I wanted to talk a little bit about products.
Every product, when it arrives in Japan, undergoes a little makeover before it hits the market, so that it will better appeal to Japanese tastes. This causes some things to be vastly improved, and other things to be (in my foriegner's opinion) vastly weirdified.

As for weirdified-- well, my toothpaste is black. It tastes of... grapes and licorice, and something else I can't identify. At first I was horrified by it, and couldn't look into the sink after I spat, because it made me gag. I did a whole lot of brushing with my eyes closed! But now I really like it, and find that how gray the sink is indicates whether I've rinsed enough! Another strange thing (for me) is peanut butter. I know I can get jars of Skippy if I want to, but I thought I might try Japanese peanut butter since I was in Japan. I bought a stand-up yellow tube with a picture of Snoopy on it. Snoopy's Nut Cream. Well, let's just say that Snoopy's Nut Cream was a little outside my realm of experience-- it was too weirdly smooth and creamy and sweet, the taste of peanut almost entirely over-ridden by sugar and oil. It was really pale, too-- almost whitish. I've since found that any 'Peanut Butter' product is invariably graced by Snoopy's Nut Cream, or something just like it. No thanks.

As far as product improvements go, I would have to say that packaging, in general, is ingenious and interesting. Half the time the best part about buying a box of strawberry pinecones (or whatever) is the opening of the box, the peeling back of the layers of brightly coloured and carefully detailed wrappers. There are typically more layers of wrapping than you would find with western products, but this enhances the feeling of suspense and enjoyment for the consumer. The downside to this is the waste involved. If ever I've been aware of a consumerist society's impact on the environment, it's been here in Japan. You find garbage everywhere, heaps of it left for months, maybe years. Mostly because there's nowhere for the garbage to go. The garbage system in Tokushima is designed to try to cope with this-- two days a week for burnable trash, once every other week for recyclable plastics (which there are a lot of), a couple of times a month for bottles, cans, newspapers, cardboard, and once a month for non-burnables like razors and lightbulbs and what-have-you. But then there's the things that don't entirely fit one category or another, and they are left to moulder wherever they fall-- bicycles, damaged bowling pins (you recall I live near a bowling alley now) fishing waste like anchors and nets, etc, etc, etc. No-one would dare to pick up a piece of random litter because it then becomes a burden to dispose of correctly. Public trash bins are pretty much unheard of.

Oh-- and while I'm on the subject of products, I was informed in TOPIA today that I can indeed buy brown rice. It's kept with all the other rice in the grocery store, just in such small packages that I didn't spot it right away. And you should keep it in the fridge if you buy it, because it spoils quickly. I was privy to this information because there is a lovely Canadian girl who works at TOPIA-- she came across this blog while poking about on the 'net. I'm finding I'm gaining some small-town notoriety as the writer of this thing, and to be honest, it makes me a little nervous. Especially since there's now a link to pictures of me dancing! I have to be more and more particular about what I say, and about whom, which makes this less a confessional and more of a carefully edited travelogue. I suppose I can always use pseudonym's...

So! Pseudonyms away! I went to one of M and K's wedding parties on Saturday. The Japanese tradition is to have party after party, with multiple changes of clothes for the bride and groom. This particular party happened about a week after the 'real' wedding, and was held in a hotel's cafe. It was for the 'younger' crowd; high-school friends and M's co-workers from NOVA and K's job in the City Office. M looked absolutely stunning in a volumnous wine-red ball gown. I arrived a little late, and couldn't fit at the NOVA table, so settled in at an all-male table of K's junior-high-school buddies, which was a blast! There were speeches and toasts and lots of food and dirty quizzes and bawdy games. I entered almost every game, being a bit of a sucker for attention when I'm feeling high-spirited. I failed miserably at the beer-chug contest. Next I tried to blend in with a row of Japanese girls while the blindfolded groom grasped our hands, squeezed our upper arms and allowed his hand to be kissed in an attempt to locate his bride. I was so embarrassed by his exclamation of "Zen-zen chigau!" (No WAY!) when he grabbed my upper arm, that I bit his hand rather than kissed it. He ended up choosing the wrong girl anyway (number five instead of number one), and received a smart slap across the face. Finally I played a game that I ended up being very good at. I joined another line-up of girls, and everyone was given a ping-pong ball and a male partner. My guy was a funny Japanese fellow who came up to my shoulders. He stood, with the other guys, on chairs before the girls-- on the signal of GO, the girls had to thread the ping-pong ball up the inside seam of the guys' trousers, over the crotch, and down the other leg, and then reverse the process! I had no idea what I had gotten myself into, but seeing as my partners legs were short and my arms are long (and my spirit very competitive), I had the task completed in no time flat. (Little Mari was paired with Neil, so she didn't have a chance!) I celebrated by yanking my partner off the chair and hoisting him into the air. There were enormous cheers and laughter, and shouts of "Kiss! Kiss!"-- my partner tried to escape, so I behaved badly and forcibly grabbed him, spun him around and smooched him hard on the lips. Poor guy! (When I told this story to Maz, she said, "Oh, you were a scary gaijin!" I have no doubt that's exactly what I was.) At any rate, I won a lovely prize; an ionic facial steamer. I haven't tried it yet... The party continued at another bar, but lost a lot of it's velocity when the groom accidentally put his arm through a plate-glass door; I was in the bathroom when it happened, and came out in time to see the shattered glass, the droplets of blood, and the groom with his arm tied up with kitchen towels before they rushed him off to the hospital. So much for that! I stayed for a while and flirted a bit with H, but I've been told before that he's not interested in dating gaikokujin girls because he is 27-- he's getting 'old' and wants to find a nice Japanese girl to settle down with and marry. I know that not all Japanese people feel this way, but many do. There seems to be an expiry date on people, and desperation sets in as one approaches thirty-- one stops caring about who they marry, and just worry about getting married at all. It makes me sad, because I can't imagine marrying someone I wasn't crazy about. And I've met a lot of nice Japanese guys, some of whom I'd love to date, but I am just so outside of their perceived range of dreams for the future, that I am undatable to them. I seem to be of greater interest to older married men-- no thanks! I don't worry about it though... the one thing I am certain of in my life is that the right thing will always happen. So whether I date or I don't is really no big deal in the grand scheme of things. And that, my friends, is one of the tricks to developing the habit of happiness...

Until next time,

Namaste