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!

Magic Potion

I got these two Final Fantasy “potion” drinks at 7/11 on Thursday. They’re to promote the new PSP game Dissidia. Which is like a Final Fantasy fighting game. There are two flavors, called  “Chaos” and “Cosmos”. As you may or may not know potions are the drinks in Final Fantasy that revive your health. While drinking Cosmos I felt my hit points raise  by around 60 (kidding). Cosmos was kind of a grape fruit flavor. I haven’t tried Chaos yet. I’ll let you know what it’s like at a later date. Each can has a couple random drawing of FF characters.

I guess some people would never drink them and collect all of the variations. I however will just recycle them.

Christmas Doritos

Even Doritos are getting in the Christmas spirit.

With these new White Cheddar flavoured chips, to evoke the snowy feeling of Christmas. They have even shaped the chips into Christmas trees.

Dragonball Figure

I purchased this Dragonball figure a couple weeks ago. It’s one of those random box things that are popular over here. You never know what is inside. The figure I got was….

Goku’s dead grandfather (hence the halo) Son Gohan. It’s pretty nice and detailed, but I would have preferred Goku, Krillin or even Turtle Master.

Daiso

This is the Daiso in Kakuda. Daiso is like all of the dollar stores in Canada, except it doesn’t suck. They actually have good quality stuff there. Even some really nice stuff like dishes and lots of cute character items. Most of the items are 100 yen, but some of the bigger stuff will cost more. The quality of the items is surprising sometimes. They don’t come off as super cheap looking like most of the Canadian dollar stores. What is interesting is there is actually a Daiso store in Vancouver. Stuff is a little more expensive than in Japan though.