"Working" For The Weekend

It’s a slow day at the office today, so I thought I might take a brief respite from the non-stop Gweek coverage to tell you a bit about my weekend. Prepare yourself, for what follows is an account of exhilarating events that could only take place in the land of the rising sun.

On Friday night, we headed down to the coolest bar in Hachinohe, a somewhat recent discovery. As much as I would like to take credit for this breakthrough, the truth of the matter is that Charlie Tyack found it and was kind enough to let us in on the secret. The place is called Hanbey and it’s inconspicuously hidden down a flight of stairs on the main drag. The only thing that might clue you into the fact that there’s an awesome bar hiding down there is the old movie posters that line the walls of the staircase.

Step inside and you’re surrounded by old toys, posters and various other paraphernalia, most of it from the 50s and 60s (although I also managed to spot at least one wartime propaganda poster as well). Drink enough here and you can probably convince yourself that you’ve stepped into a time warp.

They’ve also got two black and white TV sets that play old commercials from the 50s and original Astroboy episodes non-stop. At all times, the bar is filled with the vaguely haunting sound of pop music from a bygone era.

Completing this ambience is the menu, which is based heavily around wartime staples and long-forgotten drinks. Like the so-called denki-bran (“electric brandy”) which harkens back to a time when anything could seem modern and exciting if attached to the prefix denki. What’s nice is that the prices induce a sense of nostalgia as well; most drinks go for about half the yen you’d pay anywhere else in town.

Then there’s the food. Hanbey’s extensive menu ranges from standard Japanese snack fare to antiquated oddities to the downright bizarre-and all of it is dirt cheap. I can’t recommend the frog’s legs because even though they do actually taste like chicken, there’s really not enough meat on a frog’s leg to make it worth your while. Although I haven’t seen it yet, the oppai ice cream is supposedly appropriately perky (no, I’m not going to translate that for you). There's also a rule on the books that states that women get a free bowl of ice cream if they ask for it.

Finally, there’s the “table charge”. Many bars in Japan charge a “sitting fee” simply for entering their establishment, which can range from a few bucks to upwards of $20 depending on how nice the joint is. They justify this by giving you a small, “complimentary” dish when you sit down, generally some gross pickled vegetables or something equally unappetizing. Occasionally you’ll happen upon a place that is kind enough to provide you with chocolate, cheese, popcorn or even noodles. Not to be outdone, Hanbey rounds out their eccentric offerings with one of the strangest table foods I’ve seen yet: raw cabbage. They provide two kinds of dipping sauce for the cabbage and if you finish your plate, they’ll bring you another at no charge. Despite what you might think, cabbage with spicy sauce makes for a great pub food. There are a few Hanbey locations in various places throughout the country and you could do worse than to look up this curious anachronism the next time you feel like a night out on the archipelago.

The next day we drove around aimlessly before deciding to go to a barbecue being thrown by someone from Ryan’s office (although he received a personal invitation over the phone, he had no idea who had called him). On the way, we stopped at this playground in Misawa that had a fairly sizeable metal maze. Although we initially wrote the maze off as child’s play, we soon found ourselves ensnared in the belly of the metal beast, wandering around helplessly and bumping our heads repeatedly on the low-hanging bars. That was a scary five minutes there.

At the barbecue, Ryan decided to sport the latest in Japanese headgear technology.

Afterwards, we headed out to the Homac (the Japanese equivalent of Home Depot), for lack of anything better to do. While wandering around in the aisles, I spotted this large display for kabtuomushi (lit “samurai helmet insect”) known outside of Japan as the rhinoceros beetle. Large beetles like this have long been kept as pets in east asia-they’re clean, require relatively little space or maintenance, they’re safe to handle and males can be easily coaxed into fighting each other. You might remember that I mentioned this phenomenon in passing some time ago but what I didn’t tell you then is that an entire industry has blossomed to capitalize on this common childhood obsession. Beetle fighting arcade games, stuffed beetle toys and “Mushi King” branded pajamas are all common sights at any mall or toy store. Ask any elementary school boy to draw a picture and nine times out of ten, it will have a kabutomushi in it somewhere.

Here’s one of the buggers (get it?) in all of his invertebrate glory. While standing around taking these pictures, I observed at least three children begging their mothers for a beetle. The conversation usually went something like this:

Child: “Wow, look, mom! They’re so big!”

Mother: “Yes, they are.”

Child: “I want one. I really want one.”

Mother: “They’re too expensive. Now, come along.”

I find it curious that all of the mothers objected on the grounds of price and not on the grounds that their children wished to bring huge, disgusting bugs into their home.

Leo was just as confused and disgusted as you or I.

Also, I finally broke down and bought one of them newfangled Nintendo DS Lite units. Although they came out here in March, they’ve been consistently sold out nationwide until quite recently. When I dropped by the local Toys R Us and saw that they would be getting a few in stock, I decided to seize the opportunity. Upon I showing up at the counter with my ticket, I was rung up by the cashier who then proceeded to call someone on the phone. A woman came over from the stock room and looked at me before running back whence she came. I ended up standing around at the register without any idea what was going on while various employees scuttled about. Were they making me a Nintendo back there? After about five minutes the pimply-faced checkout guy told me to “Please wait a minute”. Oh, okay. After waiting for about five more minutes, a manager finally emerged from the back room and walked up to the register. She faced me and pointing at the order slip, said to me in English “This...this...this is...”. At this point I told her that she could explain it to me in Japanese and she then simply asked me if I wished to purchase an extended warranty for six dollars. Sheesh.

Although I’ve wanted one of these things for a while now, I knew that this desire was only borne out of an impulsive need to possess whatever the shiny, new gadget of the moment is. I had originally planned on restraining myself from buying something that I would never use until Matt showed me his DS Lite and the kanji dictionary that he had purchased for it. I’ve wanted to buy a denshi jisho (electronic kanji dictionary) for a while now but two things were keeping me at bay: their prohibitive price and the fact that you usually have to know a kanji’s phonetic reading in order to look it up (which doesn’t help at all in the commonly frustrating situation of being confronted with a character on the page that you’ve never seen before). Actually that’s a lie, you can count the number of strokes in a character and look it up that way on almost any electronic dictionary but that always seemed like way too much work to me. Anyway, the DS dictionary alleviates this problem by using the unit’s touch screen and stylus to allow you to enter characters that the software then attempts to match. What’s more, the DS unit and a copy of the game still cost considerably less than a denshi jisho with similar functionality.

Plus, it plays Tetris. And Tetris is awesome.