Only in Japan

The picture on the left is of a small booth operating in Shibuya, one of the busiest public transportation hubs in Tokyo. The booth is like a newspaper kiosk where, in this case, only one person could fit into it. Tradition and hygiene dictate this person to remove her shoes before entering that small kiosk. The picture on the right showed her shoes neatly stored together by the door.

Imagine doing this in New York, London, or Jakarta: that person will be surprised to find herself walking home barefoot! Or perhaps she might be luckier and still could find her shoes, but not in the same shape as she had left them. I happened to be in the area and passing this booth a few times today, so I could say that her shoes remained intact throughout the entire day. Who knows? Maybe on other days someone does play a trick on her; or maybe she has a security camera trained on that pair of shoes, or the shoes had a Global Positioning System chip so that she could track the thief down. This is, after all, Japan.

Business Names

An American expatriate friend of mine told me that if he ever needed any dental work done, he would prefer to wait until he returned to the States, because he had heard that Japanese dental work was not good at all. Someone quizzed me one time why a lot of Japanese covered their mouth when they laughed. I said that it was perhaps out of modesty. Wrong, he said; it was because they did not want to expose their teeth. That was horrible, but was he right?

It did not help that the business on the picture above had the name Gross Dental Labor, and the name was repeated, making it look like Gross, Gross! I am sure it is the name of the person behind the business, not a name chosen out at random. Then again, when you go around Tokyo, you would see these mind-boggling company names: there is a bookstore called Book-Off, or this salon pictured below, whose name was Flash Bust-up Salon. WTH???