Right now, the answer is about six months.

But, they don’t take cats, also the whole student loans thing.

Oh, well.

It has NOT replaced the PSP or DS Lite that I usually have on me, though, because it’s not great for gaming.  That isn’t to say that there aren’t great games for it – at the very least, the Cave shooters are Quality Titles – but the battery on it drains so quickly just over the course of a normal day that I don’t want to put extra stress on it through gaming.

So, my old iPod Classic lives in our car now instead of my backpack, I leave my camera at home unless we’re going on a trip or some such, and my netbook has become, well, kind of a window into Japan – when it’s not being used as a flip clock, that is.

That is, I found a webcam that’s pointed at Tokyo Harbor, and I just leave the webcam up on the eeePC and I get a bit of the sights & sounds of Japan.  The webcam is also near an elementary school or a park or something, so the usual background noises – cars, boats, planes and the like – are occasionally broken up by the sounds of kids playing; it’s kind of fun.

I happened to be watching it the other day right around sunset and thought it looked particularly neat so I thought I’d share a couple of screenshots I took about an hour apart; I love the flare effect in the first of these as the sun is setting and then seeing all the lights come on as it gets a bit darker in the second.

If I were to say to you that “Man, Woman, and the Wall” was “kind of like ‘Rear Window’, only in Japan and with an awful lot of nudity”, you might be tempted to slap me upside the head.

One, after all, is a suspense classic about a guy who spies on his neighbors and discovers a horrific crime, and the other is, well, actually kind of similar, just with a hefty dose of “Oh, JAPAN”.

Rather than being laid up with a broken leg and spying on his neighbors with binoculars, however, this particular voyeur simply moved into an apartment with extremely thin walls, and as a result becomes aware of every detail of his neighbor’s life, then obsessed with them to the point where it honestly becomes rather creepy and you’re wondering if you’ve accidentally rented a horror movie instead of a comedy.

That’s about when he discovers that the neighbor he’s spying on is actually in danger, and thus begins a quite clever scheme to a) save the girl and of course b) get the girl.

Having a main character who’s essentially a stalker makes for a difficult movie to sell. Amelie, to pick another stalker-hero-movie, pulled it off by having a thoroughly charming main character, and this film does more or less the same; the guy may be a bit of a manboy, with a cluttered apartment and action figures for decoration, but at least he’s employed and can cook, which is pretty good for a guy.

As mentioned previously, the female star of the movie does spend an awful lot of time with her knickers off for the camera, so it’s not exactly one to watch with the folks, even if your folks are into bizarre Japanese romantic comedies, but it’s a pretty good way to spend 90 minutes.

Japan, fortunately, agrees with me, though they just call the stuff “Soft Cream” and leave it at that.

This last trip to Japan, I ran into a development in Soft Cream technology that, well, is probably nothing new but which I found to be bloody brilliant.

Basically, instead of having banks of different ice cream machines, each one dispensing a different flavor, they’ve put the actual ice cream into these little styrofoam cartridge things that each hold a single serving, so you can have very small stalls that nonetheless offer a nice variety.

For example, this sign taken from one of the two soft cream vendors at the Great Buddha at Kamakura:

or this truck from Ueno Park, which was selling seven varieties of soft cream in addition to quite a rainbow spectrum of shaved ice:

Anyway, faced with the panoply of new flavors, I saw it as my duty to expand into the Worlds Beyond Vanilla.

For example, sweet-potato-flavored soft cream, which was fantastic:

and also purple, or purpple if you’d prefer.  Apparently, in Japan, purple is the color of sweet potato, and this summer seemed to have a LOT of sweet potato flavored products for sale.

Also, sesame, which was a little less fantastic on the first bite but which grew on me by the end of the cone:

and they’ve even cracked the swirl problem.  In a display of mad-scientist-level-genius, they PRE SWIRL their soft cream before packing it into the aforementioned styrofoam cartridges:

Ahh, Japan.  For all your problems, you do have your good points.

The Japanese reads “Businessman’s breakfast yogurt” and “Includes konnyaku balls”, by the way.

It was an interesting yogurt experience.  It was, unsurprisingly, banana flavored, but a little bit bitter and the addition of konnyaku gave it a surprising texture.  This is yogurt you can actually sort of chew, which is just not a verb I traditionally associate with yogurt.

All in all, fairly good stuff and quite lived up to the punchy nature of the packaging.

If I had money – or gullible financial backers – I’d tempted to open a chain of Man Spas based on the Japanese capsule hotel experience.

From my – admittedly rather limited – experience with capsule hotels, they hit pretty much every need a guy wanting to get away from the stress of daily life could possibly have.

The one I stayed at in Osaka this last trip had a vending machine full of alcohol, more smoking areas than non smoking, 24/7 pornography on your in-capsule television, a huge bath and sauna, mahjong tables, video games, massage chairs for a couple hundred yen, actual masseuses available if you wanted to spend more money, and you could walk around in pajamas all day.

Oh, and a restaurant that sold a menu made of “fried” that you could eat in your pajamas while drinking alcohol from the machine and smoking.

I think duplicating this could really work. 

Poster at a police station.  This one was behind glass so it’s not a terribly good photo.  There was a much larger poster of this up in the local train station, but when I went back to take a photo of it, it’d been replaced with an advertisement.  I guess the train station didn’t care much about your sense of justice.

Dino’s wish – what, the purple guy from the Flintstones? – is to keep and shine your beauty forever.  Pretty heavy stuff for the family dog.

Speaking of things that are purple, this shirt is either the worse case of poor color recognition skills or it has some deeper meaning.

I’m going with the poor color recognition skills for now.

I keep staring at this one, and I keep ALMOST seeing what they were trying to say, and then I just can’t make it make sense.

So so close and yet so so far.

I saw many very awesome T-shirts, but unfortunately most of them were being worn by live people walking around.  I didn’t have the guts or the gall to stop random people and tell them “your shirt is hilarious, may I take a photo?”

Anyway, I like “Here is a tiny dressing up fou you” a lot, and it was being worn by a shirt form, and those can’t complain that you’re taking a photo of them.

This is probably my favorite from the whole trip.  It’s not just the slightly off-kilter English, it’s the message: “I don’t care what people think about me.  I have bigger things to worry about.  Like, say, bolstering my sagging self esteem through buying clothing.”

It’s actually a fairly literal translation of the text, and it makes perfect sense in the original, so I feel bad about making fun of it.

But I’m going to do it anyway.

I was reading a discussion about Japan recently and someone used the word “fukeiki” in their contribution to the discussion.  I didn’t recognize the word offhand, and I was too lazy to grab a dictionary, so I just highlighted the word and told Firefox to look it up in Google.  I figured that would give me both a definition of the word and maybe a little context for its usage.

The second result was an article from Time magazine entitled “Yes, We Have No Fukeiki“, which seemed like it would probably meet both criteria, so I clicked on that and started skimming it.

I wasn’t really paying too much attention to numbers or dates, so it took me about five paragraphs – really, the point where the article starts talking about cotton workers in Osaka having to do their job on roller skates to keep up with the production lines – to say to myself, “self, something is a little weird about this article” and I actually looked at the date it was originally published.

December 19, 1955.

So I was reading a nearly 55-year-old article, but because it was wrapped in the framework of the modern Time Magazine site and I hadn’t been paying THAT much attention to the content, I hadn’t realized it.

I was originally going to title this post “The perils of deep archives”, but on a little reflection, I can’t blame this one on the existence of deep archives, or even on Time Magazine, but solely on my own inattentiveness and assumption that, because something was ranked highly by Google, that it must therefore be current and relevant. 

An awful lot of them were anime or manga fans, and many of them had bought into the whole “Gross National Cool” meme; they expected anime merch to be crowding the aisles in every store and dancing cosplayers in the streets of Akihabara.

Reality was Somewhat Different.

To their credit, after the initial shocks wore off, they mostly adjusted to the grim realities; that they weren’t any more in the mainstream in Japan than they were in America and that Akihabara was just a big shopping district largely aimed at guys who were refusing to grow up… oh, yes, and that there was quite a lot of porn for sale, and that shops weren’t shy about putting rather risque stuff front & center.

Even more to their credit, even the most rabid of fans seemed to follow a basic pattern: They’d have one massive binge buying session early, and then they’d realize that they had to get all this stuff HOME somehow, and their purchases would suddenly start trending towards Very Small Things.

Lest you think I’m putting myself too far above them, I will just say that I planned my binge shopping to occur near the END of my trip to Japan, and I elected to ship stuff home instead of trying to make it all fit in my luggage. 

Anyway, the overall effect was that a whole bunch of people went over to Japan with crazy ideas of how Things Would Be, and came home with a better picture of How Things Are.  If they can just spread some of that sanity among their peers in their home country, the world will be just a little bit better for it.