These Dogs' Lives...

The lives of those cute dogs in Japan may not all be that rosy. There are indeed plenty of adorable looking dogs popping up from some girls' handbags in the metro, or ones peeking out of others' jackets. Like the character Claudia from Anne Rice's "Interview with a Vampire," these dogs' growth and development seem to have been arrested permanently, leaving them in a perpetual state of cuteness and cuddliness. I often wonder why I had not seen many of these while living in America, but perhaps this recent article from the New York Times may shed light on how and why these dogs came to be.

Click HERE to read the entire article, titled "Japan, Home of the Cute and Inbred Dog," by Martin Fackler (December 28, 2006). Photo above by Masafumi Yamamoto for the New York Times.

Daisuke "DICE-K" Matsuzaka: The 51-Million-Dollar-Boy

When I boarded my NRT-LAX flight on Wednesday, the gate was chock full of photographers and newscasters. Turned out sitting in the same cabin as I was Daisuke Matsuzaka, the Seibu Lions pitcher known for his "Gyroball." Only 26 years old, and the Boston Red Sox paid $51.1 Million just to talk to him. You can read about it HERE.

During disembarkation, I got stuck in the gangway behind Matsuzaka-san, a rather tall figure. A handler was showing him the way through the immigration. Some passengers, upon learning who he was, started asking for his autographs. Many photographers and newcasters were ready outside of the arrival hall. The Boston Red Sox has 30 days to make up their mind about the boy.

Photo by Donald Miralle/Getty Images

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???

BNE Has Arrived in Tokyo

On September 17, 2006, New York Times produced an article by Jesse McKinley titled "In San Francisco, a Plague of Stickers Opens a New Front in the Graffiti War." It talked about the proliferation of white stickers with a big black BNE printed on them. Remember those ubiquitous stickers "Obey," the "Giant" (referring to Andre the Giant)? It is similar to that. In the report, it mentioned the possibility of the stickers popping up in Tokyo. Well, guess what? They are definitely here. Above is a couple of stickers that I found at the Shibuya bus terminal.


[Update: January 7, 2007]
The top-most pictures of this blog remain the only remnants of BNE at the Shibuya station. As of January 1, the authority did their annual cleaning and scraped all stickers and repainted walls and columns. No more trace of BNE, but late last night I spotted more graffiti in two different sites in the Shibuya area: one in a dark back road by a river (the two horizontal pictures down below) and one in a busy alley in the heart of Shibuya (the vertical picture on the right). So, who is this BNE?