![[Figure: Oishii Bangumi logo]](fig_oishii_logo.gif){kind=logo}
I found this logo on a web page soon after I returned home. I didn't note down the URL. Now I can't find the page.
Wed Apr 12 2000 (ctd)
On the Yurikamome train back to the mainland, I stood hunched over to keep my head from bumping the ceiling. Next to me, a woman held a scrap of paper against the car wall and wrote. I watched, wondering if I'd be able to decipher her writing. And then I stopped. Should I invade her privacy just to improve my language skills? I probably couldn't understand anything private. But how would I feel about a stranger reading my notebook, even if he might not understand it? Anyhow, I stopped.
Back at Shimbashi station, I checked my watch. It was about 17:00. Oh no, I was back in Tokyo at rush hour. Maybe I didn't want to hop on a train right then; maybe this would be a good time to look for dinner. I started to look around for an entrance to an underground mall or something. Through a door, I saw what looked to be a bunch of boutique-y little food shops. I went through the door. There were a bunch of places selling fried things or seafood or other icky things. There was also a place selling to-go sushi and another one selling some produce, including strawberries. That hooked me. I bought some sushi. Over at the produce stand, I picked out some strawberries and some mikan. When I'd first come to Japan, Jimmy had pointed out some little citrus fruit at a convenience store. "Those are mikan," he'd said, "and they are very tasty." I'd learned to like them, often the only fresh fruit to be had in that bleak winter.
The mikan at this stand were much larger than what I remembered--it was sized more like a grapefruit than a tangerine, but what the heck. When I went to pay for the produce, the lady indicated that I should pay at a register around the corner. I was, in fact, in the entryway of Keikyu Urban Dining, which turned out to be a grocery store. Oh my. I stocked up on food. The cash register didn't just show me the cost of the most-recently-totted item, but of the last two items. High tech.
When I emerged from the store, I was starting to sniffle. My symptoms were re-asserting themselves. I was tired, and wondered what a drowsiness-inducing pill would do to me. I still needed a way to kill some time until rush hour had quieted down a bit. I had been walking along in the station area, but now I stopped next to a pillar, trying to think. I looked around. I noticed a distinct lack of people pouring into the train station.
So I entered the station, and rode back to Asagaya. It wasn't crowded at all.
Back in the hotel, I blew my nose, had a decongestant, ate a little, and fell asleep quickly. But not before I watched a little of a cooking show "The! Oishii Bangumi". It seemed to be a cooking contest, but the contestant chef wasn't supposed to do the food preparation himself. Instead, he had to order around his kitchen helpers. These helpers were not cooks, but comedians. They were preparing something that looked like a cross between a pinecone and an artichoke but I didn't really follow because I was so very tired.
Thu Apr 13 2000
Once again, I was awake super-early. Not too surprising since I'd fallen asleep super-early. I took advantage of the time to look over my guidebook, slap together a possible itinerary for the next week. I would have to hurry to see everything that I wanted. One night in Hiroshima, a few hours in Matsuyama, a few hours here, a few hours there... I would have to rush, but it would be worth it.
I took a little walk in Asagaya, enjoying the early morning cool, trying to decipher business names. I noticed that the GEOS eikaiwa (English conversation school) chain had changed their logo. I paid attention to GEOS. I'd worked for a company called Geoworks on a product called GEOS. We'd trademarked the name in a few places, but not Japan: this school had already grabbed the name. On my previous trip to Japan, I'd dropped by the Kagoshima branch of the school and begged for one of their advertising posters and had brought it to work as a trophy. In the intervening years, Geoworks had changed their company logo and colors to purple, green, and orange. Now I saw that the GEOS school had changed their logo and colors to purple, green, and orange. I vaguely wondered who had been first.
And then it was onto the train and off to Shibuya and the TEPCO Electric Museum. One of my co-workers had recommended it. Like DoCoMo Town, it was a shill for a utility--in this case the local electric company. There were multi-media displays, animatronics, interactive computer stations, the whole nine yards.
![[Photo: Electrical stuff]](pht_tokyo_tepco.jpg)
They had a display with a robot arm. They were trying to develop a robot arm to do hot stick work. However, the displayed robot arm didn't appear to be anything special, and really didn't seem well-suited for working with wire or cable.
I was more interested in the display in which a nuclear plant spun and danced while the projection of a narrator said things which I couldn't understand. I jotted down the kanji for various nuclear things in case they came in handy later. I noticed that 原子 ("genshi") was a common prefix for atomic things.
There was a uranium sample, but not as pretty as others I'd seen. Maybe they didn't think that was the point. Maybe I'm jaded. They didn't say anything about what some doubting Thomases had to say about breeder reactors, instead breathlessly extolling their nuclear "Recycling Centers".
There were many displays, none of which interested me. It might have helped if I understood more Japanese. What was I supposed to notice about this electric range, about this arcade game, about this photo club machine? I finally gave up and left.
I went to Tower Records and got a bunch of CDs by The Blue Hearts and The High-Lows. The last time I was in Japan, I'd picked up an album by the Blue Hearts and really liked it. I'd spent the next few years failing to find much else by them in American music stores. I'd found maybe five albums, a fraction of their output. The Blue Hearts had since broken up, with two members going to the High-Lows. I'd found one single of theirs in America.
I was really, really happy to find so much of their music.
It wasn't until later that I realized I had forgotten to look for a ska section.
For lunch, I tried a restaurant in the Tokyu Department Store. I ordered a rice omelette teisho-ku (lunch set). I was surprised when they brought me silverware instead of chopsticks. Unfortunately, the silverware consisted of a fork, a serving spoon, and a spoon large enough to serve as a saucer with convenient soup-handle attachment.
I tried to figure out how to use them. The bigger spoon is always the soup spoon, so I tried to use it to eat my soup. The spoon was too big. I tried to use it to transfer soup from the bowl to my mouth, but couldn't get it right. I tried the other spoon, and it was better, but not much good.
I looked around, embarrassed--who had seen my lack of success with these implements? The other people in the restaurant all had chopsticks. At this point, I started to figure it out.
The restaurant had given me silverware because I was a Westerner. They probably hadn't known which silverware was, in fact, useful. There was a handle on the side of my soup bowl. It was more like a cup. Really, obviously, it was okay to drink this soup from the bowl/cup thing. Why on earth had they brought me a spoon. Why had they brought me two?
I was glad to leave that place. I bought a train ticket so that I could go to Hiroshima on Saturday. I had vague memories from my last trip of having trouble doing the breeze-in-and-buy-a-ticket-five-minutes-ahead-of-time thing on weekends.
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