Softbank

Softbank is supposedly the most popular cell phone carrier in Japan. Which is apparent by how much they can spend on American celebrities to be in their ads. Cameron Diaz appears in a lot of their print and TV ads as you can see below.

Brad Pitt also does a bunch of ads too They recently added a new service tied to Disney called Disney mobile. Hillary Duff is the spokes women for the service. It’s a family friendly version of the normal Softbank service. People are crazy for Disney stuff over here, so this service should do well.

Softbank also has some really interesting TV ads featuring popular Japanese celebrity Ueto Aya, in which her family includes a father who has been changed into a dog, and a brother who is black. It a continuing series, and they have new ads every couple weeks or so. They are very strange and kinda funny. You can see a couple below. More can be seen here.

Spicy Chicken

Mister Donuts has a new item. It’s a spicy chicken pasterie. They advertise it as the No. 1 spiciest thing that they have ever had. I tried it, and while being very delicious, it was not spicy at all. It was like medium spicy salsa level. Try hard next time Mister Donut!

Shibata Summer Festival Part 2

Welcome back for part two. Summer festivals in Japan are at their best during the evening. Double the amount of people come at night time.

The atmosphere of the lights, sounds and smells are fantastic. I took some really nice photos using no flash and various exposure and film speed settings. I think they capture the atmosphere perfectly.

Remember kids, never use the flash on your camera if you want to take great photos. Just forget that you even have a flash. Anyways we went back to the gold fish booth that night to catch some fish. It was extra packed with people now.

This kind of booth is traditional at summer festivals in Japan. There will always be at least one there every time.

Ken got one fish from his attempt (of course you get one fish automatically for trying). He was really happy since he wanted to do this all day.

After we did that there was fireworks. They lasted for over one hour. I’ve posted the big finale of the evening.

After that everyone went home after a good day of fun.

The Kakuda summer festival is coming up in a couple weeks. I’m really looking forward to it. It’s also going to be a block or two from our house so it’ll be easy to go to.

Shibata Summer Festival Part 1

Yesterday we went to the Shibata summer festival. Shibata is one of the towns next to Kakuda. There was a lot of girls wearing yukata at the festival.

Yukata are summer kimono. They are a little bit more casual and not as hot as normal kimono. There was tons of food stands at the festival, selling all kinds of traditional festival food. Like yakisoda, which is noodles stir fried in sauce with cabbage, meat, and topped with ginger.

Our friend’s kids Ken and Karin, both got water balloon yoyos to play with.

Some of the food vendors were dressed in traditional costumes.

They also had a game for catching gold fish. You have like a plastic ring with paper covering it. The goal is to pick up as many fish as you can before the paper breaks. This is quite difficult as the paper get so fragile when it touches the water.

They had a large group of people in traditional costumes doing dances to music.

After that they brought out the mikoshi. Which is a portable shrine.

A large group carries the shrine, being careful not to drop it. They do this so that the god in the local shrine can get away from the shrine and see the area. Kind of like a vacation from normal duties.

For dinner we had giant hotdogs on a stick. Which Karin had an interesting method of eating.

At the site hanging from one of the buildings was a giant Teru Teru Bozu. Japanese people believe if you hang one of these up it’ll ward away the rain. It worked on this day.

Well come back tomorrow for part two of the festival. The night time is when the festival truly come alive.

Parco

We have a new department store opening in Sendai soon called “Parco”. They have been working hard putting together the new building next to Sendai station. The ads for it have been all around town, but one giant ad really made me laugh.

Parco, I hardly know you. Stop being so casual!

Pachinko

Below you can see a pachinko parlor. These places are all over Japan. Even really small town have a few pachinko parlors. They are always busy too. Filled with lots of Japanese people wasting their money away. Also they’re very noisy and always filled with smoke.

Pachinko is one of the things that is unique to Japan. Some people say it’s like pinball, but it’s not really like it at all. Basically you are shooting small metal balls into small slots to gain more balls.

They have all kinds of pachinko machines based on pop stars, animation, movies, TV dramas, etc. I tried playing pachinko one time. I got 1000 yen worth of balls and proceeded to see them completely used up in just over one minute. All you do in Pachinko is turn a knob, which controls the speed of the balls shooting out. It’s really quite boring. Now you might be wondering why Japanese people love this game so much. One reason, gambling.

Much like the chap above they want to get a big score and make lots of money. The thing is getting money from playing pachinko is illegal. Everyone in Japan knows the system though. You take all of the balls you’ve won and exchange them for a present or a token. After that you go to a special store which is usually in close proximity and sell the item you got for cash. Yes even the police know about this. Everyone does! I put a link to a flash based pachinko game so that you can try it out, and see for yourself how boring it actually is. Enjoy!

Pachinko Game

Boneless

KFC in Japan just added a new item to their menu, boneless pieces of chicken! So now you can enjoy all of the delicious taste of original KFC chicken (the chicken strip and stuff don’t taste the same as the normal pieces of chicken at KFC), without all the hassle of the bones and nasty stuff. This is especially great for me as I can only eat boneless chicken. I’ve had a few pieces and I’m happy to report that it is incredibly delicious. It’s like all of my chicken dreams have come true!

Game Center

I found this scary looking game center in Sendai. It’s in kind of an alley way and down some dingy looking steps. Inside it was smoke filled and full of questionable people. What made it interesting however was the selection of arcade machines was impressive. They had a wide assortment of fighting games, scrolling shooters and rhythm games. Of course they also had lots of mahjongg machines and pachinko. I didn’t have an oportunity to take a spy photo of the interior this time, as there was too many eyes. I will try again in the future some time.

C3P0

Yes, I finally got the C3P0 Pepsi Be@rbrick! I had been searching for him since they came out. I think he might be the rarest one, or maybe the most popular. Yurie finally found him at the grocery store. I was starting to loose hope as many stores didn’t have them anymore. You can see him below out of the package. He’s so shiny and awesome!

Curry Egg Dog

I spotted this item at Family Mart, which is a popular convenience store in Japan. I though it sounded interesting. I could not spot any hotdog inside of the bun however. I do like the cute little Indian guy on the package though.