Andy in Tokyo

The Food Obsession

Japanese TV programmes tend to fall into two broad categories: 1. celebrities eating food and 2. everything else. Usually you can find, at any time of day, at least one celeb-food show on the air. The perplexing thing is that most of these programmes are not cookery shows in the Jamie Olliver sense of the word (ie, they don’t teach you anything about how to cook), rather they involve people standing around in an insanely-coloured studio stuffing their faces. Invariably, the food is declared to be “oishii” (delicious), and the celebrities spend the next ten minutes prattling on about the time their mum made the same thing, or when they went to Osaka and saw locals putting mayonnaise (shock horror!) on the food in question.

Admittedly, now and then some TV shows do actually have celebrities eating in proper restaurants, but I really don’t care to watch them noisily slurp an enormous bowl of greasy ramen in a random Yokohaman restaurant. “What am I getting out of this experience?” I say to myself. Apart from the knowledge that that particular celebrity likes eating katsudon, or whatever, and what the food looks like, it offers me nothing. I don’t think I’ve ever gone to a restaurant because I’ve seen so-and-so eating there on TV, in fact it works more as deterrent: the place would be so busy that I’d have to queue up for an hour just to get through the front door. If I’m going to eat out, I’ll either wander around and explore a few places by myself, or search online for a reasoned opinion that stretches to more than just “umai!”

Perhaps the one decent food programme I’ve seen while in Japan is, unsurprisingly, not Japanese. It’s called Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations, and you can watch it on the Discovery Channel. Bourdain is not only a trained chef; he is also a witty, down-to-earth host who travels the world in search of new experiences. The idea is that yes, food can be nice, but it can also be bloody awful. Food is used more as a means to exploring the people, places and culture of wildly different places, rather than an end in itself. And that’s the way food programmes on TV should be.

Japanese Newspapers

These days it’s not uncommon for people to get all their news from the internet, and for absolutely nothing. Needless to say, this whole ‘free news’ malarkey has proved disastrous for the newspaper industry. Many papers, such as the New York Times, initially required users to pay for online content, but as more rival sites became free such revenue models were abandoned. Some thought that advertising would help plug the gap, yet so far online advertising has proved far less lucrative than its paper-based counterpart.

While Japanese newspapers have also suffered from declining sales, they remain absolutely vast, in terms of both circulation and reach, when compared to their foreign cousins. The following diagram is my attempt at shedding some light on the scale of the big three Japanese dailies: the Yomiuri, Asahi and Mainichi “Shimbuns”. (Click the image to expand.)

Akebono’s Gleeful Journey

Akebono has had many fine achievements during his forty years on earth: becoming the first foreign sumo wrestler to achieve the rank of yokozuna, winning eleven top division titles, and, err… managing to win one fight out of twelve in his career as a K-1 fighter.

Okay, so things may have gone a bit downhill after sumo, but when you’ve reached the highest echelons of one of the most famous sports in the world it’s always going to be hard to go one better. But recently the big man has roared back into the limelight thanks to a series of adverts for Fox’s latest smash hit comedy/drama thingy, Glee.

Words can’t really do the adverts justice. All you need to know is that they involve a lot of Akebono singing and dancing. The song? ‘Don’t Stop Believing’ by Journey – nothing could be more appropriate.

Check it out for yourself:

You can catch the rest of Akebono’s adverts on YouTube or one of the many Fox-related channels on Japan’s satellite TV network, Sky PerfecTV.

Healthcare in Japan

Japanese healthcare is a difficult subject that I’ve been meaning to write about for some time. For those of you living in countries without a national health service the idea of paying for hospital stays and operations may be nothing new, but until I moved to Japan I had never really thought about it. You break an arm, you go into hospital, have an operation, and come out the next day. That’s it: no bills, no nasty fees, nothing.

Most of what is written in this post is based largely on my own personal experiences. If anybody has any further information they would like to share on this subject, please do!

Oi! I thought Japan had a national healthcare system. Doesn’t that mean healthcare in Japan is free?
Yes yes, I know, no healthcare system is free: somebody has to pay for it somewhere along the line. The big difference between Japan and the UK, for example, is how far along that line healthcare is paid for. By and large, in Britain patients don’t pay up front – in part or in whole – for hospital stays or operations. Japan’s healthcare system is not so straightforward. The main Wikipedia article on Japanese healthcare says:

“Japan provides healthcare services, including screening examinations for particular diseases at no direct cost to the patient, prenatal care, and infectious disease control, are provided by national and local governments.”

Some services are “at no direct cost to the patient”, others will cost you. Generally speaking, in their various guises the national healthcare systems pay for 70% of drugs and healthcare costs. The remaining 30% is paid for by the patient.

I’ve just moved to Japan. Do I have to enrol in a healthcare programme?
No, you don’t. Broadly speaking, there are two categories of healthcare scheme: employee health insurance (健康保険 or Kenkō-Hoken) and national health insurance (国民健康保険 or Kokumin-Kenkō-Hoken). In theory all residents of Japan are required to be enrolled in one of these schemes, but for reasons of cost (either personally or to their employer) many are not. Foreigners are recommended – but not forced – to join one of them.

How do I know if I’m already enrolled in either of these healthcare programmes?
Have you got a credit-card sized piece of plastic with either 健康保険 or 国民健康保険 written on the top? If you haven’t, then you’re probably not enrolled. Also, check your pay slip for deductions under 健康保険科.

My company says I have private health insurance, and that it isn’t really worth enrolling on one of the national schemes.
If you’re coming to Japan as an English (eikaiwa) teacher then your company might have a private scheme that you automatically become part of. What this means is that every time you visit a doctor or dentist you might have to pay for the full cost of everything by yourself, rather than the 30% you would be pay under one of the national healthcare schemes. You will need to send all the medical receipts off to your insurer, who will then reimburse the cost – often several months later.

Example: You have private healthcare, but no national healthcare. You catch the flu and visit your doctor. He checks you out and prescribes some medicine. The doctor’s fee comes to ¥6,000, and the medicine costs ¥2,000. If you had national healthcare, this would have cost you ¥1,800 and ¥600, respectively.

If you’re coming to Japan for a year or two. and are fairly confident that you won’t fall seriously ill or have a nasty injury, then a private scheme might be all right for you. They are usually much cheaper (around ¥7-8,000 a month compared with ¥14,000 for national healthcare), and some paranoid twits relish the idea of not being locked into the ‘government system’. However, if you’re going to be here long-term, I strongly recommend you enrol yourself on a national healthcare scheme.

Whoa there, Silver. Let’s go back a step: I thought all companies had to enrol their students on a national healthcare scheme anyway…
All full-time workers should, in theory, be provided with employee health insurance. To get around this many of the shadier companies keep working hours at just below the full-time level. This saves them loads of money, but benefits neither their employees nor the healthcare system in general. The number of part-time workers has sky-rocketed in recent years, starving the healthcare system of much-needed funding.

What about dentists?
As long as you’re not having anything cosmetic done, the same 30% fee applies. If you’ve got national healthcare, that is.

A word of warning: enamel fillings seem to be classed as ‘cosmetic’ in Japan. That doesn’t necessarily mean you have to end up looking like Jaws from James Bond, though: resin fillings are pretty decent these days.

Mutant Strawberries

Bought some strawberries today. I think they may have been grown in Chernobyl:

Office Life in Tokyo

I’ve spent three years working in the same office, sat at the same desk, seeing the same salarymen day-in, day-out. I still don’t know who everyone is (four hundred people = a lot of names), but I have managed to come up with plenty of nicknames for the most peculiar individuals:

Man Child
This fellow has the head and voice of a man, but the body of a child. His head is absolutely massive: the fact that his neck can support it defies all the laws of physics. He also spends far too long in the toilet, rustling the tissue paper a little bit too vigorously.

The Womble
A sixty-something mumbler with all the speed and grace of a sloth. He has no internal monologue and spends considerable time saying ‘unnnn, sou ka’ (‘ahh, I see’) to inanimate objects. His job is to… well, to be quite honest, I have no idea what his job is. He spends much of the day wandering between floors with a small bag, occasionally picking bits of dust of the floor.

Stewie
Named after Family Guy’s evil toddler, pint-sized Stewie seems far too small to be at work; he should still be at infant school! He sits at his big boys’ desk all day, his little legs dangling off the chair, issuing commands down the phone like Napoleon’s younger brother.

Bill Gates
Nothing much to say about this chap, apart from that he is the spitting image of Bill Gates (if Bill Gates was Japanese).

The Fifth Beatle
Long straggly hair, enormous Bose headphones and a ‘God you’re so unfair, I hate you!’ teenage pout. He also seems to be something of a hypochondriac, and spends a good portion of his day gargling antiseptic mouthwash in front of the bathroom mirror.

The Weasel
A fifty-year-old silver-haired weasel who is terrified of his computer. Every time he sits in front of it his face contorts into a picture of abject horror, as if he’s watching a streaming video of an Al-Qaida hostage being beheaded. Perhaps someone told him that if you click the mouse buttons too hard the whole internet breaks, so he’s being extra careful.

Penfold
Do you remember Danger Mouse? (If you don’t, go here.) This guy is the spitting image of Penfold, right down to the glasses and hair (or lack of). The only thing missing is the occasional ‘Cripes, DM!’.

Penguin Pilferer Foiled by Sharp-eyed Security

A young Fukuokan pet shop owner has been arrested in Nagasaki for attempting to steal a penguin from a zoo.

Employees at Nagasaki Bio Park in Saikai became suspicious of young Akira Honda’s (24) activities after he became cagey when security guards offered to store his rather large suitcase. Further inspection revealed that the suitcase did, in fact, contain a somewhat perturbed Humboldt penguin.

Police were considering moving the penguin to Britain as part of a witness protection scheme, but had to scrap the plan when it was revealed that the feathered fish-feaster was afraid of Wales.

Mandarin Oriental, Tokyo

Continuing with our birthday tradition of spending a night in a fancy Tokyo hotel (see last year’s post on The Peninsula), this weekend my better half and myself stayed at the Mandarin Oriental in Nihonbashi.

Rooms are very spacious. Starting from 50m2:

The bed is a decent size:

As is the TV (a 42 incher). You can watch both Wowow and Star Channel movies in full HD, which is ace:

If it’s your birthday the hotel provides a free bowl of strawberries, which is nice. You can see the bathroom through the vertical blinds in the background. The bathroom mirror is on rails so you can move it out of the way when you want to see Tokyo from the bath:

The bathroom itself has a solid granite sink:

All the knobs and handles are polished to within an inch of their lives:

The bath is a solid granite affair. Easily big enough for two:

I filled our bath with hydrochloric acid. It cleans the pores, deep down (to the bone):

The toilet is, as you would expect, a high-tech Toto super-loo:

Features abound:

The shower has a selection of free stuff by Aromatherapy Associates. My wife assures me that their stuff is the business:

Back in the bedroom, we have a yoga mat and brolly in the cupboard:

More views of the room. Wifey can be seen sat on the sofa, exasperated by my photo-taking antics:

Rooms come fully-loaded with booze:

Snacks:

More booze:

And, erm, stationery:

Oh and you also get a pair of yukata’s and fan for poncing about the room in, feeling all imbued with the spirit of the samurai and all that guff:

We thought “Bollocks to it!” and ordered a room-service breakfast:

Green tea pancakes with maple syrup. Very nice:

And an omelette with assorted fried bits and bobs:

Finally, the view. Our room was on the 30th floor, which is the lowest. Bizarrely, the front desk is on the 38th floor, which means to get outside you have to take one lift from the 30th to the 38th floor, then get in another lift that takes you to the ground floor. Our room was facing east, towards Asakusa. There were a few cranes in the way as they’re building something next door:

Construction of Tokyo Sky Tree is well and truly in progress. The finished article will be 634 metres tall, falling some way behind the awesome Burj Khalifa:

The sumo joint:

Looking left:

Looking right:

The same view at night reveals a fancy ferris wheel:

And some very bright crane lights:

Oh and one more thing before we wrap this little photo tour up. The customer toilets on the 38th floor have a “pee on the plebs” feature which I had to take a video of (I don’t normally take videos in toilets, you understand, but this one was special):

All in all, the Mandarin Oriental Tokyo is a top-class hotel with a fantastic view, and I highly recommend it.

View Mandarin Oriental, Tokyo in a larger map

Live webcams around Tokyo

Want to see what’s going on in Tokyo right this very minute? Here’s a selection of some of the best live webcams. All of the cameras are running in real time (none of that “updates every ten seconds” nonsense), and you can control them yourself. Just click on the images below and away you go.

Shibuya (Hachiko):

Shibuya (outside Tower Records):

Shibuya (Parco):

Shinjuku Station:

Roppongi Hills & Tokyo Tower:

Ueno:

Cool Japan

Imagine if the BBC created a programme called ‘Cool Britain’, in which a group of foreigners discussed the most mundane aspects of British culture, such as rambling, Sunday Lunch, making a ‘proper’ cup of tea and Shrove Tuesday. The discussion would be occasionally interrupted by snippets of one of the foreigners ‘experiencing’ that week’s cultural item: plodding through the Yorkshire Dales in drizzle wearing an impossibly-coloured Berghaus anorak and occasionally screaming ‘Oooh, isn’t this lovely!’, for example. Presenter Richard Hammond would then throw out thought-provoking questions to the multicultural horde, questions like: “So, Ordinance Survey maps, a classic British navigation tool. Are they cool?”.

At the end of the show, and after much smug, self-congratulatory back-slapping by ‘Hammy’, June Sarpong and a random cultural ‘expert’, the day’s topic would be either voted cool, or not, and… well, that’s it.

Oh, and all the foreigners speak French.

Dying to see such inventive programming? I bet you are, and luckily for you a Japanese version, ingeniously titled ‘Cool Japan’, is aired on NHK’s BShi channel every Tuesday from 10pm. Here’s a clip:

Now, what really makes Japan cool? Kurara Chibana:

ANA’s ‘Mohican’ jet returns

Japan’s second airline, All Nippon Airways (ANA), has decided to go back to the future by reintroducing this funky ‘Mohican’ livery, which was last seen in the skies twenty years ago:

Unfortunately only one plane – a Boeing 767 now operating between Tokyo and Kyushu – has been given the new (or should I say old) paint job. I think it looks fantastic, especially when compared with ANA’s current bland, identikit early-90s branding. Perhaps a concerted on-line campaign will encourage them to repaint more of their fleet.

More infomation: ANA’s offical press release