According to the Chinese Zodiac, this is the year of the Rat. The Japanese use the Chinese Zodiac symbols (but a different calendar) and so they launched their Year of the Rat in January, 2008. Here are some samples of rat imagery from that period:

Gung Hay Fat Choy!

Theresa, my wife, just bought us both these wonderful lunch carriers made by the Japanese company Zojirushi. Besides being a simple, functional, aesthetically pleasing and complete solution to the problem of moving food around, my new lunch carrier gave me a cool cross-cultural experience today as I opened it up for lunch at work for the first time.

Last night, Theresa packed us both food for today. As I pulled the three separate, sealed containers out of the metal tube they sit in, wondering what would be in each one, I felt a deep sense of the shared enterprise that is my home life, and the caring that my containers filled with homemade food represented.

Reflecting back on the time I spent living in Japan, I thought about how this unpacking of a homemade lunch is an experience that many Japanese men (gender roles being what they are in Japan) have every day.

For the first time, I really felt how much that ritual-preparing, packing, unpacking, eating lunch-can express the emotional facet of shared lives.

Itedakimasu: I will receive.

While in Japan, in a Mitsukoshi food hall, we came across Konopizza, pizza (and desserts!) in a cone.

It’s not just a Japanese company, and they are aiming for the English speaking market with “the future of pizza, the pizza of the future.” I have seen the future of pizza and its name is Kono? Personally, I hope not. Think about biting into one and managing the mass of bubbling cheese goo. I foresee burning messy gagging.

Here are some variations on the hot dog from Ginza.

Coney dog, okay. Cheese dog, sure. Bacon potato, I dunno?

Egg? Zucchini? These are rather elegant reinterpretations of the serviceable wiener, but they read so unappealing and dissonant. I’m all for elegant reinterpretations of fast food but these struck me as very foreign (granted, I was the foreigner, trying to find the symbols of home in another environment).

Stay tuned for our Taiwan snack food experiences.

And one more that I’ve been hanging onto for a very long time. Family Boat appears to be a concept restaurant, with a website intended to appeal to investors and future franchisees. They’ve opened one pilot store in Holland. The concept is all around providing food in “boats.”

Potatoboats

Sandwichboats

Ice boats

Lots of designy stuff on the site as well:

Anyone ever tried any of these foods? What do you think?

A few years ago, Gene asked what happened to the IDEO shopping cart?

Well, look what we saw in Japan!

Anne demonstrates how the basket mates with the cart

Minimal cart hardware stacks tightly

Is this the cart, finally? Or did their design partly reflect a solution already in place in other parts of the world?

I thought this advertising bear in Shinjuku was cool, and so stopped to take a picture. The bear saw me and posed with the typical Asian two-fingered V-gesture. After I took the photo, I did my best gaijin attempt at a bow. The bear returned the bow, and then saluted me.

Without a common language (indeed without a common species) we had an interesting opportunity to share our knowledge of each other’s culture in gestures. And although I rarely salute my friends and family, I understood its intent as a gesture-of-Western-origin.

Japan is quite impenetrable to the outsider, and it’s easy to subsist on a parallel layer, free from the possibility or opportunity for everyday interactions. In our two weeks that moat was crossed less than a dozen times (i.e., the couple in a cafe who smiled and waved at me when I peered in the window and inadvertently triggered the sliding door, letting in some very cold air; the couple who saw us eating Taiyaki (cooked sweet batter filled with bean paste in the sahpe of a fish) and explained what it was, what is was called, and compared camera models) and each time was rewarding in its own small way.

But making this connection with a bear, in the land of kawaii, was briefly and intensely magical.

It’s fascinating how most successful products lead to an ecosystem of supporting products. The Crocs fad has provided the fan-base to support charms, little decorations that attach to the holes on the shoe’s surface and let the wearer further establish their individual identity within the trend of people who have established a unique identity by wearing Crocs in the first place.

Acknowledging that following a trend has a very different meaning in Japan, we bring you the Crocs family, who we saw on a bus in Kyoto, each with their own charms.

Dad

Mom

Son

Baby

In addition to aftermarket personalization, many trends also generate a safety backlash meme (iPod muggings, anyone?). In Taipei, it’s dangerous to wear Crocs on escalators.

Manufacturers like Apple are very savvy about creating/controlling their aftermarket, but I wonder about the backlashes. Are PR people planting those stories or doing damage control or not realizing their significance?

Update: Karl Long on the Crocs backlash (safety and others) here

We found these interesting calendars

(Google translate link) in Japan. They contain different daily activities tied to the room that you’d use them in, including kitchen, bedroom, bathroom (i.e., the room you bathe in), and toilet. I liked that the toilet calendar features a happy individual, presumably using the calendar, sitting on the throne. The calendars offer a small peek into Japanese home life.

We saw these kawaii decals for sale in Tokyo. According to the in-store display, they are intended for mobile phones and iPods, but could go on anything.

I was amazed to see the familiar and consistent visual brands of Marvel superheroes so dramatically localized, reflecting the Japanese kawaii (“cute”) aesthetic by infantilizing Wolverine, Spiderman, and the Hulk.

Excerpted from this story

Japan is suffering a crisis of confidence about its ability to compete with its emerging Asian rivals, China and India. One result has been a growing craze for Indian education.

Many are looking for lessons from India, seen by many in Japan as the world’s ascendant education superpower.

Bookstores are filled with titles like “Extreme Indian Arithmetic Drills” and “The Unknown Secrets of the Indians.” Newspapers carry reports of Indian children memorizing multiplication tables far beyond nine times nine, the standard in Japan. And the few Indian international schools in Japan are reporting a surge in applications from Japanese families.

At the Little Angels English Academy & International Kindergarten, the textbooks are from India, most of the teachers are South Asian, and classroom posters depict animals out of Indian tales, including dancing elephants in plumed turbans.

Little Angels is in Mikata, a Tokyo suburb. Only 1 of its 45 students is Indian. Most are Japanese.

As with many new things in Japan, the interest in Indian-style education has become a social fad, with everyone suddenly piling on.

Indian education is a frequent topic in public forums, from talk shows to conferences on education. Popular books claim to reveal the Indian secrets for multiplying and dividing multiple-digit numbers.

Interesting to see how “foreign” India may be to the Japanese, such that a mythology emerges. Reminds me of the tantric sex mythology (one of many, no doubt, over the centuries) that the West has built up around India.

What sort of stuff is “popular” in another country? How do we, as visitors, experience, catalog or contextuallize pop culture? More posts on this to come.

Being in Japan means constant encounters with kawaii, or cute, characters. Some will be familiar to visitors, whether imported (i.e., Stitch, Snoopy, Miffy, Mickey, Pooh, Pink Panther) or domestic (i.e., Hello Kitty, Totoro, Domo-kun). We were intrigued to come across a new character, then, and wondered who he was.

A display at Tokyu Hands featured this plush toy and a catchy song, in Japanese.

Then we saw him (with friends) in an arcade window.

And then we saw a complete window display in Harajuku featuring this (presumed) bug.

And that gave me something to Google: bug, and mono comme ca (the name of the store). Success! It’s the Bottom Biting Bug (Oshiri Kajiri Mushi).

As my New Year’s Gift to you all, then, here is the video, with subtitles in Japanese and English. This is what started it all, and is an awesome, awesome earworm. Someday soon, very soon, you will awaken with a slight startle, and as the real world comes into grey focus, you’ll grasp at the fading threads of your dream only to realize that it’s been the Bottom Biting Bug song as your internal, nocturnal soundtrack.

Biting is important business, indeed.

Note: the first of what should be over 1000 images and stories are up on flickr here.