I received for Christmas from my darling wife. First I got a really cool “Panson Works” figure. They do lots of cute design and also invented the popular Robin character.

It’s Son Goku from Dragonball. Very awesome. It’s to celebrate the 40th anniversary of Shonen Jump. Next is this very cool CD case.

It’s an amazing Luche Libre wrestler mask styled case. I will be soon transferring all of my PS3 games to this for safe keeping. Finally we have a Dragon Quest cell phone strap.

It’s an incredibly cute blue slime strap. He’s so cute!

Thanks go to my wonderful wife, for her hard work finding these items for my Christmas gift.

Sanders Claus

Yesterday on Christmas Eve, I was in Sendai to work my final evening before vacation started. I had previously mentioned how KFC is the king of Christmas in Japan. To prove I did not exaggerate this, I swung by and took some photos.

As you can see the lineup is really far out the door. People really want their fried chicken for Christmas. This was taken at 8:00pm, so you can imagine what it would have been like at dinner time. Crazy! The Colonel knows which side his bread is buttered on, that’s why he gets in on the Christmas mania too.

Christmas Sweets

Here’s some Japanese Christmas sweets. They’re quite nice to look at, and very beautifully made (like most Japanese sweets). I’m not really a big fan of them though. These are made of mochi, which is a very sticky glutinous rice pounded into a sticky blob. I don’t like mochi, so I just like to look at them. By the way, Merry Christmas everyone!

Arc De Triomphe??

Last night I went on a spur of the moment “nomihodai”, which means all you can drink in Japanese. You can easily go down to Kokubuncho and set it up at most bars. Kokubuncho is the “entertainment” district in Sendai. It features all kinds of legal and illegal stuff to do. Mostly it’s just a bunch of bars and hostess clubs where excessive drink can be done. Well we were walking around looking for a place to go among the myriad of choices, and I spotted this place.

A huge replica of the Arc de Triomphe! It was very strange to see, I simply had to take a picture of this oddity nestled in with all of the normal Japanese bars. One of my drinking cohorts informed me that it is supposedly in fact a complex filled with gay bars. Which strange because there was a long line of young girls outside. Mysterious…

From China

On Saturday we had a visit from one of our friends from China, Cliff. He was in Japan just for 24 hours to pick and his daughter and go back to China. What he brought along with him was a beautiful antique Chinese mahjong set for us. You can see the case has a nice painting of two quails (at least i think they are quails).

Inside the case is all of the mahjong tiles, a set of english instructions, and some dice. The set is so nice.

The tiles have the traditional wood backing on them so they’ll make a really nice sound when you slap them down. I can’t wait to play mahjong with this set. Thanks Cliff and Megumi!