Gaijin Tonic

Kawasaki City’s annual penis-celebrating fertility festival, the Kanamara Matsuri took place on Sunday and was as crazy as ever. A highlight was the appearance of Gachachin, a grotesquely mutated phallic version of the popular cuddly character, Gachapin. Gachapin usually looks like this:

…and this is Gachachin:

Truly, deeply warped. He looks like the bad-trip hallucination of Sigmund Freud watching children’s television on mescalin.
I wonder if we can expect to see more of Gachachin in the future?
I, for one, would like to see him do battle against Flesh Gordon.

The Japanese are obsessed with remaining youthful (as we can see from the legions of grown men sitting on trains, wearing Donald Duck T-shirts and reading comics or playing Nintendo DS games.)

The shops are full of beauty products which promise to help buyers retain their good looks.
According to Invertorspot, ladies these days will stop at nothing to preserve their unblemished skin. The successful “Q-Bit” range of beauty products, made by Nihon Sofuken, even has piggy placenta as its active ingredient. Q-Bit can be purchased as a face-pack, a drink, or supplement pills. Ever wondered why the Japanese always look so young? People are frantically rubbing swine-afterbirth on their faces, or guzzling it down like there’s no tomorrow.

Worried about drinking the liquidized placenta of Porky Pig? Don’t worry- it’s peach flavoured!

Invertorspot

Visitors to Japan find much amusement in the high-tech toilets. You know, the sort of futuristic robo-crappers that C3PO might drop his techno-turds into. Tourists point and guffaw at the heated seat and the panel of buttons so complex you need a pilot’s license to operate.
I wasn’t laughing, however, when I was puking into one of them the other day.

In a state of drunken delirium I had blithely missed my last train home from Tokyo after a frenzied drinking session, and had to stay on my friend’s sofa. His classy new apartment was equipped with a space-age lavatory and, early the next morning, I was kneeling in front of it, miserably spewing up the acidic contents of my guts. I felt bloody awful and deeply regretted the three pints of gin and tonic I had knocked back towards the end of the night.

After some considerable time I finally stopped heaving and I reached blindly for the control panel to flush the toilet. However, as I fumbled feebly with with the buttons, I somehow made the mistake of operating the bidet function instead. As the sudden jet of scalding hot water hit me in the face, startling me and drenching my shirt, I sorely missed the traditional, cold porcelain toilets of home.

The designers of this ad for NOVA corporation clearly weren’t thinking too hard. Their mascot is the NOVA Usagi, a hybrid pink rabbit with a beak. As if looking like a deformed chimera that’s escaped from a genetics lab wasn’t enough, in the picture below, the Usagi appears to be waving his winky around like a depraved flasher!

One thing that makes life easy in Japan is the multitude of colourful convenience stores, or “convenies”. These brightly-lit shrines to capitalism can be found on every street corner, open all day and night, with inexplicable names like “Three F” and “Sunkus” (a woeful attempt to spell “thanks”.) Inside, they look like compact versions of Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory, full of shelves adorned with luminous packages and bottles branded with bewildering, boldly-written gibberish names like Pocky, Pocari Sweat, Asse, Calpis and Bubble Man II. You can buy comics, condoms, DVDs, Adidas T-Shirts, make-up, batteries, lightbulbs, bananas and, most importantly, alcohol.
Convenience stores certainly make drinking more, well… convenient. Even in the remotest suburb of Japan, at four AM, you can wander a few yards from your front door and buy a beer without any hassle. Amazing!

Every night out seems to begin with a couple of convenie beers or perhaps chu-hai (fruity, stomach-dissolvingly acidic alco-pops) consumed at home as you throw on your glad rags. And every night without exception ends, en-route to your house, with a trip to the convenie for a shopping spree of midnight snacks and preemptive hangover-cures.
The staff are awe-inspiringly enthusiastic, crying cheerful greetings the moment you enter. Such welcomes are worlds apart from what you’d expect in the squalid inconvenience stores at home, where you’d consider yourself well-attended-to if the clerk flinched briefly to look up from his magazine. The Japanese shop-staff take remarkable pride in their jobs, even if their jobs are minimum wage. And working all night in a convenience store is not without it’s perils. These poor saps have to deal with drunken Gaijin.
For example, some fun-loving American neighbours of mine were in a Lawson’s convenience store one night on their way home from an evening of prodigious boozing. One of them, a big guy named Andrew, was still in party-mode and overwhelmed by all the sounds and colours. Suddenly, just for the hell of it, he started dancing to the muzak and stripping his clothes off, much to the shock of the other customers and the immense amusement of his drinking buddies.
In the film “Reality Bites”, Winona Ryder and her high-spirited slacker pals dance to the song “My Sharona” in a convenience store. Well, Andrew’s antics were like a warped and demented frat-boy version of that scene. Soon he was stark-bollock naked and dancing like a madman. He jived and thrusted like crack-crazed Chippendale, as the other customers evacuated the area.
Eventually, after much coercing from his mates, Andrew pulled on his trousers and went on his merry way, but not before he had leaped over the counter and danced with the elderly guy manning the till. Surprisingly, the old geezer was not at all upset by this- in fact, he was giggling hysterically and slapping Andrew’s arse-cheeks.
In Japan there is a saying, “the customer is god.” An admirable motto, and apparently it even extends to naked, drunken loonies.