Storifying the Skytree, and other made-up words

The Skytree finally opened yesterday after an eternity of manufactured hubbub. Just in case the protracted hype wasn't annoying enough, they sent around their mascot to do the morning show circuit today. Sorakara-chan ("from the sky") waved her arms and talked in a voice that was a combination of chalk on a blackboard and squeaking styrofoam. She answered pertinent questions from the announcers like, What's the best thing about the Skytree? and What's your favorite food? and Do you have a boyfriend? It gave me flashbacks to being introduced to endless classes of third graders.
A new intern at The Japan Times made this Storify collection about the opening. We think Storify has a lot of potential for quickly creating a multimedia survey of responses to an event. Frankly, none of the ones we've put up so far have gotten a ton of views. One thing that's cool about Storify is that the finished product can be embedded in other sites. I'm trying that here just to see what it looks like.

Total eclipse of the SMAP

You can catch an annular eclipse every few hundred years or so. But the chance to watch the moon turn the sun into a ring of fire while SMAP sings along to celebrate? Just one moment in time, baby. Maybe it was the early hour or maybe it was the fact that this boy band is pushing middle age, but watching them shuffle through their song and half-hearted hip thrusts was painful. They wore matching blue vests (and fedoras? It was early for me, too. [UPDATE: See the newly added photo below for why you should never trust witness testimony.]) and stood on a round stage with a big white ring suspended over it.

In human history, there must have been ancient people who greeted astronomical events with some form of music and dance to appease the frightening gods. I can only imagine the performance today would have the opposite effect.

"Lift your face up a little"... but only with an approved solar viewing device.

UPDATE! Don't take my word for it. Here's SMAP singing what I'm going to translate as Upside-down Sky.

I crunk corrected

As my (I hope still?) friend @Durf pointed out, "Ice cream ≠ Popjoy." Several others did, too, but none with quite the same beautifully crunky economy of expression. I admit, it crossed my mind that maybe we were getting our Crunkies crossed. I crunked to the crunkiest convenience store and crunked a Mint Crunky icemilk bar. Honestly, after the crunky Popjoy experience, my expectations were slightly crunked. I opened it up and crunked it as soon as I got outside. Hmmm, not bad! The puffed malt crispies give the chocolate shell a great texture. There are no crunky little "mint capsules" ruining everything. My crunky American palate would prefer a mintier mint taste (and a hell of a lot less plant oil), but I get it. It's tasty. To anyone I crunked off, I'm sorry.

Mint Crunky is kind of... crunky

It's that time of year, when the Twitter feeds of gaijin in Japan are abuzz with Mint Crunky sightings.
Somehow I missed the Crunky experience last year. Part of the fun is that they take a little luck to find, and I guess I'd never run across them. Yesterday I found them staring up at me from the shelf at Lawson. People go out of their way for these, and here they were, just sitting, so I felt a kind of obligation to try them. If you are a devotee, I'm going to ask you to stop reading right now. There's enough gaijin-on-gaijin rancor out there, and I don't want to start anything. But I was disappointed.
The chocolate-covered pellets are like a diluted York Peppermint Patty and malt ball mash-up. It's neither very minty nor very crunchy. It has little "mint capsules" that snap in your teeth like something that isn't supposed to be there, an effect like specks of gristle in a hamburger. It's still a sweet little nugget wrapped in chocolate, it's not like it's painful to eat. It just made me wish for candy that has more conviction.

Other writing

I wrote a story for CNN International on the buzz in Tokyo about the US presidential election. Nevermind that there isn't much. I felt like there would be more to say about it when the actual election gets closer. I learned a lot about Japanese elections while I was writing it. Most of it didn't belong in the story, but I felt like I had to understand how the Japanese see their own elections before I could understand how they see ours. (Maybe that wasn't totally necessary? It felt like it was.) I had thought I'd live out my days without knowing anything about how it all worked, so it was fun to dive into. When you've got some time, check out how Japan divvies up votes when the handwriting (!) isn't clear. They could never have the equivalent of a hanging chad problem. The editor suggested I work in karaoke somehow to give it more of a Japanese flavor. This insulted my journalistic integrity, so I put in something about pop hydra AKB48 instead. Oh, well.

The only reasonable size

I'm doing fewer posts at Japan Pulse now. One recent one was about Japanese versions of American fast foods. Make no mistake, you can get as fat as you want to in Japan. I also put up something about the remarkable unpublished "teenage wasteland" photos that LIFE magazine has released from its archives from a shoot in Japan in 1964. A lot of the pictures are of Japanese kids losing their minds to The Tokyo Beatles. Their music sounds like it wants to be a direct copy of the actual Beatles -- a copy in the same way that looking in the mirror and drawing with your left hand would give you a copy of a painting. But the band looks wilder. Backstage photos show them with shirts off and magic marker writing on their bodies. Check out the music on the post.

I don't know why posting here is so much less frequent. Probably because the time goes to Twitter, sliced up into tiny chunks like fine sushi (there's some Japan flavor!!). [Commenter: I went to a sushi shop in Kyoto once and the pieces of sushi were very large. You shouldn't say that fine sushi is small.] Anyway, the truth is that writing, anything, feels harder and harder. I don't know why. Maybe the relevant brain cells have curled up and died. I'm hoping they're just sleeping.

Who dropped this beautiful eyelash?

An ingenious little set-up for testing out fake lashes.

In the sticky heat of last summer, I thought fake lashes would be a good alternative to mascara that seemed to smear, no matter what claims it made, when confronted with Tokyo's brutal humidity. It was not a success. I didn't really give it a fair shot, though - I bought plastic ones on a discount rack from a kiosk in Harajuku. They came with their own little tube of glue. It was only in the moment of panic after I'd sealed my eye shut that I considered the wisdom of putting dirt-cheap, unbranded chemicals into my eye. It stung, and I wondered if I'd still be able to see, if and when I was able to pry my lids apart. Second maybe only to using eyebrow scissors on a jerky train, is there a dumber way to blind yourself? When the tears stopped, my vision was intact, but the lashes were, alas, not awesome. They felt like a strip of plastic wedged along my eyelid, poking in at the corners. I tried to get used to them while I cleaned the apartment that day, but I peeled them off before I went out for the evening. I'm sure getting nicer ones would help. It was pretty traumatizing, though. I'll probably stick to mascara for a while. I haven't tried this Heroine Make brand, but I like their ads.    





Who dropped this beautiful eyelash?

'Twas I! I did it on purpose!

Yellow. Different. Better

I tried to upload this a few times this month, and it crashed my phone every time. Maybe it's because I was writing unfriendly things about the fluffy bunnies and cute kitties we've been subjected to in the Tokyo Metro Manners posters all this past year and the machine was trying to save me from looking like the kind of jerk who doesn't like cute widdle animals. I have nothing against cute animals! The fact is, for two years, the subway had the sometimes-befuddling but always bright and original yellow posters, and then suddenly they downshifted into boring stock photographs of animals with insipid slogans. Nothing original or interesting about them. A lot of people take issue with the scolding tone of the signs, but I was happy to see this guy up at the beginning of April (the beginning, of course, of the new subway poster fiscal year). The stylized guy, the oblique English that doesn't really match the Japanese, the tragicomically hapless teddy bear - it looks like Bunpei is back with an interrobang.

Please stand by

I flew standby to LA last week. On the way back to Tokyo, it took a few tries to get on a plane. While I was waiting to be picked up from the empty departures drop-off zone at 1 am for the second night in a row, I noticed this stencil on the ground. I'd been rejected from three flights in 36 hours at that point. Wait here. Yeah, I got it.

Reconstructing 3/11

Get yours now.

Our Man in Abiko has done it again. But this time, it's completely different. Quakebook was a fast and raw response, a time capsule of a moment, put together to help people in need by raising money and awareness. The immediacy of it was what made it compelling. In Reconstructing 311, Our Man asked journalists to take their time and go deep about the impact of the disaster on the fields that they know best. I helped edit this collection, and I learned something from every piece.
Philip Brasor gives a blow-by-blow of how Japanese news outlets covered the disaster and its aftermath, how they compared with the international media, and where both fell short. Reading about politics usually makes me itchy. (I probably shouldn't admit that.) But Michael Cucek's tale of how Prime Minister Naoto Kan saved the day is as fascinating and readable as it is controversial. I'm probably biased since I know and like Tohoku volunteer Jamie El-Banna, but I like the straightforward way he weaves a frank explanation of the problems facing communities trying to rebuild into stories of his life as an accidental full-time volunteer. (Check out this video of Jamie first, so you can read his piece in the appropriate British accent.) Jake Adelstein goes beyond the meme of convoys of yakuza driving supplies to evacuation shelters to untangle the history of disasters and organized crime in Japan, and in the process reveals a bit about his own relationship with the gangsters.
And that's just for starters.
This is an interesting book, and it's also an interesting kind of book, a stab at what the future of publishing and journalism might look like. It costs $2.99 and you are pretty much guaranteed to learn something about the situation in Japan now, a year ago, and in the future. Please buy a copy and ask someone else to, too. Still not convinced? Listen to what Our Man himself says about it.
Done? Now head on over to Amazon to download your copy.

You knew I was a TV crew when you let me in

When the TV crew rang the bell and came into my apartment, I pointed to the row of slippers I'd laid out and said in Japanese, "Please come in, help yourself to slippers if you'd like." TV crew? Yep. Stay in Japan long enough and you're bound to be looking into a TV camera sooner or later. I'd gotten into this when they contacted the Quakebook people about being part of a 3/11 anniversary program. I thought originally that it was about media, social networking and how foreigners' news sources differed from what Japanese people were reading. At a preliminary camera-free interview at my place, the producer seemed to be after a different story: he wanted to know how many times a day I'd called home and what my mother's "words that echoed in my heart" were as I went to the airport and why I like Japan more than America. By that time, I felt, sinkingly, that it was too late to back out.

More intensity

When the entire crew of six came over, the first thing the director did was tell one of his underlings to take all the Japanese magazines and hide them (his words) under the English ones. As they were setting up lights and plugging in boxes, the interpreter suggested to the director that I do at least part of the interview in Japanese, since she'd heard me speak at the first interview. "Absolutely not," he said. Speaking only English in the interview didn't bother me, but his adamance did. It seemed like he had already decided who I was, and speaking and reading Japanese wasn't part of that. I'm almost surprised he didn't ask us to put shoes on to clomp around the apartment. He did ask me to do other silly things that edged closer and closer to flat-out re-enacting the day. I grudgingly changed sweaters to give the impression that we were filming on different days, though he didn't say to what end. He asked to see the camera I'd used to take pictures off the balcony, then to see the balcony, then if I could just hold the camera up like I was taking pictures. And actually, could you just aim toward the ground and actually take a few? It seemed way too late by that time to talk about the differences between interviewing and acting and which one we were there for. (This was a few weeks ago. I've seen a few interviews with actual survivors on other Japanese TV stations, and they all feature footage of the person standing where they had been standing and holding up their cameras. Just because it's standard doesn't make it unsilly.)

When, as the crew leaving, they filmed the inevitable ding-dong-we-'re-entering-the-home-of-our-unwitting-subject shot, I was instructed to wait ten seconds after the doorbell, then open the door and say, "Nice to meet you." To the guy who hadn't spoken a single word of English in the three times we'd met. I'd like to give them the benefit of the doubt that they'll use what they got in a journalistically responsible way, but I'm not holding my breath. I'm kind of hoping now, if they do use any of it, that they go all the way. Make the footage grainy black and white, or maybe red-tinted, and make it look like it's shaking. That might be the best way of all to get people to think about how the news worked and didn't work in the aftermath of the disaster.
UPDATE: This is the video. Don't blink.