Gaijin Tonic

My friend Ethan arrived home at his poky second-floor apartment one evening, exhausted after several hours of teaching. After he unlocked the door, kicked off his shoes and staggered into the living room, much to his surprise he discovered one of his students, a nurse, waiting for him on the sofa. A surprising development after a mundane day in an English conversation school.

The obsessive woman had been pursuing Ethan for quite a while, booking lessons with him as often as possible, and persistently hanging around outside the school. Finally, she had somehow got hold of his address and broken into his flat after climbing onto his balcony. This was an audacious invasion of privacy, behaviour which could be legitimately branded as stalking.

Thoughts raced through Ethan’s mind when he laid eyes on the crazy woman, sat there smiling at him suggestively. What should he do? Throw her out into the street or try to talk to her? Notify his superiors at work, or call the police and seek a restraining order?
His decision?
He shagged her.

Now it’s fair to say that this was an unorthodox course of action, and surely not one that experts would recommend. However, it seemed to do the trick. She never bothered him again. Far from disturbed by the experience, the one thing which bothered Ethan was the girl’s loss of interest after he’d delivered the goods. He took this as something of a slight on his performance.

I’m becoming a global phenomenon! Surprisingly, some nice people have translated my blog entries into Hungarian for a website. You can check them out below (in the unlikely event that you can read them!):

Halloween 2007.
Shark Bar.
Fleamarket Bar.
The Drinking Culture In Japan.
Karaoke.

Japanese bars have posters of women in swim-wear drinking huge tankards of beer on the beach, thus combining three of my favourite things. These pictures, which advertise beers such as Asahi and Kirin, are very easy on the eye, so I thought I’d post a few on my blog for you to enjoy. You can see them below.
Young, attractive women are probably not the biggest target market for these breweries’ ads, but posters featuring lecherous, nicotine-stained businessmen vomiting into the gutter wouldn’t be to great for sales.

Yowser! The people at Corona beer in Japan certainly didn’t hold back when designing their 2005 advertising campaign. The raunchy ads below, with their slogan “grind it in deeper,” seem to be likening the act of pushing a bit of lime into the bottle, to sex. Wow- I’d never made that comparison before, and I’m drooling perv.
Perhaps the pictures might be designed to inspire folks to guzzle a bottle of Corona, just to cool off.
Well, the ads succeeded in sticking in my mind but, to be honest, it wasn’t the Corona I was thinking about.

You can read more about this at Schema Magazine.

In keeping with the boozy theme of this blog, here are some clips from a Japanese TV show, in which someone with the most irritating voice known to mankind ranks the top 10 Japanese beers.
Featuring alongside the ice-cold glasses of foaming lager are some highly attractive, nubile young ladies in bikinis. Cheers to that! Hey, who am I to interfere with another country’s culture and traditions?

Me and a buddy went to a Japanese hip-hop club the other day, drawn in by the flyer above. Can you guess why?
I have to say, the women in this club were throwing down some eyeball-scorchingly raunchy dance-moves. Evidently they’d seen a couple of sleazy “2 Live Cru” videos on MTV and taken them way too seriously, but I wasn’t complaining. These dance-hall divas were also doing some impressive acrobatics which resembled a jaw-dropping mixture of Flashdance and the Chinese State Circus, throwing themselves all over the room, body-popping, bouncing off walls, and waving their arses in the air. The only ladies who weren’t dancing were in wheelchairs, or hobbling around on crutches, apparently injured while attempting overly-ambitious dancefloor stunts.
Luckily I had my trusty disposable camera at hand!

*Note the crutch behind the couple dirty-dancing in the last picture!

I thought I’d spice up my site by mentioning “Wet Hot Sale,” a raunchy Japanese sex comedy which manages to combine the twin passions of sake and sex.

In the ludicrous story, a pub owner discovers the secrets of making delicious sake by using the bodily juices of sexy virgins, who do aerobics in specially-designed sake-filled leotards. The sleazy publican learns that this demented technique won’t work unless the girl is virginal, so he coerces his comely daughter into getting hymen regeneration surgery so she can help him make the tasty drink. Charming! It’s a heart-warming story for your children and grandparents to enjoy.
I’m sure Steven Spielberg is being lined up to direct a Hollywood remake as we speak.

Read more here.

The other day I went to see one of my fave Japanese bands, Shonen Knife, perform live in Tokyo. They were in town to promote their ace new LP “Fun! Fun! Fun!”
If you’re not familiar, Shonen Knife are an all-girl punk trio from Osaka, who recently celebrated their 25th anniversary (although only singer/guitarist/songwriter Naoko remains from the original line-up.) They became quite popular in the west for a while in the early nineties, and supported Nirvana on tour in 1993.

The show was very cool, and the line up includes two cute new members on drums and bass. There were some authentically nerdy fans in suits dancing at the front, too.
The band played some great new songs, including songs about popcorn, cookies, the flu, and barnacles. Shonen Knife excel at writing songs about such inane topics. I had a chance to chat with Naoko, the singer, after the show, and asked her why shy wrote a song about a barnacle. She said “because it’s very fun,” which was good enough for me.

Here’s a good Shonen Knife fansite.

I think I’m turning into a Japanese Otaku (which is a “geek”, in English.) As if the fact that I write a blog isn’t evidence enough, I now have conclusive proof: The other day I went to a maid cafe. The maid cafe is the preferred hang-out of Japanese nerds, a safe haven where they can chat about comics, watch cartoons on a big screen, and get served by cute girls in French maid outfits (which, frankly, was the only reason I went there. Funnily enough, the night I went was the day of the Tanabata festival, a kind of star festival, so the girls were wearing traditional summer Yukata instead.)

The maid cafe I went to was a joint in Yokohama, called “Honey Honey.”
Unsurprisingly, due to the major nerd-factor there were were no female customers in the place.
The maids were very chatty, though, so I took advantage of the situation to practice my Japanese on them.
I ordered an omelet, and one of the maids drew the face of AnpanMan on it with ketchup (AnpanMan is a cartoon character with a bread roll for a head.)
Initially, I wasn’t entirely seduced by the whole maid cafe thing. However, after drinking several beers, I was sold.
Here’s their homepage.

I saw these two girls at a music festival in Tokyo and pestered them for a photograph. Do you think they were trying to tell me something?

I’m guessing the two girls didn’t meet by coincidence. I wonder if they felt the need to stand next to each other all day.